Hoenn was calling.

Even far, far across the ocean in the centre of the Sinnoh region, I could feel it. It was like a volcano erupting, or a legend preparing a Hyper Beam. Energy rolled off of it in waves, passed over the water and disturbed the currents. They cascaded against many far shores, one of them on my own region. The remains of my soul trembled as I approached the southern shore. The salt in the wind exploded on the surface of my body like land mines and the rough waves threatened me from just beyond the sand. Despite the sea's rejection, I felt pulled towards that island in the distance.

I had to be there.

But the ocean was wide. The Sinnohan government, at least, had planned their regions well. Without assistance I could not travel to the far shores. And without a trainer, I would be caught…or worse. Killed.

To get there, I'd have to be with a human. If not, Hoenn's gatekeepers would reject me. My only option had been the human to which I'd been assigned, but she was out of reach. Her snarling psychic had struck my beacon from her like a star from the sky, and it had burned out before I could find them. I'd been forced to follow her siblings, as they bickered and fought and embraced in the empty routes of Sinnoh.

"Go find your sister first," Lumine, the older sister said. She had long, layered blue hair that had been braided behind her ears, and sarcastic yellow-brown eyes. She was imitating their mother in a high-pitched, mocking tone for the third time that day.

Resko, her brother, laughed for the third time, still loud and still humourless. He ran his fingers through his wavy blue hair, wiping sweat off of his forehead. He had the same eyes as his sister, but they were a shade lighter and wider. He whistled loudly, and his salamence flew down to land beside them with a thump. The sun was draining my energy like sand through an hourglass, and I only just managed to sway out of the way of the dragon-type. She would not have seen me, but she would have felt me, and then her trainer would know.

She extended one wing towards Resko, and he ran a hand down the bony ridge of it, then grabbed the base. After a second, Resko swore and let go when her sun-baked skin scorched him. Lumine laughed at him, but exhaustion had stamped out that mocking tone.

I hovered aimlessly as they walked and talked. My mind began to fold inwards to conserve energy, and it wasn't until one of the sibling's pokémon let out a burst of psychic energy that I struggled back to full consciousness again.

They were preparing to Teleport. Two huge steel bell-like pokémon floated on either side of the two trainers, one belonging to each. Somewhere in my mind lay their names, but I didn't have the energy to look for them. Shell-pink energy encircled the group like a tornado, beginning to thicken and grow as it powered up. With a burst of energy, I threw a hand created from dark energy at them. It wrapped around the boy, and squeezed. I was too tired to attach it gently, and his mouth opened wordlessly in pain a second before we vanished.

In the next second, we were within a cave. With the dregs of my power, I jostled the roof to drop a volley of sharp rocks on the boy and distract him from my stranglehold. I could feel my consciousness slipping. The darkness of Mt. Coronet dampened the heated pain from over-exposure to the sun, but it was not enough. I slowly shut down every other ability, and watched as the siblings walked towards my human. I didn't have the energy to find her alone.

"What the f-!" Resko screeched as a number of small rocks bounced off of his shoulder. He jerked away and rubbed at the sore skin.

"What?" Lumine asked flatly. "What did you do?"

"What did I do?! A bunch of rocks just fell on me!" he said, and yelped after rubbing a particularly sore spot.

Stanton the bronzong swiped the rocks away from where they lay by his feet and Resko thanked him. 'I can sense your sister and her team. They are fighting wild pokémon. I was not going to drop you in the middle of a battle. Follow this tunnel.' Stanton murmured into their minds. The cavern suddenly lit up bright pink as the bronzong glowed with psychic energy. He pointed down the path to their right, then split his own pokéball at the seams, and let the red light devour him.

Resko yelped again and fumbled the ball as it fell from the air. Ansia, Lumine's bronzong, hovered silently while her trainer cackled in response.

"Alright," Lumine said to no one in particular. They walked along the tunnel slowly, picking their way over displaced rocks and small holes in the ground. Ansia silently kept the zubat off of them with shot, bursting Psychic attacks.

At the end of the tunnel was a bright room, lit up with the tell-tale yellow tinge of a Flash attack.

