“My, my, have I had an interesting few days!” Volo waggled a finger at me, but I didn’t miss the worried glint in his eye.

The Gingko merchant was dressed in the Guild’s textbook blue uniform with a white apron-like material secured by a brown belt on the waist. He sported a yellow and blue cap atop his blonde hair, which was styled in a way that obscured his left eye. A giant backpack sat on his back, but the tall man didn’t seem particularly bothered by the additional weight. “What did you find out?” I had tried to keep my tone neutral.

The man resembled Cynthia; I had noticed. But that didn’t mean he was trustworthy. After all, he was a very distant relative of hers- most likely. I know, you may be thinking, that I’m therefore very hypocritical for judging Cyllene to the same standards as Cyrus despite the man not even been born yet, but forgive me for being paranoid over a woman strongly resembling the monster that had tried to sacrifice me to Giratina.

“Ah, ah!” Volo’s visible eye had a spark to it. “Let’s save the fun for Kamado, shall we?”

Oh, dear…

Volo had refused to give anything away on the short trip up to the Commander’s office. Mercifully, we were immediately let in upon our arrival, so I wasn’t subjected to having to stew in my own anxiety for any longer than necessary.

“Volo, and… Rei,” Commander Kamado greeted us. “It is good to see you.”

“It’s always good to see my most well-paying customers,” Volo replied with a surprising amount of charisma. “I have salt harvested straight from the Alabaster Icelands for your lovely village, if you’re interested.”

“It is appreciated,” Kamado acknowledged, “but you would be better off going to Cyllene about that.”

Volo didn’t seem to mind the lukewarm response. “Oh well. Anyways, I have news about our friend, here.”

Kamado shot me a significant look before returning his gaze to Volo. I gulped and felt sweat pool in the palms of my hands. “And?”

“Giratina exists,” Volo declared. I had been initially incredibly relieved at hearing that. Until Volo continued, that was. “My credible source claims it walked Hisui at some point in the incredibly distant past. And hoo are we talking distant, here. Its power supposedly eclipsed that of the Lord of Space and the Lord of Time and had utterly defeated them at one point. A Pokémon that knows nothing but rage and violence- or so they say. Its wrath almost wiped out the entire population living in Hisui. Strong, huh?!”

To no one’s surprise, neither Kamado nor I shared Volo’s enthusiasm. “That is… surprising to hear.” Kamado said after a minute of introspection.

“Oh, but there’s more!” Volo sounded delighted for some reason- like a kid who’d just uncovered some great, juicy secret. “That space-time rift, as your dear professor had named it? It’s the same one that Giratina emerged from in the past.”

For the first time since I had met him, Kamado seemed to be too stunned to speak. “Oh, bother…” he muttered to himself. “This is not good.”

Oh, bother didn’t even come close to representing the danger we were in. I didn’t even have the will to be all ‘I told you so’ at that time. Apparently, Giratina’s excursion atop Mount Coronet by Cyrus’s hands was the second time it had been summoned to Sinnoh. Or Hisui, or whatever. And the way things are going in Hisui right now? The future’s summoning of Giratina could even be the third time it emerged. I had to stop that.

“What I wander…” Volo continued. He seemed heedless of our stupor- or heedless of the danger we could end up facing. “Is why Giratina hasn’t emerged from that rift, yet?”

There was a silence. Actually, that was a very good question in hindsight.

“How can we stop Giratina… if it happens to emerge into Hisui?” Kamado eventually asked.

Truthfully, it spoke to the sheer amount of sway Volo held that Kamado completely trusted him at his word. I probably should’ve noticed that at the time…

“Ah…” Volo’s expression suddenly froze. “You… well. You, uh. You can’t.”

“What?!” both Kamado and I exclaimed at the same time. This didn’t bode well at all for future Sinnoh’s current predicament. Oh, what had I gotten myself into…

Volo grimaced slightly. “I’ve recently learnt of a… ah, a fourth legendary Pokémon that serves as the antithesis to Giratina.”

