CHAPTER 113

I sat to Denzel’s left as I grabbed my phone and opened my email. “Didn’t you start looking already?”

“I was waiting for you,” he shrugged.

“Laptop would come in real handy right about now,” I said. “Y’know what’d be a good policy change for the League? A computer lab room where trainers would be able to use them for whatever they wanted in Centers.”

“Well look at you, already finding ways to improve our lives,” Denzel smiled. “Anyway, this is going to take a while.”

“Tell me about it,” I sighed as I opened my email.

There were hundreds of messages from different companies that dated back weeks. Some were even from before I had beaten Candice, and a few businesses had contacted me multiple times. Of course, I had ghosted all of them, because having to look at this stuff gave me crippling anxiety. The idea of having to go through it all was worse than actually doing so, however. It was kind of when people were anxious about answering the phone, but when they actually picked up, they were relatively okay.

“Okay, let’s sort through the shitty offers first,” Denzel explained. “Here, for example. Look.”

He showed me an email from a company that had been asking for a meeting.

“This is from Surf Solutions… I don’t know what it is they do exactly, and that’s a problem, right?” He continued. “If they don’t respect us enough to at least tell us that, then it doesn’t pass the smell test. I’m not going to look up every company out there, that’d take days.”

“Right,” I nodded. “Retani Industries didn’t tell us what they were about in their email. Emi and Pauline had to explain it to us.”

“And look how that turned out. We almost signed away years of our lives. So… scroll down to right after your battle against Gardenia and start sorting through the shit offers.”

“You seem prepared,” I said, my eyes widening slightly.

“Pauline helped me improve my financial literacy a little. We should probably still ask them if we aren’t sure about anything, though.”

And so, we began writing off any company that seemed suspicious. Some of them, because they didn’t tell us what they were about, like Denzel had said, but others because they had offered us hilariously bad terms in the email, not even as a contract. Twenty potions per month? Come on! They were obviously trying to take advantage of the price hike, and I feared some trainers might have taken the bait. There were also the usual monthly salaries offered, but some of them were bad too. I might have gawked at fifty thousand Pokedollars per month a few months ago, but today?

I knew we were worth more than that.

“Annnnd, done,” I said before stretching.

“How many offers you got left?” He asked.

“I don’t know, I didn’t count. Probably thirty or so.”

“I’ve got twenty-four, and they’re all pretty recent,” he explained. “Now, I guess we should try to meet as many of these as possible during our time in Hearthome and sign the best deal before we leave.”

I nonchalantly agreed, but then froze when my eyes glazed over one of the messages. I had been in such a trance when deleting these emails that I didn’t actually read that one of the companies offering to sponsor me was the Poketch Company.

“Holy shit,” I breathed out. “I—I think the Poketch Company wants a deal with me.”

“Huh? They usually only sponsor high-level trainers! Craig is sponsored by them.”

“I… I know. There must be a catch to this,” I frowned, carefully reading over the email.

It was a short but concise message that got straight to the point that they had sent a week and a half ago. A first paragraph describing what they did— not that I needed it, they held an effective monopoly over the smartphone industry— then a second one saying that they’d be interested in a meeting and that I should contact them back as soon as possible.

“They don’t explicitly say it, but I don’t see why the Poketch company would want to meet you unless they wanted to sponsor you,” he said. “Damn, I’m jealous.”

“My dad works there. Maybe it has something to do with that?”

“How high up is he in the food chain?”

“He’s an engineer for their products,” I said. “He gets paid a lot, but he wouldn’t be able to influence who they sponsor.”

“Well, think about it like this,” Denzel pondered. “You were almost poached by Retani Industries, who are trying to break into the smartphone market and rival the Poketch Company. Back when we had just beaten Gardenia, I don’t think it would have mattered very much, but if you keep gaining traction like you have… it could maybe become a major blow to them.”

“Ah, you might be right. Then they’d be preemptively securing me. Plus, since my dad works there, if I did get into the Conference, for example… then wouldn’t it be embarrassing?”

“Embarrassing?”

“Yeah, imagine the headlines. My dad works in the Poketch Company, but I’m sponsored by someone else or even a rival. It’d be embarrassing, and my dad could maybe get in trouble if it generated too much negative press. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before.”

I sighed in relief, and there was a brief pause in the conversation.

“Still,” I continued. “There’s always a catch with these. I can’t rest on my laurels.”

