“Maybe we could try interviewing the other captured majū as well? More information might be helpful,” Isaac suggested.
After hearing the stories from the two Pokemon clan leaders, our group had retreated to a different building to discuss the situation. This building was just as dreary as the warehouse had been, but at least it had a thin rug on the ground and a plain table for us to gather around. I was currently sitting slumped in a chair with Pausso dozing on the ground next to me, listening with ever-increasing boredom as the adults came up with bad idea after bad idea.
“We have plenty of information from the two clans already,” Hisa pointed out. “I say we send a team back out onto the trail to find the Haunter that the Nidoking mentioned. It may be able to show us the truth of the situation.”
“You would trust a ghost to tell the truth?” Tomo asked flatly. He adjusted his glasses and sniffed. “I may not be a trainer, but I know the reputation that ghosts have.”
Hisa spread his hands out wide and smiled disarmingly. “What, that they are supernaturally enjoyable?” A low snickering came from underneath the table, where Misdreavus was haunting the meeting.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Florence briefly smile. She was trying to sit up straight and look like one of the adults, but I had noticed that she kept playing with Natu’s poke ball under the table, twirling it round and round in her hands. I wasn’t the only one who was getting bored and impatient.
“We are thinking about this too much,” General Finnegan barked out as he thumped a fist down on the table. “We captured plenty of majū this morning. Just pick a Growlithe and a Nidoran, heal them up, and tell the damn creatures that they are the missing ones.”
Edwin drew in a deep breath before speaking. “I do not think that would work, sir,” he said, choosing his words with care. “Majū can surely recognize their children, the same way that we humans do.”
“I do not see how when they all look the same,” Finnegan grumbled.
“Going back to the idea of gathering information, our problem is that we have incorrect information,” Tomo said. “At least one of the majū must have lied to us. We need to force them to tell the truth. Perhaps if we starve them?”
I exchanged an uncomfortable look with Florence, but Isaac spoke up before either of us could interject. “That will not work,” he said calmly. “Being in a poke ball appears to slow a majū’s metabolism. I have not had the time to do a proper study yet, but I hypothesize it would take weeks before the majū even felt hungry. You would have to keep them out of the balls, and that raises a host of other difficulties.”
“Perhaps we could trick them?” Edwin suggested. “Ask them many questions, then when one of them makes a mistake in their story point out that we know they are lying.”
“That is assuming they would care if they were caught out,” Hisa said idly.
My mind was starting to wander again. Yes, I knew that this conversation was important, but it had been going on for at least twenty minutes already and I was bored. I hid a huge yawn behind my hand, trying to look awake and alert instead of half-asleep.
Isaac must have noticed my yawn, because he smiled slightly and turned to the rest of the group. “Gentlemen, may I suggest that we let the children leave so they can rest? They have had a long day and are not necessary for this discussion.”
I sat up straight and glared. I did not like the insinuation that I was some kind of baby who got cranky because he didn’t get his nap. Florence kicked me under the table before I could say anything, though. “I think we would appreciate that,” she said brightly. “Let us know if there is anything we can do to help.”
She shot me a hard look that clearly communicated don’t mess this up as Finnegan nodded carelessly. Then she got up, shooed Hoppip down from where he had propelled himself near the ceiling, and exited the room. I was left to wake Pausso up and follow after her.
“What gives?” I asked as we caught up with her on the street outside. “I thought you wanted to be treated like a real trainer, not a kid.”
“I do, but that meeting was useless,” she said freely. She shot an arm out to the side to catch Hoppip before he could be blown away by a sudden gust of wind, then started walking in a random direction. “I mean, ‘just replace the Growlithe and Nidoran’, really.”
“So, what, we just give up?”
Florence scoffed. “Obviously not. Instead, we will find the missing majū ourselves! That will make them take us seriously.”
I grimaced. “You say that like it’s so simple. How are we supposed to find two specific majū? They could be anywhere!” I lowered my voice a little and glanced away. “They could even be dead. You saw how angry that Nidoking got – what if something happened to the missing Growlithe and he’s just lying about it?”
Florence considered the idea for a moment, then shook her head. “I think they are both telling the truth.”
A group of men in military outfits were carrying large barrels across the street in front of us, so we paused to let them go by. I turned and gave Florence a flat look while we waited. “How do you figure that? Their stories totally contradicted each other!”