In the middle was a huge battle. As they entered, they saw an onix hovering lengthways in the air, encased in a tornado of static-y pink energy. It went flying across the room and crashed against a far wall. In the centre of the cavern was a lake, with most of Luka's team fought with several wild pokémon. They looked around until they spotted her sitting on the far right by a large rock, and jogged over.

I reached for my human. She sat quietly, and looked down at something in her lap. Her long, light blue hair fell into her eyes, and was wild and dry with split ends. I couldn't see her eyes, but I remembered what they looked like alive with fire. She didn't move when I tethered myself. Dark energy wrapped around my body and hers; an infernal Destiny Bond. I saw through her eyes and skimmed her thoughts, but my presence was so weak that her psychic would not see me.

The darkness was cool and warm in equal measure, and I breathed out slowly and let it take the pain away.

Carrow the claydol returned to hover just above the huge lake after knocking out the onix. He occasionally dispersed bolts of psychic energy as various gyarados and whiscash appeared. If not defeated immediately by that, Jackal the luxray and Asio the tall, dark brown stantler, finished the job. From where they stood at two corners of the lake, equidistant from Carrow, who was directly across from Remni. In the water, a huge sharpedo, Nikko, attempted to lure a silky-looking dragonair from the depths. He occasionally Aqua Jetted off to corral it away from the deeper areas.

Remni, their sort-of-missing sister, had placed herself right in the middle of a pile pokéballs and paper. Several of the pokéballs already had shadowed inhabitants, and a scrawled list of half-written details sat between the devices. She started when she saw them and asked, "Uh, hey guys? What are you doing here?".

"You got a letter," Lumine said, nonplussed, as Jackal Thunderbolted a gyarados hard enough for it to careen backwards before sinking below the surface.

"…Like Raune's?" She turned fully towards them, jostling some of the objects on the floor, then grinned and asked, "I can go to Hoenn?"

"Was something stopping you?" Resko asked sarcastically. He was somewhat bitter about travelling all the way to Mt. Coronet just to find her.

"Yes," Lumine answered her, ignoring Resko. "There are ferries departing from Sunyshore City in a few weeks, for a few weeks." She said again, and Carrow froze in mid-air.

"Look…I…I'm excited, you know I am!" she said enthusiastically. "But Mum and I have a contract. This is- this is work! I can't just leave!"

"Fuck the contract," Lumine replied, not entirely joking.

"This is important," Resko added. "Really important. We're going to be helping people- maybe an entire region! Mum'll understand."

Remni chewed her lip in agitation. In her lap, her hands played over and over each other. Red marks appeared on her knuckles where her nails had caught the skin.

Lumine noticed her sister's anxious fidgeting, and knelt down with a tired sigh. She lay one hand over Remni's to stop the damage. "Let's go home. You can talk to Mum, sort your shit, then we'll go."

Remni looked up at her sister and slowly smiled. "Okay, Lumi. Give me a minute."

It ended up taking much, much longer. Carrow the claydol had frozen like a statue when Lumine brandished Remni's letter, waving it like a fan in the stagnant cave air.

Remni had angled herself back towards him and after a short psychic conversation he turned back, knocking another gyarados back beneath the waves. Suddenly the water went still, and the dragonair peeked out over the edge of the deep lake. Ice blossomed across the lake in a semi-circle behind her, and a quick, tiny jolt from Jackal paralysed her. The others set about slowly whittling down her energy. Carrow methodically set up Protective barriers in front of each team member. Jackal copped a Dragon Rage right across his cheek, and reared back in pain. A tail slap sent a huge plume of water towards Carrow, who deflect the Aqua Tail with a Psychic. A jolting Thunder Wave missed Asio by an inch as she dived to the side. Fully submerged, Nikko rained small Bites against the dragon-types underbelly to keep it in the shallower area.

"It's gonna be a long day," Resko said, then sighed.

After only three days on the mountain before they interrupted her, Remni insisted on going through her whole song-and-dance in capturing two other dragonair and a dratini, to make a more significant dent in the breeder-provided list. They finally managed to drag her home after the third capture, wherein Asio had made a fantastic leap into the water to stop the dratini from slipping away, in a moment where a huge gyarados had appeared out of the depths and caught Nikko fully in its mouth.

