Live Wire

[Live Wire]

The last thing Theo remembered was falling.

Not a normal fall, not the kind where your stomach lurches and you throw your hands out by instinct. This was different. It was like the ground beneath him had simply stopped existing and something else had taken its place. Colors he didn't have names for pressed in from every side. Sound went wrong, too high and too low all at once. And then the dock came up fast.

He hit the wooden planks hard enough to knock the air from his lungs, skidding across them on his palms and knees before slamming into a rope post. For a moment he just lay there, gasping, staring up at a sky that was a familiar shade of blue. One that made something in his chest loosen slightly, even though he couldn't say why.

He pushed himself upright. His palms were scraped raw and his knees weren't much better, but nothing felt broken. He looked behind him.

There was nothing there. No tear in the air, no swirling tunnel of light. Whatever had dropped him here was gone.

When he reached back for something, a home, a face, a name, there was nothing solid to grab onto. Just flickers. A ceiling he vaguely recognized. The sound of something electronic. Words in a language he understood but couldn't place.

He pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead and forced himself to breathe.

Figure it out later.

The screaming started.

It came from the people at the far end of the dock. They scattered, knocking into each other, abandoning their gear and bags as they ran. Theo spun around and felt every thought in his head go very quiet.

It came through the air above the water. That was the first thing that struck him, that it moved wrong, drifting rather than flying, trailing long transparent tendrils that caught the light like glass. It was enormous. It looked like something from deep underwater that had never been meant to exist in open air.

Nihilego.

The name came to him without effort, like it had always been there waiting. He knew what it was. He knew it shouldn't be here, that it belonged somewhere else entirely, somewhere far removed from this harbor and these boats and that blinking lighthouse.

He also knew it was looking at him.

The creature's blank eyeless face turned in his direction. Those tendrils drifted toward him slowly. There was no expression to read, nothing to warn him, but his body decided for him. He was on his feet and running before he had consciously made the choice, back up the dock toward the city, boots hammering against the wood.

He made it about thirty meters.

A tendril caught him around the ankle and yanked. He went down hard, cracking his chin off the dock, and the world spun. He twisted onto his back and kicked at the tendril but it held fast, squeezing with a pressure that wasn't quite painful but wasn't right either. Like something was being pulled out of him rather than crushed.

He grabbed the rope post beside him with both hands and held on.

"Hey!"

The voice was like a thunderclap. Theo's head snapped up.

The man was huge. That was the first impression, just massive, broad across the shoulders, wearing a vest that looked like it had seen actual combat. He stood at the dock entrance with his arms crossed and his jaw set, looking at the Nihilego the way someone might look at a car that had cut them off in traffic. Annoyed. Unbothered.

"Let the kid go."

The Raichu at his side didn't wait for a command. It was already moving, orange and brown and fast, lightning crackling between its ears as it slid to a stop between Theo and the Ultra Beast. The thunderbolt hit the Nihilego dead center and the tendril snapped back. Theo scrambled upright, nearly fell, and got himself behind the rope post.

The Nihilego shrieked, a sound like shattering glass filtered through water. It surged forward and the Raichu met it again, a thunder wave spreading across the dock in a ripple that made Theo's hair stand on end. The Ultra Beast convulsed, those long tendrils going rigid.

The man walked forward like there was nothing urgent happening at all.

"Finish it, Raichu."

One more thunderbolt. The Nihilego folded in on itself like something collapsing and then it was gone, dissolved back into whatever it had come from, leaving nothing behind but the smell of ozone and a faint shimmer in the air where it had been.

The dock was silent except for the water.

Theo became aware that he was shaking. His palms were still bleeding and his ankle ached where the tendril had grabbed him, and his chin was definitely going to bruise. He looked up at the man now standing a few feet away, studying him with pale eyes that gave very little away.

"You're not from here," the man said. It wasn't a question.

Theo opened his mouth. Closed it. He genuinely didn't know what to say to that, because the honest answer was that he wasn't sure where he was from.

"I don't know," he said. His voice came out rougher than he expected.

The man's eyes narrowed slightly. "You don't know."

"No."

A long pause. The Raichu had padded over to sit beside its trainer, watching Theo with round dark eyes. In any other situation he might have found it hard not to stare. He had known what a Raichu looked like, in the same way he had known what Nihilego looked like, but knowing and seeing were entirely different things.

"What's your name?" the man asked.

Another silence.

The man sighed through his nose. It sounded like a decision being made.

"I'm Lieutenant Surge. You're in Vermilion City." He jerked his head back toward the city. "And you're coming with me until we figure out what to do with you."

Vermilion City. The words landed somewhere familiar in Theo's head, like an echo of something he should know better than he did. He turned it over for a moment but nothing more came.

He looked at the empty space where the Nihilego had been. Then back at Surge.

He didn't have anywhere else to go.

"Okay," he said.

Surge gave him one last look, measuring, unreadable, and then turned and walked back up the dock without waiting to see if Theo followed.

He followed.

 

[Live Wire]

The police station smelled like old coffee and something faintly chemical that Theo couldn't name. He sat in a chair that was slightly too big for him, hands folded in his lap, then unfolded, then pressed flat against his knees. The officer across the table was shuffling papers she kept glancing at without reading and he kept his eyes on the wall just past her shoulder because looking directly at people felt like too much right now.

Lieutenant Surge stood against the wall behind her. He hadn't said anything since handing Theo off at the door. He didn't look like he planned to.

There was something familiar about the officer, though Theo couldn't place it. The shade of her hair maybe, or the cut of her uniform. It nagged at him the way everything nagged at him, just out of reach, gone the moment he tried to look at it directly. He let it go. He had bigger things to hold onto at the moment.

She leaned forward and folded her hands on the table. "Let's start simple. What's your name?"

He had not said it out loud yet. It had come to him somewhere between the dock and the back of whatever vehicle had brought him here, surfacing quietly through all the noise in his head. He had kept it to himself then, too rattled to know what to do with it. He wasn't sure he was any less rattled now, but he had at least stopped shaking.

"Theo," he answered.

She wrote it down. "Last name?"

He shifted in his seat. "I don't know."

Her pen paused. "You don't know your last name."

"No."

"Where are you from?"

He glanced toward the door without meaning to, then back at her. "I don't know that either."

She studied him. He got the feeling she was good at reading people and he got the further feeling she wasn't sure what to make of him, which made two of them.

She sat back slightly. "I'm Officer Jenny. Vermilion City Police." She said it the way people did when they expected the name to mean something.

It did. Not her specifically, but the name landed somewhere familiar in his head, the same way Vermilion had when Surge said it. He turned it over for a second and nothing more came. He let it go.

"How old are you, Theo?"

He thought about it. His knee started bouncing under the table and he pressed his hand down on it to stop. "Fourteen. I think."

"You think."

"Yes."

She set her pen down, seeming to decide something. After a moment she picked it back up and tried a different direction.

"Do you know what a Pokemon is?"

"Yes." The answer came out faster than anything else had, more certain. He caught himself and swallowed.

"Can you describe one for me."

"Which one?"

She blinked. "Any one you like."

"Raichu." He hadn't meant to sound so immediate about it but there it was. "Electric type. Evolves from Pikachu using a Thunder Stone. Fast, strong special attacker, better suited to hit and run than taking hits. Lieutenant Surge's is experienced, you can tell by how it moved on the dock."

The room went quiet.

Surge shifted slightly against the wall. It was the first time he had moved since they sat down.

Jenny wrote something on her notepad. Theo looked at the wall again. He was aware of how that had sounded. Rattling off type matchups while barely remembering his own surname. He had no explanation that wouldn't make things worse so he kept his mouth shut.

"What about the creature that attacked you," Jenny pressed. "Can you describe that."

"Nihilego. Ultra Beast, classified UB-01 Symbiont. Comes from Ultra Space through wormhole breaches."

"Why did it attack you?"

He held her gaze for a moment, fingers pressing harder into his knee. "I don't know."

She tapped her pen against the notepad. "You can rattle off Pokemon classifications but you can't tell me your own last name."

"That's correct."

"You understand how that sounds."

"Yes," Theo replied, quieter than he intended. "I do."

Surge spoke for the first time. "Bring in the Hypno."

Jenny glanced back at him. Something about her expression suggested she had been waiting for him to say it.

They brought the Hypno in a few minutes later, led by a handler who positioned it at the far end of the table. It was tall and slow moving, its pendulum swaying in a steady rhythm as its yellow eyes settled on Theo. He had known what a Hypno looked like. He hadn't known how heavy its attention would feel sitting across a small table from one. He kept very still.

"It'll read your surface memories," Jenny explained. "It shouldn't be uncomfortable."

Theo nodded. His hands were pressed flat against his thighs now.

The Hypno's eyes half closed. The pendulum slowed. Theo felt something at the edge of his thoughts, not painful, more like pressure, like a hand pressing gently against a door.

Then the Hypno stopped.

It pulled back so sharply that its chair scraped against the floor. The pendulum swung loose and uneven. Its handler grabbed its arm and spoke to it quietly, and the Hypno responded with a low unsettled sound that Theo felt more than heard.

Everyone in the room was looking at it.

The handler looked up slowly. "It can't get in." He hesitated. "It says there's something there. But it isn't something it recognizes."

Jenny stared at Theo. He looked back at her and tried to keep his face even.

"I'm not doing anything," Theo pressed.

"I know," she replied, in a tone that suggested that was exactly the problem.

After that they took him down the hall to a small bright room that smelled like antiseptic and something sweeter underneath it. A woman was already waiting, leaning against the counter with her arms crossed and a look on her face that suggested she found the whole situation considerably more interesting than she was letting on.

"Sit," she instructed, nodding at the bed in the center of the room. "I won't bite."

She waited until he'd climbed onto it before pushing off the counter and extending a hand. "Nurse Joy. And before you ask, yes there are a lot of us, and no I won't explain it because I find the confusion entertaining."

The name caught him the same way Jenny's had. Familiar without reason, like an echo of something he should know better than he did. He shook her hand and said nothing.

She snapped on a pair of gloves and got to work, cleaning the scrapes on his palms with an efficiency that suggested she had done it a thousand times. "So," she began conversationally. "Fell out of a wormhole, got grabbed by an Ultra Beast, survived both. Anything else exciting happen today or was that your limit?"

"That was my limit," Theo murmured.

"Shame. I was hoping for something really dramatic." She checked his chin, tilting it toward the light with two fingers. "Bruised. You'll live. Probably."

He glanced at her.

"Joke," she clarified, not looking particularly sorry about it. She moved to his ankle, unwrapping the boot carefully. "This one's going to be sore for a few days. Whatever grabbed you really didn't want to let go." She wrapped it with practiced hands then made a few notes on her clipboard. "You're healthy otherwise. Little underweight but nothing I'm crying over tonight."

She paused with her pen over the paper.

"No records matching your description anywhere in the system. Not in Kanto, not in the other regions." She glanced up at him then, and the teasing had gone quiet. Her voice was still light but her eyes weren't. "Not anywhere."

"I know," Theo murmured.

She held his gaze for a moment, then clicked her pen and tucked the clipboard under her arm. "Well. You've had a thoroughly terrible first day, wherever you came from." She pulled the gloves off and tossed them. "Get some rest when you can. Doctor's orders. Or Nurse's orders. We can argue about the distinction another time."

She left with a small smile that felt like it was meant to stay with him, and it did, just a little.

He sat alone in the small room for a while. The ceiling was plain white. He stared at it and tried to slow his thoughts down. The Hypno. The look on Jenny's face. The way the handler had gone pale. He turned it all over and couldn't do anything useful with any of it so he set it aside.

He had a name. That was something.

The door opened and Surge stepped in. He stood in the doorway with his arms crossed, looking at Theo the way he had looked at the Nihilego on the dock. Measuring.

"The Hypno has never done that," Surge grunted.

"I'm sorry," Theo offered.

"Don't apologize for it." His eyes moved across the wrapped ankle, the bandaged palms, the bruise coming up under Theo's chin. "You got nowhere to go."

It wasn't a question. Theo answered it anyway.

"No."

Surge nodded once, slowly. "You'll stay at the gym. We'll figure the rest out as we go."

He turned toward the door and left it open behind him.

Theo sat with the quiet for a moment longer.

Then he got up and followed.

 

[Live Wire]

The walk from the police station to the gym took less than ten minutes.

Vermilion was built close, the kind of city where everything important sat within reasonable distance of everything else, a design choice that Theo suspected had less to do with urban planning and more to do with the fact that Lieutenant Surge had never seen the point in walking further than he needed to. The station sat two streets back from the waterfront and the gym sat one street forward from it, both within shouting distance of the harbor if the wind was right.

The city opened up as they left the station behind and Theo slowed slightly without meaning to.

The ocean was enormous.

He had known Vermilion was a port city the way he knew everything about this world, from somewhere distant and secondhand. But knowing it and standing at the edge of a street with the whole harbor laid out in front of him were completely different things. The water stretched further than he could properly account for, a deep shifting blue under the early morning sky, catching the light in ways that made it look almost electric. Ships moved slowly along the far edge of the harbor, large commercial vessels with their horns cutting low across the water. Closer in, fishing boats rocked gently at their moorings and on the furthest pier a group of Slowpoke sat with their tails dangling in the sea with the patience of creatures that had nowhere particular to be.

Above the water Wingull moved in wide lazy arcs, riding the wind without much effort. Further out and higher up something larger was moving, dark against the sky, too far to make out clearly but big enough that the Wingull gave it considerable space without needing to discuss it.

On the streets around them Vermilion was beginning to wake up. A woman was rolling a cart of produce past a storefront while a Meowth wound itself between the wheels with catastrophic disregard for its own safety. A pair of Rattata were having some kind of disagreement near a drain. On the corner a man in a fisherman's vest was crouched down talking to a Magikarp in a water tank in a low encouraging voice, the kind of voice that suggested he either believed it understood every word or genuinely didn't care whether it did.

Theo watched all of it and said nothing. There was too much to look at and not enough room in his head for words at the same time.

The gym came into view at the end of the block. It was larger than he had imagined, a broad building with thick walls that had the look of something built to withstand considerably more than bad weather. The exterior was purely utilitarian, no decoration, no flourish, just solid construction with an obvious purpose behind every decision. But what struck him most was the sheer size of it. The outer walls rose high enough that the roofline cleared most of the surrounding buildings, and along the upper exterior ran rows of wide windows that caught the morning light and threw it back in long pale strips across the street.

A sign above the entrance read VERMILION CITY GYM in letters that had weathered several seasons but remained perfectly legible. Two Electrode sat motionless on either side of the entrance like sentries, which Theo found either reassuring or deeply alarming depending on how he chose to think about it. On the wall beside the entrance someone had painted a lightning bolt in yellow, slightly faded now but still clean and sharp at the edges. It looked like the work of someone who had known exactly what they were doing.

Surge pulled the side door open and let him through without ceremony.

The gym smelled like ozone.

Theo noticed it the moment he stepped inside, a sharp clean smell that sat at the back of his throat and didn't leave. The training floor was wide and open, the battlefield marked out in worn lines on the concrete, the ceiling vaulting high overhead with enough space that a fully evolved Pokemon could move without constraint. Banks of fluorescent lights ran the full length of it, buzzing faintly at a frequency Theo felt more than heard.

But what stopped him in his tracks was the seating.

Tiered rows of seats rose up on all four sides of the battlefield, stacked high like a proper stadium, enough to hold what looked like several hundred people comfortably. They were empty now in the early morning quiet but the scale of them said something about what this place became on the right day. This wasn't just somewhere people came to train. It was somewhere people came to watch.

Pokemon were everywhere on the floor below.

A pair of Jolteon were running circuits along the far wall, their spiked fur crackling with small discharges every time their paws connected with the ground. A Magneton drifted in slow lazy loops near the ceiling, occasionally dipping toward a chalkboard covered in battle diagrams before floating back up as though reconsidering. Three Voltorb sat in a neat row near the equipment storage, perfectly still in a way that suggested they were either sleeping or planning something that nobody was going to enjoy. Two Pikachu were sparring in the corner under the watchful eye of a Raichu that looked as though it had seen considerably more of the world than it had ever wanted to.

Theo stood in the doorway and took all of it in and felt something in his chest loosen slightly for the first time since he had hit those dock planks.

He knew this. Not personally, not from any memory of his own life in this world. But he knew it the way he knew everything here, from somewhere else, somewhere that felt further away with every hour that passed. It didn't matter right now. Knowing it was enough to make it feel less like standing on the edge of something and more like standing on solid ground.

"You'll get used to the smell," said a voice to his left.

He turned. A young woman was leaning against the wall with her arms crossed, watching him with an expression that sat comfortably between amused and assessing. She was a few years older than him, dark haired, wearing the same style of vest as Surge though hers looked considerably less battle worn.

"Visquez," she introduced herself, pushing off the wall and extending a hand. "Gym trainer. Surge filled me in this morning, said you'd be staying with us for a while." She looked him over without being remotely subtle about it. "You're smaller than I expected if I'm being honest."

"Everyone keeps saying that," Theo replied, shaking her hand.

"Well everyone keeps being right." She glanced past him toward where Surge had already disappeared down a corridor without further comment. "He really just handed you off and walked away didn't he. Very him." She turned back to Theo with a more practical expression. "Come on then. I'll show you around before things get busy."

He followed her through the gym, watching the Pokemon as he went. The Jolteon slowed as he passed, both turning to look at him with sharp amber eyes. One of the Pikachu stopped mid spar and tilted its head curiously in his direction. The Raichu from the dock was sitting near the far corridor and it watched him cross the floor with the same quiet measured attention it had given the Nihilego the night before.

"They can feel something off you," Visquez remarked, watching the Jolteon track him with its eyes. "Electric types are sensitive to aura at the best of times. Whatever you're giving off they're picking up on it." She said it the way someone said something they had been turning over all morning and hadn't quite landed on an explanation for.

Theo said nothing. He wasn't sure what to say to it.

She showed him the storage room with its walls of equipment in varying states of repair, the small kitchen that smelled like someone had been burning toast since approximately the founding of Kanto, and finally the narrow back room with a cot and a window that looked out onto a side street where a Pidgey was aggressively stealing something from a bin and daring the entire world to say something about it.

"Home for now," Visquez announced, leaning against the doorframe. "It isn't much but the roof doesn't leak and the Voltorb stopped wandering in here at night. Mostly."

Theo looked at the room. Small, quiet, actual daylight coming through the window.

"It's fine," he replied, and meant it considerably more than he expected to.

"Good." She crossed her arms comfortably. "So. How much do you actually know about how gyms work?"

Theo opened his mouth and then stopped.

He didn't know. Or rather he thought he didn't know, and then something shifted at the back of his mind the way it always did when the right word got said in the right order. It came back not gradually but all at once, like a light snapping on in a dark room. Gyms. Badge circuits. Challengers working through eight of them across the region, building their teams, testing themselves against gym leaders who specialized in a single type.

Gym leaders.

He turned that over and looked at Visquez. "Surge," he started slowly. "He's the gym leader here."

"That's right," she confirmed, watching him with mild curiosity. "Electric type specialist. Been the Vermilion leader for a long time." A pause. "Did he not tell you that?"

"He told me his name and that I was coming here," Theo replied. "That was about it."

Visquez stared at him for a moment. Then she exhaled through her nose in a way that suggested this was not entirely surprising. "Right. Very him." She pushed off the doorframe. "Yes. Lieutenant Surge is the Vermilion City gym leader. One of the eight in Kanto. Trainers come from all over the region to challenge him for the Thunder Badge as part of their gym circuit." She nodded toward the main floor. "That's what the stadium seating is for. Gym challenges are public. People come to watch."

Theo turned that over quietly. He had known all of this from somewhere. He just hadn't connected it to the enormous man who had pulled a Nihilego off him on the dock last night and told him to come along without much further explanation.

"He saved my life before I even knew who he was," Theo said, mostly to himself.

"That sounds about right for Surge," Visquez replied, not without warmth.

He found Electrike by accident.

He had been standing near the side of the floor, watching the Jolteon run circuits and trying to stay out of the way, when something moved low and fast at the edge of his vision. He turned and found a small dog sized Pokemon pressed against the wall behind a stack of equipment crates, half swallowed by the shadow back there.

Green and grey, a low slung body, a thick tuft of fur around its neck standing completely on end. Even from across the room Theo could see the tension running through every line of it like a current with nowhere to go.

Electrike.

He went still and crouched down slowly, dropping to its level without moving any closer. He kept his hands visible and made himself as small as he could and waited.

The Electrike didn't move toward him. Its eyes stayed fixed on him with an intensity that didn't waver, tracking him the way something tracked a threat it hadn't fully decided what to do with yet. A low sound came from its throat, not quite a growl, something more measured than that. A warning from a Pokemon that had clearly learned at some point that warnings needed to be issued early.

Visquez appeared quietly at his shoulder. Her voice dropped.

"That's Electrike. It belonged to a rookie trainer, girl named Mara. She was just starting out, fresh off her first badge." She paused, something careful moving through her voice. "Ultra Beast attack caught her outside Vermilion about six months ago. She was on her own, barely into her journey. Got hurt badly enough that she couldn't continue and retired before she'd really even started."

Theo kept his eyes on Electrike. "And it ended up here."

"Surge heard about what happened and took it in. He does that." Visquez was quiet for a moment. "It's been hard since. Doesn't trust easily, barely interacts with the other Pokemon, spends most of its time back there behind those crates." She watched Electrike for a moment, expression thoughtful. "I don't know exactly what it's picking up from you. Could be nothing. Could be something about you is setting it off in ways I can't explain yet." She shook her head slightly. "Either way it's going to take time."

