CHAPTER 232

Denzel and Emilia came into the room with both of their laptops and immediately started setting up. For a second, I had to remind myself that this would just be for practice and not the real deal because of how serious they were. Cece observed them with her arms crossed and lingering frustration that both of them were too engrossed in their technical talk to figure out.

"Ok, so we'll have these act as our two monitors, and this is how it'll look the day of except we'll be live instead of offline," Denzel said, presenting both computers to us.

One of them had some sort of streaming program opened while the others had his chat open on one side and his channel open on the other where we would see our delayed selves. Even while he wasn't streaming, his chat was moving at a slow pace with people talking about tomorrow's event since he had already announced it on his socials. I wasn't good at any of this influencer stuff, but I did know for a fact that Denzel knew how to build up hype for an event.

"Two screens? Is that the norm?" Cece asked.

"It certainly makes things easier when you don't have to repeatedly tab out. Some people even have more, but that's hard when you're a trainer that's traveling," Emi said, turning to her. "What's wrong, by the way? You look disappointed and we haven't even started explaining."

"Oh, nothing," she sighed. "We were just busy."

Denzel hummed a tune as he typed to his chat. A flurry of activity began as soon as his message came out. "Emilia's been talking about this crazy nose-piercing idea—"

"Only you call it crazy," she said.

"I did say it'd look good on you," he defensively told her. "Anyway, moving on! Here's the plan. First, we do a Q&A with the chat. The questions will come from Chatter and will pop up that screen. We've been going through them and filtering out the troll ones, but do you have boundaries you don't want to cross?"

I smiled. "This reminds me of my first pre-interview training with Mel and the team. Uh, it should be fine, right? Isn't this just going to be Pokemon-related?"

Emilia snorted. "Oh, Grace. They want to know much more than that."

"Like what?"

"Like League-related things, personal stuff, politics…"

"Why don't we just scroll through them during the event and you can pick which ones you want to answer? That's a lot easier," Cece said.

Denzel worked his jaw from side to side. "It's a lot less professional than I'd like, but if that allows us to avoid the annoyance of filtering out questions with one day to work with, sure."

Emi picked up from where he left off. "The Q&A will last an hour and a half, but we'll be talking between ourselves during the stream too."

"Oh. Do we have to be, like, entertaining?" I asked. "I'm not great at that."

"You'll do just fine," Emilia said. "Plus, Denzel and I are good at making sure there are no lulls in the stream, so all you have to do is bounce off of us."

My best friend nodded, releasing his Lopunny into the room. The normal type was pissed for whatever reason, but her anger instantly subsided when he threw her a phone.

"You got her one?" I asked.

"The day she got back from the Center after her battle," he nodded. "My chat was quite mean to her for a while, but I shut it down as fast as I could."

"That's always the problem with battle streams," Emilia shrugged. "People always blame the Pokemon when ninety-nine percent of the time it's the trainer who screwed up. No offense, Denzel, I mean I don't understand anything about battling anyway."

"You're good," he said.

Lopunny quickly started typing something on her phone before turning it toward us, showing us the opened Notes application. I already knew what she'd said because she spoke while she typed, which was really cute, especially with how broken her grammar was compared to the words she actually meant to say.

They say I loose to ceiling. Fucking anoying. Kick them in the balls.

"Oh. She's got quite the mouth on her," Cece noticed.

"Uh, yeah as it turns out," Denzel embarrassingly scratched the back of his head. "She's been translating what my team says and they're all quite, uh, talkative. Swablu's the worst of them. She can't say a single sentence without swearing."

"I thought she was a baby?" I said.

"Yes, which makes it worse. Anyway, when she learns proper grammar, I can hook her up with a text-to-speech program and she'll be able to act as my interpreter. She's very excited about it. Right?" Denzel asked, turning toward her.

Lopunny answered with this.

Fuck you. Lovingly ❤️.

The delayed response made it extremely funny and we all found it hard not to laugh at it.

"Lopunny will be on the stream too, but she'll take on more of a passive, off-screen role," Denzel said. "I've been looking into recruiting mods that can actually moderate my chat, and she's one of them for better or worse."

Lopunny brooded as she typed, What do u maen worse?

