To my surprise, sailing was actually kind of enjoyable. Once I got used to the feeling of the ship’s constant movement I didn’t feel sick anymore, and it was fun to watch the crew work. For a while it seemed like they were constantly busy adjusting the sails and steering the ship in esoteric ways, but I started to get a better sense for how the ship worked as I watched them move about.
Pelipper kept it going with Tailwind for a while, but soon he got worn out and had to stop using the move. After that the crew adjusted the sails to catch the regular wind so we could keep making progress. I was surprised to see that they were able to set us on a western path even though the wind was blowing towards the south, though they had to curve the sails about in strange ways to make it work.
Once the path had been set, the first day was uneventful. That was nice, actually; I got to spend most of the day sketching and talking to Pausso instead of filling all my time with training and work on the poke ball project. The only real downside was that Echo abandoned us to go hide away in the lower deck after only an hour out in the sun. I tried to coax her back out again, since it was much nicer on the main deck, but she categorically refused. Eventually I gave up and let her rest in the dark like she wanted to.
We kept the shore in sight at all times, just like Tanaji had said before. For most of the day we passed plains and rocky beaches, and I would sometimes watch the wild Pokemon out on the land go about their everyday business. I even got to watch a colony of Sentret and Furret as they grazed amongst the grasses. They always ran away when we tried to get close to them for poke ball research, but they didn’t seem to mind the sight of a ship passing by.
By late afternoon we had switched to a northern trajectory and the plains and beaches had given way to a dense forest. I leaned against the side of the ship and watched the trees carefully. Something about the forest made me feel uneasy, though I wasn’t quite sure what it was.
Tanaji had been busy scrubbing the deck nearby. Now he got up and came to lean on the railing next to me. “You’re interested in the Forest of Ilex?” he asked with mild curiosity. “I have heard about it before. It is supposed to be a dangerous place.”
I nodded slowly; that would explain why the forest felt so eerie. “It’s not that bad,” I replied. “Florence and I go in there sometimes for our research.” Sure, the Pokemon there still attacked us a lot, but our teams could handle that now. Though we did tend to stay on the outskirts of the forest, just to be safe.
“You should be careful,” Tanaji said. “There’s supposed to be a really powerful majū that lives there, one that could defeat any trainer with ease. You do not want to get on its bad side.”
I looked right at Tanaji. “Are you talking about Celebi?” Out of the corner of my eye I noticed that Florence, who had been sitting near the back of the deck and idly brushing Snubbull, sat up straight and looked right at us.
“That’s the name,” Tanaji said, snapping his fingers.
All things considered, I didn’t know that much about Celebi, just what Florence had told me when we’d first met and a few odd comments from people here and there. Maybe if I knew more it would help me figure out the mystery of the gold and silver ball. “Yeah, I heard that it’s supposed to be the guardian of the forest,” I said casually. “I never heard it was dangerous, though.”
Tanaji took the bait, just like I wanted. “Then I’ve got a story for you!” He lowered his voice and leaned in close. “I heard this the last time we visited Azalea’s port. There was a girl that played in the Forest of Ilex by herself every day. One day she told her parents of strange dancing lights and whispering voices, and they told her to not go into the forest again. But she did not listen. The next day she disappeared, and everyone thought she must be dead. Seven days later an old woman hobbled out of the forest with tales about a strange green majū she had encountered. And that woman –“ he paused for emphasis – “was the very same girl! Except she said it had been seventy years for her, and could not explain how.” He grinned widely. “Spooky, yes?”
I stood still as a cold feeling washed down my spine. I hadn’t really thought before about how much time was passing, but it had now been half a year since I was thrown back in time. I had grown enough over the summer that my tunic and pant sleeves were a bit too short, and my hair had grown long enough that it reached past my chin.
If – when – I finally got home, how much time would have passed there?
Henry had been walking past us; now he leaned over and gently cuffed the side of Tanaji’s head. “That is an old wives’ tale,” he told the boy in a chiding tone. “You should not speak about Celebi so thoughtlessly.”
Tanaji rubbed his ear and shrugged. “The boy who told me swore it was true,” he said in a nonchalant tone. “Besides, it’s just a forest majū. What harm could a story do?”