Several days had to pass before the recently obtained dragon-types could be shipped, and despite her grumbles, Remni had to sign off on their movement. Tracking pokémon shipments in Sinnoh was a pain, but at least something was being done about the recent poaching issues. It was early in the morning, and she was tending to a litter of shinx kittens when the confirmation notification flashed onto her pokétch.

She grinned, and showed it off to the huge lion-like pokémon sitting beside her. Jackal the luxray tilted his head, unable to read it, but nodded happily along with her. Remni quickly sent a message to her travelling friends. Distracted, she didn't notice the baby shinx sneaking up on her.

"Shi!" It yowled triumphantly and sunk its tiny needle-sharp teeth into the fleshy part of her palm. Remni yelped, and jerked reflexively.

She quickly reached down and pressed her thumb and forefinger to the hinge of its jaw, applying pressure until the tiny pokémon's jaws eased open. Once it was fully free, she snatched her hand back and shook it, eyeing the bloodless marks that were beginning to redden against her dark skin. The shinx was tiny, but average for six-week-old kittens. She shooed them away from the brown-striped white tiled corner of their little fenced off enclosure, and placed the warm lunch bowl inside. It was more of a tray than a bowl: shallow, but long. She poured a mostly-liquid mixture of tauros stock, vitamins and bits of charred starly meat, there was enough room for all eight of the shinx to line up and get their mouths in it. She turned to scrub at the inner sides of their small, elongated water trough, and unlatched it from the wall, then walked outside the old metal shed to toss the water into the dirt.

In front of her stood a veritable maze of rich soil with everything from seedlings to fully grown plants snaked between a myriad of small ponds and other, larger sheds, butting up against an oval-shaped lake and the edges of a forest, before finally curling back and ended up at a large wooden house adjacent to her, on the right. It was tall, painted mostly in reds and browns and had a farfetch'd-topped compass perched on the highest part, making it easily mistaken for a farm from the road, which is probably what led to the expensive-looking car rolling to a sinking stop in their driveway, which really was just a flat area of land leading from the road to the house. It was most likely a rich family trying to buy an expensive, battle-bred starter for their child, even though Remni knew there weren't any scheduled appointments until later in the afternoon.

She took a minute to shake out the lingering droplets from the drinking trough and gaze at said house, a warm sense of comfort curling in her chest, then turned back to the lake and forest in the distance, where the warmth went flat and wary in her stomach.

"Who do you think is going to come out tonight?' she mused aloud, and Jackal shot her a look from where he stretched against the shed wall. "Weather's changing again, which means grumpy wild pokémon, broken fences and frightened baby pokémon." She looked out, out passed the gardens, the wooden fence and across the wide, deep pond a few feet behind it. The forest started right at the opposite shore of the lake, and often wild pokémon like angry scyther and bibarel came through the trees to cause trouble. The bug-types flew easily over the lake, while the water-type bibarel could swim through it. Aside from that, it mostly kept away wild pokémon that had no easy way of coming through. The worst were the duskull and gastly, who drifted through anything solid with ease, and weren't afraid of what lived beneath the still surface of the water. At the very least, the ghost-types preferred harmless pranks to the outright destruction their later evolutionary forms enjoyed.

A psychic, snarky thought jolted across the outskirts of her mind, projected from somewhere in the house and she rolled her eyes.

"I think we better keep both Asio and Laiza out tonight, huh Jackal?" she peered down at him, while he peered back, eyes large and red and yellow.

"Ux," he growled, leaning forward to place his chin on his outstretched paws.

"What does that mean again?" she asked playfully.

'There's a call for you.' Carrow's voice cut through her lazy, sun-warmed thoughts like a knife, and she leaned up onto her heels.

'Okay,' she said in response. Inside her mind, she projected the word towards where Carrow's voice had come from. He didn't reply, but she knew from communicating in the past that he had heard her.

