"We're going to a spa."

That announcement came the next day, after Hayley had finished her morning rounds at the arena and was waiting for Barrett and Ceres to be healed. Assuming the "we" referred to Connie and Marcie, Hayley briefly wondered why Connie had tracked her down in person just to tell her this. Maybe she was just that excited about a spa day. "Okay," she said, indulging her. "Have fun."

Connie grabbed Hayley's hands before she could sit down again. "No, silly. We're going to a spa."

"What—me too?" Hayley blanched. "Um. When? And why?"

"This afternoon. And we're going because it'll be fun! I always go to the spa before contests."

"Yeah, but I'm not competing in the contest… Am I?" The last part came as she wondered whether Connie had somehow managed to sign her up for a super rank contest despite Hayley having neither a coordinator card nor the points to qualify for super rank. Connie laughed.

"No, but you'll like it. Your team will, too. All Pokémon like being groomed."

"I really don't think mine do. Maybe Ceres, but Barrett and Sen… And I was planning on training this afternoon."

Connie's face fell in a calculated way, and Hayley winced. She knew what was coming next—and there it was, the big, sad Lillipup eyes. "Come on. Please?" she near-whined. "It'll be fun. I promise."

Either Hayley had lost her resistance to that look over the past three months, or Connie had gotten tips from Skye on making it look even sadder, because the effect it had on Hayley's mettle was stronger than ever. She barely made it three seconds before caving. "Okay. I'll go." Immediately, the sad eyes were gone, and Connie brightened back up. "But couldn't you have told me earlier?"

"Of course I couldn't have told you earlier," Connie said. "If I had, you would have found an excuse not to go."

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In the end, Hayley still didn't think the spa was fun, but it wasn't the disaster she'd feared it would be. The receptionist brought them into a big white room lined with counters and tables. Soft music played over the speakers, and the light was bright, but gentle. Off to the side, three mid-size tubs were set into the floor. Two women were already in the room, wearing skirts and high heels and lab coats, and one greeted Connie familiarly and ushered her to a table to start "her usual treatments." The other smiled at Hayley, and the trials began.

Hayley had only planned on releasing Ceres, but encouragement from her beautician, as well as from Connie across the room, persuaded her to release Barrett and Sen as well. Hayley had hastily tried to explain what a "spa" was to all three of them before they came here, but Sen had been visibly disinterested, and for Barrett and Ceres, she'd only had a few minutes between getting their balls back from the nurse and being whisked away by Connie to their appointment. Predictably, Ceres was thrilled to be in a place that, as she understood it, specialized in very fancy baths, while Barrett and Sen were not. Barrett, in fact, glared at the beautician like he would chop her hand off if she dared to come near him with a brush.

But apparently the beautician, who introduced herself as Morgana, was used to working with rebellious Pokémon. Over the next ten minutes, she did the impossible and convinced both of them to try out treatments. Sen tuned her out and stared at a wall as she suggested acupuncture and cupping and deep-tissue massages, but she finally got his attention when she pitched the mineral bath. The water, she said, was imported from Lavaridge hot springs, and it helped the body recover naturally—her emphasis on natural was so strong that Hayley was sure she must have encountered medicine-hating Meditite in the past—and come out stronger than before. Sen's eyes were still filled with suspicion, but he was also begrudgingly intrigued, and eventually, he slunk over to the steaming bath and lowered himself into it.

Barrett was a tougher sell, and Hayley tried to persuade her to give up several times, explaining over and over that he didn't like people touching him. This, too, must have been something she regularly encountered, because after patiently explaining the benefits of clean, sharp claws and buffed scales in combat, Morgana put out a sandstone slab, a nail file, and pumice stones of varying sizes, and told Barrett how he could use them himself. Barrett was still resistant, but for the finishing touch, she hung a heat lamp over the sandstone, turning it into a warm and toasty basking rock. Even Barrett's pride couldn't hold out against that, and so, just like Sen, he shuffled over in defeat and began examining the grooming tools.