Theo straightened slowly and took two deliberate steps back, giving it the room it was asking for.

"How old was she," he asked quietly.

Visquez glanced at him. "Fourteen. Same as you."

Theo didn't say anything to that. He looked at Electrike one moment longer then turned away and left it to its corner and its shadows and whatever it needed to make itself feel safe.

He had time. He didn't have much else right now but he had time.

The morning moved on and the gym began to change around him.

It started slowly. A handful of kids filtering in through the main entrance, finding seats in the lower tiers, talking among themselves in the way people did when they were trying to seem more relaxed than they were. Then more came, and more after that, until the weekend crowd had settled into the stadium seating in proper numbers, mostly younger kids between ten and thirteen from the look of them, clutching snacks and pointing at the battlefield and arguing with each other about things Theo couldn't quite make out from where he was standing.

He found a quiet spot near the side wall and watched it fill.

The gym felt different with people in it. Bigger somehow. More like what it was built to be.

The first challenger of the morning appeared at the entrance not long after, a boy around his age with a brand new trainer bag and the slightly overwhelmed expression of someone who had not entirely processed what they had signed up for. He stood at the edge of the battlefield and looked across it at Surge who was already on the other side with his arms crossed and his expression giving nothing away whatsoever.

The crowd settled into quiet. Even the younger kids stopped arguing.

Theo straightened up from the wall without thinking about it, suddenly wanting to see properly

 

[Live Wire]

The crowd had gone completely quiet.

Not the gradual quiet of people losing interest but the sharp immediate kind, the kind that fell over a room when something was about to happen and everyone present understood it simultaneously. Even the younger kids in the upper tiers had stopped their arguing and their snack wrangling and were leaning forward with their elbows on their knees.

Theo found himself doing the same without noticing.

Across the battlefield Surge stood with his arms crossed and his expression completely neutral, watching the challenger the way someone watched weather coming in off the ocean. Measuring it. Not concerned by it.

The challenger was a boy, maybe Theo's age, maybe a year younger, standing at the edge of the battlefield with a trainer bag that still had the store crease in the strap. He was trying very hard to look like he belonged there. He didn't quite manage it but Theo gave him credit for the attempt.

A gym trainer Theo hadn't met yet stepped forward from the side of the field and raised a hand.

"This will be a two on two battle between challenger Reid and Gym Leader Surge of Vermilion City. Standard rules apply. The battle ends when both of either side's Pokemon are unable to continue or forfeit is declared. Switching is permitted for the challenger." He looked between them. "Are both sides ready?"

Reid nodded quickly. Surge gave a single slow nod that somehow conveyed considerably more authority.

"Begin."

Reid grabbed his pokeball and threw it in the same motion, the way someone did when they were afraid that hesitating would make things worse. A Rattata materialised on the field, small and quick, its whiskers twitching as it found its footing on the concrete.

Surge looked at it for a moment.

"Voltorb," he replied simply.

The pokeball opened with a sharp crack and a Voltorb rolled forward onto the field, its single eye blinking as it settled. It looked almost cheerful about the whole situation, which Theo found quietly alarming.

Reid squared his shoulders. "Rattata, quick attack!"

The small purple Pokemon shot forward like a fired stone, fast enough that Theo lost it for a split second against the pale concrete. Reid had chosen well. Voltorb wasn't built for speed in the conventional sense and quick attack prioritised movement above almost anything else.

"Rollout," Surge replied, in exactly the same tone he might have used to order lunch.

Voltorb spun. Not the clumsy rolling of something caught off balance but deliberate and controlled, a tight spinning motion that built momentum with every rotation, and as Rattata closed the distance Voltorb was already moving to intercept. The two collided near the center of the field and Rattata went skidding sideways across the concrete with a sharp cry.

Reid winced. "Quick attack again, keep moving!"

Rattata scrambled up and darted left, changing direction mid run, and Voltorb adjusted its rollout arc to match with a fluidity that told Theo this Voltorb had done this many times before. Rattata was fast. Voltorb was faster on the roll and gaining momentum with every pass.

The third collision wasn't a contest. Rattata crumpled and Reid recalled it quietly before the gym trainer had finished making the call.

"Rattata is unable to continue. Challenger Reid, send out your second Pokemon."

Reid stood for a moment with the second pokeball in his hand, staring across the field at the cheerfully spinning Voltorb. Theo could see him thinking. Could see the exact moment he made his decision and the exact moment doubt came right behind it.

He threw the ball. A Pidgey landed on the field, wings spread for balance, eyeing Voltorb with the wariness of a Pokemon that had been in enough scraps to know when something was more dangerous than it looked.

Reid took a breath. "Pidgey, gust from above. Don't let it get close."

It was the right instinct. Get vertical, use the range, keep Voltorb from building rollout momentum. For a first time challenger it was actually a sensible read and Theo found himself nodding slightly without meaning to.

Pidgey beat its wings hard and lifted, rising fast toward the high ceiling. Below it Voltorb slowed its spin and watched with its single eye, patient.

"Thunder wave," Surge stated.

The electric discharge came up not as a bolt but as a spreading pulse, filling the air between Voltorb and Pidgey in a crackling sheet. Pidgey caught the edge of it and dropped sharply before recovering, its wings stuttering in the paralysis, rhythm broken entirely.

Reid's face fell. He understood immediately what Theo had understood a half second earlier. A paralysed flier was a grounded flier and a grounded flier against a Voltorb was nothing good at all.

"Gust, now, everything you have!"

Pidgey tried. Its wings beat hard despite the stuttering paralysis and the gust that came off them was real enough to push Theo's hair back from where he was standing against the side wall. Voltorb rocked in the wind.

Then it rolled forward and that was that. Pidgey hit the ground and Reid recalled it before the gym trainer had finished raising the flag.

"Pidgey is unable to continue. The winner is Gym Leader Surge."

The crowd exhaled collectively. A few of the younger kids in the upper tiers looked mildly traumatised. Most of them looked delighted.

Surge walked across the field and said something quiet to Reid that Theo couldn't hear from where he stood. Reid listened, nodded several times, and walked away with his shoulders straighter than when he had walked in.

Theo leaned back against the wall and turned it over in his head. The whole thing had lasted maybe five minutes. Surge had used two moves. He hadn't raised his voice once, hadn't shifted his expression, hadn't done anything that looked remotely like effort. And yet every single decision had been exactly right, not in a showy way but in the way of someone who had so completely internalised the logic of a battle that the correct answer simply presented itself before the question was even fully formed.



He was still sitting with that when the second challenger arrived.

She walked in differently to Reid. No new bag crease, no wide eyes at the seating. She crossed to her starting position the way someone crossed a room they had been in before, unhurried, mapping the space out of habit rather than nerves. She was older, seventeen or eighteen, with the kind of economy of movement that came from having done something long enough that the body stopped wasting energy on it.

The gym trainer stepped forward again.

"This will be a six on six battle between challenger Yuna and Gym Leader Surge of Vermilion City. Standard rules apply. The battle ends when all six of either side's Pokemon are unable to continue or forfeit is declared. Switching is permitted for the challenger only." A brief pause. "Are both sides ready?"

Yuna cracked her neck once. "Ready."

Surge had already uncrossed his arms.

"Begin."

Yuna moved first, sending out a Fearow that hit the open air of the gym and immediately climbed, using the high ceiling the way Reid's Pidgey had tried to and failed. The Fearow was bigger, faster, and considerably angrier looking, circling near the fluorescent lights with its beak angled down like something that had already made decisions about this battlefield before it arrived in it.

Surge sent out Electabuzz.

The crowd reacted to that. Not loudly, not all at once, but a murmur ran through the tiers that Theo felt more than heard. The Electabuzz was big, the black and yellow stripes of its body catching the gym lights, electricity already arcing between the antennae on its head in steady rhythmic pulses. It stood in the center of the field and looked up at Fearow with an expression that suggested it was considerably less impressed than the crowd was.

"Drill run," Yuna commanded, sharp and immediate.

Fearow folded its wings and came down like something dropped from height, spinning into a tight aerial corkscrew that built speed with every foot it fell. The crowd tightened.

"Dodge left. Thunderpunch on the pass."

Electabuzz stepped left with a single fluid motion, Fearow's drill run parting the air where it had been standing, and the Thunderpunch came up from below in the same movement, connecting with Fearow's underbelly as it screamed past. The sound it made was sharp and ugly and Fearow pulled up hard, electricity crawling across its feathers.

Yuna didn't hesitate. "Agility. Recover your speed."

Fearow spiralled upward, burning through the paralysis risk with sheer momentum and willpower. The exchange continued, Fearow diving and breaking off, Electabuzz tracking and throwing Thunder where it could. Fearow was fast but Electabuzz was relentless and eventually a Thunder caught Fearow clean across its wingspan on a dive it committed to a half second too long.

Fearow dropped and Yuna recalled it before it hit the ground.

"Fearow is unable to continue."

One down for Yuna. Surge held his position, Electabuzz still on the field.

Yuna reached for her second ball without pause.

Sandslash hit the concrete low and fast, claws scraping as it found its footing, and Theo's eyes moved immediately to Electabuzz and then to Surge. Ground type. Completely immune to electric. Electabuzz had no switching option, no relief coming. Whatever it had left it was going to spend without its best tools and everyone in the building who knew their types had already worked out what that meant.

Surge knew it too. The set of his jaw said so.

"Earthquake," Yuna called, and her voice carried the confidence of someone who had prepared exactly this matchup.

Sandslash drove its claws into the concrete and the shockwave that rolled across the field was something Theo felt through the soles of his feet from the sideline. Electabuzz staggered badly and Surge's expression tightened by a fraction.

"Fire Punch. Stay close and keep the pressure."

Electabuzz closed the distance, Fire Punch connecting hard against Sandslash's side and leaving a scorch mark across its pale scales. Sandslash grunted and dug in and answered with another Earthquake that brought Electabuzz to one knee.

The exchange was brutal and uneven. Electabuzz landed two more Fire Punches, good solid hits that left Sandslash marked and breathing hard, but without electric moves the damage wasn't enough. The third Earthquake put Electabuzz down and Surge recalled it before the crowd had finished reacting.

"Electabuzz is unable to continue."

One down for Surge. He reached for his second ball without expression.

Jolteon hit the field and Sandslash looked at it and Theo worked through it in his head. Jolteon was electric type. Electric moves were useless against a ground type. But Jolteon was fast and it had other options, moves that didn't care about type immunity.

"Pin Missile. Keep moving."

Jolteon circled fast, throwing Pin Missiles in tight controlled bursts that forced Sandslash to keep moving rather than setting its feet for another Earthquake. The concrete floor between them became pocked with small impact marks as the exchange stretched on, Sandslash slower and more deliberate, Jolteon faster and more methodical, neither able to land the clean decisive hit they wanted.

Sandslash caught Jolteon with a Rock Slide that slowed it enough for a follow up Earthquake that connected fully and Jolteon took that hard, stumbling sideways before recovering. But the Pin Missiles had done their work over time and when Sandslash came in for another Rock Slide it was moving a fraction slower than before and Jolteon's Swift caught it clean and that was enough.

Sandslash went down and Yuna recalled it without hesitation.

"Sandslash is unable to continue."

Two down for Yuna. One down for Surge. Jolteon still on the field but visibly damaged, moving carefully on one side where the Earthquake had connected.

Yuna switched immediately. Tauros hit the field at a run before it had fully materialised, horns down, already committed to the charge. The injured Jolteon had no time to reset its footing and the Body Slam that followed was the end of that conversation. Jolteon went down and Surge recalled it before it hit the wall.

"Jolteon is unable to continue."

Two down for Surge. The crowd noise climbed another level.

Surge sent out Magneton.

The triple steel Pokemon drifted onto the field, its three connected units rotating slowly, eyes tracking Tauros without urgency. Tauros lowered its horns and Magneton answered with a Thunderbolt that crackled across the field and caught Tauros hard across its flank. Tauros bellowed and charged and Magneton drifted back just far enough to keep distance, throwing a Thunder that came down with considerably more force than the Thunderbolt had. Tauros staggered and charged again, closing the gap with its horns, and Magneton switched back to Thunderbolt, faster and more precise at close range, catching Tauros twice in quick succession before it could connect.

Back and forth it went, Magneton alternating between the raw power of Thunder and the precision of Thunderbolt depending on the distance between them, controlling the pace of the exchange in a way that gave Tauros no clean answer. Tauros was tough and it kept coming but the accumulated damage told over time and eventually a Thunder landed clean and Tauros went down hard.

Yuna recalled it immediately.

"Tauros is unable to continue."

Three down for Yuna. Two down for Surge. Magneton still on the field.

Yuna looked across at the Magneton and something shifted in her expression. Subtle enough that Theo almost missed it. A decision being made that had already been planned for.

She sent out Clefable.

The crowd went uncertain. Murmurs rippled through the tiers. Theo worked through it quickly. Steel type moves hit fairy types for super effective damage. Magneton had exactly that. But Clefable wasn't sent out to win this exchange and something in Yuna's posture said she had already accepted what was coming.

"Reflect," Yuna called immediately. "Then Light Screen."

Clefable got both arms up fast and the pale barrier spread across Yuna's side of the field before Magneton had fully adjusted to the switch.

"Flash Cannon," Surge commanded.

The steel beam hit Clefable hard and super effective, driving it back across the concrete and pulling a pained cry from it. Clefable absorbed it through sheer effort and kept its arms raised as the Light Screen layered over the Reflect. Both screens settled into place across Yuna's half of the field, shimmering faintly in the gym lights.

"Flamethrower," Yuna called back.

Clefable steadied itself and the fire that came off it was focused and real, catching Magneton square and pulling a sharp metallic screech from it. Magneton drifted sideways from the heat and Surge steadied it immediately.

"Magnet Bomb."

The steel orbs came fast and they hit Clefable super effective and Clefable had taken too much already. It went down hard and Yuna recalled it the moment it hit the ground.

"Clefable is unable to continue."

Four down for Yuna. Two down for Surge. Both screens still hanging across Yuna's half of the field.

In Clefable's place came Smeargle.

The crowd went completely uncertain. Smeargle was not a Pokemon anyone sent out to win a direct fight and everyone in the building understood that at once, including Surge whose expression had shifted from focused to sharply alert.

He understood what was coming.

"Magneton, Thunderbolt, now," he commanded, and for the first time all morning there was something underneath the command. The precision of someone trying to stop something before it started.

But Smeargle moved first.

It slammed both paws against its own stomach in a sharp drumming motion and the effect was immediate and visible, the Pokemon's energy burning through itself, its painted tail drooping as it traded half its remaining health in a single moment for something the crowd couldn't see but Theo understood with complete clarity.

Attack stat. Maxed. Ready to pass.

Magneton's Thunderbolt hit Smeargle a half second later and it was a real hit, a serious hit, the kind that should have finished the conversation outright. Smeargle flew backward and hit the concrete hard and the crowd gasped sharply.

It didn't go down.

The Light Screen had done exactly what Yuna had built it to do, blunting the edge of the special attack just enough, and Smeargle raised its head from the concrete with its tail still faintly glowing, barely breathing, barely there, but there.

The crowd was absolutely silent.

"Baton Pass," Yuna said quietly. Almost gently.

The light took Smeargle and what replaced it shook the floor when it landed.

Machamp hit the field and the concrete cracked where its feet struck. Four arms spread slightly at its sides as it straightened to its full height, each one the size of a grown man's torso. The Belly Drum energy ran through it visibly, the air around it shimmering faintly with everything Smeargle had built and handed off at the cost of half its life.

Nobody in the upper tiers was sitting down anymore.

Magneton did not survive the first Dynamic Punch. It hit the ceiling before the sound of the impact had finished crossing the field and Surge recalled it before it came back down.

"Magneton is unable to continue."

Three down for Surge.

He sent out Lanturn.

Lanturn lasted two exchanges. A Water Pulse that caught Machamp's arm and slowed it for just a moment before a Cross Chop ended things definitively. Surge recalled it the instant it went down.

"Lanturn is unable to continue."

Four down for Surge.

He sent out Electrode and the speed of it gave even Machamp pause, the Electrode zipping across the field in tight unpredictable bursts that made it difficult to pin down. Then it stopped moving entirely and its body began to glow white at the edges and the crowd recognised what was coming before Machamp did.

Explosion.

Machamp caught it in a Submission grip and held on as the detonation hit it full in the chest, the blast throwing it backward across the field and shaking the upper tiers hard enough that several of the younger kids grabbed each other. Smoke hung thick across that end of the floor. Surge recalled Electrode through it without waiting for it to clear.

"Electrode is unable to continue."

Machamp walked out of the smoke.

Battered, one arm hanging slightly lower than the other, burns across its torso from the blast, but walking. The crowd completely lost itself.

Five down for Surge. One Pokemon left.

Theo was gripping the edge of the bench with both hands and hadn't noticed.

Surge sent out his final Pokemon and it was a Raichu but not the one Theo had seen on the dock the night before. This one was leaner, its colouring slightly different, its tail held differently as it took its position on the field. A gym Pokemon, trained for exactly this environment, and when it looked at Machamp across the scarred and smoking battlefield its expression was composed in the way of something that had been in worse situations and was still standing.

Machamp looked at Raichu. Raichu looked at Machamp.

"Close Combat," Yuna called, and for the first time her voice carried something underneath it. Not nerves. The weight of knowing this was the last exchange.

Machamp came forward with the full weight of everything Smeargle had given it, still burning through its arms despite the damage from Electrode's explosion, and Raichu moved in a way that Theo's eyes struggled to properly track, a tight lateral burst of speed that put it outside Machamp's lead arm as the first blow came down. The Thunderbolt that answered wasn't thrown from a distance. Raichu was close enough that it was almost contact and the electricity that poured into Machamp at that range made the lights in the gym flicker once.

Machamp took it and turned and came again.

Back and forth across the field, neither giving ground, both burning through everything they had left. The concrete between them became marked with scorch lines and the deep gouges of Machamp's footwork and the crowd had stopped making individual noise and become one continuous sound.

The end came suddenly.

"Volt Tackle," Surge called out

"Dynamic Punch," Yuna replied.

Both Pokemon moved at the same time. Raichu exploded forward in a sheath of crackling electricity and Machamp's fist came down with the last of everything Smeargle had given it and the collision between them was not a clean exchange of blows but something messier and louder than that, a detonation that kicked dirt and concrete dust up across the entire field and knocked the front row back in their seats. The lights flickered and held.

The dust settled slowly.

Nobody in the building made a sound.

Through the haze both Pokemon were visible, both on their knees, both trembling with the effort of what they were trying to do. Raichu got one paw flat on the ground. Machamp got one arm under itself. The crowd leaned forward as one, every person in the tiers holding whatever breath they had left.

Then Raichu went down.

Then Machamp went down beside it.

Neither of them moved again.

Yuna recalled Machamp. Surge recalled his Raichu. The building held its breath for one long second.

"Machamp and Raichu are simultaneously unable to continue. Gym Leader Surge has no remaining Pokemon. The winner is challenger Yuna."

The roar that came out of the crowd was the loudest thing Theo had heard since the wormhole.

Surge walked to the center of the field. Yuna met him there. He held out the Thunder Badge and she took it and that was that.

Theo sat back against the wall and let out a long slow breath.

He had known what battles were. He had understood type matchups and strategy and the logic of it from somewhere that felt further away every day. But there was a difference between knowing something and watching it play out in front of you at full speed with the weight of real consequence behind every decision.

He had seen a boy with a brand new bag learn that knowing what to do and being able to do it in time were not the same thing.

He had seen a woman spend an entire morning building toward a single moment, accepting losses she had already planned for, turning the shape of the battle itself into a weapon.

He had seen Surge absorb both of those things with the same expression he had worn when he dragged a Nihilego off a dock.

Theo looked out at the empty battlefield, still smoking faintly at the far end, and felt the size of this world settle over him in a way it hadn't fully managed yet.

It was bigger than he had understood. And he was very new to it.

 

[Live Wire]

The outfit was folded on the desk when he woke up.

He lay still for a moment looking at it from the bed. A vest similar to Visquez's, dark and practical with the kind of stitching that suggested it was built to last rather than to impress, a plain shirt underneath, trousers with enough give in them for movement. Someone had found his size without asking for it.

He sat up and dressed and stood in front of the small mirror above the chest of drawers for exactly long enough to confirm everything fit. Whatever was looking back at him this morning he didn't particularly need to spend time with it.

Visquez was waiting in the corridor outside, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed and the easy patience of someone who had been awake long enough that a few more minutes meant nothing.

"Morning," she offered. "Come on. I cooked."

The smell that met him when she pushed open the kitchen door was considerably better than burnt toast. Eggs and something that had been in a pan with butter and herbs, actual toast, a pot of tea in the center of the small table with three mugs already set out.

Three.

Surge was already there, seated at the far end of the table with a folded piece of paper in front of him. He set it down without comment when Theo sat, looked briefly at the vest Theo was wearing and gave a single slow nod before returning to the paper.

They ate mostly in silence. Visquez made easy conversation that didn't ask much back, small practical things about the gym's morning rhythm mixed with observations that had no practical purpose whatsoever. She told him the Jolteon on the left had strong opinions about eating order and would make everyone aware of those opinions if ignored. She told him one of the Voltorb had rolled into the men's bathroom three days ago and the situation had been resolved but she preferred not to discuss it further. Surge interjected occasionally with something brief and useful that suggested he had long ago stopped trying to manage what came out of Visquez's mouth at breakfast and had made his peace with it.