“I don’t think they’ll shaft you like Retani Industries tried to do. The Poketch Company’s well known for their sweet deals. I mean, if Craig’s working with them, they’re doing something right.”

“I’m not expecting to be screwed that hard, but I don’t know…” I muttered. “Companies value profit over everything. I’m a high-profile trainer, but our novelty’s starting to die down—”

“Until you reveal that Turtonator of yours,” he interrupted with a grin. “There are only rumors right now. People aren’t sure if you caught it or not.”

I rolled my eyes. “He’s a piece of work, let me tell you. My point still stands, though. We’re starting to disappear from the news cycle. We burned bright, but we’re burning out quick. Older, high-leveled trainers like Craig… they’re like candles. They stay lit for a long time. They’re household names. A constant, reliable presence. Which is why they get the deals they do.”

“Well, you don’t even know the deal they’re offering yet. Could be good.”

“You and your positive outlook and everything,” I groaned.

“Just write them already! You only get offers like these once in a lifetime, and you don’t know when they’ll rescind it!”

“Fine!”

I rolled my eyes and started typing a short response, saying that I had just arrived in Hearthome and I was available to meet any time. I wrote back to three other companies as well in case the Poketch meeting didn’t work out: Bloom & Breeze, which was a well-known clothing brand that delved both into luxury and everyday clothing. Fitstride, which was a footwear company that focused on making durable shoes for trainers. The new sneakers Cece had bought me were from there. Finally, there was RefreshCo, a beverage company that made all kinds of soft drinks, including my favorite grape and orange sodas. Denzel, meanwhile, wrote to ten in total, so he was being a lot more generous with his standards than I was. Now all we had to do was wait for them to write back.

“We won’t be together for our meetings this time,” Denzel told me. “Will you be alright?”

“I’ll have to try,” I sighed. “I wish I could bring Cece.”

“Closed-door negotiations are a bitch,” he nodded. “But don’t sign anything right away.”

“Obviously. You know me. I don’t make the same mistake twice.”

He smiled, gently wrapping an arm around me and giving me a short hug. “Alrighty. Let’s get back to the party!”

“It’s been five hours, I don’t think the party’s still going.”

“If I’d been there, it would have been,” he chuckled.

——

We knocked on Emilia’s room, and she opened the door after thirty seconds or so. I turned toward Denzel and gave him a smug smile when he saw that everyone aside from Pauline was gone, although she was lounging on the bed under the covers, and she was glaring at me specifically and not Denzel, who looked like he had seen a ghost.

“Oh, shit! Sorry. Party’s over, I’m guessing?” Denzel awkwardly asked.

“Yes. Justin’s resting in his room, and Cecilia decided to go out on an item shopping spree,” Emilia said. She seemed to be worried. Her breaths were tired and short, and her eyes were darting between me and Denzel.

My shoulders slumped. I had wanted to speak to Cecilia, but she was probably going to be gone for a while. It was my fault too. I had told her that I was going to speak to her tonight, and it was still the afternoon. Maybe I was being too clingy.

I took a step inside. “Well, can we hang out—”

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“Uh, wait,” Denzel said as he pulled my shirt. “Let’s go hang out with Justin, Grace.”

“What? Justin needs his alone time—”

“No, I’m pretty sure he’ll be fine,” he interrupted. “In fact, he’ll be glad his teacher’s spending some time with him.”

“But—”

“Bye guys!” Denzel ignored me and closed the door right in my face.

I turned toward him angrily. “What the hell was that for?!”

For some reason, he stared at me like I was a lost cause.

“What’s with the look?!”

He sighed and shook his head. “Let’s go hang out with Justin.”

I clicked my tongue and attempted to get an explanation for his strange behavior, but he wouldn’t budge. After going up a floor, we knocked on Justin’s door, and he opened in instantly. There was an open book on his desk.

“Grace. Denzel,” he smiled. “Come in.”

“Sorry, Justin,” I grumbled. “I didn’t want to disturb your reading, but Denzel was adamant about visiting you.”

“Ah, it’s not an issue, I was going to take a break anyway.”

“Whatcha reading about?” I asked as I sat on his bed.

“Oh, just a book about recent innovations in human medicine,” he sighed.

“You’re the only one that’d read a book about that stuff. You could have looked it up for free,” Denzel smiled.

“I tend to prefer holding a hardcover in my hands,” he shrugged. “I’m terrible at focusing with a screen.”

“So, what’s new in the world of human medicine?” I asked.