Remni checked the date on her watch. She'd already made her friends wait the extra two weeks it took to see if her letter would come, even after theirs had already arrived. Then there was the extra week just gone by to ensure the shipment of the Coronet-caught dragons reached the right place. Making them wait longer felt awful, even if it was only for a few minutes, so she ran up the dirt path, leapt the doorway and dodged the couch. An older, wall-mounted screen hung at the far end, and on it was a split-screen displaying three different people in three different rooms.

"Alexei! Eti! Risa! " Remni greeted cheerfully.

"Take your time, seriously," Risa joked. The white-haired girl reclined on her bed with her screen in her lap. In the background, Remni could see a mess of clothes, cans and a sleeping bag. She was packing.

"Hey, rude!" The only boy of their group scolded her. Alexei sat at the table in his own living room, the screen presumably on his table. He had dyed-blonde hair with brown roots, and it kept falling across his face. He was in the middle of pulling the mess back into a ponyta-tail.

"Enough, you two," Eti, the last of them, said lightly. She was lying on her stomach on her own bed, with her chin propped up on her hands. Her light brown hair fell in her eyes and flowed down her cheeks and across her neck. Remni winced sympathetically at the sweat the beaded along Eti's forehead, and was suddenly grateful that Carrow had cut her hair short a few nights previous. The cut was sort of lopsided, but it was cool and comfortable. She scooped her warm feelings into a little affectionate package, and mentally pushed it towards him like a gift. She felt the tentative touch as he reached for it, the surprised jolt, then the slow growth of an answering warmth. She grinned.

"Resko said you got your letter?" Eti asked.

"Yup!" Remni said and grinned. "Two weeks overdue, but better late than never! Thanks again for waiting for me."

"I knew you'd get it," Risa said and rolled her eyes. But the corners of her lips tugged up into a grin.

"There's a ferry departing from Sunyshore City in two days…" Alexei said, and glanced off-screen.

"Aren't there ferries leaving every day?" Eti asked.

"Yeah, but I kinda want us to be on that one," he answered.

"Like it, love it, gotta have it!" Risa said, and clapped her hands together, making the others laugh.

"Alright, alright!" Remni said, still laughing, "I'll meet you in Sunyshore?"

"We live in the same freaking town, Remni," Alexei said.

"Yeah but! I gotta talk to my parents… I don't want to make you wait longer," she replied, and her eyes widened earnestly.

"We waited for you because we want to travel with you," Eti explained calmly. "Not out of obligation. When you're ready, we'll go."

The others were quiet in the wake of her words, but Remni nodded, excitedly. "Okay!"

As it turned out, her mother didn't need convincing.

"Remni," Alaine had said in her best lecturing tone. "Of course you can leave! The contract was just to make the process legitimate. I'd rather not be sued for child labour," she said, and laughed. It was a scratchy sound, but familiar and warm.

Remni couldn't help but smile when she heard Alaine. "Mum, I'm nineteen. I haven't legally been a child for nine years," Remni replied. She tried to laugh, but the stress of asking, and of possibly disappointing her mother crashed on her shoulders like a wave, and her eyes prickled as tears grew in the corners.

"Ah, yes. But you're still my child," her mother had answered, and dragged Remni into a hug.

Later that night, after her pokémon had run the forest nearby, everyone had dinner and her father had retired to the study without making eye contact, the video phone rang again.

"I'll get it!" Remni's youngest brother, Rio, yelled. He shoved his chair back from the table and ran to the other room. He returned after a second, pouting, and said, "It's for you, Rem. Again." Her youngest sister, Lahnu, stuck her tongue out at Rio, and the two immediately started arguing.

"Mum she stuck her tongue out at me!"

"You're such a dobber, you baby!"

Remni dodged out of that argument and into the lounge room as fast as her legs could carry her.

A few minutes later, Remni whined, "I can't believe you left without me." Her tone was part mocking irritation and part genuine betrayal, and on-screen it made her twin, Raune, pull a face.

"I didn't know you'd get a letter!" he exclaimed.

"You still could've waited! It wasn't impossible!" she shouted back, then shied away as she caught a few people looking curiously over Raune's shoulders. He spun around and waved them off.