Theo's mouth almost moved once. He caught it and kept it still.

It was easier than it should have been to look unbothered. He had always been good at that, at presenting a surface that read as calm while everything underneath did whatever it was going to do regardless. This morning the underneath was doing quite a lot. The night had not been restful and the day ahead had a particular shapelessness to it that he kept pushing at and finding no clean edges on. He ate his breakfast and answered when he was spoken to and kept his hands easy on the table and nobody sitting with him would have known any of it.

By the time they finished eating he felt close enough to ready.

Surge stood and that was the signal.

The tour moved at the pace Surge moved at, which was to say it moved and didn't stop to check if you were keeping up. He walked Theo through the main floor and its training zones, the registration desk and its systems, the medical station, the patrol routes the gym trainers ran through the city and surrounding areas with their Pokemon alongside them. He mentioned the gym trainers the same way he mentioned everything else, matter of factly and once.

"Six on the roster," he said, while they were crossing the main floor. "They rotate. Not all of them are here on any given day. They handle training, challenges, and share security responsibilities for the city with their Pokemon." He didn't slow. "Everyone here carries their weight. That's not negotiable regardless of what the task is."

He covered the rest of the building without dwelling on any of it. Theo paid attention to all of it and asked a question here and there when something needed clarifying and mostly just absorbed.

They ended up in the office.

Theo sat in the chair across the desk and kept his posture open and his face easy and told himself quietly that this was fine, that he could sit across from this man who had saved his life two days ago and not look like he was holding himself together with more effort than he wanted to admit.

Surge settled behind the desk and looked at him in the way he had looked at the Nihilego on the dock. Measuring. Unhurried.

"Registration desk, trial basis. Pokemon care rotation, also trial basis." He said it the same way he said everything. "I need to know where you're useful and the only way to find that out is to put you in front of things and see. You'll work the roles, I'll observe, and we'll adjust from there."

"Understood," Theo replied.

"The gym trainers operate to a standard," Surge continued. "I expect the same from you regardless of how simple the work is. Your best, every time."

Theo nodded.

Surge set both hands flat on the desk. A small shift that was enough to signal the conversation was moving somewhere different.

"You're fourteen," he said. "You landed here under circumstances most adults wouldn't handle cleanly. You don't know where you came from. You were attacked within minutes of arriving." He said it the way he said everything else, directly and without performance. "There are people qualified to help with that. I can make an introduction if you want one."

Something pulled tight in Theo's chest and he kept it entirely off his face.

"I'll think about it," he replied.

Surge held his gaze for a moment. The nod he gave was the nod of someone who recognised that answer for what it was and had decided today was not the day to press it.

"Visquez," he called.

She appeared in the doorway.

"He's yours," Surge told her. Then he picked up the folded paper from his desk and that was the end of it.

Visquez was already in the corridor when Theo came out, leaning against the wall with her arms folded and the expression of someone who had been listening through the door and wasn't going to admit it.

"Therapy suggestion?" she asked.

Theo looked at her.

"He does that with everyone," she said, pushing off the wall. "His version of checking in. Very Surge." She started walking. "He once suggested the same thing to a Raichu that had been in a bad mood for a week. The Raichu didn't take him up on it either."

Theo's mouth moved. Just slightly. He stopped it before it became anything.

Visquez noticed and looked profoundly pleased with herself.

She led him back along the main corridor at a comfortable pace and started talking in the easy way of someone who had explained things many times and had found the most efficient path through them, though her version of efficient left room for considerably more commentary than Surge's did.

"Trainers," she began. "When someone starts their journey they register with the league and receive their trainer identification. From there they work the badge circuit, eight gyms across Kanto, one badge from each." She settled into it comfortably. "Most first years get through around five before the difficulty catches up with them. Badge six onwards is a significant step up." She paused. "Some trainers describe it as running into a wall. Others describe it as running into a wall and then the wall jumping on them." Another pause. "Surge would describe it as necessary. He's not wrong. He's also never been a first year trainer who didn't see it coming."

"The gym leaders scale their teams to badge count," Theo said, before he had fully decided to say it.

Visquez looked at him sideways. That particular look she had been giving him since yesterday.

"You keep doing that," she observed.

"Doing what," Theo replied.

"Knowing things." She said it without accusation, more like someone noting an interesting pattern and deciding to keep an eye on it. "It's fine. It's just interesting." She turned back to the corridor ahead. "Surge does it too but he's been doing it long enough that nobody notices anymore."

She continued without dwelling on it.

"Second year trainers re-challenge the full circuit at the higher level. Meaningfully stronger than first years. Third year is where it splits. Some pursue professional battling. Some move into league administration. Most retire from active competition and go into other fields."

"Ace trainers," Theo said. "That's the professional route."

She glanced at him again with that look. Let it pass. "Tournament circuit, exhibition matches, contracted work with institutions and the league. A first year trainer has no business across the field from one." She paused. "Most learn that without needing to be told."

"What about Rangers?"

"Rangers protect wild Pokemon and natural areas. Routes, forests, coastal zones. They work with partner Pokemon the same way trainers do, different purpose entirely, no badge circuit." A brief pause. "If you've come across the stylus method, that's specific to certain regions. Fiore operates differently. Here Rangers work conventionally."

Theo had known that. He kept it where it was.

"The circuit culminates at the Indigo League Conference," Visquez continued. "Every trainer who collected all eight badges that season competes. Two tournaments. Rookie section first, first years only. Then the main tournament for second and third years." She glanced at him. "The top four finishers from the rookie section get to enter the main tournament."

"Has a rookie ever won the main tournament?" Theo asked.

Visquez was quiet for a moment. "Once," she replied. "Years ago. Hasn't happened since."

She left it there and Theo didn't push.

They had slowed near the far end of the corridor and Theo had been vaguely tracking where they were heading without landing on an answer.

"Can I meet them?" he asked. "The gym Pokemon."

Visquez looked at him. Something in her expression shifted to something warmer and she turned and led him further down the corridor toward the wider space at the back of the building.

She pushed the door open and the sound and warmth of it hit him before the sight did. The space was alive with electric types moving through their morning routines, the air crackling softly with passive electricity, morning light coming down through the ceiling panels overhead. Baby Elekid waddled between the legs of fully grown Electabuzz who paid them the patient attention of creatures used to being tripped over. Magnemite drifted in loose clusters near the ceiling while their evolved forms, the larger Magneton, moved in slower and more deliberate orbits below them. A group of Eevee were tumbling over each other near the far wall while two Jolteon watched them with the particular expression of Pokemon who remembered being that small and had opinions about it. Voltorb rolled in their unpredictable patterns between everyone else, apparently indifferent to the chaos they caused. Raichu moved through the space with the authority of Pokemon who had been there longest and knew it. Further back, half obscured by the morning light, the jagged silhouette of an Ampharos stood quietly apart from the rest, watching the room with calm amber eyes.

He stepped inside and one of the Jolteon looked up.

Then everything happened quite quickly.

It was an Electabuzz that moved first, crossing the space toward him with a directness that made Visquez glance back. Before she had finished turning a second Pokemon had changed direction and then a third and then it was not three but many, electric types of every size converging with an interest that was immediate and total and not remotely ambiguous. A Jolteon pressed its head against his hand. A Pikachu climbed his arm without asking. An Electabuzz stood directly in front of him and looked at him as though it had been waiting for something and had just found it.

Theo stood very still and let it happen and kept his breathing even and his face calm and told himself firmly that the slight unsteadiness he felt was manageable and not visible and absolutely fine.

He was aware of Visquez watching from a few steps back. He was aware of his own expression giving nothing away while considerably more was happening behind it.

Visquez let it settle for a long moment. Then she began gently redirecting Pokemon back to their routines, not rushing it, just gradually breaking the concentration of the group until it thinned and dispersed.

When she came back to him her expression was different to any he had seen on her before.

"Electric type specialists," she began, with the measured quality of someone choosing their words. "There's something in certain people that electric types respond to. An inclination. Something in the way their aura reads that these Pokemon feel before anything else." She paused. "Surge has it. I have it. It's part of why we both ended up working with electric types."

Theo waited.

"What I just watched was not the same thing." She said it quietly and with the weight of someone who meant it. "What we have draws a response. What you just did stopped every Pokemon in this room." She looked at him steadily. "I've worked here four years. I've never seen anything close to that."

Theo looked at his arm where the Pikachu had been and said nothing.

Visquez didn't push it. She moved to the edge of the space and gave him a moment with the remaining Pokemon who were still circling at a more respectful distance now, curious but no longer overwhelming. She checked something on her tablet and tucked it under her arm.

"I'll leave you to get acquainted," she said. She paused in the doorway. "They're a good group. Loud, opinionated, absolutely no concept of personal space." A beat. "You'll fit right in."

She left before he could respond to that.

The door closed behind her.

The remaining Pokemon settled gradually back into their morning routines and the space grew quieter and Theo stayed where he was and let the quiet exist around him.

He noticed Electrike before it noticed he had noticed it.

It was at the far edge of the space near the wall. It hadn't joined the group when the others converged and it hadn't dispersed with them either. It stood alone in the space between staying and leaving with its nose pointed toward him and its fur half raised and that same conflict he had seen twice before written through every line of it.

Theo didn't look directly at it. He stood still and let the other Pokemon move around him and kept his breathing easy and waited.

Electrike took one step toward him.

He felt it more than saw it, that small shift in the air between them, and kept his eyes forward and his expression even.

Another step.

Then the fur rose fully and Electrike stopped and stood there in the space it had crossed halfway and looked at him. Theo finally looked back, just briefly, just enough to acknowledge it without making it into something it wasn't ready to be.

Then Electrike turned and walked away.

Theo stood in the quiet long after it had gone. Around him the Pokemon went about their routines with the easy rhythm of creatures comfortable in their space. Outside the ceiling panels the morning sky had shifted from grey to something pale and clear.

He breathed out slowly.

Then he went to find the registration desk.

 

[Live Wire]

Therapist: How was your week?

Theo: I laughed a few times. That was new.

The registration desk had a rhythm to it once you found it.

Challengers came in waves, mostly in the mornings, the earliest ones arriving before the gym had fully woken up with the particular energy of people who had convinced themselves that getting there first meant something. Theo processed their registrations with the careful attention Surge expected and the quiet efficiency of someone who had learned quickly that the system rewarded consistency over speed. He logged names and badge counts and Pokemon rosters and sent confirmation to the league database and by the end of the first week the sequence of it had stopped requiring active thought.

The Pokemon care rotation had its own rhythm too. Feeding schedules, exercise logs, health checks that Visquez had handed over to him on day four with the particular casualness of someone who had already made the decision and was simply announcing it. The gym Pokemon had accepted him with the same enthusiasm as that first morning, crowding around during feeding time, following him between zones, conducting themselves generally as though he had always been there and the question of when he arrived was irrelevant.

All of them except one.

Electrike had not joined the feeding crowd. It had not followed him between zones. But it had moved, quietly and incrementally over the course of the week, appearing a little closer each day to wherever he happened to be working. The first day it had watched from the far wall. By the third it had been closer to the middle of the space. By the sixth it had been close enough that he could see its expression clearly, that same impossible conflict between wanting and not wanting, between the pull of his electric aura and the fear of what had tainted it.

He had not pushed it. He had simply kept showing up and doing his work and letting Electrike decide what it wanted to do about that.

He was thinking about this on the morning of the eighth day when Kalea appeared at the registration desk and sat on the counter beside his monitor with the complete disregard for the counter's purpose that had become, over the course of the week, entirely predictable.

"Good morning," she announced, to him and to the general vicinity.

"You're blocking the screen," Theo replied.

"There's nobody checking in right now."

"That's not the point."

She moved approximately four inches to the left which resolved nothing and looked pleased with herself for the compromise. Behind her Kadan passed through the main floor with the purposeful stride of someone arriving for a shift and getting directly to work, pausing only to give Theo a brief nod that had been, over the course of the week, gradually warming from assessment to something closer to acknowledgment.

"He likes you," Kalea said, watching her brother cross the floor.

"He tolerates me," Theo replied.

"For Kadan that's the same thing." She swung her legs lightly against the desk. "He was suspicious of you at first."

"I know. He wasn't subtle about it."

"He's never subtle about anything. He just thinks he is." She said it with the fond exasperation of someone who had been making this observation for eighteen years and expected to be making it for eighteen more. "Did you sleep alright?"

Theo glanced at her. "Why?"

"You look tired."

"I'm fine," he replied, which was mostly true. The nights were still the hardest part, the quiet and the shapelessness of it and everything that moved through his head when there was nothing else to occupy it. He had started therapy at the end of the first week, reluctantly, and found it simultaneously less and more uncomfortable than expected. Less because the therapist did not push harder than he allowed. More because he was beginning to suspect that not being pushed was its own kind of pressure.

He kept all of that where it was and turned back to the monitor.

Kalea watched him for a moment with the particular attention she gave things when she had noticed something and was deciding whether to say it. Then she seemed to decide against it and hopped off the counter and went to find Visquez.

Theo watched her go and felt his mouth do the thing it had been doing slightly more often this week. He stopped it before it became anything.

The morning moved on. Challengers came and went through the registration desk. Surge conducted two battles on the main floor, a first year whose Pidgeot put up a better fight than most before going down to a Jolteon that had clearly seen every aerial strategy Kanto had to offer, and a second year whose Starmie caught Surge's Magneton badly enough that the crowd sat forward before the outcome reasserted itself. Kadan ran the morning patrol with his Pokemon, returning mid morning to file his report with the quiet efficiency that characterised everything he did. Kalea ran drills with the younger gym Pokemon in the habitat, which Theo could hear from the registration desk as a rotating series of enthusiastic commands and what sounded like at least one minor incident involving the Voltorb.

At lunch Visquez put food on the table in the small kitchen and the four of them ate together and Kalea talked enough for everyone which nobody seemed to mind. She told a story about her second circuit that involved a rainstorm, a Snorlax blocking a critical route, and a series of decisions that Kadan described as catastrophic and she described as creative. By the end of it Theo had stopped trying to keep his expression neutral and simply let it do what it was doing, which turned out to be somewhere between disbelief and amusement.

Kadan noticed. He said nothing about it but the assessment in his eyes shifted slightly toward something that was almost approval.

"She reached the top eight in the second year conference," Visquez said at one point, when Kalea had gone to refill the tea. "Both of them did. You need all eight badges and a tournament run to earn the right to challenge the Elite Four. They came close."

"Close is generous," Kadan replied, without particular regret. "We were good. The people who won were better."

"You were nineteen," Visquez pointed out.

"The people who won were also nineteen," Kadan replied simply, and finished his food.

Kalea came back with the tea and the conversation moved on and Theo sat with what he had learned and filed it away with everything else he was gradually building a picture from.

The afternoon wound down into early evening and the gym settled into its quieter rhythm and Theo made his way through the Pokemon habitat for the last care rotation of the day. The bigger Pokemon were already moving toward their resting areas, the Electabuzz and the Raichu and the Ampharos drifting toward the far enclosures in the particular unhurried way of creatures whose bodies had found their schedule and were following it without instruction.

The Elekid were the last to be corralled, waddling between everyone else's legs with the cheerful chaos of Pokemon too young to have learned that the day had a shape to it. Theo directed the last of them toward the junior enclosure with the patience he had developed over the course of the week and checked the feeding log and made his notes and let the space go quiet around him.

He was closing the log when he felt it.

He went still.

Electrike was behind him. Not at the wall. Not at the middle of the space. Behind him, close enough that when he turned slowly he found it standing less than two feet away, looking up at him with those wary conflicted eyes, its fur half raised the way it always was around him but its feet planted forward this time rather than braced back.

Theo crouched down to its level.

They looked at each other for a long moment in the quiet of the emptying space.

Theo lowered his hand to the ground between them, palm up, fingers loose. He didn't reach toward it. He just made the space available and left the decision where it belonged.

Electrike looked at his hand.

It looked at him.

It took the last step forward and lowered its nose to his palm and held there, tense and trembling slightly, the conflict still running through it but not winning anymore, not right now, and Theo stayed completely still and breathed carefully and did not move a single muscle that might give it a reason to change its mind.

The moment held.

Then Electrike lifted its head and stepped back and turned and walked away toward its corner, not running, just walking, and Theo stayed crouched where he was long after it had gone.

Outside the ceiling panels the evening sky had gone dark and the first stars were showing through the glass.

He breathed out slowly and looked at his palm and felt the faint warmth still there where Electrike's nose had been.

It was something.

He knew exactly what it was.

 

[Live Wire]

Therapist: Do you ever let yourself be afraid?

Theo: Not if I can help it.

Two weeks changed things in ways that were difficult to point to directly.

It wasn't any single moment. It was the accumulation of small ones that didn't feel significant until you looked back and realised how different things were from where they had started. The registration desk felt like his. The feeding rotation ran without him having to think through each step. He knew which Elekid would wander into the supply corridor if the gate wasn't latched properly, which Jolteon sulked after hard training sessions, which Magneton had strong opinions about the positioning of its charging station and would make those opinions known until something was done about it.

He had learned all of it by just being there, which was different from being taught, and the difference mattered more than he had expected.

Dale had a lot to do with that.

He had shown up on the second Monday, a broad shouldered man around Surge's age, weathered in the way of someone who had spent a lot of time outdoors and hadn't minded. He shook Theo's hand and looked around the gym with the satisfaction of someone coming back to a place they liked.

"Best gym to work at in all of Kanto," he announced. "You know why?"

Theo waited.

"The pay is absolutely shocking." He said it like it was the first time he had told it, which it clearly was not. "Get it? Shocking. Because electric types." He looked at Theo. "That one's free. There are more."

From across the main floor Visquez made a noise that suggested she had heard this joke many times and had not warmed to it.

Theo found, to his mild irritation, that he liked him immediately.

Dale didn't really teach. He stood nearby and talked, mostly about the Pokemon, their histories, their habits, the things you only picked up from being around them long enough. He told Theo about a Voltorb that had rolled itself into the city drainage system and the four hour operation to retrieve it that had involved three gym trainers, a city engineer, and a level of negotiation Dale still felt had been unnecessary. He told him about the Ampharos at the back of the habitat, who had been at the gym longer than anyone currently on staff. It stood at the window during thunderstorms with an expression that Dale called philosophical and Surge called something else. They had been disagreeing about it for six years.

"The thing about electric types," Dale said one morning, watching Theo work through the Elekid feeding rotation, "is that they're honest. They can't help it. Happy, scared, excited, whatever they're feeling comes out in the current. Most Pokemon you have to learn to read." He paused. "Electric types you just have to listen to."

"How do you listen to electricity?" Theo asked.

"Same way you listen to anything. You stop talking and pay attention." He thought about it for a moment. "My wife says I've been doing it wrong for twenty years but she married me anyway so."

Theo's mouth moved. He let it this time.

Dale noticed and looked pleased about it without drawing attention to it.

The Electrike progress was harder to describe.

It hadn't transformed overnight. What happened instead was a slow renegotiation of the space between them, done entirely on Electrike's terms in steps so small they were only obvious looking back. It came to morning feeding without being last anymore. It had stopped pressing against the far wall and sat at a middle distance instead, watching Theo work. Three days after the first touch it had come to him again in the evening quiet of the habitat and stayed longer, long enough that Theo had moved his hand slowly and rested it on top of its head and Electrike had stayed still for several seconds before stepping away.

It wasn't partnership. It was trust being built carefully by a Pokemon that had reason to be careful about it, and Theo understood that better than he could say.

Surge noticed. He noticed everything. He said nothing for several days and then appeared at the registration desk one morning during a quiet stretch and stood across the counter in the way that meant something was coming.

"You've been inside since you arrived," Surge said. "Short walks aside."

"Yes."

"Take Electrike through the city this afternoon. An hour, no more. Keep the Pokeball on you." Not a suggestion. "It knows you well enough now. Do you both good."

"You think it's ready for that?"

Surge looked at him the way he looked at things he had already made a decision about. "I think you both are," he said, and walked away.

The afternoon was clear when Theo came out of the side entrance with Electrike beside him. The Pokeball was clipped to his belt unused. Electrike had looked at it, decided it had opinions about it, and ignored it in favour of walking at Theo's left heel with its nose working steadily.

Vermilion in the afternoon was different to the grey before-dawn city Surge had walked him through on the first morning. The streets were busy with the kind of easy noise a working city made, market stalls along the waterfront, the harbour visible at the end of every side street, the ocean wide and blue and catching the light. A Meowth was asleep in a window box outside a florist like it owned the place. A pair of Slowpoke sat at the harbour entrance with their tails in the water going nowhere slowly. A Wingull watched everyone from a post above a fish market.

Electrike catalogued all of it carefully. It startled once when a Rattata came out fast from behind a bin and Theo's hand went down without thinking and Electrike's nose found his fingers and settled.

They walked along the waterfront and Theo looked at the ocean and felt something ease slightly that he hadn't noticed was tight. He had been inside for three weeks. The gym was safe and structured and he had needed that. But out here with the water in front of him and Electrike at his side it was harder to keep the rest of it at arm's length.

He looked at the water and thought about things he couldn't reach and let himself do that for a while and then looked at Electrike who was staring at a Slowpoke like it had personally offended it.

"Come on," Theo said.

Electrike gave the Slowpoke one more look and fell back into step.

They had turned back toward the gym and slowed near a quiet stretch of the waterfront railing when Electrike stopped walking.

