CHAPTER 173

I ended up placing my name on the Café Cabin waiting list, and after begging the receptionist not to give me special treatment, she finally agreed and left me on there. A room suspiciously freed up immediately afterward though, and, well, there wasn't much I could do about that. She wanted to keep me there so badly that I almost considered leaving right away out of spite. It wasn't that I wasn't expecting to be treated differently, it was mostly the fact that she just lied to my face about it. I wasn't going to make a scene though, so I just bore with it and entered the room they gave me. It was only slightly smaller than a Pokemon Center room, but it was arranged similarly, with a tiny bed, a desk and a chair. There wasn't a television though, which kind of made sense. Most kids just didn't watch TV these days, and it was just a relic of an older time in Pokemon Centers, meaning that they could save on costs. There wasn't really a point when everything could be found on a phone. Denzel was the epitome of this, but I still really enjoyed television, especially with my Pokemon, so one not being there was a bummer.

I finally washed all of the muck and grime off of my body and relaxed on my bed with a heavy sigh. My entire team wouldn't fit in such a small room, so I opted to release Princess alone. The rest were either too big or needed to rest from their battle, so some time in a Pokeball would do them some good. The fairy type hugged me with her little arms and I pet her head.

"I'm gonna be looking up some stuff, so— ah, why don't you grab some dirt from outside?" I asked, standing up to open the window. "You can practice your sculpting while I research."

She happily nodded and flew out the window. A few seconds later, she brought back a huge glob of dirt that barely fit through the opening.

"What are you gonna work on today? That's a lot of dirt."

Princess apparently didn't want to reveal what her plan was. She was usually a lot better with a model, so I found it interesting that she was going to sculpt without one.

Unless—

"Wait is it me—"

"Toge."

"Ah."

Way to crush your mother's heart, I thought with a sigh. I grabbed my laptop, plugged it in and started browsing. The internet here was slow, but it was better than nothing. The first thing on the list was Falkirk, Chase's hometown.

Falkirk.

That surprisingly didn't yield any coherent results. There was apparently a famous singer with the last name Falkirk, and it was all the internet showed me. I needed to narrow the search down.

Falkirk Iron Islands.

The first thing that came up was the images. Falkirk looked as bad as Chase had made it sound. Hundreds of rundown buildings huddling the side of a cliff, dirt paths and the rough waves perpetually keeping the entire place wet and eroding the rocks on the side of the cliff. Not even the worst neighborhoods in Jubilife that dad always told me to avoid looked this bad. The only place that looked remotely well-maintained was the small port that I assumed the miners shipped their iron from, where it'd go to Canalave and be turned into steel or other things.

I had to scroll to the bottom of the search page and go to page two to figure out what happened. I never went to page two. There were a few articles about the town having been destroyed by a Steelix slightly more than two years ago.

In a harrowing turn of events, the small mining town of Falkirk in the Iron Islands has been reduced to ruins, as a colossal Steelix wreaked havoc upon its inhabitants. The destructive force unleashed by this powerful Pokémon has left only a few dozen survivors, forcing the abandonment of the town that once thrived in the heart of the Iron Islands.

I felt my stomach drop. That was how Chase's father died? Not only that, but he'd lost his entire hometown and everything he once knew… Arceus. The article said that the city once thrived, but from the way he'd spoken about it, it had always been relatively poor. I scanned the rest of the article.

…mined too close to the Steelix's territory and drove it to attack. The Iron Island rangers were too weak to stand up to the beast, leaving it enough time to wreak havoc upon the town for two hours until reinforcements from Canalave arrived to evacuate Falkirk. The survivors were taken to the city and officials have opened an investigation into Teracore, the corporation running the mining operations in the islands, but also notably in Oreburgh.

Teracore… I'd heard of them a few times, but I hadn't even known they operated in the Iron Island too. The survivors also sued the company, so I wanted to see what ended up happening to them. Unlike with Falkirk, that was easy enough to find. They'd paid off large sums to some of the victims and fought the ones that hadn't accepted the money in court until they ran out of money for lawyers. I clenched a fist. It wasn't only Cece and Louis' fathers that were evil. Teracore had essentially traded the lives of thousands of people for profit. The government investigation proved to do a lot better, or at least it did at first glance. The people in charge of the Iron Island sector were fired and would spend decades in prison, which for most would mean that they'd die in there.

