I stopped at the entrance of the cemetery and checked my watch. It’s nine and thirty a.m.

I released my three teammates and Cape, Jungle, and Mesa appeared in flashes of red. The newest companions glanced around at the unfamiliar place.

There were other people around us going in and out of the cemetery. They were also here to visit their loved ones that departed. An old man in an expensive kimono with a Persian, a young teenager with traveling clothes, a young woman with a kid both dressed in formal black, and others of different ages and backgrounds.

I felt my legs begin to move and my pokemon followed in a line, Cape as the last one, to keep an eye on the younger ones.

We soon reached the big and circular gravestone in the middle of the first and most prestigious section of the cemetery. On the top of the expensive grave was a statue of a man and a Scyther. The man had an axe in one hand and a whip in the other. The stone Scyther was so detailed that I could even see his many scars.

I remembered them from my history classes. Ilex and Xeli, the founder of what would become Azalea Town and his mighty pokemon. I also knew that written on the gravestone would be the names of many of his clan members, including his wife, Azalea.

We passed through his gravestone and then the gravestones of important people. The great men, women, and pokemon that made Azalea what it is today. Trainers, lords, mayors, builders, and war heroes, and finally we reached the public service gravestone. The city reserved a part of the cemetery for public workers near the entrance. It had been one of the first sections built, back then when all of Azalea’s population were, in a way, public workers. And by that I meant serfs.

I felt like smiling at my joke, but the air here was too oppressive for that. People from Johto were already generally serious and this location made that even worse.

I followed the path that I had walked the day of the Burial and as we walked we saw an old woman in a kimono, a priestess, moving in our direction. A serious Misdreavus in front of her, seemingly guiding her, and a Haunter behind her, apparently following her. As we passed each other we bowed. The pokemon that accompanied her merely glanced at me and mine.

The Misdreavus was solemn and the Haunter, somber. Not even a hint of a smile or laughter from either of them.

That would have been a strange vision for people who knew anything about ghost pokemon but who had never entered a cemetery. Places like these, that honored and remembered the dead, seemed to be the only places that they respected. I had come here five times and seeing a Haunter without a smile on its face still left me with a sense of wrongness.

I shrugged that thought away as we finally reached our destination, a walkway.

The new path invited us to step on it but I stopped and looked up at the plaque on a nearby post. L-23. When I first came here, on the day of the burial, I almost followed people’s example of writing down the sign to not forget where Mother Elena was buried.

I believed that it would be disrespectful to write it down and that I somehow had the duty to never forget where her grave was. To brand the path we took to get here into my brain. It had seemed more right than just writing. I had become angry that people thought that I would need a clue to remember where she was.

The day after that one I acknowledged that it had been a stupid thought. People moved on with their lives and forgot important things all the time. When they needed to remember something important people would note it down, not because it was not important but because it was. If it was not for that signpost in a few more years, when people came back to visit her, they would not remember the path they took to reach the grave and probably would have to ask the Temple priest or priestess for help.

On my second visit here I fixed that and wrote it down in a journal. Maybe in the distant future, I will need to look it up. Not today though, this path was still fresh in my mind.

A movement by my side made me alerted to the fact that Jungle had begun to approach me, probably wondering why I was so still, but Cape stopped him. My starter already knew that I needed a moment to compose myself.

I fixed my trainer clothes and soon enough I was ready.

I turned to my team. “Come on, guys.”

We walked the last stretch and finally stood before the familiar rectangular-shaped stones, her gravestone.

The inscription on the main and higher stone read “Matron Elena Rain” and under it “Loved Mother of Many”.

I checked to see if we would need to clean the grounds but it was already spotless. No doubt someone had visited her grave, at the very least, in the last couple of days and cleaned it. It could have been any one of us.

I bowed and prayed, after that, I took out from my bag her favorite sweet and laid it on the stone.

Then I began to speak about what I was up to. I told her how Alice, my friends, and I were doing all right. About the monotonous days of work at the Pokemart and of arbitration of tournaments. Told her about the letter that moved forward my life in years. Meeting the famous Professor Oak. About finally going on a journey and of our victory against Bugsy. Showed her Jungle and Mesa. The little green guy was confused but after speaking a little with Cape he seemed to get it and then tried to bow, which ended up being more like a nod. Mesa floated near the grave, trying to decipher it. When I explained to him that it was not a puzzle he went back to his original position.

Stolen novel; please report.

I imagined what her response would be.

She would be glad that we were all okay, would say that I was working too much, and that she would talk to the mayor if I needed to take a break from arbitering. She would be intrigued by the letter and would ask if she could talk to the famous Professor Oak, she did say one time that he had been one of the best Champions around. She would say that it was finally time for my journey and would be glad to know that Cape and I had won against Bugsy, she was always saying that the ‘bug boy’ was too arrogant for his own good, as if he was not one of the thirty best trainers in Johto.

Like Alice, she would have babied the Baltoy, and would try to show her small garden behind the orphanage to Jungle, she was famously hard to impress so she would not care at all that he was a Bulbasaur.

I smiled and remembered that one time that a former orphan who had become fairly rich came back and narrated the story of how he had done it to us, the little orphans, and her. I remember that we were very impressed as he had been very smart about the way he gained his money, something about making something that already existed more affordable, a common way to wealth sure, but he had done that in a very interesting way.