Theo stopped too.

Electrike was looking up at him with an expression he hadn't seen from it before. Not the wary tracking look, not the conflict between wanting and not wanting. Something quieter than both. It took one step toward him and then another and Theo stayed completely still and kept his breathing even and didn't do anything to make it feel like a moment, because the moment it felt like a moment Electrike would feel it too and step back.

It was close enough now that he could feel the warmth of its electric field against his hand. Its nose moved toward his palm and Theo held very still and the gap between them was almost nothing.

Then the horizon went dark.

Not gradually. One moment the sky south of the city over the ocean was clear afternoon blue and the next something was building out there, too fast and too dark, rolling in with the weight of something that had no interest in being ordinary weather.

Electrike felt it before Theo saw it fully. Its head came up, nose going to the air, and the warmth of its field against his hand vanished as it stepped back and turned toward the south with its fur starting to rise.

Every Wingull on the waterfront left at the same time, lifting off in a mass and wheeling east without circling first.

The Slowpoke got up.

Theo looked at the horizon and understood that whatever was coming was not something the city was prepared for.

It hit without warning.

One moment the sky was there and the next it was gone, replaced from one end to the other with darkness that crackled constantly at its edges in slow rolling pulses, not quite lightning but using the same space lightning did. The temperature dropped hard and fast. The pressure changed in his ears.

The wind arrived without building. It just hit the waterfront full force, stalls collapsing sideways, awnings tearing free, a bicycle left in the road spinning on its side before skidding away. Theo planted his feet and leaned into it. The rain followed immediately, driving sideways, hard enough against his face that it stung.

Beneath all of it a sound that wasn't quite sound, a vibration he felt in his chest and the soles of his feet and the back of his teeth, steady and coming from everywhere at once.

People on the waterfront ran in all directions. A shop front gave way as a gust hit it wrong, the window going in, a display of ceramic figures exploding across the road. Screaming from somewhere out of sight. More from a different direction. A woman with two children fought toward a covered entrance bent sideways against the wind.

His communicator crackled.

"Theo." Surge, cutting through the static. "Zapdos is moving east across the ocean. The storm is a byproduct. Get Electrike inside and stay there. Dale is holding the gym. I'm taking the trainers out. Wild Pokemon are coming off the northern and eastern routes and the harbour is getting Gyarados and Tentacruel driven in off the water."

"Understood. I'm on the waterfront road heading back."

"Get inside as fast as you—"

The communicator went to static and stayed there.

Theo put it away.

A power line two streets back came down with a crack like a gunshot, the flash of it strobing through the rain. Fire caught where it hit and spread to the front of the building behind it, and the wind took it before the rain could do anything about it. Smoke rolled sideways across the street, mixing into the rain, reducing visibility further. The flames reflected orange in the puddles below.

Then the explosion. A transformer somewhere behind the market district, the sound of it reaching Theo as a wave of pressure before the noise caught up. Then a heavy groan from somewhere in the city and the crash of something coming down. The screaming rose and didn't stop.

Wild Pokemon hit the streets.

Jolteon and Electrode and Mareep coming off the northern and eastern routes, overwhelmed and discharging into anything they touched. Plusle and Minun scattered in every direction, too small and too frightened to go anywhere useful. A Raichu ran through the road ahead of Theo and the puddles it crossed lit up and the electricity jumped to the drain covers and the lamp posts and made the direct route back to the gym a problem he didn't want to test.

Electrike made the sound.

Theo looked down.

What was standing beside him was not the Pokemon that had been walking at his heel twenty minutes ago. All four legs braced, body rigid, eyes white at the edges and seeing nothing, its fur standing fully upright and sparking in short uncontrolled bursts against the wet road. The Zapdos energy in the air was going into every electric type in the city and Electrike had no way to stop it.

"Electrike," Theo said. "Hey. Look at me."

It didn't.

Electrike bolted.

Not toward the gym. Just gone, full acceleration around the corner toward the harbour before Theo had fully registered the movement.

He reached for the Pokeball as he ran. The button discharged into his hand when he touched it, sharp enough that his fingers went numb, and the release mechanism clicked without producing anything. He tried twice more and put it away and kept running.

Moving through the storm was work. The wind pushed back against every step, not dramatically, just constantly, building up the further he went. The rain made it hard to see. He kept the smell of the harbour to his left and moved toward the docks.

Another explosion behind him, bigger, the pressure reaching him even at this distance. More from the city, the fire, the screaming. A building somewhere in the streets behind him made a sound that buildings weren't supposed to make and then came down. The screaming rose and the wind drove rain into his face and he kept moving because stopping wasn't something he was going to do.

He could hear Surge's voice faintly from the direction of the main road, the gym trainers moving through the chaos, but they were going the other way and getting further with every second.

He came around the last building and out onto the dock and the wind hit him without anything to break it and knocked him two steps sideways. He got his feet under him and kept going.

The dock stretched out over the water, the moored vessels straining at their lines, hulls knocking against the pier in the swell. Nobody had come this way. The dock was empty in both directions.

Electrike was at the far end of the pier.

It had run out of dock and stopped. It stood at the very edge with water on three sides, shaking without pause, electricity running across it in waves that jumped to the metal railing and cracked down into the harbour below, each discharge spreading across the surface in pale blue rings that the rain flattened immediately.

Theo stopped at the start of the dock.

He looked at Electrike.

He looked at the storm pressing down on everything.

He looked at his hands.

They were shaking.

Not slightly. The full visible kind that didn't stop when he pressed his palms flat against his thighs.

The thing he had been keeping below the surface for three weeks came up and kept coming and there was nothing left to hold it down with. Not composure, not routine, not the familiar shape of the gym around him. Just the dock and the storm and the city burning somewhere behind him and Electrike at the end of the pier and no communicator and no one anywhere near them.

He was frightened. The real kind, with weight behind it, and it moved through him and he stopped trying to make it stop.

He stood at the start of the dock and breathed and let the fear be there because he had nothing left to put it anywhere else.

Electrike screamed.

Every circuit at once, a white crack of light going in all directions from where it stood, hitting the water and the railing and the hull of the nearest vessel and lighting the dock in a flash that went straight through Theo's closed eyelids.

Electrike went down on its front legs.

Got up.

Discharged again, wider, the electricity going where it went with nothing behind it, just pouring out of a small Pokemon that had no way to stop it and didn't understand why it was happening.

Theo knew that feeling.

He didn't think his way to it. It was just there, from somewhere he couldn't see, already known.

He started walking.

The electricity off the dock planks found his feet twice. The wind pushed at him and he leaned into it. He kept his eyes on the green shape at the end of the pier and kept walking.

"Hey," he said, when he was close enough. His voice came out steady. He had no explanation for that.

Electrike spun toward him. The discharge across its body was constant, its eyes wide and white at the edges, recognition coming and going behind them in waves.

Theo stopped two feet away and got down on one knee on the wet planks and put his hand out palm up and didn't move.

"Take your time," he said. "I'm not going anywhere."

Electrike discharged and the light hit him and the world went white and he was still there when it cleared.

Still on one knee. Still with his hand out. Still looking at it.

Electrike took a step toward him.

Another discharge, weaker. Another step.

The electricity running across its fur started to come in pulses instead of a constant flow, slowing down, and Electrike stood in front of his outstretched hand and the recognition in its eyes was holding now instead of coming and going.

Theo stayed still.

Then Electrike lowered its nose to his palm and this time it didn't stop there. It pressed the full side of its face into his hand, eyes closed, the electricity between them quiet and warm and running in a loop that felt nothing like the storm. Not a discharge. Not a flinch. Just Electrike, fully, choosing to be there.

Theo sat down on the wet dock planks and let it happen.

This was what had almost happened at the waterfront railing before the darkness came in off the ocean and interrupted it. Electrike had been about to do exactly this and the storm had come between them and now they were on a dock in the middle of the worst thing Theo had seen since the night he arrived and it was happening anyway.

He rested his other hand gently on top of Electrike's head.

Electrike didn't move away.

They sat together in the rain while the storm hammered the city and the harbour churned and the fires behind the rooftops painted the clouds orange and Theo breathed and Electrike breathed and the shaking in both of them eased slowly toward something manageable.

Then the sound came.

He felt it in the back of his neck first, then his teeth, then the air around him. He had felt it once before on a dock not unlike this one, thirty seconds before something came through and grabbed him by the ankle.

He looked up.

The sky above the docks was tearing open. A vertical line of light pulling itself apart in the air directly above them, shimmering at its edges with energy he recognised from the inside out.

The wormhole opened.

Theo sat on the wet dock in the rain with Electrike pressed against his hand and looked up at it and around at the empty dock and the city lost in its own chaos behind them.

There was no one coming.

They were completely alone.

 

[Live Wire]

Therapist: Do you think you're brave?

Theo: I think I'm just bad at stopping.

The wormhole sat in the sky above the docks and pulsed.

Theo stood beneath it and the fear that had come up during the storm was still there. He wasn't pretending otherwise anymore. It sat in his chest and had no interest in leaving and the wormhole above him wasn't helping.

He looked at Electrike.

It was pressed against his leg, trembling, spent from the storm, fur damp and breathing uneven. It had already given everything it had once tonight and what was left was a small Pokemon with its eyes on the wormhole and its body shaking.

Theo felt its fear through the bond.

He looked at it for a moment. Then he stepped forward and put himself between Electrike and whatever was coming. Not because the fear went away. It didn't. But Electrike needed him in front and that was bigger than the rest of it.

Something came through the wormhole.

It didn't arrive the way the Nihilego had, drifting and slow. This came through fast and unwound itself on the other side with the deliberateness of something that knew what the crossing felt like. Long and wrong, limbs like cables stretched too far, a head that was a tangle of something that wasn't quite organic and wasn't quite mechanical, crackling constantly at every point where its body met the air. Tall. Taller than anything that had any business standing on a dock. The electricity running across it was structural. Part of what held it together.

Xurkitree.

Then Electrike made a sound.

Theo had never heard it make that sound before. Sharp and involuntary, nothing like the sounds from the storm, and through the bond he felt what was behind it land in his chest like something cold.

Electrike knew what this was.

Not this specific one. The kind. The shape of it against the air, the particular way its bioluminescence moved, the energy it gave off. Electrike had seen a Xurkitree before and it had not gone well and every part of its body was remembering that right now.

Theo also felt something else through the bond. Underneath the fear, underneath the recognition, something small that was choosing to stay anyway.

He rested his hand briefly on top of Electrike's head.

Electrike didn't step away.

Theo also felt, through whatever the wormhole energy gave him by way of instinct, that Xurkitree was diminished. The crossing had cost it. Its bioluminescence flickered unevenly and its movements were slower than they should have been.

Then the sky above Xurkitree lit up.

The Zapdos energy still rolling across the clouds found Xurkitree and poured into it in a sustained connection. Xurkitree absorbed it without resistance and the flickering bioluminescence steadied and then brightened past normal into something that lit the dock in cold white pulses.

The diminished thing Theo had sensed was gone.

He felt Electrike's fear spike through the bond.

He also felt it hold.

"Together," he said. It wasn't a command. Just the only word that fit.

Electrike's fur rose. Its legs stopped shaking. It was still afraid, Theo could feel that clearly, but it planted its feet on the wet planks and looked at Xurkitree and didn't look away.

Xurkitree moved first.

The Thunderbolt it threw was enormous, crossing the dock in almost no time and hitting Electrike before Theo had finished processing that it was coming.

Electrike absorbed it.

Lightning Rod redirected the bolt as it flew, curving it toward Electrike rather than wherever it had originally been aimed, and every muscle in Electrike's small body went rigid as the electricity poured in and released through the ability rather than through it. When its fur settled it was standing differently. Charged. The warmth of its electric field running noticeably hotter.

Xurkitree threw another Thunderbolt.

Electrike absorbed that one too, the charge building higher, and Theo could see the edge of it in the way Electrike held itself. The line between charged enough and too much was not wide and it was getting closer.

Then Xurkitree abandoned the electric moves.

A limb extended with a speed that had no right to exist, reaching across the dock in a whipping arc that caught Electrike and sent it skidding sideways across the wet planks.

Power Whip.

Electrike found its feet and got back into position. Theo could see the cost of it. It glanced at him briefly and what came through the bond wasn't asking for permission. Just checking he was still there.

He was still there.

Theo thought fast.

Electric moves were useless against Lightning Rod. Power Whip bypassed it entirely and Electrike couldn't absorb that the same way. They couldn't outlast this in a straight fight, not in the state Electrike was in, not against something running on Zapdos storm energy.

He looked around.

To the left of the main dock, extending out over the churning harbour water, a U-shaped jetty connected to the far side of the pier. Smaller than the main structure, its wooden planks slick with rain, its support posts already under stress from the storm swell hitting them below in heavy irregular bursts.

He looked at the posts where they met the waterline.

He looked at Electrike, carrying a charge approaching its limit.

He looked at the water below the jetty, violent and churning, the kind that didn't give anything back.

It was the only plan he had.

"Distract it," he said to Electrike. "Keep moving. Don't let it settle."

Electrike looked at him the way it had looked at him in the habitat that first evening, not yet trusting but choosing anyway.

Then it moved.

It went at Xurkitree in tight unpredictable bursts, too fast and too low for Power Whip to connect cleanly, drawing its attention with constant motion. Xurkitree threw another Thunderbolt that Lightning Rod pulled harmlessly toward Electrike and turned to track the movement.

Theo ran left across the dock toward the jetty entrance. The wind pushed at him sideways and he leaned into it and kept going. He reached the jetty and stopped and looked at what the storm had left him to work with.

A broken plank. A rusted metal fitting. A length of frayed mooring rope.

He grabbed the plank.

Xurkitree was still tracking Electrike when the plank hit it across the back of its tangled head. The throw wasn't heavy and it wasn't particularly accurate but the wormhole energy Theo gave off pulled Xurkitree's attention the way it always had and the moment it registered the throw it turned from Electrike and found him standing at the jetty entrance.

He grabbed the metal fitting and threw that too.

Then he stepped back onto the jetty.

Xurkitree followed.

It moved onto the jetty with the certainty of something that had found what it was looking for and was done being diverted, its long limbs finding the planks one at a time. The structure groaned under it. The storm swell hit the posts below and the whole thing shuddered and Xurkitree kept coming.

Theo backed to the far end of the U shape with water on three sides. He grabbed the mooring rope from his belt and threw it at Xurkitree's head. Its attention stayed on him. Behind it at the jetty entrance Electrike moved into position.

One second. Two.

"Now," Theo called.

Electrike discharged into the support posts.

Everything it had built through every Lightning Rod absorption across the entire fight released in a focused pulse that hit the metal posts where they met the waterline and ran through them and into the wood and through every joint and bolt holding the structure together. The jetty dropped one side first as two posts failed at once and the planks tilted and Xurkitree's limbs scrambled for purchase on wet tilting wood and found nothing and the far end of the U shape went into the harbour and Xurkitree went with it.

The water swallowed it.

Electrike discharged into the harbour surface immediately, the remaining charge releasing in a wave that spread from the broken foundation outward in every direction. The harbour lit up white and under it Xurkitree convulsed with the electricity hitting it from everywhere at once.

Then the light died.

The water was still.

Theo breathed out slowly. Then again. His legs felt the full weight of the last hour all at once and he sat down on the wet dock planks because standing was suddenly asking too much.

Electrike crossed the dock toward him.

It pressed its face against his arm and he felt through the bond something he hadn't felt from it before. Not relief exactly. Something looser than that. The particular feeling of a thing that had been braced for a very long time finally letting go of some of what it had been holding.

Theo put his arm around it without thinking about it.

They sat together on the dock in the rain and the storm still rolled above the city and the fires still burned somewhere behind the rooftops and neither of them moved for a moment because neither of them had anything left to move with and they had done it and that was enough for right now.

Electrike made a small sound against his arm.

Theo almost smiled.

Then Xurkitree's limbs came up over the edge of the broken foundation and it dragged itself back onto the dock.

It was slower. Much slower. The harbour had done real damage and it moved with the stilted deliberateness of something on drastically reduced capacity. Its bioluminescence guttered badly, the sustained connection to the storm broken when it hit the water, flickering unevenly.

But it was standing.

And Electrike was not going to be able to do anything more tonight. It was on its feet through something that had stopped being strength a while ago, its legs trembling with every breath, its eyes still fixed on Xurkitree with the stubborn focus of a Pokemon that refused to look away.

Through the bond Theo felt how much even that was costing it.

He also felt something else. Something that had come through the other side of standing on a dock in a storm and facing the kind of thing that had broken it once before and not running. Small and fragile and very new but there.

Xurkitree oriented on Theo again. Finding the wormhole energy in the dark and the rain without difficulty. Even now, even damaged, locking onto him with the same certainty it always had.

It raised a limb.

The electricity at the end was concentrated and focused, pulled to a point and building, not the broad casting energy of a Thunderbolt but something with a single clear destination.

Electrike made a sound.

It tried to step forward and its legs refused the first attempt and it tried again and got one step and Theo's body moved before his mind had finished forming the thought.

He stepped in front of Electrike.

He put himself between the concentrated charge at the end of Xurkitree's raised limb and the small exhausted Pokemon behind him and he stood there on the ruined dock in the rain with nowhere left to go.

The charge built toward release.

 

[Live Wire]

Therapist: Who found you?

Theo: Someone who didn't need to.

The charge at the end of Xurkitree's raised limb built past the point where Theo could track it and he stood on the ruined dock in the rain and didn't move because moving wasn't going to change what was about to happen and Electrike was behind him and that was the only thing that mattered right now.

Then something changed in the air.

Not the storm. The storm had been a constant presence for the last hour, its subsonic vibration in his chest and teeth and bones, and he had stopped registering it as a separate thing somewhere between the power lines coming down and Electrike going berserk on the dock. This was different. A pressure that had nothing to do with Zapdos or electricity or wormholes, something older and more deliberate, the weight of a Pokemon of immense power making its presence known before it arrived.

Theo looked up.

Something was descending through the storm clouds. Not falling. Descending with purpose, the clouds moving around it rather than buffeting it, the storm parting for something the storm had no authority over. The downwash from its wings hit the dock surface before Theo could see it properly, a force that flattened the puddles and drove the rain sideways and made the remaining ropes on the broken jetty snap taut.

Then Dragonite came through the clouds.

Ten feet of lean muscle and hard scale, its body built like something designed for the specific purpose of being impossible to stop, its wings wide enough that their span swallowed the width of the dock and the harbour beyond it. Its eyes were amber and completely steady and they contained no warmth whatsoever, the eyes of something that had seen a great deal of the world and had formed clear opinions about most of it. A scar ran along its left jaw in a pale line. It was not smiling. It looked like what it was, a Pokemon that had spent years being pushed to its absolute limit by someone who demanded the best from it and accepted nothing less.

The man on its back dropped to the dock in a single motion that had no wasted movement in it.

The red cape settled around him as he landed.

Theo's eyes went to the cape and then to the red hair and then the recognition arrived before he had consciously assembled the pieces. He had known this person from somewhere that felt further away every day, from a world where this person had existed in a different form, and seeing him in the rain on a ruined dock was something else entirely.

Lance.

The Champion.

Lance took in the scene with a single look that missed nothing. The broken jetty. The scorch marks across the dock planks. The harbour water still faintly lit from what Electrike had done. Theo standing in the rain. Electrike behind him. He said nothing about any of it and reached no visible conclusion that he shared. He simply looked and then looked at Xurkitree, still standing with its limb raised and its concentrated charge building, and moved.

He said nothing to Theo.

Dragonite was already crossing the dock.

It grabbed the concentrated charge at the end of Xurkitree's limb with one clawed hand, the electricity running across its body harmlessly, absorbed and dissipated through ten feet of Dragon type that simply was not interested in being hurt by it. Xurkitree thrashed and the charge detonated against Dragonite's grip and lit the dock in a white flash that Theo felt in his back teeth.

Dragonite looked at Xurkitree.

Then it moved again and this time there was no pause in it, just Dragonite's entire body accelerating into a Dragon Rush that hit Xurkitree with everything it was and the sound of the impact rolled across the harbour and off the hulls of the moored vessels and back again like something that needed somewhere to go.

Xurkitree went back and hit the water and didn't come out of it.

It dissipated. The structure of it coming apart above the harbour's surface, the energy of it dispersing into the storm like something that had never been more than borrowed from somewhere else. There and then not there. The same way the Nihilego had gone, on a dock not unlike this one, on the night Theo arrived.

He turned that over once and filed it because this was not the time.

Dragonite returned to Lance's side and folded its wings and stood with its amber eyes moving across the dock and the harbour and the city beyond with the steady assessment of something that had not yet decided it was finished working.

Lance looked at Theo.

He looked at him the same way he had looked at the dock and at Xurkitree, taking in information and reaching conclusions and sharing none of them. His eyes moved to Electrike, to the broken jetty, to the state of things, and when they came back to Theo there was something behind them that hadn't been there a moment before.

"Yours?" He nodded at Electrike.

"Yes," Theo replied.

"You stood in front of it."

"It couldn't stand."

Lance was quiet. Not the quiet of someone who had nothing to say. The quiet of someone deciding what the thing in front of them actually is. His eyes went back to the broken jetty and the scorch marks and the harbour water and when they came back to Theo again the recalibration was visible.

"How old are you."

"Fourteen."

A pause that had weight in it. "You're Surge's."

Not a question. "He took me in."