“A fourth?!” I sputtered.

“Yes,” Volo confirmed. “My… source confirmed that Giratina holds a particular hatred towards this fourth Pokémon, but that the Lord of Space and the Lord of Time serve it. Its power is supposed to rival that of Giratina, but even with the two Lords’ help, Giratina was just barely sealed away.”

A Pokémon that could fight Giratina…

“What about controlling it?” I asked, thinking back to how Cyrus was able to use Dialga and Palkia to somehow ensnare Giratina’s free-will.

“Controlling Giratina?” Kamado sounded aghast at the thought. I really was giving this man a bad day, it seemed…

Here goes nothing. This was as good a chance I was going to get to explain myself. I ended up telling the two everything that had happened in my time. How Cyrus had used three unknown Pokémon to bend Dialga and Palkia to his will and how he then used their combined power to dominate Giratina. “He said something about a bond…” I really was struggling to remember Cyrus’s exact words. “Eight sacrifices to bond Giratina to something… maybe himself. I was supposed to be the eighth.”

“This mystery man, Cyrus, was trying to bond with Giratina?” Volo was rubbing his cheek in thought. “And he was sacrificing humans to do so… but when you, the last sacrifice needed, was about to meet your end… something happened that freed Giratina from the two Lords’ control.”

“And then something flung me up into the space-time rift,” I affirmed with a nod. “But…” a sudden flash of horror struck at me like lightning. “There was a ninth there! A girl…”

Akari, if they were truly the same (I was actually starting to doubt myself by that point), could’ve somehow travelled to my time to prevent Giratina’s release. But in failing, she provided Cyrus with the missing sacrifice needed when I had been pushed into the space-time rift! The fate of Sinnoh all depended therefore on whether Cyrus could get Dialga and Palkia to regain control over Giratina.

Had future-Akari enabled the very fate she travelled so far into the future to prevent?

I really needed to go back there. It’s funny, looking back, at how desperate I felt to just throw myself back into the space-time rift in the hopes it would get me to my time as fast as possible. The reality was that I had all the time in the world. I had centuries. Possibly even longer…

Was Cyrus’s plan truly to use Giratina somehow? Or was he trying to force this fourth Pokémon to intervene?

I was so toast.

“What if you were sent here to somehow defeat Giratina?” Volo posited. He was looking at me intently. It reminded me of how he looked when he had grabbed at me by the Wallflower and I didn’t like it. “What if your task is to destroy Giratina and rewrite the future?”

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

“Do you truly think that’s possible?” Kamado sounded doubtful. He had taken to leaning against his desk as if his legs couldn’t support the weight of the conversation.

Volo considered, though his fervent gaze on me still lingered. “Maybe… I mean, for us? The future hasn’t even happened yet. So, there may technically be nothing to rewrite. Ah, time stuff always gets my mind in a bunch! I need to confer with my source some more. The way I see it… if we truly want to destroy Giratina, then we’ve got a lot of problems we’re going to be facing. First of all, where even is Giratina? And second, how do we enlist the aid of this fourth Pokémon? Is there a way to contact it? To summon it? Thirdly, even if we do somehow get this Pokémon on our side… the last battle between them was barely won. Which means we’ll need the two Lords’ help or we’ll lose for sure. How do we get them in on the fun?”

“We need to get the two clans involved.” Kamado declared. “They must know of this.”

Volo interlaced his hands behind his head and turned to face the exit stairs. “Good luck with that. But see if you can squeeze any information out of them. I’ll be conferring with my source in the meanwhile. Adaman might be cooperative, but Irida is… another story. If you can’t get anything out of them, I’ll ask them myself later and see if they’ll trust me enough to share. Anyways. Goodbye!”

I stood frozen in place for a while.

“Who exactly is Volo?” I asked Kamado.

“I know not exactly…” he answered after a while. He massaged his temples with a deep sigh. “Not even Ginter can claim to understand him. This source of his, if they really exist, can be trusted. I know that much.”

“How?”