"I mean that you're still learning not to be biased," he groaned. "Pauline will be another, and I've got five other people that will be there, so the chat should be slightly less toxic. Last time it didn't matter since you weren't looking at it, but this time it'll be in your face all the time, and since you're both not used to it, it can be grating at first."

"The brain likes to focus on the negative," Emilia added.

"Don't threaten anyone, I'm pretty sure that could get my channel banned," Denzel said.

"Psht. Come on, I wouldn't threaten someone out loud. I'd make sure I'd threaten them in a way where no one but they know I'm doing it, I can't ruin my reputation."

Cecilia nodded. "I'll be here to stop any mishaps. There's a face she makes before she feels like murdering something."

"Ah, yeah, that thing where she stops blinking and her breath slows," Denzel said. "You're better at spotting it than I am."

"The blinking just stops when she focuses, it doesn't always guarantee violent thoughts. The key is that her body is perfectly still. Like a painting."

"Did you guys speak about this behind my back?!" I stammered with a twinge of betrayal in my heart.

"Oh please, it's common knowledge. There's a blink counter meme about you, and it's not just in my chat. It's everywhere online," Denzel said. "People count how many times you blink during battles."

"I blink plenty."

Although my eyes did always feel dry after, I thought to myself.

"Any other memes about her?" Cece asked with a coy smirk.

"Oh, so now you're interested," I groaned, putting my hands up in defeat.

"The blinking one's the most well-known, but you also have stabbing coming at a close second," Emilia said. "Third is how hard it is to get a hold of you—"

She stopped herself and laughed.

"Actually…" she chuckled. "Denzel has this really funny meme about you saved on his phone—"

My eyes darted to Denzel, and his tall frame somehow shrunk as he shot Emilia a disbelieving gaze. Lopunny, who had already claimed a spot on Cecilia's bed, seemed to be enjoying every second of this.

"It's stupid," he said.

"Show me."

As soon as he had his phone out, I snatched it out of his hand. Cece leaned toward me to look, and she let out a hearty laugh. It was a blurry picture of me… somewhere in Solaceon. It took me a while to remember that it had been taken in that clearing I trained my team in for the tournament. The picture looked to have been blurred on purpose and had the text 'LEGENDARY POKEMON SPOTTED' in all caps and bolded impact font.

"Where's the joke? Seriously, that's not even funny," I mumbled.

"It straddles the line between horribly on the nose and hilarious," Emilia laughed. "And for some reason that makes it even funnier."

"Ha, ha," I mocked. I glanced back down at Denzel's phone and noticed some other memes on his camera roll. "Wait, he has other memes in there—"

"That's enough of that!" Denzel yelled, grabbing his phone back. I tried to grab it, but he extended his arm up in the air until he was out of reach.

"Do you have memes about all of us saved?" I scoffed after giving up.

"He sends them all to me," Emi said. "I'd say at least fifty percent of them are funny."

"You just don't appreciate humor like I do," he shook his head.

"Send all of the memes about Grace to me," Cece spoke to Emilia.

The chestnut-haired girl nodded, and before I could even protest, Denzel spoke over me.

"Let's get back to the topic at hand! We got way too side-tracked. One hour and a half of Q&A. Do you all follow me so far?"

"It's hard to follow with all of this off-topic stuff, could you go over it again?" Emilia teased.

"I'll just choose to ignore you. Next, we have an hour and a half long interview with Goalducc42— his real name is Andrew Melendez. He'll be joined by his friend Archive, who doesn't want his real name out there."

"So it's not just Goalducc now, but this Archive guy too?" I asked. "Every hour it seems like you add new stipulations to the stream."

"A one-hour-and-a-half interview seems ridiculously long," Cece muttered.

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"Okay, I get it," Denzel sighed. "You guys don't like it. It's not really an interview, it'll take the form of a podcast. For this section of the stream, Emi and I won't be speaking most of the time. It'll just be you two, Andrew and Archive in a call while we'll be sitting on the bed and joining in to moderate and observe. So we have a three-hour stream, and it'll probably last around ten minutes longer if we're generous. Does tomorrow at nine in the evening work for you all? Because I already said it would be at nine and it would be really awkward to change it now."

"Nine sounds about right, but wait, what are they going to talk to us about? Don't we get a heads up for the questions, to like prepare?" I asked.

