PART FOUR: OVER SEA, UNDER SKY

It had been dark for several hours by the time we reached Azalea. The battle at the tumblestone deposit and Hoppip’s unexpected evolution had set us far behind schedule, especially when Isaac insisted on drawing out our lunch break so he could examine Skiploom and question him about his new form. But we’d made it out of the hills before the sun set, and the path that led to the town was easy to walk, even in the dark.

I grinned as we entered the city limits and Echo started shivering in excitement, her ears twitching furiously as she tried to get a sense of this new place. She eventually launched herself off of my head and began swooping from place to place, occasionally hanging off a tree branch or hovering next to a closed food stall as she moved about. It was interesting seeing how much more at home she was in the dark; she navigated the streets as if she’d been born in them, even though it was her first time in the city. If only I could figure out a way for her to feel as comfortable flying around in the middle of the day…

We reached the house and Isaac unlocked the front door as Florence and I said hello to the pair of Slowpoke that still lounged out in front. We walked inside and I barely managed to take off a single shoe before Charity burst out of the workshop and slammed into Isaac in a whirlwind of glee.

“Papa! You are home!” she cried, hugging him tightly. He laughed and returned the embrace, picking her up in the air briefly before he set her down again. As soon as he let Charity go she turned and hugged Florence (who looked more than a little shocked); then she hugged me, which I hadn’t expected. I stood there awkwardly, not sure what to do with my hands, and caught a sense of amusement from Pausso.

Echo landed on my head and squeaked a question. For some reason that made Charity jump and back away. She stared with big eyes at Echo, then looked directly at me. “Monroe,” she whispered, “there is a Zubat on your head.”

“… I know?” I replied. She kept staring at me. “It’s okay, she’s my newest team member. We met in Ecruteak.”

Now Charity’s forehead creased in confusion. “Ecruteak City? What were you doing there?” she asked as Maisy the Slowpoke finally wandered out of the workshop.

So then we had to tell the whole story of everything that had gone wrong during the trip. I noticed that Isaac heavily edited certain parts, like how badly Luca’s Piloswine had been injured and how Finnegan had threatened us, but I decided to let it slide. Charity wasn’t that much younger than me, but she sure acted like she was. I could understand why Isaac would want to protect her.

By the time we finished our story we had all migrated to the kitchen to eat a late meal of leftover travel rations. Charity had sat like one enthralled through the whole thing, gasping and laughing at all the right parts. Now she applauded, and the slow thump of Maisy’s tail against the side of the table signaled that the Slowpoke approved as well.

“I have been busy too,” she said cheerfully as she picked at the crumbs of her food. “I had an idea for how poke balls may be able to spin about so they always hit a majū with the button. You just have to change the center band so it’s a little heavier in the front, to concentrate the tumblestone there.” She bounced in her seat, grinning widely, as she looked at all of us. “I already made a few samples! Perhaps we can test them out tomorrow?”

Isaac looked concerned. “I thought I told you not to use the lathe by yourself?”

“I didn’t!” Charity protested. “Joshua was there too!”

Isaac opened his mouth, probably about to argue that another kid didn’t count, but at that moment Joshua himself showed up at the front door. Apparently he’d been escorting Charity back to the Kurt’s house each night since she insisted on staying in the workshop every afternoon to work on her ideas.

Charity and Isaac went off to talk to the boy, leaving Florence and me in the kitchen with our Pokemon. I sighed, leaned back, and stared at the ceiling. Now that I had eaten I felt tired, but my brain was also nagging me about what I needed to do next.

Florence must have noticed how I was acting. “What is wrong?” she asked.

I glanced back towards the entryway and lowered my voice. “Charity talking about poke balls reminded me that I need to take another look at Celebi’s ball. I still don’t know how the lock works, but we have lots of experience with releasing majū now. I should probably just try that instead.”

I didn’t say the other part of what I was thinking. Releasing Celebi when it was still in the ball would be risky. It was possible that some damage would be done to the Pokemon’s energy form, and if that happened it would be my fault. Even if everything went according to plan I had no guarantee that Celebi wouldn’t just fly off immediately and leave me stuck in this time forever.

Florence lowered her own voice. “Perhaps we can try tomorrow after training? Best to see if it works as soon as we can.”

I nodded mutely. She was right; there was no sense in waiting around. The first chance I got, I would see whether this new approach would work. And if it did work, I’d finally be able to go home.

~

We walked out to the training field the next morning to find that Smith wasn’t there. Our little group of people and Pokemon backtracked and made our way to his house, where we found him enjoying a cup of tea with Venomoth on the front stoop. He didn’t seem all that surprised when we walked up – at least, not at first.