Elena Rain, however, had not been impressed at all, and just said good job as he had just cleaned the floor, and that was after he had spent one hour on this story! He was, to this day, still a donor to the orphanage.

I finally talked about how we would be leaving Azalea and only coming back sporadically. She would have probably been sad but also would have been the first to push me out of town. Finally after what seemed hours. We left her grave, the walkway, and the cemetery.

It would be a long time for us to come back, I knew that, but when we did I sure hoped that we would have some nice stories to tell her.

I looked at my watch, 9 a.m. One hour left before we left Azalea City.

-

I was at the western exit of Azalea, near the station that held the official entrance to Ilex Forest. My team and I were doing some last-minute training before Jess got here and we left for Goldenrod.

The station seemed very oppressive. I became acutely aware of my palms sweating. I had never been outside Azalea before.

I shook my head and looked forward to where Cape was trying to learn Counter, which was a difficult move to learn and to use. It was the second compound move that Cape learned, the first being Aerial Ace. A simple move was one that you just needed to gather energy and release. A Tackle, for example, was a simple move.

A compound move is a move known to demand more complexity, Counter used fighting-type energy as a sponge to soak physical damage. If that was all it did, it would be just a less efficient Harden, but it also gathered that force and, if you timed it right, it would let you use that damage and redirect it back to the opponent with even more force added, fighting pokemon that battled in the Conference could even get it up to double of the original attack.

How did that work? Type energy shenanigans that scientists wrote many, many articles about.

What I did understand by reading some of the more dumbed-down articles about Counter was that one facet of fighting energy was the tendency towards control since almost all pokemon of the fighting type spontaneously created martial arts and, or sports, which were just movements with method and technique. It was then theorized that at least one part of fighting energy nature was that it demanded control to use it. Counter performed based on that aspect to control the physical strength of the opponent and redirect it back.

Easier said than done, of course.

Cape right now was learning how to use fighting energy to hold the physical damage and Jungle was being his training partner.

“Bulba.” Growled the grass type as rushed forward as a grey blur to hammer into the Heracross who had crossed his orange glowing arms to receive it. Cape grunted at the attack, and the glow in his arms pulsed once but rapidly faded away, indicating that he had failed for the ninth time in a row.

“Cross.” He said, annoyed at the failure.

“Legendaries, Cape. It is your first day of trying that move, just try again but don’t think about success today… Actually, take five to calm down.” He grumbled but did as I said. He knew that he would not be able to even begin to use Counter with his state of mind as it was, it was all about control after all. Jungle began to trot forward to mess with him.

“And you Jungle.” He froze. “Since Cape is resting you can go back to try to form a seed.” He jokingly sighed, curled down, and began to train growing a seed in his mouth. For Jungle we were hoping that we could get Bullet Seed and Poison Powder for Leader Whitney’s badge. I had already talked to Jungle and Mesa that for now on they were in a—healthy—competition to see who would be the second pokemon that would participate in that battle.

Speaking of Mesa. I turned to see how he was doing.

He was floating nearby, looking at a rock and trying to use psychic energy to move it. When he was able to do that with ease, we could start learning Confusion. If he could do that by the time we left Ilex Forest we could begin to learn Rock Tomb. Those two moves will later on be the base to learn Psybeam, Power Trick, and Ancient Power, the three moves that combined were the reason I put Claydol on my list. The rock glowed pink for a split second. Mesa continued to glare at it, but it did not move anymore. Unlike Cape, Mesa, for now at least, didn’t experience frustration so he could continue to try until he was physically or mentally tired.

Soon enough Cape’s five minutes were up and he continued to try to learn Counter. We continued to train for some minutes and then stopped to rest and wait for Jess.

After half an hour I looked at my watch, 10:15 a.m.

She was fifteen minutes late. I turned my head towards the city to see if I could spot Jess coming and began to tap my fingers on the grassy field. I noticed that Cape had begun glancing towards me. He knew how I felt about unpunctuality. Jeremy sometimes called me a control freak. I was not, however, I liked people who did as agreed. It took ten more minutes until we could see Jess.

She reached the place where we were and began to speak. “I am sorry. My alarm didn’t go off.”

I forced a smile. “No problem. Let's just go.”

As we began to make our way towards the Ilex Forest station we heard a big noise coming from the north of the forest as if something had exploded. Soon enough two Pidgeots left the Ilex Station and began to fly towards that direction. Each had one person on them, both vaguely wrote the colors of rangers.

Cape and I looked at each other when a pinging noise began to sound in some place in my body. I vaguely noticed that it happened to Jess too. I searched the many pockets of my traveling pants until I found the cause. My pokedex had an alarm on it. As the new model was touchscreen I clicked on the red triangle that had appeared on the screen. The sound vanished and the screen was overtaken by a text.

It began with ‘Code T012 on the northwest boundary of Ilex Forest and Azalea’, and below were instructions for civilians to get away from the area and the clarifications about the code, 012 meant a wild and aggressive group of pokemon nearby. T meant every trainer above one badge.

Jess and I looked at each other and then we had the same realization. They were calling us to help with an emergency.