Aoooo shivered as she climbed the summit of Mt. Silver step by step. The mountain's peak was covered in soft white snow, snow that sunk into her shoes and froze her feet. But she couldn't stop moving, not now, not when she was so close. The voices reassured her that this fight was the final battle, the one they'd all been waiting for. This was the end. One last fight, and she would be free.

The voices chanted the name Red, but the challenger who stood above was not the red-clothed boy that they had alluded to time and time again. The one she approached was a girl her own age with long hair and brightly-colored clothes. Though the other girl wore a tank top and a short skirt, she did not shiver, seeming perfectly content with the frigid temperatures of her surroundings.

The chant of the voices shifted as this girl came into view. No longer did they fixate upon the name Red. Instead, they repeated another name, one that Aoooo had heard only a handful of times before.

Alice.

Soon enough, the two stood face to face. Aoooo tried not to blink as snowflakes covered her eyelashes, and she reached for a Poke Ball on her belt, knowing what her new objective was. Whoever this "Alice" was, she had to be defeated.

But Alice wasn't the grim, silent, stony-faced opponent that Aoooo had come to expect. Instead, the other girl grinned widely as Aoooo held her Poke Ball out.

"Why, hello there, stranger!" Her voice was light, airy, whimsical. She sounded amused by Aoooo's presence more than threatened.

Aoooo spoke the first words that came to mind. "Not Red. Alice."

Alice giggled softly. "Red? Was that what they were calling me? No, it's just little old me up here."

"They?"

Alice nodded. "Hey, it was obvious. Your erratic steps, your twitching, and I could hear you bumping into the cave walls down there… You must be a new vessel of the voices, right? Can't imagine what you're doing up here. Guess they really must have wanted to pester me." Her laugh at the end of the speech was hollow.

"You know the voices?"

Alice pushed up her glasses as she looked down at her opponent. "Know the voices? You mean they didn't tell you about me? They controlled me too- that's how I became Champion. Speaking of which, you didn't tell me your name, but I'm guessing you're the Johto Champion Aurora, right?"

"Not Aurora. Aoooo."

"Aoo?" Aoooo shook her head, wincing as the other girl mispronounced her name. "Aaooo? Aoooooo? Sorry- look, can I just call you Aurora? It'd be much easier."

"No."

"Okay, fine. Well, then, Aao-" Alice said the name with a certain sarcastic emphasis, and Aoooo started to wonder if she was butchering her name on purpose. "You're not very talkative, are you? But I can understand, I was the same way when they controlled me…"

Aoooo gritted her teeth. "No."

Alice raised her eyebrows. "No?"

Aoooo rolled her eyes. "It's not because of them. I can talk like you. I don't want to." She practically spit out the last few words, her eyes as fiery as the mountain was cold.

"I… um… hmm. Okay. Well, Aooo-"

"Aoooo."

"Aaoooo?"

"Aoooo."

"You sure you wouldn't rather go by Aurora? That's the name all the news stations have been calling you by-"

"No. Aoooo."

"Speaking of the news stations, that reminds me… The voices left me when I became Champion, I thought that's how it always was, but you- you're Champion already, and they still haven't left? I must say, that seems quite unusual, I don't know what else-"

"Shut. Up."

Alice looked at Aoooo with eyes wide and full of pity. "I'm sorry, honey. I wish I knew how to quiet them for you, to free you from them, I know how hard it is to hear-"

"Not the voices. You. Shut up."

Alice opened her mouth, then closed it again upon meeting Aoooo's icy glare.

"Battle. Now."

Alice nodded, and the two withdrew their Pokemon. Alice let out a Mew- Aoooo couldn't help but stare, distracted for a moment from letting out her own Pokemon by the sight of the legendary creature, but moved on after noticing that Alice was smiling smugly. Aoooo let out her Xatu, and the lime green bird shimmered, its sparkles reflected by the snow.