“Only parts,” she said seriously. Then she started listing points off on her fingers. “They both agree that the conflict started because of a disagreement over the berry grove, that the missing Growlithe was in talks with the Nidoran clan, that the two sides were supposed to meet at the trail to reach a final agreement, and that Nidoking attacked Arcanine when she came to the meeting. Only some of the details are different.”
“Some really important details,” I grumbled.
“Regardless – what if they are both telling the truth? What if someone else kidnapped the two missing majū?”
I made a face. “That sounds too complicated. And anyway, how would someone else stealing away the majū help us find them? They’d still be lost.”
Florence deflated somewhat. “That is true,” she admitted glumly.
The soldiers finished crossing the street and we started walking forward again, silent this time. I perked up when I realized that I could finally see some buildings that didn’t look like boring military compounds up ahead. Perhaps taking a break for a little while would help us come up with a solution.
I shot a grin over at Florence. “While we’re brainstorming how to find the majū, how about we check out the city?”
She shrugged in reply. “I suppose that could be interesting.”
~
It turned out that Violet was pretty similar to Azalea, except that everything was bigger and more communal. For example, one building that we passed had a huge room where dozens of women sat and worked at their weaving. I had gotten used to seeing women working at their looms in Azalea, but in that town each woman would generally work in her house or right outside of it. Here, it looked like they all worked together instead.
We passed a giant kitchen where a cluster of soldiers had gathered to talk loudly over a late breakfast, and a nursery where a frazzled-looking girl chased around a pack of toddlers who were screaming joyfully at the tops of their lungs. On the next street down I stopped to stare in awe at a huge smithy that spanned the length of an entire block. Dozens of men banged their hammers on hot metal and sharpened blades inside, and I could hear shouting as someone scolded an apprentice for getting sloppy with a batch of nails. Eventually Pausso tugged on my ragged sleeve and sent me a small feeling of impatience, so I sighed and started moving forward again.
After we had walked down a few blocks Florence let Natu out of her ball. Predictably, the first thing the tiny bird did was panic at the sight of the whole city around her and teleport away. She came back after a few minutes, though, and even let Florence hold her when it became clear that the bird’s hopping pace was far too slow to keep up with the rest of us. Florence narrated what was going on around the city in a quiet voice as we walked, and Natu appeared to be listening to her intently, like maybe she could understand the words if she just tried hard enough. She probably could, too; wild Pokemon had to be good at learning languages if they wanted to partner up with humans.
I was enjoying taking in the sights of the city, but there was still one place in particular that I wanted to see, and I was kind of surprised that I hadn’t noticed it yet. I glanced up at the sun, then frowned; I still had trouble internally tracking directions, though I had gotten a lot better than I used to be.
“Hey, Florence,” I asked, “which way is north?”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
She glanced up and hummed. “Right in front of us, I think. Why?”
That was strange. The place I was looking for was supposed to be at the northernmost point of the city, and it should have towered over the other buildings. I spotted a man working outside by a nearby woodshop and walked up to him. “Excuse me, can you point the way to Sprout Tower?”
The man glanced up from the stick he was smoothing down and frowned at me. “What did you say, boy?”
“I’m looking for Sprout Tower,” I said more slowly. “Do you know how to get there from here?”
His frown deepened. “Never heard of a Sprout Tower,” he said gruffly. “Is this some kind of joke?”
I stared at him for a moment, then mentally slapped myself. I had always thought Sprout Tower was ancient, but apparently I was wrong. “Never mind, I think I –“
“Yaaargh!” the man suddenly shouted as he jumped to his feet and dropped his stick and sandpaper. I looked around, wondering what made him yell, and noticed that Pausso had wandered over to join me. “Get that thing away from me!”
“It’s okay,” I said quickly, putting a hand on Pausso’s shoulder. “He’s my majū, he won’t hurt you –“
The man didn’t listen; he just shrieked again and ran back into the woodshop. I sighed and decided it was best to retreat before we got in some kind of trouble.
“Sorry, buddy,” I said quietly to Pausso as we walked back up to Florence. “I guess this place is different from Azalea after all.”
“Zee,” Pausso said glumly in agreement.
Florence raised her eyebrows at me as we caught up to her and started walking down the street again. “Sprout Tower?” she asked in a low voice with great interest.
I shook my head. “Forget it.”
“Information about the mysterious future, then.” She pursed her lips and frowned as Hoppip did a happy little twirl in front of her. “A tower built only for Bellsprout, perhaps? Who would make such a thing?”