But at the end of the day, Teracore was still chugging along, making hundreds of millions of Pokedollars and were still getting paid by the Oreburgh and Canalave city government to do their mining. It had barely been a slap on the wrist. Surely there could be some kind of better oversight, no? I doubted that the people currently serving their sentence had been acting out all on their own.

"Damn it…"

It was so unfair. I could see where Chase's mistrust of companies and the government in general came from. I wondered if he was planning on going back to the Iron Islands when he went back to Canalave if he had the time. Falkirk itself was still abandoned, but maybe he'd want to see other towns around the islands.

Or maybe it'd be too painful to remember.

I glanced at Princess' statue, and I still couldn't figure out what she was making, so I moved onto the next topic. I needed to figure out if I could use physics to my advantage, and for that, I needed a textbook. A pdf of one would do. I racked my brain, trying to remember the name of my old textbooks, but nothing came up.

"Screw it, new textbook it is."

After a bit of sleuthing, I ended up buying Introduction to Physics and Chemistry 101, which were a lot less impressive sounding than I expected, but we all had to start from somewhere. I didn't expect to create massive explosions or whatever, but it was a good base to build up from. Come to think of it, Sunshine could only create explosions on his shell because of the sulfur there that kind of smelled like a mix of eggs and burned matches. That was chemistry too!

And yes, it had taken a while to get used to the smell, and I barely registered it these days.

Anyway, I decided that I'd do at least one hour of physics and one hour of chemistry each day, and that started… later.

No! I was completely free right now, so I needed to do it! Why was it that I always procrastinated with anything non-Pokemon related? And the worst part was that this was Pokemon related, I just needed to push through and get to the meat of the subjects to see its effects in the way I battled.

Chemistry was first.

—

"I hate chemistry!"

"To…"

"You don't get it, Princess. This is mind-numbingly boring! Sure, learning about the three states of matter and how molecules behave as a gas, solid or liquid is nice, but when am I ever going to use that in— well… actually, it's pretty useful now that I'm thinking about it for a few seconds. Heating up water to stop a water type attack's the kind of obvious stuff every trainer knows, but what about turning a gas back into a liquid? The textbook said it was condensation."

Togetic let out a series of chirps, still engrossed in her statue. It was slowly taking form, and I knew now that she was making the entire family— Sunshine included. Of course, she still hadn't created me, and she wouldn't.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

"Uhh, you do it by lowering the temperature of a gas. Like, if Chase's Abomasnow used a massive Icy Wind on Buddy's Mist, the attack would just turn into water and ice crystals. I bet Chase would never know about that though."

"Toge!" She snickered.

"He is a musclehead," I smirked. "But you can't underestimate him, I mean, he just beat us, didn't he? Anyway, Mist isn't even proper gas, but steam is. There are all these gases that look like gas but aren't. I wonder if Sunshine's Smokescreen is a gas? It seems a lot heavier than steam. Smog too."

Well, it wasn't like I had any ice type moves to think about doing that just yet anyway, but it was still something to think about. Something like Powder Snow or Icy Wind would work better than Ice Beam, since the area of effect would be wider. Now that my one hour of chemistry was done, it was time to move onto physics. I didn't want to overwhelm my brain and not retain any of the information I was learning.

It ended up being even worse than before, and unlike with chemistry, I couldn't see any applications to anything I'd learned in the hour I had studied and taken notes. The only thing I'd taken an interest in so far was motion and kinematics, but there was no way I was going to whip out a formula mid-battle to calculate the trajectory of an attack like Rock Throw, especially when the Pokemon could just switch the direction of the rock whenever they wanted.

And the target would obviously be my Pokemon.

Where it could be useful was in situations like that interaction between Vacuum Wave and Angel's vines, but I wouldn't be learning any of that for a while. This was just an introduction book. Of course, I could always skip ahead, but I knew I'd be completely lost if I did that.