“It is no ordinary majū,” Henry said. “There was an incident in Cherrygrove… oh, years before either of you were born. I was a ship’s boy myself then, on the Yamana.” He sat carefully on a nearby barrel and stretched his peg leg out in front of him. “We had just come in to dock, and everyone on the pier was in a complete uproar. The captain sent me to find out what had happened. I followed the commotion until I came upon the source, which looked to me like a perfectly ordinary cherry orchard, complete with trees brimming with ripe fruit. However, we were in the first months of spring then. It was far too early for cherries to grow.”
He paused to look up at the sky, and when he continued talking his voice was soft, reminiscent. “I asked one of the men there what had happened. He told me that the previous week that very orchard had been burnt to a crisp. A rogue… hmm. Was it a Typhlosion, or a Houndoom?” He considered for a moment, then shrugged. “It does not matter. A rogue majū used a fire attack in the wrong place and it got out of control. The townsfolk were able to set up a firebreak before the city, but they could not save the orchard or the forest that bordered it.”
“The morning of the day my ship arrived, something miraculous happened. People woke to find the orchard and forest had grown back overnight. Not only that – the land was thriving as if it were the middle of harvest season, not the early days of spring. A few of the locals who lived nearby saw what happened. They claimed there was a brilliant light that spread throughout both orchard and forest, accompanied by the sound of bells chiming. At the center of that light was a small green majū that looked like something out of a fairy tale – Celebi, of course. Before their very eyes the burnt remains of cherry trees were replaced by whole, healthy trees, as if Celebi had merely turned back the pages in the book of the orchard’s history and stopped at a better time. A power like nothing in this world.”
I shivered and rubbed my arms reflexively.
Henry sighed, then looked back at Tanaji and myself. “I do not know what truly happened that day, but I do know that what I saw was not possible by human means alone. Celebi saved that orchard and the livelihoods of those who worked it. It deserves better than to be disparaged by idle gossip.”
“Okay, okay,” Tanaji said with a laugh. “I did not mean anything by it!”
Henry grunted as he stood up. “Perhaps, but it still would not hurt you to think before you talk.” Then he looked meaningfully from Tanaji to the bucket and brush he had balanced on the floor next to his feet. “Besides, did you not have work to do?”
Tanaji sighed and picked his tools up, then went back to his scrubbing. I glanced over at Florence, who had clearly been eavesdropping the whole time, to see that she had drawn her legs up against her chest and was staring blankly ahead, probably occupied with her own memories. I turned to look out at Ilex Forest again with a new range of troubling thoughts in my mind.
If Celebi really was so powerful – and I believed that it must be based on my short interaction with it – how did it get trapped in the gold and silver ball in the first place?
~
That night, I found that I couldn’t sleep.
It wasn’t like the troubles I’d had during the trip to Violet. I’d fallen asleep easily enough on the road before; I just always woke up too easily due to noises outside, or a chill breeze blowing through, or just because of the sheer discomfort of sleeping on the ground. Besides, once I figured out how to get settled into my hammock it was fairly comfortable, even though I was sharing with Pausso.
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No, the problem this time was that my brain wouldn’t calm down. I found myself lying awake and alert, listening for any unexpected noise and watching for any sign of movement in the darkness. My mind kept running through things that might go wrong – what if the ship suddenly sprang a leak? What if a wild Pokemon attacked? What if a storm came out of nowhere?
Eventually I gave up and fought my way out of the hammock, waking Pausso in the process. He grunted at me sleepily, so I waved at him to go back to sleep. He ignored that and rolled out of the hammock too, then followed me as I climbed the stairs to the upper deck.
It was chilly outside, and I shivered and huddled into myself to ward off the cold. Sizhen was standing watch up at the front of the deck. She cast a look back at me, nodded briefly, then turned her eyes to the sea again. I moved to stand up by the side of the deck and closed my eyes, letting the rushing sound of the ocean surround me.
For a few minutes Pausso and I stood there quietly as I tried to release all my anxiety out into the night air. Zuri and her crew were good sailors and they had been perfectly nice to us so far. There was no reason for me to be so antsy. We were safe.