"Ooh, is that a shiny Pokemon you have there? I saw one of those before but the voices made me kill it, I'd love to examine one more closely…" Alice stepped towards the Xatu, but withdrew after the bird flapped its wings threateningly. "Right. Battle. Another time, perhaps?" Aoooo's glare was matched by the Xatu's now. "And that's a no. Okay, I get it."

Aoooo rooted around in her bag, the voices searching for something that could not be found, before looking back at the smiling Alice and giving out commands. She had to win this battle, not just to be free of the voices now but to wipe that smug smile off the other girl's face.

"Fly."

The response came quickly, and the Mew reacted faster, moving before the Xatu had a chance to soar into the frigid sky. "Follow Me." The Mew wagged its finger, but didn't seem to do anything. Alice muttered something under her breath, and though Aoooo couldn't catch the words, she understood what was going on. Her opponent was toying with her. The other girl didn't respect her enough as a Trainer to take the fight seriously and use her strongest moves. Alice must have figured that Aoooo would lose whether she went all-out or not.

And, as Aoooo glanced down at the Poke Balls remaining on her belt, she got a sickening feeling that Alice's estimation of her skills wasn't far off. She only had three Pokemon able to battle now, the others having collapsed of exhaustion during the long trek up the mountain, and the voices had proven to be utterly inept at battling more often than not. Though it pained her to think of it that way, Aoooo knew that she was probably fighting a losing battle.

Though Aoooo's Xatu hit the Mew again and again, Alice seemed more preoccupied with the tattered notebook she had retrieved from her purse than with the battle itself. As the shiny Pokemon recoiled with the touch of snowflakes, Aoooo could hear the other Trainer thinking out loud as she tapped her stubby pencil against the paper. "Hmmm… Shiny Pokemon equally vulnerable to the cold…"

But just when Aoooo thought Alice had lost interest in the battle entirely, the girl would toss a Full Restore at hew Mew to prevent it from passing out from the impact of the ice and the Xatu's aerial attacks. The voices were too inept to use their own healing items, and, slowly but surely, the Xatu fell, not to the Mew's rare attacks but to the ice shards that impaled its wings.

Alice wrote in her notebook once more, and her speech was louder than before, perhaps now intended for Aoooo's ears. "Shiny Pokemon do not appear stronger than regular Pokemon in battle."

The Mew took down another of Aoooo's Pokemon after a brief struggle, and Alice kept frantically scrawling notes in her notebook in between giving commands, only occasionally looking up at the actual battle. Aoooo struggled to find the Poke Ball which contained her Vibrava, the only survivor, and suddenly she noticed that Alice had stopped writing and was staring at her with wide eyes. It took several minutes of the voices squabbling before the battle could continue. And when Aoooo finally took down her opponent's Mew, the only thing Alice said before releasing her next Pokemon was, "How interesting."

But, with the snow doing as much damage as Alice's Pokemon, it quickly became clear who the fight's victor would be. Aoooo struggled to keep her last Pokemon alive while the voices forced her to call out moves that did nothing to the Masquerain that now stood as her foe. Her cheeks grew red and hot as she realized that the only thing hurting the bug now was the ice, which hurt her own Pokemon as badly.

It was perhaps a small blessing that what finally felled Aoooo's last Pokemon was not the freezing snow of the mountain, but an aerial attack from Alice's Masquerain. At least she had been defeated by an actual attack from her opponent, not the weather. Still, the battle had been embarrassingly one-sided, and Aoooo knew she would need to train a lot more before she had any chance of winning. How long would that take? Hours? Days? Weeks?

As had happened so many times along her journey, just after her last Pokemon had fainted, so too did Aoooo. Her legs buckled under her, her vision grew dark and blurred, and she could barely hear the icy winds that blew along the mountaintop. Aside from the sorrowful pronouncements of the voices, the last thing Aoooo heard before she awoke in the Pokemon Center was Alice saying, "Oh, so that's what happens…"