Arceus, I was bad at this. If anything, I'd have to supplement these lessons with research online, or it would take months for me to come up with any ideas.

But it was a long-term project, so we'd see where it left me.

"Ohhh, it's so cute!" I squealed, looking at Princess' work. "You've gotten so much better!"

Everyone was there, and they were size-appropriate too. I could see Angel's individual vines and the different layers of Sunshine's shell. She'd done all of this in two hours!

"You're so talented," I said, grabbing my phone. "Here, let me take a picture. Stay in the shot! Give me a big, wide smile."

Since we couldn't carry her sculptures, I kept track of them using pictures instead. She was never bummed out about having to leave one behind, strangely enough, but I wanted to keep the memories. Plus, we'd look back on it in a few months and see how far she'd come.

I ended up finally sending a message to my friends to let them know that I'd made it to the Café Cabin and that I'd met Chase there. Everyone but Cece, Denzel and Pauline were on the road though, so I doubted that they'd see it any time soon. Cece actually asked me for a picture to cheer her up, and we ended up sending silly faces to each other for almost ten minutes until I called.

The moment the phone stopped ringing, I almost jumped for joy and excitedly kicked my feet against the bed.

"Grace!"

"Cece, I miss you so much!" I whined.

"So do I. It's terribly lonely at night," she said. The sound of her voice felt like bliss. "I've been resting as much as I can to recover as quickly as possible! We'll be leaving Solaceon very soon."

"That's great news, but make sure not to overwork your leg. The Café Cabin's a bit annoying, but the food's great, so I think you can stay there for a day like I'm doing if you need it."

"And be apart for another day? Absolutely not. Have you done anything interesting there? I saw that you met Chase."

"Every time I see him, it's like he matures ten years," I chuckled. "We battled too. He won."

"He did? What were the rules?"

"Three-on-three, no switches. His Pokemon are no joke, especially Ri."

I ended up explaining the entire battle in detail to Cecilia, including Chase's new Pokemon and evolutions. Since he wasn't actively hiding them, I didn't think he'd care at all.

"I've also started learning a bit about physics and chemistry. I figured it'd give me a leg-up on the competition."

"In what way would—" she paused. "Oh of course, I see what you mean. Clarence never gave me any lessons of the sort. The instructor I had kept to arithmetics. I mostly focused on things like dance, music or gymnastics."

"You are flexible…" I muttered. "And yeah, you technically used chemistry when you turned the sand into glass during that one battle in the tournament, so it'd definitely be of use," I explained. "It's better to get started early than late. It'd help a lot down the line when we start creating moves too… hah, man, I hope I make something that can be widely used so I sell the rights to Silph Co. and become rich."

"That's one in a million," she laughed. "I don't know if I'd like to delve that deeply into those two subjects, though. The common sense concepts like the three states of matter should be enough."

"Uh, right, everyone knows about that. Condensation, am I right?" I nervously laughed.

"There's no shame in not knowing. You're smart and pick up on things quickly, so you'll no doubt surpass common knowledge in a week."

I couldn't help but grin. "Thanks. How are Pauline and Denzel doing?"

"Pauline was never bothered, but Denzel's doing better. He took your departure almost as bad as I did— but don't tell him I told you. He wanted to send you off with a smile, so he hid it, but he's been down in the dumps."

"Yeah… I could tell," I sighed. "I'll call him after you. And Pauline too, or she'll throw a fit about being left out. How are Sol and Zerst doing?"

"You know, I thought we'd made a lot of progress, but they've been fighting a whole lot recently…"

—

"I love you. Have a good rest of your night!"

"You too," she said. "And don't forget to send me Princess' sculpture later."

"I'll have to ask her," I said, looking at her sleeping in my arms. "She's pretty shy about her art."

I hung up the phone, stretched and called Denzel next.

"Hey big guy. I've heard you've been depressed without me," I said, half-jokingly.

"From who? Was it Pauline or Cece?" He groaned.

"You think I'd just tell you? I'm better than that. Now tell me what's been kicking your ass."