Lance looked at Electrike for a long moment. At the way it stood behind Theo and the way Theo stood in front of it. "That bond will be worth watching." He said it the way someone stated a fact rather than paid a compliment, with the authority of someone who knew what a real bond between a trainer and their Pokemon looked like and was simply identifying one. Then he was already moving, Dragonite spreading its wings. "Stay at the gym. We'll speak before I leave Vermilion."

He was in the air before Theo could respond.

The downwash hit the dock and flattened the puddles and then Dragonite took Lance back into the storm and they were gone.

Theo stood alone on the dock.

Then he looked at Electrike.

Electrike looked back at him. Thoroughly and completely exhausted, standing through stubbornness alone, its fur flat against its damp body, its breathing loud in the sudden quiet.

Theo unclipped the Pokeball from his belt and held it out.

Electrike looked at the ball.

Then it walked forward and pressed the button with its nose and the red light took it in without hesitation, without conflict or flinching or the long negotiation that every previous interaction with the ball had required. Just in, quietly and completely, like something that had decided where it wanted to be and was done reconsidering it.

The ball clicked shut in Theo's hand.

He looked at it for a moment.

Then he turned and walked back toward the city.

Vermilion was still in it.

Zapdos had moved beyond the city's perimeter but the storm it had generated moved at its own pace and what remained over Vermilion was still violent. The rain was still heavy and the wind still carried force and the streets were still dark where the power infrastructure had failed and loud where it hadn't. Things had not cooled down. They were not going to cool down for some time yet and anyone who had been out in it long enough understood that.

The wild Pokemon were still coming.

Dale had been watching the door for two people who hadn't arrived.

They had called in on the gym's emergency line forty minutes ago. He had talked them through shelter instructions and told them to move when they could and said he would keep the light on. That was forty minutes ago. Everyone else who had called in had arrived or called back. These two hadn't done either.

He made a cup of tea he wasn't going to drink and kept the door open and kept the light on.

Electivire stood at the entrance with the particular stillness of a Pokemon that had nothing to prove and knew it. The wild Pokemon that passed the gym on their chaotic orbits through the city encountered Electivire's presence and made different decisions without needing to be told why. Three times in the last hour something had come close enough to require a direct response and three times Electivire had handled it cleanly, moving with the unhurried efficiency of a Pokemon that had been doing this kind of work for a long time alongside someone it understood completely.

The gym was full. The number had stopped meaning anything specific somewhere around thirty and Dale had stopped counting and simply kept letting people in. A man near the back wall was holding a Pidgey that had followed him in off the street and looked unsure what to do about it. Two children were asleep against their mother's side near the equipment storage. An old woman had found the corner near the Voltorb enclosure and claimed it.

Dale walked the room every fifteen minutes the way he had walked the gym floor for thirty years, not doing anything specific, just being present, just letting the people in the room feel that someone who knew what they were doing was there with them. It worked the way it always worked. People's shoulders came down a fraction each time he made the circuit.

He completed it and came back to the door and looked at the street and looked at the two spaces in the room where two people weren't.

Electivire glanced at him without turning its head.

"I know," Dale said.

Kalea was not struggling with the wild Pokemon.

Victreebel had the eastern intersection handled, its Razor Leaf cutting through the electric types coming off the routes efficiently, its grass typing making their best attacks pointless. When a wild Electrode came in too hot and too charged for Victreebel to redirect cleanly she sent Heracross and Heracross dealt with it the way it dealt with most things, directly and without ceremony. Feraligatr held the northern flank, heavy and immovable, an anchor where the pressure was most consistent.

She was managing.

The problem was the grocery store on the waterfront road. She had spotted the family through a gap between buildings twice now while working her section and both times something had been in the way of getting to them. A downed line here. A cluster of wild Pokemon there. She went for the gap when she saw it and the gap closed before she reached it and she went back to her section and looked for another one.

Twenty seven minutes they had been in there.

She tried her communicator. Static.

Victreebel looked at her from the intersection.

"I know," she said, and got back to work.

Kadan ran the numbers.

Flygon on the aerial routes, Dragon Breath keeping the eastern approach manageable, ground typing absorbing the electric moves thrown at it. Alakazam on the ground, precise and efficient, redirecting what it could and stopping what it couldn't redirect. Umbreon at his side, steady, its presence doing quiet work on the civilians sheltering in doorways around him.

The system worked.

The residential block on the junction of harbour road and market street did not. Part of the upper facade had come down, street entrance blocked, lights in two windows meaning people inside. The route to it had enough wild Pokemon activity that clearing it meant pulling the system apart. Pulling the system apart meant the eastern approach opened. He had sent the information through his communicator three times and received static three times.

He needed more people and he didn't have them.

Flygon swept low and he looked at the lights in the windows and sent the information a fourth time.

Static.

Umbreon pressed against his leg briefly and he put his hand on it for a moment and looked at the windows and kept working.

They came from the north.

The Rangers arrived in a line that moved without urgency and what they brought was not more capability. It was numbers. That was all. That was everything.

Kalea had her path to the waterfront road cleared in four minutes. She was through it before it was fully open, reading the route as it happened and going through it, and she knocked on the grocery store door and said it was safe to move.

The door opened.

She looked at the family inside and the Growlithe that had not left its post for an hour and she said come on and led them out and kept her voice easy and her face steady.

Twenty nine minutes. She didn't say that part out loud.

Kadan had Flygon directing two Rangers to the residential block while Alakazam held the east approach. The street was cleared in eight minutes. He watched from below as the building was emptied floor by floor, the lights in the windows going dark one by one from the top down until the last one went.

He turned back to his section.

The Ace trainers arrived four minutes after the Rangers and the difference they made moved through the city like a change in pressure.

There were four of them.

The first one Kadan saw came around the corner of the east approach at an almost casual walk and looked at what was in the street and said something under her breath. Her Gengar appeared beside her without a ball being opened, simply was there, and she said something to it too quietly to carry and the Gengar went into the street and the wild Pokemon encountered something that understood exactly how to use a dark storm and a city full of distressed electric types as a working environment and decided elsewhere was better.

Ninety seconds.

Kadan watched it and said nothing.

The second Ace trainer found the Ampharos that had been circling the block behind the market district for the better part of an hour, keeping three evacuation routes closed. He looked at it for a moment and sent out a Quagsire that sat down in the road in front of it and looked at it with the expression of a Pokemon that had nowhere to be and no strong feelings about electric type moves. The Ampharos discharged into it three times. The Quagsire absorbed all three with the placid acceptance of a Pokemon that simply did not experience this as a problem.

The Ampharos stopped.

The Ace trainer walked up slowly and put a hand on its side and spoke quietly and the Ampharos leaned into it like something that had been frightened and loud for a long time and had just been given permission to stop.

Kalea watched this from across the intersection.

She sent Victreebel back to its ball and rolled her shoulders and looked at what still needed doing and got back to work.

Dale's two missing callers arrived at the gym fifty minutes after he had last been in contact with them, escorted by a Ranger who had found them sheltering in a doorway two streets over, cut off by a downed line that had since been cleared. One of them had a cut above her eyebrow that Nurse Joy would need to look at. Both of them were wet and tired and there.

Dale opened the door wider.

"Come in," he said. "Tea's on."

He made them tea and made himself one too this time and actually drank it.

Theo walked back through the city.

The storm was still raging, the rain still heavy, the wind still carrying force. But it was different from how it had been an hour ago in the way that mattered, the particular difference between a situation getting worse and a situation that has found its ceiling. Rangers moved through the streets with purpose. Ace trainers worked the remaining wild Pokemon with an efficiency that made the problem look smaller than it had been. The city was not fixed. It was going to take a long time to be fixed. But it had stopped getting worse and that was enough for now.

He moved through it without stopping. Past a Ranger redirecting a confused Jolteon. Past Kadan standing in the street watching a building with all its windows dark, his face telling nothing. Past Officer Jenny who looked up at him as he went and held his gaze for a moment with the expression of someone who had questions and had decided this was not the moment for them.

He had Electrike's Pokeball in his hand.

He didn't put it away.

The gym appeared at the end of the block with its lights on and its door open and Electivire visible in the entrance and Dale behind it, and Theo walked toward it through the rain.

Dale saw him coming and stepped aside and let him through and handed him a towel without saying anything.

Theo took it and sat down on the nearest bench and looked at the Pokeball in his hand and the people around him did what people did when they understood something had happened to someone and didn't have the shape of it yet, which was to leave it alone.

After a while Dale sat down beside him.

He handed him a cup of tea.

Theo took it.

He sat with the Pokeball in one hand and the tea in the other and outside the storm continued doing what it was doing and somewhere above the clouds Zapdos moved east toward open water and the long work of putting Vermilion back together had already begun.

 

[Live Wire]

Therapist: How do you feel about not being able to leave?

Theo: Like it makes sense. That's the worst part.

The gym was empty when Theo woke up.

Not quiet in the way it was quiet in the evenings when the Pokemon had settled and the training floor was dark and the only sound was the low electrical hum that never fully went away. Empty in the specific way of a space that had held a lot of people and now held none and was still adjusting to the difference. Blankets someone had left folded on a bench. A child's drawing on the floor near the equipment storage that had probably fallen from a pocket. A row of cups in the kitchen that Dale had washed and stacked before going home.

Theo sat up on his bench and looked at all of it.

The bandaging on his arm pulled slightly as he moved and he adjusted and let it settle. The burns weren't serious, Nurse Joy had been clear about that, treated and wrapped and they would heal without leaving anything permanent behind. They didn't hurt much anymore. They were just there, a physical note about the previous night that his body was keeping for its own reference.

Outside the gym windows the city was grey and wet and quiet in the way cities were quiet after something had happened to them, the particular subdued quality of a place taking stock of itself. He could see people on the street from where he sat, moving slowly, stopping to look at things, the universal behaviour of people surveying damage in the daylight that they hadn't been able to see in the dark.

The storm had passed.

The sky above Vermilion was low and pale and ordinary and the subsonic vibration that had been pressing against everything for hours was gone. What remained was just a grey morning after a bad night, which was something Theo knew how to exist in even if he hadn't slept enough to feel good about it.

He looked at the empty space on the bench beside him where Electrike's Pokeball usually sat and remembered.

All injured Pokemon had been taken to the Pokemon Centers overnight. Electrike was there now, being looked after by people who knew what they were doing, and the distance between those two facts felt larger than it was this morning.

He got up and went to the kitchen and found that Dale had left the kettle full and the tea where it always was and made himself a cup and stood at the small window and looked at the side street where the bin the Pidgey had been robbing every morning was on its side, knocked over by the storm, its contents spread across the wet road.

The Pidgey was already there, picking through the wreckage with the focused satisfaction of a Pokemon for whom this constituted an upgrade.

Theo drank his tea and watched it and didn't think about anything for a few minutes.

Surge and Visquez came back to the gym mid morning.

Theo heard them before he saw them, Surge's voice in the corridor carrying the particular quality it had when he was issuing the end of a long series of instructions rather than the beginning of one. When they came through the door they had the look of people who had been working through the night at something genuinely dangerous and had come out the other side of it.

Visquez's vest had a scorch mark along the left shoulder that hadn't been there yesterday. She looked at Theo when she came in, just briefly, the kind of look that said she knew broadly what had happened and was still deciding where to put that information, and then she went to the kitchen and Theo heard the kettle going.

Surge stopped in the middle of the main floor and looked at the gym the way he always looked at it when he came back from something, a quick assessment, checking that it was as it should be. His eyes went to Theo's bandaged arm and stayed there for a moment and then moved on.

"Get some food," he said. "I'll want to talk to you in an hour."

He went to his office and closed the door.

Visquez came out of the kitchen with two cups and handed one to Theo and sat beside him on the bench and said nothing for a while. Outside the window a couple stood in the street looking at the front of their shop, a section of awning torn away and piled against the building next door by the wind.

"Power plant," Visquez said, not looking at him. "The storm was driving electrical surges through the grid that would have taken the whole system down if they weren't managed. Surge spent the night with his Pokemon absorbing and redirecting the overloads." She drank her tea. "If the plant had gone the city would have been dark for weeks. Everything that was already bad gets significantly worse."

Theo looked at his cup.

"He couldn't have known about the wormhole," she said. "He sent you out for a walk."

"I know," Theo replied.

She looked at him sideways for a moment and then looked back at the street. "You did something considerable last night," she said eventually. "I want you to know that I know that. Even if nobody makes a production of it."

She finished her tea and went back to work and left Theo sitting with that thought.

Lance arrived at the gym an hour later.

He came through the main entrance rather than the side door and the effect was immediate. Two gym trainers on the floor stopped mid conversation. A third dropped his clipboard, picked it up and then stood holding it without apparently knowing what to do with it. Kalea appeared from the Pokemon care corridor, took one look, and grabbed Kadan's arm beside her with both hands.

Kadan looked at Lance and then looked at Kalea's hands on his arm. "Let go."

"Give me a second," she said without releasing him.

Lance crossed the main floor toward Surge's office without looking at any of them, the red cape settling around him with each step, carrying himself with the complete ease of someone who had walked into rooms where people reacted this way his entire adult life and had long since stopped registering it.

The office door closed behind him.

The gym trainer who had dropped his clipboard was still holding it.

Kalea finally let go of Kadan's arm. "That's Lance," she said, to nobody in particular.

"I'm aware," Kadan replied.

Theo sat on the bench near the registration desk and waited. Kalea looked at the closed office door and then at Theo with an expression that was half awe and half the particular alertness of someone who had noticed that the quiet kid from the dock was apparently having a meeting with the Champion and had several questions about that.

Theo gave her nothing.

She pointed at him. "We are talking about this later."

The office door stayed closed for twenty minutes.

Then Surge stood in the doorway and looked at Theo. "Come in."

The office with three people in it distributed itself differently than it did with two. Lance stood to the right of Surge's desk with his arms crossed and the focused attention he brought to everything. Surge sat behind the desk. Theo took the chair across from him and kept his posture even and his face open.

Surge set both hands on the desk.

"The International Police are already aware of your situation," he began. "They have been since shortly after you arrived. What you are is something they have a specific classification for." He met Theo's eyes directly. "The term is Faller. It refers to someone who has come through an ultra wormhole from another world into this one. Someone who doesn't belong here by the normal order of things and carries the energy of that crossing inside them." He said it plainly and without softening it. "That energy doesn't go away. It stays in a Faller's body indefinitely and it is detectable by anything sensitive to Ultra Space."

Theo sat with that.

Surge continued. "There is one recorded Faller before you. The International Police found that individual and monitored them. The Ultra Beast activity around them was significant but manageable." He looked at Theo steadily. "What has followed you here is not manageable in the same way. Two Ultra Beasts in Vermilion since you arrived, both appearing at your exact location. A wormhole opening directly above you on the dock last night." Surge leaned forward slightly. "The working theory is that the energy you carry is considerably stronger than anything the International Police have encountered in a Faller before. Which makes you a different category of situation entirely."

"How much stronger," Theo asked.

Lance straightened from where he stood. "That's what the specialists being dispatched will determine. Two of their best people are being sent to Vermilion. They have more experience with Ultra Space energy and Fallers than anyone else in the organisation. They will be here within the week."

"What do they need from me," Theo asked.

"Everything," Surge said. "Every detail of how you got here, what you remember, what you feel. All of it." He held Theo's gaze. "You'll tell them whatever they ask. Completely."

Theo nodded.

Surge sat back. "Which brings me to the other thing. You're not leaving the gym without direct escort until the specialists have assessed the situation and we have a plan. Not for a walk, not for anything. The gym is defensible. The city streets are not, as last night demonstrated." He said it without apology because there was no apology needed. It was simply the correct call. "That restriction stays in place until further notice."

Theo absorbed this. The logic was sound. He had no argument against it and no particular desire to make one.

"Alright," he said.

Surge looked at his bandaged arm and then back at his face. "You handled last night well. The situation with the jetty was the right call under pressure with no battle experience and a Pokemon that had nothing left." He said it plainly, the same way he said everything. "I'm aware of that."

Lance looked at the arm too, briefly. "The bond you have with that Electrike is real." He said it the way he said things that were facts and needed to be on record. "Whatever comes next, that's a foundation worth building on."

Theo said nothing to either of those things. He held them and moved on.

Surge reached into the desk drawer and set a Trainer Registration form on the desk in front of Theo. Already partially filled out, name and gym affiliation and date, waiting for the rest.

"Electrike needs an official trainer," Surge said. "It chose you and after last night the question of whether that bond is real has been settled." He pushed the form toward Theo. "Fill it out. I'll countersign as the releasing gym."

Theo looked at the form.

He picked up the pen and filled in the remaining fields. His hand was steady, the bandaged arm moving without complaint. He signed at the bottom and slid it back. Surge looked at it, countersigned without ceremony and placed it in the outgoing tray on his desk.

"It'll be brought to you this afternoon," Surge said. "When the Pokemon Center clears it."

That was the end of the meeting.

Theo was sitting on the bench in the main hall in the late afternoon when the side entrance opened and Kalea came through it with Electrike at her side.

She was trying to look like this was a routine errand.

She was not succeeding.

"Nurse Joy asked me to bring it over," she said, in the tone of someone delivering information neutrally and not at all thinking about anything else. "Since you're apparently under house arrest."

"I'm not under house arrest," Theo replied.

"You can't leave the gym."

"That's different from house arrest."

"It's really not." She looked down at Electrike who had already crossed the distance to Theo and was pressing against his knee, completely ignoring her. "Wow. Okay. I'm invisible now." She crouched down and looked at Electrike. "You know I brought you here, right? A little acknowledgment would be nice."

Electrike did not acknowledge her.

Kalea stood back up and looked at Theo's bandaged arm and then at Electrike and then at the Trainer Registration receipt visible on the bench beside him and her expression did something complicated.

"Surge made it official," she said.

"Yes."

She looked at it for another moment. Then she looked at Theo with the expression she wore when something had hit her in a way she wasn't entirely ready for and was managing it by being louder than the feeling.

"You've been here five weeks," she said.

"About that."

"You came here with nothing. And now you've got," she gestured broadly at Electrike, at the gym, at the general situation, "all of this."

"I also can't leave," Theo pointed out.

"Details." She sat down on the bench beside him with the easy ownership of someone who sat wherever they wanted and found the arrangement reasonable. Electrike finally deigned to look at her and she pointed at it. "Don't think I've forgotten that you ignored me."

Electrike looked away.

"Unbelievable," Kalea said.

Theo's mouth moved. He let it.

Kalea caught it and sat up slightly and looked at him with the particular focus she brought to things she found significant. "Was that a smile."

"No," Theo said.

"It absolutely was."

"You're imagining things."

"Kadan," she called across the gym.

"Leave him alone," Kadan replied from the far side of the floor without looking up.

Kalea pointed at Theo. "It was a smile."

"It wasn't," Theo said.

"It was a smile," Kadan said, still without looking up.

Theo looked at Kadan across the gym.

Kadan looked back at him with the expression of a man who had seventeen years of experience confirming his sister's observations and found it was generally more efficient to agree.

Kalea looked profoundly vindicated. She stayed for another ten minutes, talking about nothing particularly consequential, and then she left and the gym settled back into its evening rhythm and Theo sat with Electrike pressed against his knee and his bandaged arm resting on his leg and the Trainer Registration receipt on the bench beside him.

Outside, Vermilion was still putting itself back together.

In here things were, for the first time in several weeks, precisely as they should be.

 

[Live Wire]

Therapist: What did you learn today?

Theo: That knowing something and doing it are completely different things.

Kadan arrived on Tuesday morning with a whiteboard.

Theo looked at it and then at Kadan and Kadan set it up at the edge of the training floor without explaining himself. He uncapped a marker and wrote a single word at the top.

AURA.

"Surge wants you to understand what you're working with before you start working with it," he said. "Sit down."

Theo sat. He was aware, in the background of the morning, that somewhere behind Kadan's session was a battle that Kalea had been making pointed eye contact about since yesterday. He filed that awareness where he kept most things and focused on the board.

"Everything a Pokemon does in battle comes from aura," Kadan began. "It powers their moves, their abilities, their physical output. When a Pokemon faints it hasn't necessarily taken damage that would stop a human. What it's done is exhausted its aura reserves past the point where it can continue. The body shuts down to protect itself. Rest rebuilds the reserves. That's what Pokemon Centers actually do, they restore aura, not just physical condition."

"So physical damage and aura depletion are separate things," Theo said.

"They interact. A hard hit depletes aura faster. But a Pokemon can absorb significant punishment if its reserves are deep enough. And a Pokemon with almost no visible damage can faint if its aura is spent." Kadan wrote beneath AURA: PHYSICAL. SPECIAL. ABILITY. "Type energy is what differentiates these. Physical attacks use aura to enhance the body directly. Special attacks draw type energy outward and project it. Abilities are passive aura expressions running continuously in the background without conscious direction from the Pokemon."

He paused and tapped the board. "When a move matches the user's type it draws on a deeper resonance between the Pokemon's aura and the attack itself. The result is a meaningfully stronger output than the same move from a different type."

Theo nodded. That tracked with what he already knew from somewhere he couldn't identify. He didn't say anything about it.

"Abilities can be trained," Kadan continued. "An untrained ability operates below its potential and can fail under pressure. Electrike has two. Lightning Rod, which it uses actively, and Static, which is undeveloped. Both can be strengthened through consistent training." He turned back to the board and then stopped.

Turned around again.