When that was taken care of, Morgana and Hayley turned their attention to giving Ceres the time of her life. Exfoliating treatments, seaweed wraps, massages with Pokémon-friendly oil—she wanted to try them all. Just as before, Morgana went over the benefits of each one, and with Hayley's guard gradually lowering, it took her a little too long to realize she was implying how each of these treatments could help human skin as well. She was doing the same thing she'd done on Barrett and Sen—she was trying to trick Hayley into getting a procedure done! Hayley's walls went back up, but Morgana's persistence, combined with the knowledge that she'd be letting Connie down if she left without getting a single treatment, finally won out. She consented to getting a face mask and a manicure. The face mask was goopy and cold and tasted awful when she reflexively chewed her lip and got some of the cream in her mouth, and the manicure involved way too much sitting perfectly still and inhaling the sharp smells of acetone and polish. But if her Pokémon could be relatively good sports about their own treatments, then so could she.

By the time they left, Sen was clean and relaxed for the first time since she'd met him. His skin had lost some of its greyish cast, and even his veins had receded a bit. He'd gone from looking like a crazy, strung-out mountain monk to a refined, well-trained fighter. Barrett was smoother and redder than she'd thought was possible, every old and shedding scale having been scraped off, and his nails gleamed like needles as he admired them in the light. Ceres was practically glowing and had melted into putty under Morgana's touch, to the point where Hayley had to recall her to get her out of the room—she simply refused to walk. Marcie's face and helmet were bright and her polished horn shone, and every tiny flaw in her gossamer dress had been elegantly patched with silken threads. Connie's hair shone from its keratin treatment, and the skin on her face and hands had been made ridiculously smooth and soft. As for Hayley, her face felt weird, and the violet polish on her nails threw her for a loop every time she looked at it, like her hands belonged to somebody who wasn't her. But Connie was happy, so she was happy, too.

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When Hayley got back to the dorm, Miriam was sitting on the floor, fiddling with something small and round. The second Hayley stepped through the door, she leapt to her feet and held the "something" up triumphantly. "I got it."

"Porygon?" Hayley guessed. Miriam nodded.

"Want to see?"

"Sure."

Hayley had never seen a Porygon in real life before, so maybe this was just her being dumb, but the thing Miriam showed her definitely didn't look like a Porygon. It was a round black sphere, the exact size of a minimized Pokéball, dotted with an array of lenses and tiny holes. "Um. Is the Porygon inside this, or…?"

Miriam rolled her eyes. "It's inactive, duh. You have to turn it on like this." She lifted the sphere in her hand, cleared her throat, and said, "Activate." Then she threw it like a Pokéball, directly at the wall—where it collided with a metallic thwack and clattered to the floor. No Porygon appeared. Both Hayley and Miriam stared at it.

"Um," Hayley said again, looking at the scuffed wall. Had that dent been there before? Miriam gave an exasperated groan, picked the ball off the floor, and began hitting it with the heel of her other hand.

"Activate. Come on, activate. Activate." On the third smack, the lenses on the ball blinked to life, sending beams of light in every direction. Miriam dropped it, but instead of falling, it hovered in place. Holographic lines began to take shape, the white light splitting into magenta and cyan and forming a body, a head, fins, and legs. In seconds, a Porygon had fully materialized. It jerked its head up and down and rotated its legs in a complete circle as it scanned the room—

And then the panels of light that made up its body flickered and disappeared, reverting it to a wireframe mesh with the black ball suspended at the center. The panels came back a second later, but now the entire thing had frozen in place. A tinny, robotic voice came from the ball.

"ERROR—SPATIAL CALIBRATION FAILURE. CANNOT RUN IDLE ANIMATION THREE DOT EXE."

"Not again!" Miriam crossed her arms and glared at the Porygon like that would somehow fix it. "I updated your drivers, idiot! That was supposed to fix this!"

"TROUBLESHOOTING." Its form blinked again. "DRIVER MISMATCH ERROR. C-TWO-D-FIFTY-SIX-EIGHTY-NINE-A-G DOT SYS IS NOT COMPATIBLE WITH F-THREE-A-NINE—"

"Then why did you download it?"

"PROCESSING." Another blink. "UNKNOWN ERROR. CONSULT USER MANUAL OR CONTACT SUPPORT HELPLINE FOR ASSISTANCE."