"What? No," Denzel said. "That'd be ridiculously inorganic and staged. That's not how this is going to work. If there's a question they ask or something they say that's off-limits, let them know on the spot."

"I liked my prep for my interview with SGNC better than this," I grumbled.

"Relax, it'll be fine. These are two people just as passionate with battling as we are even if they're not in the Circuit," he said. "Cece, does it work for you?"

"If I must."

"Oh, and we'll split the revenue for the stream between the four of us," Denzel said. "It won't be that much, but it'll still be substantial, I'd say. I feel like it'd be a bit unfair if I took it all since you two will be the stars of the show."

"Oh. I guess that makes sense," I muttered. "Anything else—"

"Yes!" Emilia yelled. "You're making a Chatter and a DailyTube account. Both of you."

"I'll be fine, but Grace won't be able to post anything without explicit approval from the Poketch Company anyway," Cece said.

"Same Poketch Company who would love to have her be more active online? It's not much, but just her having an account will make her follower count skyrocket even if she never posts anything and it stops people pretending to be you two dead in their tracks."

"People pretend to be us online?" I asked.

Emilia smiled, focusing on her phone for a few seconds before showing the screen back to me. She had typed the name 'Grace Pastel' in the search bar and there were around a hundred people with variations of my name. It was the same for Cece.

"Grace_Pastel1, _GracePastel, Grace-Pastel, xGracePastel— Arceus, what the hell?" I said, blinking at the screen.

"You're both famous enough to get verified, so this won't be a problem when you make an account," Denzel said.

"Some of these are just fan accounts too," Emilia added. "Not everyone's pretending to be you."

I clicked on the culprit with the most followers, who had nabbed the name GracePastelOfficial for themselves. They had twenty-two thousand followers, which according to Emilia wasn't much, but it was still astonishing that all of those people had been tricked into believing that person was me.

"Really enjoyed my battle with my friend Denzel_Williams. Now I'm on my way to get an apprenticeship with Jasmine! Maybe I'll go to Johto with her next year— why in the world did ten thousand people like this?" I scoffed in disbelief.

"Well, people were high off the end of our battle and were looking for any kind of news from you, so they all converged on this post. It probably got boosted by the algorithm too," Denzel said. "See what I mean, though? At least claiming your spot online is important."

I sighed, blowing a raspberry. "Yeah. Arceus, why didn't you tell me this earlier?"

"I tried!"

Some more accounts that pretended to be me loved acting crazy too. Like, utterly unhinged, which I wasn't. Posting stuff about stabbing, saying that one day I'd snap and commit murder, and other things that made me cringe from the bottom of my heart. Thankfully as Emilia had said, most of the accounts were normal people that were simply my fans that had made fan accounts. Some of them posted news about me and what I was doing while others made montages of my battles. It felt odd to actually be face to face with their accounts. To this day, I had known I had fans but they were faceless and might as well have not existed save for the rare person that was brave enough to stop me on the street. I had Buddy or Princess out specifically to avoid those situations though, so that rarely happened. Denzel, meanwhile, couldn't go ten minutes without getting stopped.

"Should I put out a statement about it?" I said after making both of my accounts. I had already texted Melody about it, and she'd answered instantly with a thumbs-up emoji and said that this was great news. "To stop them from being weirdos?"

"No. The more attention you give it, the more people will do it," Cece said. "You're better off ignoring them."

"She's right," Emi nodded.

"I wish my fans were like yours."

Cecilia's fans looked sane in comparison. Sophisticated, friendly debates about her battles, tactics and Pokemon that reminded me of Denzel's early days before he had blown up. What was strange with Cece was that she was popular and yet her fanbase hadn't devolved into a mess. Of course, there was always the occasional nutjob, but that was a universal issue that plagued every famous person, trainer or otherwise.

"I mean, you do stab things a lot, and the fanbase often reflects the trainer—"

I glared at Denzel, and he innocently lifted his hands.

"I'm just saying…"

"It's not weird when I do it. Right?" I asked, turning toward Cece.

She wrapped an arm around me and kissed my cheek. "Absolutely not. It's very cute."

Emilia raised an eyebrow. "You guys are so weird."