"Both can eventually function simultaneously," he added, and there was something in the way he said it, slightly more detailed than necessary, that suggested he found this particular fact more interesting than his expression was letting on. "The interaction between a trained Lightning Rod and an active Static would make Electrike extremely difficult to approach physically while remaining immune to electric type moves from range. The defensive and counter possibilities alone are—" He stopped himself. Cleared his throat. Turned back to the board. "Different conversation."

Theo watched the back of his head for a moment.

"What about hidden abilities," he asked.

"They exist," Kadan said, to the board. "Rarer. Require specific conditions to surface." A pause. "Also a different conversation."

He moved to a fresh section and his composure was fully back by the time he turned around.

"Pokemon mentality." INTELLIGENT. NOT HUMAN. "They understand complex situations, form bonds, make decisions, experience things that are recognisably emotional. But their thinking is more instinct driven and present focused than ours. When you give a command in battle you're communicating an intention to a partner who interprets it through their own instincts. Not issuing an order to a soldier."

He was talking faster now. Marginally. Theo noticed it in the rhythm of the sentences.

"This is why getting a Pokemon that is willing to follow you from the beginning matters more than people appreciate. Around seventy five percent of Pokemon have a natural affinity for battling. Getting stronger is closer to instinct than ambition for them. The ones that don't share that affinity still seek partnership and growth through other means. But the ones that do—" He made a brief gesture that was as close as Kadan got to enthusiasm. "The ones that do and that choose a trainer they trust, the rate of development compared to a resistant or forced partnership is not comparable. It isn't close."

Theo was almost smiling.

Kadan noticed. He straightened slightly and looked at the board. "Don't mistake a Pokemon that dislikes battling for a lesser partner," he finished, in his normal tone. "Moving on."

He moved to evolution.

"Pokemon evolve to grow stronger, access new capabilities, expand their aura capacity significantly. It's one of the most consequential events in a Pokemon's development."

"There are several ways it can happen," Theo said. "Through growth and experience, through stones, through trading, through friendship, through location, through time of day, through a held item, through learning a specific move."

Kadan put the cap on the marker.

He turned around and looked at Theo with an expression that had moved past the measuring look into something more deliberate.

"You know a lot," he said, "for someone who remembers nothing."

The gym was quiet around them.

Theo didn't have a good answer for it. He never did when the knowledge surfaced that way. "It just comes," he said. "I don't know why."

Kadan held the look for a few seconds. Then he turned back to the board without pushing it further.

"Individual Pokemon vary in their natural capabilities," he continued. "Genetic variation. A slightly stronger frame, marginally faster response, more efficient aura circulation from birth. These can't be trained into existence." He glanced back at Theo. "But they don't determine outcomes. A naturally gifted Pokemon with a poor trainer loses to a less gifted Pokemon with a skilled one more often than the gifted trainer expects. Bond and training matter more than genetics across the long run."

Theo thought about something and almost said a term for it and decided against it. Some things were better left unsaid until there was a reason to say them.

Kadan finished with the badge progression. Early challenges testing basic type awareness and whether a trainer could give clear commands under pressure. The middle of the circuit where strategy became the determining factor. The latter half where most trainers found the ceiling of what they had built and couldn't push past it.

He wiped the board clean.

"Theory only does so much," he said, and left.

Kalea appeared approximately three minutes later with Pikachu on her shoulder and the energy of someone who had been waiting for a reasonable amount of time and considered the reasonable amount of time very much concluded.

"Finally," she announced to the gym in general. "I've been standing in that corridor for twenty minutes."

"You've been standing there for four minutes," Kadan said from across the floor without looking up.

"It felt like twenty." She set Pikachu down and looked at Theo with the bright focus she brought to things she was genuinely excited about. "Right. First proper battle. How are you feeling?"

"Fine," Theo said.

"Your eye is doing the thing."

"What thing."

"The thing where you're not fine but you're saying fine." She waved a hand. "It's okay. Everyone's nervous for their first one. Kadan cried."

"I did not cry," Kadan said.

"He got very emotional," Kalea confirmed to Theo. "It was sweet."

"I was twelve," Kadan said.

"Still counts." She turned back to Theo, cheerful and completely unrepentant. "Point isn't to win. Point is to learn something. Pikachu's been doing this for a while, it knows the gym floor better than you do, and it's faster than Electrike right now. None of that is a problem. It's just what today looks like."

Theo looked at Electrike.

Electrike was already on its feet, weight slightly forward, watching Pikachu with a focused attention that didn't look particularly worried about the speed differential. It looked at Theo once, briefly, and then back at Pikachu.

His mouth was dry. He ran through the moves in his head. Bite, Quick Attack, Spark, Shock Wave. Type considerations. Pikachu was electric type, electric moves between them wouldn't carry much. Bite for neutral coverage. Shock Wave never missed regardless of speed.

The moves dissolved and reassembled in the wrong order and he went through them again.

"Theo," Kalea said. "You're going to be fine. I promise."

"Ready," he said. His voice came out level. He was mildly surprised.

Kalea grinned. "There we go." She looked at Pikachu. "Quick Attack. Nice and easy to start."

Pikachu moved.

"Quick Attack," Theo said, and Electrike launched and they met near the center of the floor and the collision was sharper and louder than watching from a bench had prepared him for and his thinking stuttered at the reality of it before catching back up.

Pikachu had recovered first. It was faster than Electrike, visibly and consistently faster in a way that showed in every exchange without needing to be measured, the difference between a Pokemon that had been doing this for longer and one that was still finding its feet.

"Iron Tail," Kalea called. "Go on!"

Pikachu's tail hardened and it came in low and Theo read the angle.

"Bite, cut right."

Electrike cut right and the Iron Tail caught its flank rather than square on, a glancing blow that still carried weight. Electrike stumbled and went down on one knee and Theo's mind went completely blank.

He stood on the training floor with a command somewhere behind his teeth that he could not locate because Electrike was on one knee and something in that image had reached past every layer he had built and grabbed the part of him that had been holding everything difficult at arm's length for weeks and the training floor felt suddenly very large and his hands at his sides felt wrong and his heart was extremely loud in his ears.

Electrike looked up.

Not at Pikachu.

At him.

It had one knee on the floor and an opponent standing ready across the field and it was looking at him with the same steadiness it had shown in the habitat that first evening when he held his hand out and left the decision where it belonged. Not asking for anything dramatic. Just looking at him. Waiting.

Theo's heart was still loud.

He found the command.

"Shock Wave," he said. His voice was not entirely steady and he heard it and didn't stop.

Electrike released it from one knee, the attack arcing without needing a lock, catching Pikachu as it moved. Not particularly effective between electric types but it connected and it bought space and Electrike got back to its feet.

"Yes!" Kalea punched the air once. "That's it, come on!"

Her voice helped more than he expected it to. Theo's thinking was still moving faster than felt comfortable, the type considerations and the speed gap and the move options all arriving at once, but the noise in his head was slightly less loud than it had been a moment ago and he worked with what he had.

He called Bite into a Quick Attack follow up and Electrike delivered both in the right order and Pikachu took the Bite harder than the Shock Wave and Theo felt something almost like momentum before Pikachu answered with an Iron Tail that was faster than the last one and caught Electrike across the shoulder and put it down properly.

Not a faint. Close.

"Stop," Kalea said.

Pikachu sat back. Electrike got up slowly, shook itself, and looked at Theo with the expression of a Pokemon processing the outcome and already moving past it.

Kalea jogged across the floor and checked Electrike's shoulder with practiced hands. "Bruised, nothing serious, fine by morning." She stood and looked at Theo with the expression she wore when something had landed differently than she expected. "You hesitated."

"I know."

"You came back from it though." She said it the same way she said things she meant, without decoration. "That's the part that matters." She scratched the back of her head. "Pikachu's been doing this longer than you've been in Vermilion. The fact that you landed anything clean on it in your first battle is honestly not bad."

"Not bad," Theo repeated.

"High praise from her," Kadan said from across the floor.

"Don't." Kalea pointed at him without looking. "Don't act composed. I remember what you looked like against Surge's Pikachu in your gym challenge."

"That was different."

"You panicked."

"I made a tactical adjustment."

"You called the wrong move twice and then stood there." She turned to Theo with the bright satisfaction of someone delivering verified information. "Stood there. Just looked at it."

Kadan said nothing. The silence itself was confirmation.

Theo looked at Pikachu.

Pikachu had been sitting calmly through this exchange and now crossed the floor toward Theo with the easy directness of a Pokemon that had decided something and was acting on it. It pushed its face against Theo's knee and settled there with the contentment of something that had found where it wanted to be.

Kalea watched it. Her teasing expression softened into something warmer. "Still doing that," she said quietly.

Theo put his hand on Pikachu briefly and then crouched down in front of Electrike.

He put his hand on its head and Electrike pressed back against it once, solid and present and uncomplicated in a way that helped with the noise still settling in his chest.

"We have a lot of work to do," he said.

Electrike's ears came up.

He stayed crouched for a moment longer and let the training floor be quiet around him and let the loss and what the loss had shown him both sit there without doing anything about either of them.

They had a lot of work to do.

He was starting to understand what that actually meant.

 

[Live Wire]

Therapist: Do you feel like you belong here yet?

Theo: I don't know. Ask me again in a while.

The cookbook had been optimistic about his abilities.

That was the only conclusion he could reach standing in the kitchen on Wednesday morning looking at what was supposed to be scrambled eggs. They weren't. They occupied some philosophical space between egg and regret and he'd followed the instructions carefully which made it worse somehow, like the cookbook had looked at him specifically and decided to set him up.

He found it on the third shelf behind a jar of something that expired eighteen months ago and a box of crackers that might've been older. Someone had written SURGE on the inside cover in permanent marker. That raised questions he didn't have energy for at seven in the morning. He started with scrambled eggs because scrambled eggs seemed like a starting point and the cookbook agreed with him in theory.

The practice disagreed.

He ate them anyway, cleaned the pan with the thoroughness of someone eliminating evidence, and was sitting with his tea when Dale arrived at five past nine.

Dale put his bag down. Looked at the pan on the drying rack. Looked at Theo.

"How bad."

"I ate them."

"That's not really an answer to what I asked." He opened the fridge and did a quick inventory with the expression of a man who'd walked into situations like this before and developed a protocol for them. "Right. I'll handle breakfast until Visquez is back on a normal schedule."

"I can manage."

"Son." He said it in the tone of someone who'd raised two kids and knew exactly what managing looked like. "I've seen the pan."

Theo didn't argue.

Dale made proper breakfast. The kind that used more than one thing and smelled right. While he cooked he talked the way he always talked, a running commentary that didn't need much back from Theo to keep going. The power lines were back up on the eastern road. The shop front on market street already had new timber going up. The Slowpoke at the harbour entrance had apparently sat through the entire storm without relocating and was now being treated as a neighbourhood institution.

"How's your family?" Theo asked. He hadn't asked before. Wasn't sure why he was asking now except it felt overdue.

Dale slid a plate in front of him and sat down. "Safe. We've got a basement shelter, built it after a bad storm three years back." He picked up his fork. "My youngest thought the whole thing was brilliant actually, kept asking if Zapdos was going to come back. My wife was considerably less enthusiastic about framing it as an adventure." He paused. "You know what they say about electric type trainers and basements?"

Theo waited.

"We always stay grounded." Delivered with complete sincerity. Dale pointed his fork at him. "That one's free."

Theo's mouth moved despite his best efforts.

"There it is," Dale said, satisfied, and ate his breakfast.

Thursday morning Theo heard the phone call before he saw Surge.

He was crossing the corridor when the office door let through Surge's voice, not loud but carrying the compressed quality it got when he was holding something that would be easier to let out.

"I understand the pressure you're under, Mayor." A pause. "I do. But two load bearing walls in the eastern market junction were flagged by the structural team on Tuesday and I'm not reopening that area until the assessments are done." Longer pause. "The badge doesn't make the wall safe." Shorter pause. "Then tell them to wait. We open when it's ready." A beat. "I'll call you this afternoon."

Silence.

Theo kept moving.

He saw Surge briefly around eleven, crossing the main hall toward somewhere else. The lines around his eyes were deeper than usual and there was a set to his jaw that sat somewhere between fatigue and frustration, not quite either of them. He stopped when he noticed Theo watching the Pokemon rotations.

"Any issues?"

"Jolteon wasn't happy about the feeding order again."

"It never is." He stood there for a moment longer than was strictly necessary, just looking at the main floor, and then he straightened. "Keep at it," he said, and left.

The physical training had become the part of the day Theo looked forward to without noticing when that had happened.

Running the perimeter of the main floor with Electrike in the mornings, Theo at a pace that wasn't entirely comfortable, Electrike at a pace that was clearly charitable and didn't make a thing of it. Direction drills along the far wall. Basic conditioning that Kadan had outlined and Kalea had called unglamorous and important in the same breath, which Theo was starting to understand was her way of saying she thought it actually mattered.

The Thunder Wave accuracy work was the most frustrating part.

When Electrike missed it didn't announce itself dramatically, no explosion, no obvious error, it just didn't connect and they reset and went again. The moving targets Dale had helped rig along the east wall were small and the drill required Electrike to track and hit them at varying distances, which was harder than stationary ones and more relevant to anything that might actually happen in a real battle.

Wednesday, four out of eight.

Thursday, five.

Friday, four again. Electrike looked at him after the fourth miss with an expression that communicated something specific about how Thursday's result had apparently not been a trend.

"Friday's a bad day for percentages," Theo said.

Electrike was not convinced.

They kept going anyway.

The gym had lent him a tablet, basic thing, solid enough for what it needed to do. Video sessions twice a week with his therapist, some reading when he couldn't sleep. He kept it propped against the wall on his desk and on session days he sat on the bed and talked to a woman on a screen who had a calm office somewhere he'd never been and a way of asking things that made his usual approach to conversations feel less reliable than he'd like.

Friday's session was supposed to be routine.

He came out of it forty minutes later feeling like someone had turned his pockets inside out. He sat in his room for a bit and then decided sitting in his room wasn't doing anything useful and went out into the corridor.

He nearly walked into them.

The man he saw first, standing just past the junction with the main hall, looking at the building with the unhurried attention of someone taking in a new space and cataloguing it. Shorter than Theo expected, compact, long dark coat that had clearly seen some travelling. His eyes came to Theo immediately and there was a sharpness behind them that wasn't alarm, more like a switch being flicked. The kind of man who noted exits without looking like he was looking for them.

The woman beside him was facing the other way when Theo came out, looking down toward the Pokemon habitat, and she turned at the sound of his footsteps. Dark hair, mid twenties, and there was a stillness about her that wasn't unfriendly but was very settled, like she'd found something solid in herself and had been living from it for a while. When her eyes found Theo there was something in them he couldn't name properly, not pity, not recognition exactly, something between the two.

The knowledge came the way it always came.

"Looker," Theo said. He looked at the woman. "Anabel."

They glanced at each other, brief and quick, the look of two people adjusting to something at the same time.

"Surge mentioned you knew things you shouldn't," Looker said. Something behind it that wasn't quite amusement. "Wasn't understating it."

Anabel stepped forward and put her hand out.

"Since you already know my name," she said, "I'll skip to the part that matters."

Her grip was firm. Her eyes were steady.

"I'm a Faller too."

 

[Live Wire]

Therapist: How does it feel knowing someone else has been through this?

Theo: Like finding a door I didn't know was there.

They used Surge's office but it wasn't really big enough for five people and the extra chairs from the meeting room made the space feel compressed, everyone slightly more aware of each other than a formal meeting usually called for. Lance stood rather than sat, which in a room this size was as much a statement as a choice. Looker had taken the chair nearest the door. Anabel sat between him and the desk with her folder closed on her lap and the composed bearing of someone who had run meetings like this before and knew exactly how they needed to go.

Surge was behind his desk. Theo took the chair across from him.

Anabel began.

"Wormhole Resonance." She said it like she was setting something on the table. "That's the official term for what you carry. When a person passes through an ultra wormhole the transit imprints a frequency into their aura. Permanent. It doesn't fade and it can't be removed. Anything sensitive to Ultra Space energy can detect it." She looked at him steadily. "You've been broadcasting since the moment you arrived."

"How strongly," Theo said.

"That's the significant part." She opened the folder but didn't look at it. "My resonance is measurable. Manageable. Yours is in a different category entirely. The highest readings we've ever recorded in a Faller. By a considerable margin."

Looker looked up briefly. "Which accounts for the attack frequency. Two incidents within weeks of arrival. Signal strength, not coincidence."

"The gym has been protecting you between them," Surge said. His hands were flat on the desk, his expression giving nothing away. "Null Emitters. Standard installation in sensitive League buildings. Originally designed to prevent Ghost and Psychic type interference in secure facilities. They create a containment field. Your resonance doesn't move in or out while you're inside the gym's range." He looked at Theo. "Outside it you broadcast freely. That's what happened on the dock."

"No handheld version," Looker added, before Theo could form the question. "Prolonged direct contact with the technology causes cellular damage in humans. Can't be miniaturised."

Anabel leaned forward slightly. "The goal is to make the emitters redundant. Not immediately. Eventually. Your aura and your resonance are deeply intertwined and if you can learn to centre your aura, suppress its outward expression, the resonance pulls inward with it. The average Ultra Beast navigates by signal. Suppress the signal sufficiently and you become background noise." She held his gaze. "I can teach you. I've been managing my own resonance for years."

"How long did it take you," Theo asked.

"Longer than we'd like here. My circumstances were different." She said it plainly, without softening it. "We'll get to that."

She set the folder on the corner of Surge's desk.

"When I came through the wormhole I remembered clearly where I was from. My home, the people in it, my life before. What I didn't have was any real knowledge of Pokemon. I had to learn everything from the beginning." A pause. "Your situation is the inverse. You know this world, its Pokemon, its history. But you don't remember where you came from."

"We've been trying to account for that," Looker said. "Two Fallers, two completely opposite memory profiles. Working theory relates to resonance strength or the conditions of each transit. The event that took you was significantly more violent than hers."

"What it means practically," Anabel said, "is a question we'll come back to. The global situation first."

Lance spoke.

One word. "Alola."

The room gave him the attention rooms gave people who didn't speak often and meant it when they did.

"The situation there has deteriorated beyond anything in previous wormhole incidents," he said. "Ultra Beasts appearing at a rate and scale that hasn't been recorded. Champion Moon is coordinating the response."

The name landed where everything landed, that space behind Theo's eyes where the knowledge waited.

Moon.

"Alongside the Kahunas," Anabel continued.

Kahuna. Island guardians. He knew that.

"The Ultra Recon Squad. The Elite Four. Trial Completionists recalled to assist."

Trials. He knew what those were too. He sat with the knowledge and said nothing.

"Ultra Beasts have been confirmed in every region," Looker said. "Weaker the further from Alola. The wormholes opening in distant regions are unstable fractures, not proper openings. Passing through them damages Ultra Beasts significantly. What reaches Kanto is already compromised before it arrives. It's why the ones you encountered dissipated after being defeated. Not enough reserve energy to maintain physical form. In Alola the wormholes are stable. Full strength arrivals. They can be captured with specialised equipment."

Theo thought about the Nihilego dissolving above the harbour water.

"As the crisis in Alola worsens," Anabel said, "those distant wormholes will stabilise. Stronger Ultra Beasts will be able to make the crossing without being as damaged. The window where the regional threat is manageable won't last."

A silence settled. The kind that followed something without an immediate answer.

"So I have to go there eventually," Theo said.

Looker set his pen down.

"And there it is." He said it quietly, with the weariness of a man who had seen a particular shape of thing repeat itself too many times to find it anything but exhausting. "Every time something goes catastrophically wrong in this world a child ends up at the centre of it. Carrying what grown adults with full resources and years of experience should be carrying." He shook his head slowly. "Every single time. It shouldn't be the way it is. It never should have been."

Theo looked at the desk.

Something was there. Names, sitting in the front of his mind with the same weightless availability as everything else that surfaced without warning.

"Sapphire," he said. Then: "Ruby."

The room stopped.

Not the kind of pause that happened between one person finishing and another starting. A complete stop. Looker had gone very still. Anabel's expression had shifted into something sharp and focused that hadn't been there a moment ago. Lance, from the wall, was looking at Theo with an attention that was different from before.

Surge said nothing. He was watching Theo.

"How do you know those names," Looker said. Very quietly. The voice of someone who needed the answer to a question more than they were letting on.

"They just came," Theo said. "Same as everything else."

Looker looked at Anabel. Something passed between them, quick and significant, the look of two people who had just encountered something that changed the shape of what they were dealing with.

"Those names," Anabel said carefully, "are not public knowledge. The individuals involved in the Hoenn incident were kept out of official record at their own request." She looked at him with the focused attention she brought to things that mattered. "The fact that you know them is not something we can easily account for."

Theo had no answer for that. He didn't have an answer for most of the things he knew.

Anabel held the moment for a second longer and then moved on, the deliberate choice of someone setting something aside to be dealt with properly rather than inadequately right now.

"The answers about where you came from," she said. "The records of the wormhole event that brought you here, what caused it, whether it can be traced. If that information exists anywhere." She stopped. "It's in Alola."

The room kept moving. He was aware of it distantly, the way you were aware of a conversation happening on the other side of a wall. Lance said something. Surge responded. Looker made a note. The words reached Theo but didn't quite connect to anything because he had gone somewhere else.

Somewhere there were answers. Not fragments. Not things that surfaced without explanation. Actual answers. About the birthday party he could almost remember. About the face that appeared and disappeared when he reached for it. About what his name was before he chose one for himself on a bench in a police station.

Someone touched his arm.