I decided to play it safe and change the subject. “Look, that guy is selling mochi!” I waggled my eyebrows at her. “I don’t know about you, but I could definitely go for a snack right now.”
Florence rolled her eyes, but she also dropped the subject. I ignored the peddler’s wide-eyed staring at our three Pokemon and bought a small bag of the soft rice cakes. We split them across the two of us and our Pokemon - well, most of our Pokemon. Pausso was being stubborn and refusing to eat regular food again.
“Come on, I know you haven’t been eating enough recently,” I told my starter as I waved one of the treats in front of him. “And these are good!”
Pausso just looked at me flatly. D̶͖͠r̶̠̀e̶̮̽a̵̭̕m̴̖͗s̶̥͠ ̶̮͌ a̵̼͝ȑ̷̠ḛ̷͐ ̴̖̈ b̸͚͂e̵͔̿t̴̪̄t̷̩͛e̸̤͝r̴̫̿.̶̺̔ ̸̡͛ Ÿ̷͔́o̸͚̎ũ̷̠ ̶̱̇ n̵̲̈́e̶̘̕e̷̲͝d̴̦͂ ̵͚͒ m̷̞͝ö̴̖́r̸̻̎ė̴̞ ̷̠̅ s̶̼̐l̸̬̀e̴͈̓e̷̛̫p̵̬͝.̸̞̀
I sighed and shook my head. “Sleeping outside is hard, okay? Maybe it will be better now that we’re back in a city.”
Florence glanced over at me and raised her eyebrows. “Trouble?” she asked before nibbling at her own mochi.
“Drowzee’s just mad because I’m not sleeping well, so I’m not dreaming enough,” I explained. “He’s getting hangry.”
She paused and tilted her head to the side. “Hangry?”
“You know. Hungry and angry at the same time.” She blinked at me, confused. “Never mind.”
I popped a piece of mochi into my mouth and looked around. We were reaching the end of the current block, and the area on the right side after the next intersection had been left open to form a large dirt clearing. A covered well stood in the middle of the clearing, and a few people were clustered around it to draw water. What caught my attention, though, was how the space was full of children.
Dozens of children around my age and younger were running all around the clearing, yelling and calling out to each other happily as they played. I watched them for a few moments as we drew closer, then grinned. They were playing tag! Finally, something that hadn’t changed across the years.
One of the boys noticed us coming and skidded to a halt, his jaw dropping as he took in the sight of us. Well, that made sense; with Pausso, Hoppip, and Natu out, we were walking around with almost as many Pokemon as lived in Violet in the first place.
A girl ran up to the boy and slapped his back. “You’re it!” she shrieked, grinning hugely.
The boy spluttered and turned around. “No fair! I got distracted!”
“You’re always getting –“ the girl looked past him, saw us, and stopped mid-sentence. “Wow,” she said, her eyes huge.
“Um, hi,” I said. More of the children stopped running around and turned to stare at us. “… can we play?”
The first boy stared at me like I had two heads, but in a good way, I thought. “What about your majū?” he asked pointedly.
I looked over at Pausso and shrugged. “They can play too, I guess.” My starter’s ears wiggled a little, and he flicked his trunk up and down in agreement before calling a few words over to the other Pokemon.
I half expected Florence to scold me for acting like a kid, but instead she got a thoughtful look. “This might be interesting,” she said under her breath. Then she grinned at the other kids. “Yes, they can play! They will not hurt you, we promise.”
The boy turned around and had a quick whispered conversation with the girl who had tagged him. Now the whole set of children had stopped running around, and everyone had gathered nearby to see what was going on.
When the boy turned back around, he was smiling. He took a few steps forward and held a hand out to me. “Deal. Shake on it?”
“Sure,” I said, feeling a little baffled at the sudden formality. I leaned forward and shook the kid’s hand.
“You’re it!” he screamed at me; then he took off running in the opposite direction. I stood there for a few moments, dumbfounded. Then I yelped and looked around. Pausso was already running away with his trunk swinging madly, and Florence and her Pokemon had taken off as well.
“That was a cheap trick!” I yelled as I chased after the boy who had just tagged me in the most unfair way possible.
~
We must have spent at least half an hour running around the clearing and playing tag with the other kids. Not all of them – a few did leave as soon as it was clear that Pausso and the other Pokemon were going to play too. But a surprising number of the kids stuck around, and more showed up as word spread around town about the game.