Eventually Pausso tugged on our mental bond to get my attention. I glanced over at him, then looked back at the stairs to see Florence climbing up to the main deck. She nodded to Sizhen, then walked up to join me at the railing. For a few more minutes the three of us stood there silently, just watching the ocean.
“I keep thinking back to that night in Violet,” she finally said in a quiet voice that was barely audible over the waves. “If I had not been asleep I could have done something. Raised an alarm, or fought back. And now…”
“I know,” I said, equally quiet. And now we were back in a similar situation. We were being treated as guests by the crew, yes. But Finnegan and Edwin had treated us with respect too, right up until they didn’t.
“I don’t want to be so suspicious of them,” I continued. “They’ve done nothing wrong. But I also can’t stand the thought of being tricked again.”
I fell silent as Sizhen walked by so she could move to a new position at the back of the ship. Zuri had explained that the crew always stood watches when the ship was anchored so they could keep an eye out for unexpected storms or territorial Pokemon. But what if they were also waiting for all of us to fall asleep?
Pausso watched her walk by too; then he perked his ears up thoughtfully. W̷e̴ ̷ c̶o̸u̴l̴d̷ ̶ w̶a̷t̴c̸h̴ ̵ a̸s̷ ̴ w̶e̵l̵l̸, he thought. O̷n̶e̷ ̶ a̶t̶ ̸ a̶ ̵ t̵i̷m̷e̸.̷ ̵ E̷n̵s̷u̸r̴e̶ ̶ n̷o̸t̴h̵i̵n̶g̸ ̷ g̸o̶e̷s̶ ̴ w̷r̷o̸n̵g̷.̷
I nodded slowly. “And if something does happen, the watcher can wake the others up. No one could sneak up on us.”
Florence glanced over at me, clearly confused, and I explained Pausso’s idea. She nodded in agreement. “If we split between the two of us and our majū, that would make seven watches. That is more than enough.”
We quietly made a plan for who would watch when, and when I climbed back into my hammock I felt relaxed for the first time that whole night. Pausso settled down in a sitting position on his side of the hammock, eyes open and ears alert; he was taking first watch. I patted his knee gratefully, then finally drifted off to sleep.
~
Thankfully, the night proved uneventful. At midmorning the next day Zuri explained what the next step of the trip would be.
“If we keep going north for much longer we will hit the border of the Whirlpool Islands,” she told us. She had a nautical map spread out on the table on the lower deck. The paper was full of arrows and notations I didn’t understand, but the overall sketch of Johto was familiar. “That area is tricky to map as it moves around, but it rarely comes this far south. If we make the crossing now we should hit the lower edge of Mitono Island in just a few hours of sailing. Then we can follow the shore up to Cianwood. If all goes well, we should be home by midafternoon.”
“Good,” Isaac said in a weary voice. He was still horribly seasick and had spent most of the voyage huddled up in his hammock, but he had made an effort to get out of bed for Zuri’s explanation. “The sooner we get back on land, the better.”
“What was that about the islands moving around?” Charity asked, clearly curious.
Zuri gestured broadly over the inner sea depicted on the map. “Not the islands; the whirlpools. They are damnably dangerous. In my early days Pelipper – no, he was a Wingull then – Wingull and I took a skiff out to fish in the waters between Cianwood and Olivine. We had no luck, so I was foolish and decided to keep trying through the night. But Wingull got antsy, so I rowed the boat up onto a small sandbar and beached us overnight. I thought he was being dramatic at the time.” She shuddered. “When I woke the next morning a whirlpool had formed near the sandbar, right where I’d tried my hand at night-fishing before. It could have sucked us down easily. You better believe I high-tailed it out of there as quickly as I could!”
“Captain!” Henry shouted from the main deck. “We’re ready to cross!”
Zuri rolled up the map and tucked it safely away into the chest she’d fetched it out of. Then she ran up the stairs and started shouting orders. Isaac stumbled his way back to his hammock, and Oddish trailed after him with a concerned look on her face, but the rest of us went up to the main deck to watch the proceedings.