Light. Brief. Anabel had leaned across and her hand was on his forearm and she was looking at him with the expression of someone who knew exactly where he'd gone because she had been there herself.

"Still with us?" she said.

He came back. The room assembled itself around him again.

"Sorry," he said.

"Don't be." She sat back. The stern quality was still there but something in it was less sharp than it had been. "I did the same thing when they told me. It takes a moment." She said it the way someone said something true without making it larger than it was.

Looker cleared his throat. "The International Police's position is that training should be conducted in a controlled environment. Closed. Structured. No journey, no circuit. We bring resources here, we manage his development in conditions we can monitor and secure."

"No."

Lance. One word from the wall and the word had the quality of something that wasn't going to be argued with.

Looker looked at him.

"He is a trainer," Lance said. "A real journey builds something a controlled program cannot replicate. You put him in a box and you get whatever a box produces." He looked at Looker with the calm direct certainty of a man who held more authority in this room than anyone else and didn't need to remind anyone of it. "The strongest trainers this world has ever seen developed through real bonds, real experience, real consequences. That is not negotiable."

Surge nodded once. That was all.

Looker tapped his pen twice against the folder. He had the expression of someone whose professional objection had just been overruled by people who weren't wrong and who had the standing to make it final. "The resonance," he said. "The attacks."

"A middle position," Anabel said.

Everyone looked at her. She had the floor and she knew it and she took it without ceremony.

"Surge and Lance are right. A traditional journey is the correct path. You are right that he cannot begin it at current resonance levels." She looked at Theo. "You train with me. Aura suppression, resonance management. When you can hold it consistently and I am satisfied, you start your circuit." She looked around the room. "The journey happens. It doesn't happen yet."

Looker sat with this. "The International Police maintain a presence in Vermilion throughout the training period."

"Agreed," Surge said.

Lance said nothing. He didn't need to. His position was already on the table.

Theo looked at the five people who had just decided the shape of the next part of his life and found he had nothing to argue with. The compromise was fair. More than fair it was right and the part of him that had gone somewhere else entirely when Anabel mentioned Alola would have to be patient.

"Alright," he said.

"Good." Anabel closed her folder with the finality of someone moving from discussion to action. She looked at Theo with the focused quality that he was starting to understand was just how she looked when she meant something. "We start tomorrow. Early."

"How early," Theo said.

"Earlier than you'd like," she said.

Looker made a sound that might have been a laugh. Brief and quickly recovered.

Lance pushed off the wall and the meeting was over.

 

[Live Wire]

Therapist: What does your aura feel like?

Theo: Like something I should have noticed a long time ago.

Anabel was already on the training floor when he came out at half six.

Sitting cross legged, eyes closed, hands on her knees. Still enough that Theo wasn't sure at first if she was waiting or meditating. Then she opened her eyes and looked at him and the stillness shifted into something more directed.

"Good," she said. "Sit down."

He sat across from her. The gym was quiet, the Pokemon still in their morning routines, the windows pale with early light.

"Before we start." She looked at him in the way she had, like she was reading something rather than just looking. "What I'm about to teach you isn't standard. Aura training at this level is for trainers pursuing mega evolution. Years of work, established bonds, a very specific goal." A pause. "I'm teaching it to you because your situation requires it. Suppress your aura and the resonance follows. They're intertwined. You don't manage them separately."

"So it's a workaround," Theo said.

"A necessary one. The principles are the same regardless of the reason." She settled her hands on her knees. "I'm a psychic. Which means I can feel aura fields directly. I can't locate yours for you but I can show you where to look." She held his gaze. "Close your eyes."

He did.

The floor was solid under him. The gym hummed at the frequency it always hummed at. He tried to stop doing everything else and found immediately that stopping doing everything else was harder than it sounded.

"You're managing your thoughts," Anabel said. Her voice came from slightly to his left now. She'd moved without him hearing it. "Don't. Let them go where they go and don't follow."

He tried that instead.

The gym settled around him. The hum. A Jolteon starting its circuits somewhere behind him. His own breathing, which apparently he had opinions about the second he noticed it. He let the opinions go.



Then he felt something at the edge of his awareness. Not intrusive. More like a light being held near something in a dark room without touching it. Anabel's psychic sense, steady and directed, pointing at something he hadn't been able to find on his own.

There.

Warm. Running through him the way the gym's hum ran through the building, present in everything at once. Same temperature as himself, which was probably why he'd never noticed it as anything separate.

And something else alongside it. Not the same. A frequency that had made itself at home in him since he came through the wormhole and hadn't left.

"You found it," Anabel said, and withdrew the psychic presence the way you withdrew a hand once someone had their footing.

Theo opened his eyes.

She was watching him with the expression she had when something confirmed what she already knew.

"Both of them," he said.

"Yes. The resonance will feel like that for a while. Part of you but not native. The aura is what we work with. The resonance follows it." She shifted. "Again. Faster this time."

He closed his eyes and found it again. Less time than the first. She told him to let it go and find it again and he did it four more times until it stopped feeling like luck.

The habitat door opened.

He kept his eyes closed. Felt Electrike cross the floor and settle beside him without being asked. It hadn't been called. It had just come.

"Find it again," Anabel said quietly. "Pay attention to what's different."

He found his aura. Then noticed what Electrike's field did to it. Same type of energy, his and Electrike's, and being next to each other made both easier to hear. Like finding a frequency you'd been searching for because someone nearby was already tuned to it.

He held it longer this time. Several breaths. The warmth steady, the resonance alongside it, and he could feel the difference between the two clearly enough now that working with one and not the other felt like something he could actually do.

When he opened his eyes Electrike was looking at him. He looked back and something passed between them that didn't need describing.

Anabel was watching them both.

"That's enough for today," she said.

"That's it?" Theo said.

"Most people take three days to locate their aura clearly enough to hold it." She stood and picked up her folder. "Having Electrike with you helped. The shared type energy gave you a reference point I couldn't." She looked at him directly. "Tomorrow we hold it under mild distraction. We build from there."

"How long before I can suppress it," Theo said.

"When you're ready." Firm, no apology in it. "This isn't small work. What you did this morning isn't small."

She left. Theo sat for a moment longer with Electrike beside him. Put his hand on its head. Electrike pressed back once and then walked back toward the habitat and Theo stayed on the floor and let the morning be what it was.

Kalea appeared at his door at seven with a stack of takeout containers under one arm and Kadan behind her wearing the expression of someone who had been told rather than asked.

"Johto place on the north road," she said, walking past Theo into his room and setting everything on the desk. "Because you can't go anywhere and it felt wrong to just leave you sitting here."

"I'm fine," Theo said.

"You're having dinner with us." She pulled the desk chair out and sat on it backwards and started opening containers. Kadan found a spot against the wall with his own container and ate with the quiet efficiency of someone who'd made his peace with wherever Kalea went becoming a social occasion.

The food was good. Better than anything the gym kitchen had produced in Theo's attempts this past week, which Kalea brought up four minutes in because Kadan had apparently told her about the pan in full detail.

"He described the pan," she said.

"It was fine," Theo said.

"It wasn't," Kadan said, to the wall.

They ate. Kalea talked about the patrol that morning, a building on the east side further along in repairs than expected, the Alolan restaurant on the east road still dealing with its kitchen situation.

"Pikachu," Kadan said, before she could get there.

"I was building to it."

"You were providing context."

"Context matters." She turned to Theo. "So this place does proper Alolan fluffy pancakes and something keeps getting into the kitchen at night and eating them. Owner thought Rattata so she set up a camera." A pause. "Pikachu. Just sitting there at three in the morning absolutely going through a full stack like it booked a table."

"No registered owner nearby," Kadan added. "Jenny's had a few calls. Not causing harm so nothing urgent."

"Very committed Pikachu with very specific taste," Kalea said.

Theo thought about that briefly. A Pikachu alone in an empty kitchen in the middle of the night eating Alolan pancakes. The image sat with him a little longer than the conversation did.

Kalea asked about the aura training and the conversation moved on and the evening did what evenings did. By the time they left the room felt slightly different to how it had been before they arrived, which was probably the point.

Theo sat on the edge of the bed after they'd gone. Thought about the morning and the warmth he'd found and the resonance alongside it and the Pikachu in the kitchen.

Then he went to sleep.

Far from the Blessed Isles something ancient and burning turned its attention to a frequency it had not forgotten.

The Blessed Isles had always been what they were. A place where the fabric between worlds had worn thin across centuries, the doorways there stable and natural and as old as the Wardens who stood guard over them. The concentration of Ultra Space energy saturating the isles was unlike anything elsewhere, rich and layered and accumulated across centuries, and beings from beyond were drawn to it the way water found low ground, not by choice exactly but by what their nature required.

The Lightless had come to the Blessed Isles because it needed what they had. Light. Ancient light, more concentrated there than anywhere else it had found. It had fed on that light and grown and reached further and the Wardens had opposed it as they always opposed it and the hatred it carried for the Wardens was old and accumulated and specific, built from every interference they had mounted against it, every time they had stood between the Lightless and what it needed. They were rooted in the islands in ways that made them difficult to remove, ancient protectors of the very thing the Lightless required, and the opposition they represented was not merely tactical but personal in the way only sustained obstruction over a very long time could become personal.

But the Sunne and the Moone were different from the Wardens.

The Wardens were obstacles. The Sunne and the Moone were antitheses. They generated light. The Lightless consumed it. They were radiant and self-sustaining and whole in ways that the Lightless was not and their existence was an affront not just to its operations but to its fundamental nature, a constant reminder of what it had lost and what it needed to reclaim. The hatred it held for the Sunne and the Moone was not accumulated across time the way the hatred for the Wardens was. It was immediate and essential and had been present since the first moment it had understood what they were and what that meant for what it was.

In the latest clash it had come closer than it ever had.

The Sunne had been within its grasp. Partially taken, the light of it beginning to move where the Lightless directed, the absorption beginning in earnest. And then the Moone had intervened with everything it had and the moment had fractured and the Lightless had been pushed back depleted and the Sunne had pulled free. The Lightless held this in the way it held everything that fuelled the next action. Cold and purposeful. The anger not consuming it but residing permanently beneath every calculation, sharpening every intention, informing every decision it made. It had come that close. It would come closer.

And beneath even that, older and rawer and more specific than anything else it carried, was the defeat.

In all the time it had operated, in all the conflicts it had engaged across the fabric between worlds, it had been stopped before but never ended. Never brought to the point where escape was the only remaining option and escape itself was barely achieved. The Isle's Champion had done that. A living thing. Organic and fragile and temporary in the way all organic things were temporary. And yet she had stood at the convergence of everything the Blessed Isles could bring to bear and it had been enough and the Lightless had escaped because escape was still possible and not for any other reason.

In escaping it had left something behind.

The Crown.

Its truest power. The convergence of its own nature expressed in its most complete form. The Isle's Champion had taken it in the chaos of the defeat and she still held it and she knew the worth of what she held and the knowing made the holding deliberate and intentional rather than incidental and the Lightless felt this across every distance as a constant low pressure beneath everything else. The unfathomable rage it felt for the Isle's Champion was of a different order from what it directed at the Wardens or even the Sunne and the Moone. The particular fury of something that had been diminished by a living thing that had no right to diminish it and could not unmake that fact regardless of what it did next.

Reclaiming the Crown was a primary objective. What lived on the Far Shore was a separate primary objective. The two did not conflict because they required different things from it and the Lightless was capable of pursuing both simultaneously with the patience of something that had been operating across timescales that made simultaneity a manageable concept.

At the end of the latest clash with the Sunne, depleted and withdrawing from what the Moone had pushed it back from, it had registered something adjacent to the battle.

A burst of Ultra Space energy from an unintended fracture. A rip rather than a doorway, the consequence of the collision between itself and the Sunne and the Moone, opening laterally through the fabric and depositing something on the other side. The Lightless had noted it through the depletion and the chaos and later, when it turned its attention to the frequency the rip had left behind, it had understood what it had found.

A living being saturated with Ultra Space energy from the crossing.

Not a trace or a signature. What the signal carried was a concentration of resonance so dense it was incomprehensible in a living vessel. The energy of the wormhole it had caused, the specific Ultra Space charge from the fracture, had pressed itself into this being at a fundamental level. More than any Faller it had previously registered. More than the smaller signal it was vaguely aware of elsewhere, the older crossing whose trace was too faint and too managed to be of interest at this distance. This was different in scale and different in kind entirely. A piece of the Lightless's own work contained in a living vessel, the compressed energy of the very wormhole it had torn, still present and accessible and concentrated in a being that was walking around somewhere in the world carrying it.

If it absorbed that resonance the recovery from the clash with the Sunne and Moone would accelerate. The fractures it was forcing open, the stable doorways it was working to tear through the fabric between worlds, all of it would be amplified by what that resonance carried. It was not simply a target. It was a resource of significant value and the Lightless intended to reclaim it the same way it intended to reclaim the Crown. On its own terms. In its own time.

The signal had appeared on the Far Shore. A distant region far from the Blessed Isles, unfamiliar territory, the doorways there unstable and poor quality compared to what the Blessed Isles offered. The signal had been loud when it first registered and then had ceased completely, not fading but stopping as if swallowed, and the Lightless had sent a servant through an unstable fracture to where the signal had last been. The servant arrived depleted from the poor quality crossing and found nothing and dissipated.

Then the signal appeared again. Fully and clearly, same location, same texture, and the Lightless had sent a larger servant through a fracture that had opened directly above the signal's position. This servant had arrived depleted and been stopped before completing what it had been sent to do and dissipated.

The signal ceased immediately after. Again.

The pattern was noted. The signal appeared and was swallowed in the same location, not eliminated but contained, something pulling it inward so that the broadcast stopped without the frequency being destroyed.

But the Lightless had learned the texture of that frequency.

It had known the Blessed Isles' light for as long as the Blessed Isles had existed and it had learned this signal in the same way, specifically and without the possibility of confusion. A signal that had been fully known could be found even when it dimmed. Even when it seemed to stop.

The Lightless had escaped once diminished and defeated and it had returned and resumed and come closer than ever to the consuming The Blessed Isles.

The signal on the Far Shore was quieting.

The Crown was in hands that had no right to hold it.

The Lightless was patient in the way things were patient when patience was not the absence of urgency but the correct application of it. The anger burned steadily beneath everything, the rage for the Isle's Champion, the hatred for the Wardens, the fundamental opposition to the Sunne and the Moone, all of it fuel rather than noise, purposeful and cold and present in every calculation it made.

It would not wait as long as those on the Far Shore might hope.

 

[Live Wire]

Therapist: Does it bother you, knowing things you shouldn't?

Theo: Only when other people find out.

Anabel had not been lying about earlier than he'd like.

Five forty five. The training floor dark except for the lights she'd switched on herself, the gym Pokemon still in their enclosures, the city outside making the sounds of a city not yet awake. She was already on the floor when Theo came out pulling his vest on and she looked at him the way she looked at things she was about to make significantly harder.

"Yesterday you found it four times," she said. "Today you hold it while I talk to you. While someone walks across the floor. While Electrike is on the other side of the gym instead of beside you." She crossed her arms. "Ready?"

He was not ready. He said yes anyway.

The session ran ninety minutes and was nothing like the first one. The first had been discovery, quiet and new. This was work, the grinding repetitive kind, Anabel talking at him while he tried to hold the aura steady and it slipping the moment his attention divided. She didn't let up when he lost it. She just said again and waited and the moment he found it she gave him something else to deal with.

At one point she had Kadan walk across the training floor behind him carrying equipment to the storage room. Theo lost the aura before Kadan had taken three steps.

"Again," Anabel said.

He found it.

Kadan walked back the other way.

Gone.

"Again."

He set his jaw and found it again and held it and Anabel kept talking and he kept trying to listen and hold simultaneously and it kept slipping and the specific frustration of knowing exactly what he was doing wrong and being unable to stop doing it was its own particular kind of exhausting. He knew the aura was there. He could find it in three seconds now. The moment anything else demanded attention it slipped and he was back at the beginning and he knew why and the knowing didn't help.

By the end he'd held it clean through a full conversation twice and lost it six more times. Anabel looked at him with the expression of someone who had expected exactly this and found it neither encouraging nor discouraging, just information.

"You know what you're doing wrong," she said.

"Every time," Theo said, and heard the edge in his own voice.

"Knowing isn't fixing." She said it without unkindness, just fact. "That gap closes with repetition. There's no shortcut through it." She picked up her folder. "Better than session one. Looker wants you after lunch."

Theo looked at the training floor.

"Tomorrow," Anabel said, already heading for the corridor, "we go again."



Looker had set himself up in the small meeting room with a tablet, a notepad and two cups of tea he'd made himself. The gym's cookbook was open on the table to a page about boiling water.

He looked at it when Theo sat down. Then at Theo.

"I didn't use it for the tea," he said. "For the record."

"Noted," Theo said.

He sat down and tried to settle into the chair naturally and was aware he wasn't entirely managing it. There was something about Looker's professional attention that made him conscious of everything he said before he said it, which was not a feeling he was used to from conversations at the gym. With Surge or Visquez or even Kadan there was a baseline of established trust that he hadn't noticed he was relying on until it wasn't there.

Looker opened the notepad. "Informal," he said, in the tone of someone who treated informal things with identical rigour to formal ones. "I want to understand the scope of what you know. Not just Pokemon mechanics. Broader than that. Answer honestly. If you don't know something say so."

"Alright," Theo said. His hands were resting on his knees and he kept them still deliberately.

Looker started easy. Type matchups, move categories, evolution methods. Theo answered and his voice came out level and Looker wrote and his expression stayed professionally neutral.

Then regions. Their geography, gym structures, champions. Theo answered and tried not to think too carefully about each answer before giving it because thinking too carefully made him sound like he was thinking too carefully.

Then legendaries.

"Tell me what you know about the legendary Pokemon of the Hoenn region," Looker said. Carefully.

Theo's hands pressed slightly against his knees.

"Kyogre and Groudon," he said. "Ancient Pokemon connected to the expansion of the sea and the land. Capable of inducing extreme weather on a regional scale. Primal forms significantly more powerful than their base states." A pause. "Rayquaza mediates between them. Capable of mega evolution without a stone. Connected to the ozone layer."

Looker had stopped writing.

He looked at Theo. Then wrote something slowly. "The incident in Hoenn."

Theo's jaw tightened slightly. "Yes."

"How much of it."

"Most of it."

"Ruby and Sapphire." Not a question.

"Yes."

A silence. Looker wrote something Theo couldn't read from across the table and underlined it twice. "Moving on." He turned a page. "The Alola region. Legendary Pokemon."

Theo covered Solgaleo and Lunala. The Cosmog line. Ultra Space connections. Looker wrote steadily, composure fully in place.

"Necrozma," Looker said, and the name landed differently to the others.

"Prism Pokemon," Theo said, carefully. "Light absorption. Capable of fusing with Solgaleo or Lunala. Connected to the ongoing situation in Alola."

Looker put the pen down.

He sat back and looked at Theo the way you looked at something that had changed the shape of what you were dealing with.

Neither of them spoke for a moment. Theo was very aware of his hands on his knees and kept them still.

"How much of what you've just told me," Looker said eventually, "do you discuss. Generally. With people."

"None of it," Theo said. "It surfaces when something prompts it. I don't go around talking about it."

"Good." Looker leaned forward. He had the manner of someone delivering something he wanted to land properly. "Not everything you know is public record. Some of it is actively classified. The people involved in certain incidents requested to be kept out of official record. That request was honoured." He held Theo's gaze. "You're not in any trouble. But the wrong conversation with the wrong person could create serious problems for others. People who've earned the right to their privacy."

"I understand," Theo said.

Looker studied him for a moment in the way he studied most things, thoroughly and without announcing it. Then he nodded once, apparently satisfied.

He looked at the cookbook.

"I genuinely did not need it for the tea," he said.



Kadan's sessions had developed their own rhythm. He showed up with notes that had grown from one page to several and covered material the way he covered everything, directly and without waste.

Today was status conditions and weather.

He moved through paralysis, sleep, burn, freeze and poison with the efficient precision of someone who found the mechanics genuinely interesting but considered elaboration poor teaching. Theo asked questions from somewhere he couldn't locate and Kadan answered them with the focused attention he gave correct answers.

Then weather.

"Rain doubles water type move power and reduces fire. Harsh sunlight is the inverse. Sandstorm deals residual damage to anything not rock, ground or steel type and raises rock type special defence. Hail deals residual damage to anything not ice type and raises ice type special defence." He paused. "The interactions between weather and type advantages compound in ways that are easy to underestimate in planning."

"If your opponent runs fire types and you establish rain," Theo said, "the weather suppression stacks with the type disadvantage they're already at."

"Yes. Which is why weather control is a legitimate win condition rather than a secondary consideration. But it signals your strategy the moment you use it which means the counter-play isn't always about negating the weather. It's about disrupting the sequence before the payoff. A lot of weather teams lose not because the weather gets cleared but because the opponent forces a different play before the setup is complete, which puts the whole structure under pressure before it's stable, and the question becomes whether your team has the flexibility to operate without the weather because if it doesn't then you've essentially handed your opponent a road map to your only win condition and a competent trainer will—"

He stopped.

Looked at Theo.

Theo was watching him with an expression that wasn't quite a smile but was its immediate neighbour.

Kadan looked at his notes. At the wall. "How long was I talking."

"A while," Theo said.

"How long."

"About twelve minutes on that last point."

A silence. Then something happened that Theo hadn't seen from Kadan before, which was Kadan pressing his lips together against something and losing the battle against it, and the sound that came out was short and genuine and surprised them both.