"Just tell me what I have to do to get you to work!"

"RERUNNING TROUBLE—" It didn't even complete the command before its holographic form shut off and the ball dropped to the ground. For a moment, it was still and quiet, but then several of its lenses lit up with blue light. "PORYGON HAS TERMINATED UNEXPECTEDLY. CONNECT COMPATIBLE ELECTRONIC DEVICE TO SEE ERROR LOG AND RESTART."

Miriam stared up at the ceiling and groaned again. Unhelpfully, Hayley said, "I think it's broken."

"No shit."

"Maybe you should take it back to the casino? They can probably fix it."

"Yeah, no," Miriam muttered. "I can't do that."

Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

"Why not?"

"Because—" Miriam stopped, narrowed her eyes, and sized Hayley up. "You're not a narc, right?"

Hayley still wasn't one hundred percent sure what a "narc" was, but regardless, she said "No."

"Okay. Then, I can't take it back to the casino because I didn't get it from the casino. I got it from a guy at the market."

"Oh." That made perfect sense to Hayley for all of five seconds, before she realized, "Wait, if you could just buy one from the market all this time, then why didn't you—"

"Because the one I got at the market isn't like the ones in the casino. It's kind of… bootleg." At Hayley's confused expression, she elaborated: "It fell off the back of a truck." Still nothing. Miriam sighed. "Ugh, do I have to spell it out for you? Have you ever, like, pirated music or something?"

"No."

"—Wait, really?" Miriam raised a disbelieving eyebrow. "Okay, but you know what I'm talking about, right?"

The gears in Hayley's head were finally starting to turn. "You mean…"

"People get ahold of a Porygon from wherever, they reformat it, then they load new software onto it and sell it to people who can't afford one from the stupid ripoff casino." Miriam nodded. "I should have just got one like this in the first place. I wasted so much time—"

"It's stolen?" Hayley blurted out. "Miriam, what if they took it from another trainer, or—"

"They wouldn't do that. They usually rip them off from businesses and stuff who have like, a million of them, and then those places just replace them with insurance money. It's totally fine."

"But won't the League notice if you're using a stolen Porygon?"

"Not if I'm careful." She picked the ball up from the ground and connected it to her phone with a thin cable. "There's programs you can load to fake the serial number and registration and stuff. And if I get caught, I'll just pretend I thought the whole thing was legit. Then I'm the victim, and they can't fine me."

"I guess…" Hayley rubbed her forehead. "Is a Porygon really worth all this? They're not even good battlers."

"They're only shitty battlers if you don't know what you're doing," Miriam said. "I'm going to try this one out in the arena tomorrow, if I can get it working. You can come watch, if you want."

"Not unless you're going really early. I've got Connie's contest in the afternoon." A thought hit her, and she paused. Should she… No, probably not. But maybe… Whatever. It couldn't hurt. "Do you, uh. Would you want to come to the contest with me? You can probably still get a ticket."

Miriam scoffed. "And waste the whole day hanging out with a bunch of braindead coordinators? No tha—" Hayley gave Miriam a look, and Miriam cut off mid-sentence. There was an awkward, fumbling silence as they engaged in a brief staring contest, and then Miriam dropped her gaze, ran a hand through her hair, and grumbled. "Um. I mean. I want to spend all of tomorrow getting my Porygon working. If that's okay."

"That's fine," Hayley said. Miriam breathed a sigh of relief. "Maybe you can show me the day after tomorrow?"

"Sure." The uncomfortable silence began settling in again, but then, abruptly, Miriam yelled, "Fuck!"

"What? What is it?" Miriam ignored her as she tapped frantically on her phone screen, mashed the buttons on the side, then finally threw her head back and groaned once more. Defeated, she flipped her phone around and showed it to Hayley. The screen was totally black.

"I think this fucker just bricked my phone."