“Ah, good. You survived,” he said in his whispery voice. Then he actually looked at our group and his hand jerked, spilling tea onto the porch. “Skies above, what are the two of you doing with so many majū?”

I glanced around our group. Pausso had gotten distracted by a trellis set up next to the path and was sniffing the vines with great interest; Echo had decided to stretch her wings by flying on the way to the house, though she had now landed back on my head again; Skiploom hadn’t quite figured out how to control his flight in his new body yet, so Florence was carrying him; Natu had teleported herself on top of a nearby fencepost and surveyed the rest of us from there.

I rubbed the back of my head, which made Echo squeak at the movement. “A lot happened. We might need a new training plan now,” I said with a sheepish grin.

He set down his cup with a shaky hand, then frowned at me. “Tell me more.”

We recounted the whole story yet again, but this time we were interrupted with question upon question. Some of the questions made sense – he wanted to know more about the trainers he hadn’t met before, for one thing, and he was aghast at Edwin’s betrayal and kept trying to see if it might have been some sort of misunderstanding. But he also asked about the mystery Pokemon in the Ruins of Alph and demanded to hear every detail I could remember about my encounter with Lugia and Ho-oh.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Then again, maybe his interest made sense. I’d be pretty concerned if someone I knew casually mentioned that they’d run into a legendary Pokemon or a creepy eye-monster-thing too.

By the time we finished telling him about Skiploom’s evolution, the morning was nearly over. Smith sat silently for what felt like a full minute as he stared at the grass Pokemon, his eyes inscrutable.

Then he muttered something that sounded suspiciously like ‘children these days’. Before I could protest he stood up and stretched out his back. “We have perhaps an hour until my daily session with Alonso. That should be enough time to identify the next steps to take on each of your training paths.”

I stared at him. “You train with Alonso every day as well?”

“Why do you not have us all train together?” Florence asked. She also seemed surprised.

“Because you are too green,” he said bluntly. Then he paused and considered us again. “Perhaps it is better to say you were too green. I suppose now is a good time to review, to see if it makes sense to merge the sessions.” Smith turned to look directly at me. “Trainer Monroe, what do you think the next steps of your training plan should be?”

For a moment my brain panicked. Was this a test? It sure felt like a test.

But maybe that was okay. If this was a test, Florence and I had done plenty of studying as we hiked back to Azalea over the past few days.

“For Drowzee, I think it makes sense to focus on what else he can do with his psychic powers,” I said. “I have some ideas about how we could target Confusion in different ways, and he should be able to learn other psychic attacks too.” I’d had a long conversation with Chiyo back in Ecruteak about how to train a psychic; she didn’t consider herself to be a trainer exactly, but she still worked with Espeon to develop her abilities for performances. I glanced over to Pausso to see if he had anything to add, only to see that he had fallen asleep under the trellis at some point during the conversation. “We also need to keep working on speed and endurance, and meditation of course.”

Then I looked up at where Echo was hanging from the eaves of the building. She’d flown up there earlier to get out of the sun, but the twitching of her ears showed she was still awake. “For Zubat, we should start with the basics so she can get a good foundation. But she also needs to build up more tolerance to sunlight. Once she’s done that… I’m not sure. I’ll have to see her battle more to know what she needs to work on. Maybe she could focus on learning flying techniques from Venomoth? Though she’s a great flier already…”

Smith nodded, his face blank. “And your own training?”

I made a face. “I’m still on the basics.” Then I paused, thinking back to that night in the tent when I had been desperate to get the poke balls back from Finnegan. Even now the memory of how useless I had been made my stomach churn. “I need to learn more about self-defense too. I can’t rely on my majū to do all the fighting for me.”

Smith kept looking at me for a few moments, which made me feel awkward. Then he finally turned to look at Florence. “And you?”

She must have been preparing in her head while I talked, because she launched straight into it. “We all need to master the foundations as well. Skiploom needs to adjust to his new body and improve his flying abilities, and Natu should learn how to combine her teleportation with her attacks. I want to work on my awareness during battle.” She blushed a little. “The battle with the wild majū outside of Violet was very difficult, as I could not track everything that was happening. I wish to be better prepared the next time I face such a situation.”

Smith stared at her impassively. “Anything else?”

She thought for a moment, then shook her head. “I know there is much more to do in the long term – I will eventually need to form a mental connection with Natu, and I wish to study and refine all of Skiploom and Natu’s attacks. But if I rush into things I might miss important details. I want to do this right.”