Theo laughed too. The kind that came from somewhere real, sudden and unprompted, and for a moment both of them just sat with it without doing anything about it.

Then Kadan straightened. Cleared his throat. The tips of his ears had gone distinctly red.

"Weather summary," he said, to his notes. "Moving on."

"Right," Theo said, keeping his face straight.

The ears stayed red for the rest of the session and Kadan did not acknowledge them.

Kalea set Pikachu up at the far end of the training floor and bounced on her heels the way she did when she was genuinely looking forward to something.

"Improvement check," she announced. "Last time you hesitated. Today I want to see less of that."

"I'll try," Theo said.

"Don't try. Do it." She pointed at him. "Kadan said that. Not me."

"Kadan also spent twelve minutes explaining weather team counterplay," Theo said.

Kalea's face did several things at once. "He did what."

"He got animated."

"Kadan." She stared at him. "Kadan got animated."

"He's passionate about it."

She turned to look down the gym toward the corridor where Kadan had gone after the session and then turned back to Theo and pointed at him again. "We are discussing this later in full detail."

"Looking forward to it," Theo said.

A pause.

Kalea looked at him the way someone looked at something that had changed without them noticing the exact moment it happened.

"Was that you being funny," she said.

Theo's mouth opened. Nothing came out right away.

"It was." She was delighted in a way she made no effort to contain. "Theo made a joke. Voluntarily. At Kadan's expense." She raised her voice toward the corridor. "Kadan! Theo made a joke!"

"I heard," came back from somewhere distant and unimpressed.

"You're loosening up," Kalea said to Theo, with the warmth of someone who had been waiting for this and was glad to see it.

"I wasn't," Theo said, and heard his own voice do something slightly unsteady at the end of it.

Kalea grinned. "You absolutely were." She bounced on her heels again. "Okay. Battle. Let's go."

The battle was different to the last one.

Not dramatically. The speed gap between Pikachu and Electrike was still there and still the primary fact of every exchange. But Theo's commands were coming a half beat faster than before, arriving while Electrike was still assessing rather than after it had already started responding on instinct.

Pikachu landed an Iron Tail across Electrike's front leg and Theo's command came out before he'd consciously registered the hit connecting. Bite, recover, left.

He heard it in his own voice. Clean. No gap.

Electrike bit and recovered and cut left and it wasn't enough to win the exchange but it wasn't losing it badly either and there was a difference between those two things that hadn't existed in the previous battle.

He still lost. Pikachu was faster and more experienced and that gap didn't close in two weeks of practice sessions. But when Kalea called it Electrike was standing and the hesitation had been there once, brief, and he had come back from it before it cost him more than a single exchange.

Kalea looked at him after with the expression of someone doing a quiet calculation.

"Better," she said.

"Still lost," Theo said.

"Yeah." She recalled Pikachu. "But better."



Theo was reading the notice on the gym board when Visquez appeared at his shoulder.

She had the look she'd had since the storm, slightly worn at the edges, the kind of tiredness that came from sustained effort rather than a single bad night. But she was standing straight and the warmth in her expression when she looked at the notice was genuine.

"You saw it," she said.

"Just now," Theo said. "Is it a big deal?"

She looked at him sideways. "You know there's an official classification system for trainers?"

"I didn't," Theo said.

"Eight tiers," she said. "At the bottom you have Novice, which is where you are right now, zero to three badges. Then Trainer, then Advanced once you've completed at least one full circuit. Above that Expert, then Ace." She paused. "Ace is the professional level. Tournament competitors, contracted battlers. Kalea, Kadan, Dale, they're all Ace tier."

Theo looked at her. He hadn't known that either and he found it quietly interesting that the people he'd been watching run patrols and eat takeout on his floor were sitting at professional battler level.

"Above Ace is Elite," Visquez continued. "That's where Gym Leaders sit as a minimum. A Gym Leader's personal strength has to be at least Elite to hold the position, the League assesses it formally." She paused. "I'm Elite myself. Competed professionally for a few years before I ended up here." She said it the way people mentioned things that were true about themselves without needing to make anything of it. "Surge is above that. Master tier. Same as Wattson." She nodded at the notice. "Two Master tier specialists in a double exhibition is not something that happens in Vermilion. It might not happen again for a long time."

"Grand Master. Elite Four and Champions." She said it the same way people said things that were more concept than reality. "There are others supposedly. People who reached that level and never competed officially or walked away from it years ago. The classification system only tracks what it can see."

Theo looked at the notice.

PROCEEDS TO THE VERMILION CITY STORM RECOVERY FUND.

"He did this for the city," Theo said.

"He did this for the city," Visquez agreed, quietly and with the certainty of someone who had worked alongside Surge long enough to have stopped being surprised by that particular kind of thing.

She looked at Theo sideways. "You're settling in," she said.

He looked at the notice board instead of at her. "Getting there," he said.

She put her hand briefly on his shoulder and then went back to whatever she'd been doing and Theo stood at the notice board a little longer before going to make tea.

He didn't burn it.

 

[Live Wire]

Therapist: You seem different today.

Theo: I watched something worth watching.

The training had continued.

Two more sessions with Anabel, each harder than the last. She had moved from holding the aura under distraction to holding it under active pressure, standing close and pushing her psychic presence against his concentration while he tried to keep the frequency steady. He lost it constantly and found it again and lost it again and she said again each time with the patience of someone who had decided he was going to get this and was simply waiting for his body to catch up with his understanding.

He was getting faster at finding it. Holding it was still the problem.

He noted that and kept working.

The day of the exhibition the gym closed its training floor at noon. The cleaning crew came through and by four the stadium seating was open to the public. By half past the queue stretched down the block and Theo watched it from his room window and felt something he hadn't expected, which was that he was genuinely looking forward to something.

Wattson arrived at three with a man carrying his bag and a slight forward lean when he walked that explained the bad back without requiring anyone to mention it. Shorter than Theo had imagined, broad across the shoulders, white moustache with its own strong opinions about direction, eyes that were sharp and warm simultaneously in the way of someone who had been in a lot of battles and enjoyed every one of them.

Surge met him at the side entrance.

They shook hands with the ease of two people who had done this before. Whatever they said to each other in the corridor outside Surge's office was brief and Theo caught none of it except for Wattson's laugh, which was full and without reserve and bounced off the gym walls and made two of the Elekid in the habitat corridor look up.

Wattson came into the main hall and looked around the gym and saw Theo near the registration desk and pointed at him.

"You must be the interesting one I've been hearing about."

Theo wasn't sure what to say to that.

"Don't answer that," Surge said, from behind him.

Wattson laughed. "Wahahahaha. Relax son. I'm an old man with a bad back. I'm not here to interrogate anyone." He winked at Theo. "That's Looker's job."

Looker, coming through the corridor behind Surge, said nothing.

By five the gym was packed.

Not the comfortable full of a regular challenge morning. Every seat in the stadium tiers taken, the aisles between sections occupied by people who had arrived too late for seats and decided standing was acceptable. Several hundred people and the noise of it was different from anything Theo had heard in the gym, the sustained energy of people who had been through something difficult together and were in the same room now for something good.



The psychic screen didn't come from Anabel.

Two of the gym's resident psychic types had taken positions at opposite corners of the battlefield before either trainer came out, a Mr. Mime and a Hypno that Theo hadn't seen before, their concentration generating the shimmer that spread between them and enclosed the field in a containment that the front rows felt as a faint pressure change. The crowd registered it and understood what it meant and the understanding made them louder.

Kalea leaned close to Theo. "They put the screens up for high level battles. The gym's had them since before Surge took over." She looked at the shimmer. "Two Master tier electric specialists. Without containment half the city loses power."

Electrike was on his lap before Theo had thought to invite it, climbing up and settling with the ease of something that had decided this was where it was going to be. Its fur was warm against his hands and it was watching the battlefield with the focused attention it brought to things it considered worth watching.

Surge came out first. The crowd gave him the loudest noise yet. He walked to his mark with the same expression he brought to everything and stood there and said nothing and the crowd eventually settled into expectation.

Wattson came out second.

He walked to his mark at the angle that accommodated the bad back and raised both hands to the crowd and beamed and the crowd gave him exactly the reception someone who had arrived in their city as a personal gift deserved. He bowed and straightened with the mild wince of someone who had done something they knew they'd regret and laughed about it immediately.

"Wahahahaha. Every time," he said, to no one in particular.

The crowd laughed with him.



The referee stepped to centre.

"Both sides ready?"

Surge nodded once.

Wattson cracked his knuckles. "Always."

Electrode came out fast.

Before Wattson's Pokemon had fully materialised it was already activating Magnet Rise, the magnetic field lifting it clean off the concrete before anything else moved. First decision made before the battle had formally started. It hovered there, eye moving in constant restless arcs, already reading the field.

Alolan Golem landed beside it and the impact came up through the front row seats. Dense and immovable. It settled into the battlefield like it had chosen a position and didn't intend to be moved from it.

Across the field Eelektross uncoiled from its ball with the unhurried ease of something that had never needed to hurry. Long body low, antennae trailing slow arcs of static. It took in the opposing pair with calm familiarity.

Mow Rotom burst out spinning, blade humming, grass and electric energy crackling as it climbed to altitude and found its position.

The crowd went to the held version of noise.

Surge looked at the field.

"Rocks."

Golem drove both fists into the concrete and Stealth Rock erupted in jagged clusters across Wattson's side.

Eelektross was already spinning. The Rapid Spin came before the rocks had properly settled, sweeping the hazards away with the efficiency of a Pokemon that had anticipated exactly this opening. Wattson hadn't spoken a word.

Then Mow Rotom moved.

The Will-O-Wisp didn't travel in a straight line. It curved wide around Electrode's position, slipping past it entirely to find Golem from the side, and the blue fire spread across rock plating before either Surge or Golem could redirect. Burn established. Attack halved.

The crowd reacted.

Golem answered immediately.

Rock Slide came across the field wide and hard, the physical rock move catching both opponents simultaneously. Mow Rotom took it across its blade housing and staggered in the air. Eelektross absorbed it through sheer bulk and barely shifted its footing. Not unaffected. Just deciding not to acknowledge it.

Then Eelektross began to Coil.

Slow. Deliberate. Its long body winding over itself, Attack and Defense and Accuracy rising with each rotation. It was going to take hits while it built and it had decided that was acceptable.

Golem made it less acceptable.

Rock Blast. Five projectiles fired in quick succession directly into Eelektross while it Coiled. Eelektross took the first hit. Took the second. By the third its Coil Defense boost was starting to show, the rock impacts landing with diminishing effect against the building wall of physical resistance. It kept Coiling. Patient and certain and absorbing everything Golem threw at it.

Electrode never stopped moving the entire time.

Theo tried to follow it and mostly gave up. It crossed the field in sudden sharp bursts, cutting between positions, forcing Mow Rotom to keep adjusting altitude just to track it. It darted to Golem's position, used Helping Hand to boost the next move, and disappeared back into motion before Mow Rotom could reposition to answer it.

Mow Rotom launched Leaf Storm at Electrode instead.

Electrode turned directly into it.

Mirror Coat flared and the Leaf Storm hit it and came back doubled. Mow Rotom took its own attack point blank, the concentrated reflected grass energy ripping into its blade housing, one side of it smoking and its rotation suddenly uneven. The crowd made a sound.

Wattson looked at Mow Rotom without speaking. His expression said he had noted it and moved on.

Eelektross finished its Coil.

Three full stages of Defense built up. Attack and Accuracy climbing with them. It turned from the target it had been using as a reference point and crossed the field toward Golem.

Drain Punch.

Fighting type. Super effective against Golem's rock typing. Three stages of Coil Attack behind it. The impact cracked across the gym loud enough that the upper tiers heard it clearly. Golem went backward nearly three feet across the concrete and the stolen energy flowed back into Eelektross visibly.

Burned. Hit super effectively with a boosted Drain Punch.

Golem planted its feet.

Still standing.

The people around Theo had been standing for a while. He hadn't noticed when that started.

Electrode rolled to a stop beside Golem.

Surge looked at both of them. Then at Wattson's side. At Eelektross standing with three stages of Coil still active and Mow Rotom damaged but operational.

Something had been decided.

Electrode moved to Golem's side and used Helping Hand.

Wattson caught it before the move finished.

"Protect!" The urgency in it made both Pokemon react immediately.

Mow Rotom's barrier snapped up cleanly.

Eelektross was mid-step toward another Drain Punch. The Protect came up slower. The barrier forming around it as Golem's Explosion began, not quite complete, a half-formed shield with gaps in it.

Golem used Explosion.

Galvanize converted the detonation to electric energy. STAB fed into it. Helping Hand pushed it further. But Golem was burned, its Attack halved, and under normal circumstances the Explosion would be significantly diminished.

This was not a normal circumstance.

The critical hit bypassed everything.

The detonation swallowed the field. But inside the white and the noise and the pressure against their chests, underneath all of it, there was a sound. Sharp and clean and distinct from everything else the battle had produced. A single high crack that cut through the explosion the way lightning cut through thunder.

Experienced trainers in the crowd heard it and understood immediately.

Everyone else just felt it somewhere they couldn't name.

Burns, stat drops, all of it irrelevant. The full force of a Galvanize STAB Helping Hand Explosion landed with nothing taken away from it and the battlefield turned white and the psychic barrier around the arena shimmered hard enough that the front rows felt it as physical pressure against their chests.

Mow Rotom's Protect held completely.

Eelektross's half-formed barrier didn't.

The explosion caught it through the gaps and even with three stages of Coil Defense built up the critical force behind the hit was overwhelming. Eelektross hit the far side of the field and the Coil boost that had made it nearly immovable across the last several minutes couldn't account for what had just landed on it.

It didn't get up.

Golem was already gone. The trade it had entered the field to make, planned from the moment it set Stealth Rock and started taking hits while Eelektross Coiled.

The gym detonated.

Theo realised he had both hands pressed into Electrike's back only after the fact. Electrike sat completely still in his lap. Watching everything with total focus.

Kalea beside him said something that wasn't a word.

Wattson recalled Eelektross quietly. He stretched his back afterward, wincing once, and the cheerful expression came back before anyone could comment on the wince.

Mow Rotom drifted out of its Protect. Damaged from the Mirror Coat, shaken by the shockwave even through the barrier, its rotation laboured. Still airborne. Working for it.

Electrode moved.

Rollout, circling the perimeter, building momentum with every rotation, and when it slammed into Mow Rotom the accumulated force stopped its spin completely. Mow Rotom dropped out of the air and stayed down.

Surge sent Ampharos.

It walked onto the field with the measured calm of a veteran that understood its role in this phase and had no particular feelings about it either way. The moment it reached its position it set up Reflect, the barrier spreading across Surge's side of the field and halving incoming physical damage for both it and Electrode.

Then it settled into the back line and began to charge.

Wattson sent Magnezone.

It emerged with the precise geometric calm of a Pokemon that did nothing by accident, three magnetic units rotating in exact formation. Light Screen spread across Wattson's side immediately, halving incoming special damage, and Magnezone took its own position in the back line across from Ampharos.

Two tanks across from each other. Barriers up on both sides. Both of them settling in for an exchange they intended to win.

Then Wattson threw his last ball.

Manectric hit the field already crackling, already moving before it had fully materialised, reading the field in the first second and already acting on what it read.

Electrike shifted in Theo's lap before Theo fully understood why.

Theo looked at Manectric.

Then down at Electrike.

Electrike looked up at him. Not reassurance. Not excitement. Something quieter and more specific passing between them about what the road ahead could look like, about distance that could be covered, and neither of them needed to say it.

Electrike looked back to the field first.

Theo followed.

Manectric used Charge Beam immediately. The electric pulse built special attack energy visibly around its frame and before the charge had finished settling it was already repositioning, already reading angles.

Wattson said nothing. He didn't need to.

Manectric fired Flamethrower at Ampharos.

The heat distorted the air between them and Ampharos absorbed it behind the Light Screen and replied with Focus Blast, the orange energy crossing the field toward Magnezone. Magnezone took it behind Light Screen and answered with Flash Cannon, steel beam precise and heavy, cutting toward Ampharos.

Ampharos took Flash Cannon as the two exchanged artillery fire.

Fighting type into Magnezone's steel typing. Super effective. Even through Light Screen the impact broke Magnezone's formation briefly before it pulled itself back together.

Back and forth across the back line. Two tanks behind their respective screens, firing the heaviest special attacks they had at each other, neither going down from a single hit, the accumulated damage building in a way that was going to matter.

Manectric fired a second Flamethrower at Ampharos.

Ampharos countered with Dragon Pulse but kept most of its focus at Magnezone.

Electrode had been everywhere the whole match. Supporting, repositioning, reading the field before commands were spoken. The pace of it was finally starting to show in the tightness of its orbits.

Surge glanced at it.

Electrode glanced at the field. At Magnezone behind Light Screen. At Manectric's position.

Wattson saw it immediately.

"Now!"

Manectric Protected. The barrier snapped up completely around it.

Surge looked at Ampharos.

"Protect."

Ampharos's barrier came up immediately, shielding itself from what was coming next from its own side of the field.

Electrode exploded.

Raw force this time, no Galvanize, and it hit Magnezone without mercy. The magnetic units spun wildly, two of three rotating wrong, the formation that had held perfectly throughout the entire match finally breaking apart. Magnezone hung in the air at an angle that made no structural sense and held itself there through what appeared to be pure stubbornness.

Electrode was gone.

Surge sent Raichu immediately.

It hit the field at a run, already using Quick Attack to close the distance toward Manectric before it had fully arrived, and Manectric answered in kind, cutting across the field to meet it. The two of them colliding in the centre in a burst of speed and separating and repositioning and coming back again, Quick Attack exchanges keeping both of them occupied and neither getting a clean read on the other.

While they moved Ampharos fired.

Focus Blast at Magnezone. Super effective into the already broken formation. The impact drove Magnezone backward and it hung there, the magnetic units grinding against each other, barely maintaining altitude.

Raichu broke from the Quick Attack exchanges and threw Brick Break at Manectric, the fighting type move coming in hard and low. Manectric took it on the shoulder and answered with Ice Fang, closing the distance in a burst of speed, and Raichu twisted away from the jaws and came back in with another Quick Attack to create separation.

Manectric cut sideways and fired Flamethrower mid-movement.

Raichu was already moving, the fire catching its flank rather than landing clean, and the two of them kept circling each other with the focused intensity of Pokemon that had found their level and were still working out the specifics.

Meanwhile Magnezone turned toward Ampharos.

Mirror Coat.

The previous focus blast came back twice as hard and Ampharos took it full force and went down and didn't get back up. Magnezone's formation gave out completely in the same moment, units separating, and it came down alongside Ampharos.

Both of them at the same time.

The gym made a sound unlike anything it had made before.

Just Raichu and Manectric.

Already in the middle of the field. Already engaged. The match that had been building around them all night narrowing down to exactly this.

Neither of them used electric type moves.

There was no point and both Pokemon understood it without being told. Raichu's Lightning Rod would absorb anything electric Manectric threw and vice versa. The battle that followed was fought in the space where both their typings gave them nothing, every exchange coming from somewhere else entirely.

Brick Break from Raichu. Manectric cut sideways and answered with Ice Fang, jaws closing on Raichu's guard, and Raichu broke free and used Quick Attack to create distance before coming back in. Manectric fired Flamethrower on the move, always moving, and Raichu moved with it, never letting the fire land clean, the two of them cutting across the field in tightening arcs that the crowd followed in total silence.

Back and forth.

Not frantic. The accumulated weight of the whole match in every movement. Both running on experience more than stamina, every exchange measured and deliberate.

Raichu Protected once when Manectric loaded something dangerous behind a Charge Beam boost. Crouched behind the barrier and watched the angle and calculated. Dropped it and answered with Surf, the water grazing Manectric and Manectric shaking it clear and cutting back immediately.

Manectric answered with a boosted Overheat.

Raichu moved into it.

Surf.

One final wave at point blank range. Water crashing over Manectric with everything Raichu had left in it. No type advantage, no gimmick, just the full weight of a veteran Pokemon putting everything remaining into a single move.

The field went quiet.

When it cleared Manectric was on one knee. Its breathing was audible from the front row. Everything it had spent across the whole match sitting on it visibly.

Raichu was standing.

One cheek sparking badly. One ear pressed flat. Standing.

Manectric looked back at Wattson.

Wattson's expression was the warm specific one of someone watching something they loved at the absolute end of its best night.

"That's enough," he said softly. "More than enough."

He recalled it.

The referee raised his arm toward Surge's side.

The gym came apart.

Not just cheering. Release.

The sound of hundreds of people getting exactly what they'd come for.

Surge walked to centre field.

Wattson met him there carefully, adjusting for the stiffness in his back, and the two men shook hands like people who had genuinely enjoyed themselves.

"Wahahahaha!" Wattson called over the noise. "That Raichu of yours has been doing this a long time, hasn't it?"

Surge looked toward Raichu.

"Long time," he said.

Wattson laughed and clapped him on the shoulder.

Theo stayed in the front row with Electrike warm against his chest, the heat of the battle still hanging in the air around them.

He thought about Golem slamming both fists into the ground at a single word. About Electrode recognising moments before commands came. About Raichu choosing to move into the final collision instead of away from it. And about the look Electrike had given him when Manectric entered the field.

Electrike looked up at him again.

Theo looked down.

Around them the gym still roared with celebration.

They stayed like that anyway.

And somehow, that felt enough.