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At last, the day of the contest had arrived. It was scheduled for mid-afternoon, but Connie began preparing much earlier than that. She'd shut herself up in her and Clarissa's hotel room and insisted in the group chat that nobody could come see her while she was getting ready, even Hayley. According to Skye, this was just "normal coordinator brain worms" and Hayley shouldn't think too much about it. Still, it probably would have been easier if they were all in her room together, because every ten minutes she sent a picture of a dress or shoes or a bracelet or earrings, along with a frantic message that she'd been planning to wear this all week, but now she wasn't sure, and could someone please help her out? After the fourth time Hayley responded with "it looks fine to me" or "it's really pretty" to no avail, she finally gave up and let Addison field the questions instead.

Clarissa, for her part, was completely absent from the chat, having gone off somewhere to see her private stylist. Connie had made no secret of the fact that she was desperately jealous of Clarissa for not having to do her own hair and makeup, but the allowance she got from her parents apparently wasn't enough to hire one for herself. Hayley's head swam with the thought of just how expensive all of this was. And she'd thought she'd had it bad, having to buy potions and training supplies—at least she didn't need an entire wardrobe of clothes to wear just for challenging gyms.

After hours of fretful messages, Connie finished pulling her outfit together and left for the contest hall. She and Clarissa had to arrive well before they started letting spectators in, so once again, Hayley couldn't join them. Instead, she had a somewhat awkward trolley ride with Addison and Skye as the two of them chatted about who they thought had the best shot at ranking. Hayley thought she recognized a few of the names, but couldn't put faces to any of them and had nothing to contribute. Neither Connie nor Clarissa's names came up at all—apparently, their chances were so low that they weren't even worth mentioning.

The contest hall was a huge lavender-colored pagoda that was easily as big as any gym building. Hayley had no idea why it had been built to have such a Johto look, but the style certainly made it stand out. Slateport's ubiquitous grey stone streets widened around the structure into a sprawling tree-lined plaza where people and Pokémon milled around popup food and merchandise stands. They passed through a lobby of slick mirrored steel and chrome, showed their tickets, and were ushered into an equally slick arena. The bare, packed-clay field was circular rather than rectangular, and it was a fraction of the size of a regulation League battleground. Raised stadium seating encircled one half of it, and the other half was backed by a wall with the hugest television screen Hayley had ever seen in person. The judges' table, currently empty, sat underneath the television. It was a typical setup, and Hayley had seen it on Connie's contest videos plenty of times before, but only now did she fully appreciate how awful it must be to perform and battle with the crowd staring you down from one side, the judges scrutinizing you from the other, and a larger-than-life image of your own face leering at you from above. No wonder coordinators all had anxiety.

By the time the lights dimmed, the stands were only half-full, but there still must have been at least a hundred spectators there. Most of them were probably tourists, but Hayley had also spotted a good number of people filming themselves with cameras and phones, and she suspected they were some of the online content creators she'd seen on TrainerTV. The lights above the field snapped on, and a man in a prim three-piece suit stepped out with a microphone in hand. The television blew up his head to ten times its actual size.

"Welcome, one and all, to today's super rank contest! My name is Alphone Laurent, and I'll be your master of ceremonies." He gave a grand bow, and the audience burst into applause. After a pause for effect, he straightened up again and continued. "Here, thirty trainers will compete to earn Slateport's ribbon. As always, we will begin with our appeals round, where each coordinator has up to three minutes to impress our judges in three out of the five categories of cute, cool, clever, beautiful, and tough. The top six scorers will advance to the battle round, where each contestant will begin with a point total based on their score in the appeals round. The objective in this round will be to decrease their opponent's point totals until one score reaches zero or five minutes have elapsed, and from there, the three victors will be ranked in first, second, and third place according to the number of points they have remaining." He swept a hand towards the judges' table, where five figures had taken their place. "Today, judging for the cute category, we have the distinguished Dorian Grant. For cool, the inimitable Greville Heath. The formidable Sabine Parry will be judging the clever category, and the handsome Raymond Price is scoring for cute. And of course, for tough, we have the one, the only, Havelock Martin."

Once again, the crowd erupted in applause. Hayley remembered Havelock as a Grand Festival winner from a few seasons back; he must have been here as a celebrity judge. To her right, Addison elbowed Skye and said, "Bet you're glad you're not competing in this one. You'd be screwed."