“Well, there’s a depressing lack of progress, that’s what’s new,” he grumbled. “I don’t get how it doesn’t anger more people that we can effectively save a Pokemon from anything as long as we get them to a Center, but humans still die from the smallest things.”

One didn’t have to be smart to see that Pokemon medicine had blown past human medicine in the last century, but Justin was the only one I had seen so angry at that fact. To me, it was just a part of life.

“Ditto in particular are so fascinating,” Justin continued as his eyes sparkled. “Their cells can transform into anything they touch after they’ve come into contact with it once, although they can only store enough memory to hold one transformation at a time,” he explained.

“So Grace’s scars, for example…” Denzel hesitantly asked. I elbowed him. “What? You won’t tell me anything, but I can tell that you hate them!”

“Yes, even your scars. We could potentially place a single colony of ditto cells on your skin, and they’d replace the scarred tissue.”

I didn’t even bother listening to the small spark of hope that appeared in my heart. “But there’s a catch, isn’t it?” I asked.

Justin winced. “Human trials have all… failed drastically. The results weren’t pretty.”

“What happened?” I asked, my fists tightening.

“Pherzen tried starting small. At first, we regenerated lost toes or fingers. For the first few days, everything seemed fine. The new body parts were responsive, and they genuinely felt like a part of the participants’ bodies. But after a while… the ditto cells would grow out of control like cancer and overtake the hosts’ bodies, killing them in the process. We tried everything. Surgery to remove the cells… it didn’t work. There was always at least one left over in the body, and that’s all they needed to replicate. They all died in terrible pain, and there’s nothing left of them in the end. Just a… purple blob.”

I swallowed as I felt a bead of sweat roll down my chin.

“So it works for Pokemon, but not humans?” Denzel shuddered. “Are we just too different?”

“I wished that we could have studied the phenomenon more, but my father shut down the trials immediately,” Justin sighed. “I wanted to move the testing to animals like cows and pigs so that we wouldn’t have to endanger lives, but the press had already heard of our previous failures, and he wouldn’t hear any of it. The victim’s families sued and were thankfully paid damages in full.”

Moving the testing to animals would have made sense… so why not do it? Maybe Justin’s dad just wanted to sweep the whole thing under the rug to avoid negative press, but if the potential was as great as Justin thought it to be, then they could have turned it around quickly enough. Who would care about some dead animals if their grandpa or grandma were getting their cancers cured or regenerating limbs? Justin went on further, theorizing that by using Ditto cells, rejuvenating the human body was even theoretically possible, although that had never been tested.

I was still focused on the previous incident. I felt like something had been hidden from Justin. Something far worse than his already tragic story let on. Companies were driven by profits, and the potential here was so massive if they got it right…

Or maybe I was in and over my head.

After an hour, I left Justin and Denzel alone to speak while I finally entered my room for the first time to shower and change. Showering was still painful, and I was forced to use less water pressure than usual, but at least I could actually do it now. After so long, it was the little things like showering or holding a pen without being in horrible pain that made me truly appreciate what I already had.

I hated looking at myself. I hated it. I avoided the mirror like the plague. Then at least, I could pretend that it wasn’t actually me.

Eventually, when night had fallen, I heard a soft knock on my door.

That was Cecilia’s knock. Gentle, yet purposeful.

I got up from my bed and let her in.

“Hi,” I said. “Buy anything interesting?”

She gave me a teasing, half-smile as she sat down. “Fishing for information, I see.”

“Well, I was also genuinely interested,” I chuckled.

“I never doubted that,” she said. “Are you ready to talk?”

I drew a sharp breath. “Y—yeah. Right to the point, huh?”

What did I even want to say? Complain and whine about consequences for a decision I had taken? Now that the moment had come, the words were stuck in my throat.

“Sit,” Cece said, patting my bed next to her

I nodded and obliged her.

“From the moment you were told that you’d be keeping the burn marks, I could tell that you were feeling awful,” she said. “More awful than you did when you only had to deal with the pain.”

“I…” I exhaled. “I can’t bear to look at myself, Cece.”

Her eye twitched. “Why?”

It was a simple, stupid question, but the answer was actually quite complicated. I sat there in silence for a good five minutes, trying to come up with what to say. The correct words that would express the feelings I had bottled up all this time.

“Well, it being ugly is a part of it,” I sighed. “I look terrible next to you now, Cece. People are gonna talk.”

“I don’t care. Let them talk.”