I heard Denzel exhale. "Well, it's not just you leaving. It's not even about Justin's mentality being fucked either, it's a lot of things that add up. But the biggest thing is… I feel like things just went from a fun adventure to like, this incredibly serious thing where we'll have to put our lives on the line in the future. It was always dangerous, I mean, we went through Eterna Forest without knowing jack shit about battling. We had to fight and think our way out of Mount Coronet too, but it feels different this time. Like it's just the beginning, and we'll have to fight humans a whole lot more from now on."

I paused to consider what to say.

"Grace?"

"I mean, you're right," I finally said after a heavy breath. "But I'd think that you would be able to cope with that. Everything will work out somehow."

"Copying me?" He said. I could hear his smile.

"That obvious?"

"Yup. We'll see what happens, I guess, but know that even though I'm not a target, I've got your back. I won't let Mars do any of her sick shit to you or Team Galactic hurt anyone else."

"Thank you. I mean it."

"I know you mean it," he said. "This Veilstone stuff is stressing me out."

"Me too, but we've got to deal with it. The League will protect us, so just stay vigilant."

"No, no, not even that. I need a lot of money Grace. Veilstone will make or break this year for me. I have nearly enough for a Shiny Stone from all the sponsors and donations from my fans, but I need more."

"For your sixth?" I guessed.

"I looked it up, and they've brought in a new clutch of Dratini at the Game Corner that are close to hatching," he said. "I want one, and I need to win big if I'm going to get one. I'm talking millions."

"A Dratini? It doesn't seem like Dragonite would fit your schtick though."

"What? Pauline told me the same thing! The Dragonite line is great. Have you seen a video of one flying? They're incredibly graceful."

"Dratini and Dragonair maybe, but Dragonite? They look cute, but they're kind of goofy—"

"Absolutely not. They look majestic as hell."

"Whatever you say… oh, Mira wanted to get something from the Game Corner too! She wants a Porygon, and they sell those there too, or at least that's what Cynthia said. I don't have any advice for you though. Aren't most of their games luck based?"

"Some require more skill, but there's an element of luck everywhere, yes. I've been studying up," he said. "If I don't get a Dratini, I'm fucked."

"You could always get another Pokemon and get a Dratini as your seventh."

"I— I know that would make sense, but I can't bring myself to do that. I've got to keep to my list. It's like, this goal I've set for myself, and if I don't reach it, I'll feel inadequate."

"Just don't lose all of your motivation if you don't get one, okay?"

"I'll try. Thank you for telling me about Mira, by the way. I'll see if we can figure something out."

"Maybe her Kadabra can watch and calculate the odds of each win or something crazy like that," I suggested.

"They've got a no Pokemon rule, otherwise cheating would be way too easy," he chuckled. "Anyway, I hope your trip to the Café Cabin went well? How's Chase doing?"

"Oh, he's the same as always, but more mature," I said. "Ri actually evolved into a Lucario…"

—

"Well, nothing left to do but relax and wait for tomorrow," I said after finishing my call with Pauline. She was so abrasive that she was already secretly practicing flying on Charizard's back. I told her that she'd better not get caught, or getting her license this year would be impossible, and she would need it if she wanted to get eight badges in time. There was no way she, Louis or Justin were traveling all the way to Snowpoint and then Canalave otherwise, although Justin had seemingly given up on the Conference.

Backtracking to one would have been possible, but two? They wouldn't make it to the Conference if they kept traveling by foot. Even I needed to fly on Togetic's back, or I'd be cutting it too close with Byron. Losing to him and then missing the deadline would feel a lot more crushing than just not making it to the city itself.

By the time I made it to Sunyshore, I'd have enough for a Shiny Stone if I'd calculated things correctly, and Togekiss shared a very common body type with most bird Pokemon, meaning that it wouldn't take too long to teach me how to fly on one thanks to not needing to call in a specialized teacher.

I left bright and early the following day. It wasn't like my nightmares didn't wake me up early anyway, so it'd be better to make use of them however I could. After grabbing some food to go downstairs and replenishing a little on potions, I began my trek through route 215. The transition from beautiful weather to cloudy was so quick it was almost esoteric. I knew nothing about the weather, but—

It was already raining.

"Damn it, I should have been wearing my raincoat right away!"