“They have accurately described both the Diamond and Pearl clan’s deities to them and knew about Giratina before we ever did. They seem to know everything about Sinnoh’s history and appear to know more about the two clans than the two clans themselves. They predicted the space-time rift’s opening years before it actually happened and…” Kamado trailed off.

“And?”

A slight exhale. “They knew about the thunderstorm that had started the night of your arrival.”

I scowled partly in disbelief and partly in bemusement. “The thunderstorm? What about it?”

“It matters not to us,” Kamado dismissed me with a shake of his head. “The results of that thunderstorm are the problems of the two clans.”

“Okay…” I begrudgingly let it go in lieu of a much more important question. “What do we do now?”

Kamado’s eyes snapped to me. “You will speak not a word to this to anyone. In the meanwhile, I will confer with Cyllene and will soon send missive to the clan’s leaders for a meeting. After we have heard what they have had to say and after Volo returns with more information, then we can make a plan. For now, you are to continue to help Laventon with his research. Giratina is currently dormant for whatever reason- which gives us time to plan. Acting hastily might make matters worse.”

A surprisingly rational response, but I really didn’t like it. What if Giratina suddenly appeared? I supposed the answers we needed wouldn’t come to us any quicker, however, meaning our fate wholly depended on Giratina’s continued silence.

Just who had sent me into the space-time rift?

That had been on my mind that night while I rolled around on my bedroll. I’d assumed it had been Giratina for whatever reason, but that didn’t make sense for it to shove me into the past so that I could attempt to foil it. Had it been Dialga? Or Palkia? Or both? Sending me back here in a last-ditch effort to try to destroy Giratina to save them from Team Galactic’s control would make a bit of sense… but Cyrus had both of them under his control at the time… right?

Was it this mysterious fourth Pokémon? If so, why me? Unless it was just coincidental? I just happened to get lucky? I was the one of eight that it randomly decided should go through? And if it did choose me… why? It certainly chose poorly. Why not send Cynthia here with her Pokémon?

There were too many working parts for me to figure it out with the information I had. And as I write this, I’m still unsure of the exact intricacies of everything that occurred to this day. But I’ll try to explain it all. I promise…

I was also conflicted over what I’d do when I reached the space-time rift. Was I to abandon these people to their fate and hope all would work out? I had rationalised that Sinnoh turned out well regardless of the events in Hisui, so I didn’t have to do anything. But knowing all that I do now- in the present- doing such a thing would’ve been a horrible mistake.

Or not. Things tend to work the way the world wants despite our actions in the end.

I had all of this information and theories flowing through my mind the next day in the lab. I was stressed and scared and didn’t really know what to do. Sitting around felt wrong. But it was all I could do. Laventon seemed to notice my distress and assigned me some easy tasks for the day, but Akari was still as rude and horrible as always. It was after I’d made a particularly benign mistake that I had blown up. And as much as I’d have liked to attribute blame to Akari- she wasn’t helping after all- I probably would’ve boiled over at some point anyways during the day.

“Incompetent,” she had sniggered after I had dropped Rowlet’s food all over the floor.

“Akari,” I whirled around to face her. “SHUT UP!”

I had yelled at the top of my lungs. And the silence that followed was heavy. At the time, I couldn’t really believe what I had just done. There was this awkward pause where we all sort of gaped at each other.

Then, the door to Cyllene’s office opened. “I see you’re finally cracking,” the Galaxy Boss remarked with her head poked through the door. I saw her lips curl into a smile. “Good.”

She slinked back into her office.

“Look, I’m sorry,” I buried my face into my hands. Cyllene had been told about the dangers we were facing by Kamado yesterday, but she was obviously coping quite well. Unless she was channelling her stress into her hatred for me to do so? “There’s just a lot on my mind.”

Akari was just looking at me with a scowl. But Laventon seemed more sympathetic now the shock had worn off. “Come with me,” the professor beckoned towards the hallway door. “Come.”

“What’s on your mind?” the professor asked when I followed him outside. “I’ll lend you my rather average-sized ears.”