At that, Smith smiled just a little. “A valid point. Patience is important.” He looked from Florence to me again, then sighed. “Let us train at the usual time for now. I will evaluate your progress, and if you are prepared for more independent training we can merge the sessions. The two of you and Alonso may be able to teach each other a great deal at this point in your journeys.”

We spent a little while longer discussing our plans in more detail, and I found myself grinning hugely as Smith ushered us off of his porch. He thought we might be ready to manage our own training now. Maybe it was a small step, but it was still progress, and every bit of progress counted. Even if I ended up freeing Celebi and getting sent back to my own time that very afternoon, Smith’s ideas for my training routines would surely be helpful for training in the modern day.

Actually, if I did get sent back to my own time and started a regular journey, could my first gym battle even be that much of a challenge compared to what I and my team had been through so far? That felt weird to think about.

We jogged back to the house to make up for the lost morning of training, at least a little. Once we got there we discovered that Charity was still at school and Isaac was gone; probably he was running errands around town since he wouldn’t have expected us back early. That gave me the perfect opportunity to do my investigation.

Pausso asked Natu to watch the front door in case the others returned, and the rest of us piled into the workshop. Florence and I dug through the stacks of boxes until we reached the one labeled ‘Paint’, the one I’d used as a hiding place ages before. We pried it open and sorted through the contents until we found the mysterious ball.

I pulled the ball out and considered it. The center band was definitely tumblestone, but it seemed to have some strange etchings on it like nothing I had seen on a poke ball before. I clicked the button, just to check, and nothing happened; it was still locked. Trying to twist the button did nothing as well, but that was to be expected given the tumblestone band. This was no modern ball with modern release mechanisms.

I had gotten a lot of experience with crafting poke balls by this point, so I paid close attention to the other components of the ball. It felt like it was about the same weight as an apricorn ball, but the top and bottom halves were covered with strange gold and silver materials. I ran a thumb lightly over the top and found that there were tiny ridges in the material, ridges that were barely visible in the dim light of the workshop. Strange.

It felt almost like cheating to free Celebi by taking apart the ball instead of finding a way to undo the lock, and it felt wrong to break such a fascinating object. But what choice did I have? I had no idea how to make progress on undoing the lock, and it was wrong to keep Celebi stuck when we had a potential solution. I sighed and flipped the ball over, ready to start work on the hinge. If I could separate the two halves of the ball, Celebi should be able to materialize right there in the workshop, and…

Wait. What?

“It has a fixed pin,” I said, unable to keep the disbelief out of my voice. “Who would do that to a poke ball?”

Florence raised her eyebrows. “And what is that, exactly?”

I leaned in closer to the ball to make sure I was seeing things correctly. “Uhh… it’s a kind of hinge you can’t take apart. The pin is built into the device instead of being a separate piece. It’s useful if removing the hinge could be a security risk.” I frowned, disgruntled. “Why would there ever be a security risk for a poke ball?”

Florence looked troubled. “One could ask why there should ever be a lock on a poke ball as well.”

Good point. I grumbled and pulled my carving knife out of my pouch, then stopped myself. It was one thing to cut the band off of half a ball when the Pokemon was already safely outside of it. But now, with Celebi still trapped inside? The Pokemon was just as likely to become injured or stuck in the band forever as anything else. It was simply too dangerous.

I slowly set the gold and silver ball down on the ground. Then I sat back and closed my eyes, fighting off disappointment. For over a month now I had kept this idea as a backup plan. I had figured if things ever got too rough I would just release Celebi from the ball the permanent way and hope for the best.

Now my backup plan was gone. Unless I could figure out why the ball was locked or find a way to contact that other Celebi we had briefly seen in Ilex Forest, I’d be stuck in the past forever.

I started breathing more quickly as my thoughts began to spiral. I had friends here in the past, yes, and I would miss them when I left, but I didn’t want to stay in this time forever! I wanted to see my parents again. I wanted to sleep in a room with actual air conditioning. I wanted to go on a proper journey with my team, badges and tournaments and all. I wanted to waste an afternoon looking at silly things on the internet. I wanted to –

Echo crashed onto my shoulder and nestled close to my body, squeaking her concern. Pausso was on my other side a second later, carefully patting my back as he sent a soothing feeling through our bond. When I opened my eyes I could see that Florence was leaning towards me, and she looked worried. “Will you be alright?” she asked, her voice uncertain.

I took a deep, ragged breath, held it for a few moments, then let it out again. Yes, the backup plan had failed. That didn’t mean that other options wouldn’t work. I still had time.

“Yeah. I’ll be fine.”