Honestly, it wasn’t all that different from the sailing we’d done the previous day. The crew shifted the ship so that it was facing directly away from the shore and adjusted the sails so that they’d catch the full force of the wind. Then they took up their usual positions to make sure the ship was running smoothly. The biggest difference was that Zuri stood in a sentry position at the front of the ship. She pulled out an awesome-looking telescope and trained it on the ocean ahead, then stood still and watched. She was mostly quiet as she scouted the way forward, but she occasionally gave the crew instructions to shift the course slightly to the left or right to avoid some upcoming obstacle. Pelipper had flown far ahead of us to track the upcoming path, and it looked like she was sometimes watching him, perhaps waiting for some kind of signal.
Then there was a period when she fell silent for a full five minutes. I didn’t realize something was wrong until I saw Pelipper wing his way back to the ship. He glided down, landed next to Zuri, and cawed a few times, gesturing with his wings as he did. She listened to him, muttered “Shellos slime”, then collapsed her telescope and raised her voice in a bellow loud enough to catch the attention of everyone on the ship. “Lower the sails and stand by.”
The crew jumped into action and I backed up to the railing to stay out of the way. I waited until they had gotten the two sails into their folded-down positions, then ran up to Zuri with the rest of the group at my heels.
“What happened?” I asked. “Is something wrong?”
“I mentioned before that you rarely see whirlpools this far south,” she told us. “Today appears to be the exception. Pelipper spotted two large ones up ahead and a third forming on his way back.” She peered over the side of the ship into the ocean and hummed thoughtfully. “Lugia must be agitated.”
I barely kept myself from yelping. Echo did even worse; she screeched in surprise at Lugia’s name and immediately launched herself down from the rope she’d been hanging on so she could latch herself onto my hair. A few of the crewmembers paused their work to look over and see what was wrong, and Zuri frowned at me.
I really didn’t want to talk about what had happened in Brass Tower again, so I hurried forward. “Uhh – why would that have anything to do with Lugia?”
“Oh, that?” Zuri shrugged. “It’s an old sailor’s legend. Lugia is the guardian of the sea, so whenever something goes wrong we say that it must be upset. There’s some truth to it, too. More than one ship has reported seeing the bird in the midst of a raging storm.” She paused, then narrowed her eyes at me. “Why did your Zubat get so upset?”
“She’s just a bit sensitive,” I lied hastily. Echo squeaked indignantly at me and I resolved to make it up to her later.
Luckily, Florence came to my rescue before I could dig myself into a deeper hole. “So there are whirlpools between us and Cianwood,” she said, thinking aloud. “Could we not simply navigate around them?”
“We could,” Zuri allowed. “But it would be a major risk. They come and go in these parts of the seas, and where one has appeared others are likely to follow. We could find ourselves caught in a newly-formed whirlpool. If it’s big enough it could flip the ship, and then we would be in real trouble.”
I shuddered at that thought.
Charity had been listening quietly; now she spoke up. “Can we go further south to go around the area?”
“Even riskier,” Zuri said immediately. “There’s a reason we followed the coast for as long as we did. The waters south of here are home to a large clan of Sharpedo. They are territorial, and people say they can take down a ship in minutes when they work together.” She shook her head sharply, dismissing the suggestion. “No – if we need to reroute we will go up along the coast until we’re far enough out from the islands to pass them on the northern side. There is a fairly dependable route there that we can take. That will add a few more days to the trip, though.”
Charity stuck out her tongue. “Papa won’t like that,” she said confidently.
“Well, he does not have much choice in the matter,” Zuri said brashly. Then she clicked her tongue and looked out past the front of the ship again. “We’ll give it an hour or two to see if the whirlpools disperse. If they don’t, we do the alternate path.”
I looked out at the distant ocean that seemed so flat and serene. Part of me doubted those whirlpools could be purely coincidental, though the rest of me scoffed at that idea. Sure, Lugia was the guardian of the sea, but there was no reason why the legendary Pokemon should still be interested in me.
Yet somehow, I wasn’t surprised when Zuri announced an hour later that even more whirlpools had appeared. I just accepted it as fate and sat back to watch the crew turn the ship around so that we could head back towards the shore.