I managed to tag one of the city kids early on, so I spent most of the game avoiding other kids who became It. All the training we had done had built up my endurance and even made me a bit faster, so it wasn’t even that hard to dodge around the other kids. That gave me time to watch and see how the villagers interacted with our Pokemon.
Most of the kids avoided our Pokemon at first, but a few came up to look at them more closely during lulls in the game. More and more of the kids started daring to interact with them as the game went on. It made me happy to see that the children of the city could be more open-minded than their parents.
Pausso was tagged a couple of times, but he did a good job catching up to others and tagging them each time he was It. Hoppip was tagged exactly once; when it happened, he simply caught a breeze that blew him right into another child’s arms, then used the air currents to avoid ever getting tagged again. But the biggest surprise was Natu. The little bird never became It at all, even though she was easily the slowest player. That was because every time someone ran up to her she simply teleported to the opposite side of the field before they could lay a finger on her.
Eventually everyone got worn out, and we all gathered as a group and collapsed in the dirt near the middle of the clearing. After half an hour of play, most people had gotten used to our Pokemon, so Pausso, Hoppip, and Natu were sprawled with us out there under the sun.
“You know, you never told us your names,” the girl from the beginning of the game pointed out as we all watched a man pull a handcart on the street nearby.
“I am Florence, and he is Monroe,” Florence said. She reached up automatically and caught Hoppip’s foot as he was lifted away by a gust of wind, then set him back down on the ground so he could anchor his feet properly in the soil. “He is partnered with Drowzee; I am working with Hoppip and Natu.”
“I am Nara, and my brother is Laichi,” the girl said, gesturing to the boy who had tagged me at the beginning of the game. She rattled off the names of several of the other kids in the group, but they all fled my mind pretty quickly.
“You two are really young to be trainers,” Laichi pointed out. “And Florence, you’re a girl. How did that happen?”
“Nothing says girls can’t be trainers,” I said hurriedly before Florence could start yelling (she was already looking a bit red in the face).
“All the adults say we cannot,” Nara said glumly. “I used to talk about how I wanted to find a majū to befriend, but our parents told me only boys are strong enough to go out in the wild.”
“That is nonsense,” Florence said forcefully as she sat up straight. “If you want to be a trainer, you need to seize any opportunity you can get! I will help you!”
“Well, I do not want to be a trainer anymore,” Nara said diplomatically. “I have been learning how to make dyes recently, and it is quite interesting. Mother thinks I might be able to apprentice with the guild in a year or two.”
Florence wilted and settled back down onto the ground, mumbling unhappily to herself.
“Did you all come here to help Trainer Edwin get rid of the wild majū?” Laichi asked.
“Yeah,” I replied. “We just fought a bunch of them this morning, actually.”
That made a bunch of the kids sit up and pay attention. “Tell us!” one of the girls whose name I had forgotten said.
So Florence and I spent the next ten minutes telling them all about the battle and about the interrogation with Arcanine and Nidoking. The city kids were a great audience – they oohed and aahed at all the right moments, and they even applauded when I described how Florence had tossed the poke balls at the two fully-evolved Pokemon and caught them so easily.
Florence had just gotten to the part where the Nidoking told us that his daughter went missing when a great chime rang out through the city. The system was the same as the bells that Azalea used to track time, so my ears perked up immediately and I mentally counted the number of tolls. When they finally stopped ringing, I blinked in surprise; it was only midday. How had so much happened in the day already?
All around us the other children were getting up and racing off to their homes for lunch. Nara and Laichi lagged behind briefly to say goodbye, but they ran off shortly after that as well.
“Well, that was fun,” I said as I stretched my arms out. Pausso snorted in agreement next to me.
“Yes, and I think I have an idea,” Florence said as she stood up and dusted off her clothing. “Did you see that –“
“Umm, excuse me?” a small voice interrupted from behind us.
I looked over my shoulder and saw that a girl about Florence’s age was standing there with her hands clasped in front of her. She was one of the kids who had joined the tag game late and had stayed to listen to the story. I had no idea what her name was.
“What is it?” I asked as I clambered up onto my own feet, then pulled Pausso into a standing position next to me.
The girl shuffled her feet awkwardly as she looked down at the ground. “The missing majū that you mentioned in your story? The Growlithe and the Nidoran?”
“Yes?” Florence said, her voice sounding impatient.
The girl shuffled her feet again, then looked up and met my eyes. “I think I know where they are.”