"Ignore them, Rem. Anyway, we'll see each other at the big meeting thing anyway!" he offered.

"Actually," Lumine cut in. Remni nearly jumped off the couch, and twisted around to see her older sister leaning against the wall. "You, Resko and I have been called north. One of the League's workers called Resko and asked us to go up there and investigate rumours about a rampaging pokémon."

"Just you?" Remni asked in confusion.

"No. There's three others, and we're all working under a ranger. We have to visit the research facility afterwards to get our dragons."

She considered it for several seconds, then said, "…Well then, you have to travel with me when we get there."

"What? Why?"

"You always ditch! Travel with me for a couple of weeks first. You know Lumi and Resk are gonna leave, so stay with me."

"I don't want to hang out with your dumb baby friends," he groaned, but it was half-hearted at best.

"Hey screw off, and it's not like any of your friend's are going."

"Hey! I resent that! Jasper's here!" he answered defensively.

"…That guy you battled like twice and got the number of and never called?"

He glared at her, then waved her off, "Yeah alright whatever."

"Good."

"That wasn't an agreement!"

"It absolutely was," he glared and flipped her off, but she was already grinning and his actions were light-hearted.

"Eurgh, fine."

"You're acting like you have a huge problem with this and I know you don't. You like my friends," Jackal wandered in at this point, and flopped down to the floor to lean his huge furry bulk against her legs.

They bickered and chatted for an extra half hour.

"Anyway!" he called all of a sudden, clapping his hands together. "I've gotta go and you've gotta come so," he waved at her with both hands, then closes them into fists and crossed them over, sticking out the thumbs, "Bye, sis!"

"What are you…" her heart stopped. "Um, yeah sure! See you soon!" she waved, hoping to make up for the stumble. The phone switched off, and she sprinted upstairs, passed her dad, who looked after her and called in confusion. She didn't answer.

Throwing open the doors of a cupboard in her room, she went rummaging through until she found an old scrapbook and took it to the desk, flipping it open and flicking through it. Jackal loped into the room just after she settled on a page. "Ux? Ray?" he asked, wild with confusion.

"Raune and I used to try and make up a secret code when we were younger, you know, like every other kid on the planet does. We thought it'd be a cool twin thing," she answered, without looking up. "And he just…"

On the page in front of her was the same odd two-fisted thing he had done at the end of the call, and just below it was scribbled three words. She slipped into the chair and leaned heavily over the desk, re-reading them and tracing over the picture with her eyes. Jackal bolted over in concern, and she threaded her fingers through the fur at his nape.

The page said, simply, 'Warning, danger, beware.'

Author's Notes:

EDIT: As of 09/16, the first seven chapters have been revised to cut out the unimportant garbage, and set up for the future chapters. As of now, every single chapter until the end has been planned (!).

Hello everyone and welcome to my first serious, published fanfic. My name is jackal (lower case j). I am here to cause trouble and cloud the identity of they-who-stand-behind-the-plot, until such a time that a significant numbers of chapters has been reached and it wouldn't hurt my pride for you to correctly guess about what's going on.

Thank you so much for reading this! Don't worry about remembering the parents/siblings here. It's mostly to make a point about Sinnohan families. Of all the characters mentioned here, only Lumine, Resko and the friend group will be re-occurring. I'm including a list of each trainer and their mentioned pokémon at the end of each chapter as well for clarity. Please feel free to ask any questions you have! It's likely I've made something more complicated than it needed to be, and it confused someone! Also, the author's notes should be shorter from here on out! Thanks again =3

EDIT: The narrator is a character within the story that hasn't been mentioned, that's why it slips into first person every little while. I've tried to make larger line breaks between these paragraphs, but ffnet isn't letting me for some reason. My apologies for any confusion! The narrator will crop up occasionally, but for the most part will stay out of it. Their identity will be revealed in a later chapetr.

jackal

Team List:

Lumine- Ansia (bronzong).

Resko- Stanton (bronzong), (salamence).

Remni- Carrow (claydol), Jackal (luxray), Nikko (sharpedo), Quil (skarmory), Asio (stantler), Tanner (togekiss).