“I know you don’t care, but I do,” I said, raising my tone slightly. Cecilia flinched. “I’m sorry. I care. I don’t have your thick skin, Cecilia. That’s why I keep away from the public and the forums in general. There could be a sea of positivity, but one bad comment is all it takes to ruin my day, and it hurts me more when they talk shit about you than when they do about me.”

“What can I do, then?” She asked. “Do you want me to fight back? Pauline and Chase do it.”

“No, no, it’s my problem. Don’t change the way you are,” I sighed. “It’s just… I already felt lacking compared to you— not in Pokemon battling, but in looks. And now I have this,” I exclaimed, pointing at myself. “But that’s not it.”

“There’s another reason,” she nodded. “A bigger one.”

I nodded tightly. “This… scarring. It’s a cost. That’s fine,” I said. “But it’s a mark of my failure. A mark that’ll stay there forever, reminding me every day that I fucking failed.”

“You… didn’t fail, Grace. Everything might not have gone according to your plan, but you still caught Turtonator. He’s strong enough to compete at seven badges.”

“It’s not enough,” I sniffled. “I want everything to be iron tight. This plan wasn’t. I thought it was, but it wasn’t, and I’ll have to remember every time I stare at myself. I’m not as good as I thought I was, Cece.”

Warm tears streamed down my face, and Cecilia wrapped an arm around me.

“Not as good as you thought you were? You’re holding yourself to impossibly high standards.”

“Think about it. Think. I hadn’t lost anything since… since… I can’t even remember when— oh, the fight against you at the Floaroma tournament. I hadn’t lost anything I made a plan for since then. Just losing would have been okay. One of the first lessons dad taught me before I left was to not be afraid of failure, so even though it would have stung, I would have gotten over it.”

“But not when there’s a permanent mark,” Cece said, finally understanding.

I nodded and wiped my eyes. “It’ll always be there. Fresh in my fucking mind,” I cursed. “And there’s nothing I can do about it. I was in over my head. I was high on the damn string of victories, and I thought I was invincible. I wasn’t.”

“That second part is not something I can help you with, although I’ll try,” Cecilia gently said. “But I’ll be the first to tell you that I am in no way embarrassed to stand by your side. You are as beautiful as the day I met you, Grace.”

“Come on, you’re just saying that to make me feel better. That’s objectively untrue,” I said.

“It isn’t. Look at me. Look into my eyes,” she said. I turned toward her. “I am not lying. You can tell.”

And I could. Cece had an easy tell when she gave a really obvious lie: she used her confident, smooth tone, and her face defaulted into a neutral expression, just like when she had battled Roark. Right now, she was emotional. Her voice was shaking, and she was tearing up.

“Okay, I believe you,” I conceded, falling onto the bed.

“Did you think I was going to leave you because of some scars?”

“I didn’t think so, but a small part of me couldn’t help but be paranoid and scream what if, you know?”

“Please, I’d never be that shallow,” Cecilia said, lying beside me.

We let the silence settle in as we stared at the ceiling.

“Hey,” I asked. “When’d you fall in love with me?”

I sensed her freeze next to me. “Where did that come from?”

“Nowhere, I’m just curious,” I said, still sniffling from earlier. “Spill.”

“Well…” she hesitated. “I think it was after you beat Chase in battle for me, but I didn’t realize it until you told me you liked girls. What about you?”

“I don’t really know,” I admitted. “But I knew in Floaroma.”

“That early?” Cecilia screamed.

“You’ll destroy my other eardrum if you screech that loud,” I said sarcastically. “Surprised?”

“I… yes? I thought I was the one that fell for you first.”

“Well, I didn’t even know you liked me until you kissed me,” I said. “Denzel thought that we were both terribly dense.”

We both laughed at that.

“Are you ready to meet my dad in two days?” I asked. “I’m going to make you two pamper me so hard. We’re going to the Poffin house, and you’re going to make me food. They make human variants, you know?”

“I already want to pamper you without any special occasions,” she shrugged. “But I am nervous. I want to make a perfect first impression.”

“You’ll be fine. He has a heart of gold, just ask Denzel! Although he did scream at him the first time they met…”

“Grace! Not. Helping.”

——

The next morning, I woke up to the sound of my phone buzzing. After yawning, I lazily grabbed it and opened the group chat, making sure not to wake Cecilia up.

Chase was finally out of Mount Coronet, and he’d be in Hearthome in five days.