Denzel and Emilia stayed for around an hour to tell us more about the stream, but the conversation often devolved into debates about online culture and fanbases. Denzel helped us ask for a verification checkmark and put us in contact with Goalducc and Archive. They didn't have many followers on Chatter, but he said they mainly focused on the forums, which he had told them was bad for growth if they wanted to do their podcast thing, so he was kind of acting as everyone's social media manager. Emilia kept stressing how abnormally nice he was being. Rare was an influencer of his size who still chatted and helped his fans so much. He even still answered his direct messages, although he had a horrible backlog that was growing by the day. She was quite famous in the coordinator side of the world, although less then we were, but her frequent collaborations with Denzel kept her growth steady and allowed her to act as a bridge between the two communities. And it made people start to talk.

They were together so much that there were rumors that they were dating. Of course, no one but me knew the truth.

Before they left, Lopunny asked to speak to me alone. Denzel found it strange, but he let her do so. Everyone left Cece's room, leaving me only with the normal type, who was still on my bed. Her relaxed, lounging pose was no more, however. She was tense, as if she had been preparing herself for this moment for a while now. She started to type on her phone, but I stopped her.

"You can just speak to me," I said. "What is it that they call you? Wench? That's really rude, honestly, I don't know how you deal with it."

Lopunny huffed, saying that she was proud of her name despite the negative connotations it had. I frequently heard her and the rest of Denzel's team speak with each other and it sometimes boggled my mind. Twig, Snake, Wench and Hog. Sylveon was no nickname, and I hadn't seen them speak with Swablu yet, but the fact that they liked these was still insane to me.

"So? What is it? You can always talk to me."

Lopunny took a deep breath and began speaking, first saying that Denzel had been too focused on the training they'd gotten from Craig and his… situation with Emilia and Pauline to notice the rot that was festering within.

Sylveon had tried to recruit her to destroy his relationship, and when she'd refused he called her a traitor and stopped speaking to her. Just like he had stopped speaking to me after I had the same reaction. He hadn't asked anyone but her, and Lopunny was sure than even Milotic wouldn't join in to help if asked, but this was creating a rift between her and the team because Sylveon kept her isolated from the others. At first, she was surprised that I even knew about this, but I explained that he'd done the same to me.

I bit my lip and exhaled, trying to find a way to put my thoughts into words.

"I have to tell this to Denzel," I said. "He has to speak to Sylveon. Didn't they already have a talk about this? In Hearthome?"

Lopunny didn't answer, instead saying that Sylveon had never expected Denzel to ever start potentially dating someone else, and he hated the idea of sharing. I knew fairy types were possessive and protective— hell, I felt it every day toward Cece even if I kept it deep within me, but if I let that side of me out, I knew I could turn into a horrible, controlling person. Princess was ready to kill and ask questions later if anyone ever threatened me, and Bella had put my friends through a trial to prove that they 'deserved' me.

But this went beyond that.

Lopunny continued, saying that Sylveon might have accepted one woman in Denzel's life, but the idea of dividing his time with two was too much for him to bear. She'd caught him crying on multiple occasions, hidden away from the rest of them. He was spiralling, and it was affecting his training too. New moves came slower to him than the others, and he wasn't as motivated as before.

"I can't imagine Sylvi crying…" I muttered with a twinge of sadness. It was hard not to think back to the little Eevee that I'd first met in Twinleaf. "We need to tell him about this now—"

The normal type furiously shook her head, her ears swaying wildly from side to side. She asked for one more chance to set things right. The next time they were all together, she would essentially stage an intervention with the entire team and reveal everything Sylveon had said.

"That can get ugly," I said. "I wouldn't do that if I were you."

She shrugged as sadness emanated from her. She said that they'd always been more independent than my team, and she wanted to try to fix things their way first. She also feared that Denzel would stop his experiments if he heard what Sylveon was feeling. The fairy type had kept everything hidden from Denzel perfectly so far. If it didn't work, then she would talk to me again and ask for my help. I asked her three times if she was certain, and she said yes.

Part of me felt like I was doing the wrong thing for listening to her, but Pokemon were individuals. Going behind her back when she had explicitly asked me not to would feel even worse. One thing was for sure, though, if the intervention went badly and Denzel needed to speak to Sylveon, then I would need to be there with them.