I smiled slightly at the lame joke. “I’ve recently learnt… things… that I can’t tell you,” I admitted with downcast eyes. “And it’s been weighing on me. Plus… Akari…”

“Akari’s been giving you the rundown?” Laventon’s question was posed more as a statement than anything. “I apologise, old boy. She was like that with me at first, but I didn’t really mind it. My jolly nature ended up setting her straight! Haha! But… I should’ve intervened when I saw her react the same way to you. I’ll… have a talk with her.”

“No, no.” I instantly rejected the notion. “It’s fine. I-”

Laventon held up his hand. “It’s quite alright. This needs to happen, anyways. See, Akari tends to… listen to the words of others a lot. There’s one particular woman she looks up to and she takes her opinions in like a Magikarp to water. But it’s this whole ordeal with Giratina that’s got you on edge, right?”

I raised my head. “You know?”

“No,” Laventon chuckled. “But it’s easy to guess that there is quite the conspiracy in the upper echelons of the Galaxy Team. You, Volo, and Kamado quietly having talks. Cyllene suddenly sending word for a meeting with the clans. Volo disappearing from Jubilife as fast as he had arrived… you’ve caused quite a stir.”

“I’m sorry I can’t tell you anything,” I muttered. I really didn’t appreciate Laventon enough back then.

“Myths and legends aren’t my thing, anyway,” Laventon replied with a smile. “I much prefer looking at the finer details.”

I had felt better after that. The next few days were uneventful. Akari kept up with the ugly looks but no longer said anything to me after Laventon’s talk. We sent a tearful goodbye to Cyndy who was released back into the wilderness by Prelude Beach and I had once again flitted through the Pokédex for any inaccuracies.

“Mr. Mime is a psychic/fairy type,” I had pointed out the incorrect typing. “Same with Mime Jr.”

“Fairy type?!” Laventon looked as though I had spoken another language. “What’s that?”

Hoo, boy.

Eventually, however, my mundane life had been upturned by the arrival of the Diamond Clan leader. He had been invited here first since Kamado thought he’d be the most willing to cooperate out of the two. From what he had spoken about Irida, the Pearl Clan leader seemed to me like she was… off. I think she actually scared Kamado.

Adaman had cast a looming shadow over the village. Such visits from a prominent figure were rare- exceedingly so. It had caused a major stir. But I knew the second I heard of his arrival that I was going to be called up to Kamado’s office. And lo and behold, the missive came the very same day.

I climbed the stairs with a heavy heart. The way the Galaxy Team spoke of Adaman was as if he were made of glass. Everyone was terrified of offending him somehow. Yet he was also fawned over by adoring young women. He was quite the looker, apparently.

I remember the exact words I repeated in my head like a mantra.

Please don’t mess this up…

I reached Commander Kamado’s office.

Adaman had immediately caught my eye upon cresting the stairs. He was tall- as tall as Volo, even- and wore blue robes with black, white, and yellow accents. His hair was styled in a bun that exploded outwards from the back of his head. Tinges of green and blonde marred his otherwise deep blue hair. He had plain brown eyes, though they were sharp and stern. There was this enchanting look about him that I couldn’t quite place. He seemed to be deep in conversation with the Commander.

Next to him were three Diamond Clan members in the same hoodie that Mai had worn. In fact, I had immediately recognised Mai as one of them. She was nervously wringing her hands together as if she’d been caught stealing or something.

Kamado stood at the head of his desk and was quick to notice my arrival. “Rei, this is Adaman, the leader of the Diamond Clan.”

“Good to meet you…” I nodded to him politely. The man had intimidated me, I must admit.

Adaman’s eyes met mine. “What’s he here for?” he jerked his head to me. I noticed at that moment just how tired he looked. Black bags adorned his eyes and he looked a little haggard.

“I believe it is best to explain everything in order to reveal the purpose behind Rei’s presence,” Kamado replied in a diplomatic tone. “There has been a development, you see…”