"Nuh-uh! He'd score Sherry really well—I just know he would." Then Skye sighed. "Sucks for Connie and Clarissa, though. Dorian and Sabine? They don't have a chance."

"Why? What's wrong with them?" Hayley asked.

"Well, Dorian has this idea that cute moves are only impressive when they're used by a Pokémon who isn't cute? So if you're not using like, a Grimer or something, he'll dock you points for unoriginality. And Sabine just hates anyone who pairs cute with clever at all. She says it's gross."

"Gross?"

Skye shrugged. "Yeah, I don't know. She's weird. Anyway, perfect example of why I gave up on contests. How are you supposed to get anywhere when it's a fifty-fifty shot that one of your judges will hate you?"

In the meantime, Alphonse had made his way off the stage, and now he swept a dramatic hand towards a door in the side wall. It swung open, and a girl who looked a little older than Hayley walked out. She was dressed all in black lace, and wore black platform boots that went up to her knees. Her hair was dark and her skin was pale, and as the camera zoomed in on her face, Hayley realized she was wearing cosmetic contact lenses—or at least, she assumed she was, because her eyes were a pale, cloudy white. She clutched a dusk ball in her gloved hands. "From Lilycove City, welcome our first contestant—the haunting haruspex, Adelpha Lee!"

Hayley clapped politely along with the rest of the audience, then leaned over to Skye and asked, "What's a haruspex?"

"I have no idea."

Adelpha strode to the railing at the edge of the field, seeming to glide despite her heavy boots. With a flick of her wrist, she sent her ball flying into the arena. A Haunter materialized in a cloud of holographic black and purple smoke. Before the smoke could fade, it belched a cloud of smog, which obscured it completely—until a pair of shining lavender eyes cut through, staring at every member of the audience in turn. Hayley shuddered, and her hands subconsciously clutched at the edge of her seat. An eerie, mournful aria began to keen from the arena speakers, and the performance began.

Adelpha slowly, almost listlessly, raised one arm straight into the air, while keeping her eyes focused straight ahead. Then she snapped to attention and swiveled in place, pointing straight at empty air. But it wasn't empty for long. Out of the cloud of smog, the Haunter's eyes shone once again, this time with a darker color, and illusory mist appeared out of nowhere and coalesced into the form of a specter. It was cloudy and pitch-black, aside from the pale light pouring from its eyes and mouth, and had the same general shape as a Gastly, but with two long-fingered hands that clutched the air in front of it. Adelpha traced a long arc, and the ghost followed it, performing lazy turns and somersaults as she gestured and twisted her wrist. The routine went on just long enough that the audience began to grow restless, and then the next phase began.

Adelpha threw out her other hand, fingers splayed. Her Haunter burst from its cloud and charged the false ghost. Purple wisps of flame sprang up to circle the Haunter's body, then screamed towards the illusion—but the illusion dodged, grew to twice its size, and let out a horrifying wail. Adelpha gestured again, and the Haunter flew forward, this time with flame coating its claws. As the audience watched, enraptured, the two ghosts locked themselves in a mock battle, with the Haunter firing off will-o-wisps and fire punches as its illusion shifted and morphed and lashed back with tendrils of darkness. Through it all, Adelpha directed them both like a conductor at the orchestra, her left hand commanding her Haunter and her right commanding its shade. At last, as the music reached its peak, the Haunter drew back and powered up a massive shadow ball. The attack "collided" with the ghost and exploded—though, Hayley realized, the Haunter had actually just triggered the explosion early. Night shades weren't corporeal. The ghost shrieked and blew apart into fog, which the Haunter drew back into itself, as though it was feeding on the imaginary ghost's remains. It faced the audience again, and its eyes lit up with one more mean look. Then, the rest of its body faded away, leaving only those eyes which tore through the crowd with sheer, malicious intent.

Paralyzed and stunned, it took the audience a moment to begin their applause. But once one person started, the spell was broken, and in seconds the air echoed with clapping and cheers. The judges finished marking down their scores, and the numbers appeared on the television screen:

BEAUTY 8.5

CLEVER 9.1

TOUGH 8.9

TOTAL 26.5

Hayley was starting to see where Connie had been coming from, when she'd worried her own performance wasn't good enough.