Denzel tried to ask me what the conversation had been all about, but I told him I couldn't say, and I told Cece the same thing despite wanting to tell them. One question sprung to mind, however. Why had Sylveon not done anything himself? I was happier because of it, but he kept asking others to do what he wanted instead of doing anything himself.

Not that there was anything he could do anyway—

Oh. Oh.

He had asked for Lopunny's help because she had a phone and was literate.

—

I found it easier to focus the next day despite having struggled to sleep last night. Sleep had cleared my mind and managed to make me a lot more positive than I'd been. At the core of his being, Sylveon wanted Denzel to be happy. If Lopunny could communicate that along with the fact that Denzel would always have time for him, then she would succeed.

Melody had sent me new terms and conditions for whatever I wanted to post. She had to run every single post by her team before it was approved, and only then would I be able to upload whatever I wanted. I was also surprised to see that Cece and my accounts were already verified, and the news of our arrival on Chatter had made the rounds. It was only morning, but I already had passed eighty-thousand followers and I was climbing quickly. Cece was slightly above that, at eighty-six thousand. Melody had me put some Poketch Company corporate speak in my bio. I looked up Craig's account for my own amusement and saw that he had six million followers. Even Cynthia had an account, although she only posted government-related stuff. She had fifteen million followers, which was almost half of Sinnoh's population. Chatter was mostly a Sinnoh-based platform, and other regions used their own social media that was mostly disconnected from it. Denzel? He had two hundred thousand.

I'd already gotten a bunch of direct messages, but I got tired of looking at them really soon when I read the third message asking me to stab them and the second asking me to meet them in Sunyshore and the countless number of creepy messages and I set my direct messages to friends only.

Thankfully, my teacher arrived as soon as I had enough of looking at the website.

Jasmine had messaged me the exact time she would pick me up and came at eleven in the morning on the dot.

"Jasmine!" I smiled. "Did you go to your support group?"

"Pinky promise," she said. "Feel free to ask Volkner. It wasn't… well, I can't help but think that I'm not like them every time I go there, but I've finally acknowledged that I am. Now it's a matter of putting in the effort… Arceus, let's just go and train. The further I am from a city the better it'll be."

I felt a pang of pity for the Gym Leader. "Will you be fine when you get back?"

"I'm going to be honest, I might need you to drop me off at Volkner's Gym. I don't think I can be trusted alone, Grace."

"Okay. Well, I'm free until… eight thirty, so I'll stick around until Volkner's off his shift."

"It feels weird having a teenager babysit me, but thank you," she said. "I mean it."

Jasmine released Metagross, Teleporting us away and I started to tell her about needing more help for Static Shield. Before that, though, I asked her about the battle with Volkner, and she said the fight between Honey and Electivire would be in public and would be right after the 4v4. That meant that the changes we'd made to the arena would stick.

The afternoon passed in a flash, and soon enough, evening came. When I arrived in Denzel's room, he had already set everything up, and Emilia and Pauline were there too, although the redhead wasn't in the shot and away from any microphone. Yes, they had bought large microphones specifically for this, and a fancy face cam was mounted on the desk. Four chairs that had no doubt been brought from our friends' rooms had been arranged around the desk. I shot Lopunny a knowing look, and she shook her head, signaling that an opportune moment hadn't come quite yet. She returned to typing something to Pauline, who guffawed at whatever she had said.

"How are your nerves?" Cece asked, grabbing one of my hands. "Good?"

"I'm good, don't worry about me," I said. "You're here."

"What about me?" Denzel joked.

"You're irrelevant," I teased back. It felt weird to joke around when Sylveon's plea was gnawing at me.

"Ouch. Well, it's 8:50pm. Let's start the stream— and by the way, please refrain from showing how in love you are on camera. No kissing."

"Obviously. Who do you take me for?" Cece scoffed.

"Someone who can't go five minutes without touching or kissing her girlfriend," Denzel said.

Cece was about to fire back, but she realized she'd kissed me and reflexively placed one of her hands around my waist as soon as she'd seen me. Her hand slipped away, causing Emilia to laugh, but Denzel gently shushed her so he could start his countdown.

"You really need a 'starting soon' screen," Pauline said from the back.

"I've already commissioned one, it's on the way. No talking, Pauline."

"I don't want to interact with the cesspool that is your chat anyway."

"Shh! Three, two, one, start!"