Latias' head shot up as she was startled awake. A loud sound had roused her, though nothing in her cavern home moved. Silence stretched for several long moments before another loud thump echoed through the cave from above. Something – or someone – had dropped a heavy object on the floor of the basement above, the basement of a house Latias had protected during its decade-long vacancy. If the run-down house on Manisees Island's northeast tip had finally been purchased, Latias had a new challenge ahead of her.
She rose from the pile of pillows that passed for her bed, reluctantly relinquishing the psychic embrace imprinted upon them. After arranging her glassy down to become invisible, Latias left her cave and flew along the short bluffs between the property and the sea. She found a large boat tied to the private dock facing the bay, which sat across the house's long driveway from her cavern home. She estimated the trawler-style cruiser to be about fifteen meters in length, though a line of boxes beside it stretched longer still. A much smaller boat sat on top of it, its function at the topmost deck's rear a mystery to her.
Nobody had approached the house from the island's large bay before, but it explained why Latias hadn't heard their arrival. Assuming this human had a right to be there – Latias knew there was a strict procedure to such affairs, with a large sum of money changing hands – they had never investigated the house's condition before they started to move in, unless a quick visit had occurred during her morning island patrol. Legality mattered little to her; if this person truly planned to stay, it would change her whole life. A strange mix of apprehension and joy filled her at such thoughts.
As she flew in front of the large vessel, a pale blue creature came into view. It looked to her like a Ninetales, but its coloration and different fur texture marked it as a breed she was unfamiliar with. The blue Ninetales lifted its head and called out towards the house. When Latias spun in place, she saw a man standing on the porch, with a more traditional breed of Ninetales by his side. Both pokémon looked young to her, no more than a decade. The man must have acquired them after he became an adult, unlike many inhabitants of Manisees Island, who started their lives as trainers in their late teens.
The man walked downhill towards the dock, towing a handcart behind him. The cream-colored Ninetales stayed close to him, even hopping across the gap to board the boat when he did. When the man failed to close the cabin's rear door behind him, Latias took her opportunity to dart inside.
Only a couple boxes remained inside the cabin, which gave Latias room to dart to her right when she discovered the Ninetales had settled down on a couch beside the door. Her disguise might fool eyes, but noses were a different story. Fortunately, the creature's focus remained welded to a set of stairs in the room's forward right corner. Its trainer must have disappeared that way.
Caught between a desire to explore this new curiosity and a desire to leave the Ninetales' presence as soon as possible, Latias selected a set of stairs on the forward wall's other side. These led her down to a lower deck. Its narrow hallway required her to lift her wings vertically just to fit, and its two angles were designed with a vertical posture like humans rather than her horizontal one. Moving forward without bumping into anything demanded careful navigation, but Latias soon found her way into a stateroom at its end, lower deck's furthest forward point. It was well-appointed, like the lounge area before it, and other doors in the short hallway indicated there was more to this vessel than this. With a boat like this all to himself, why did he even need a house?
As footsteps sounded from above, Latias realized the room's only other exit – a small sunroof hatch above the bed – was too small for her to fit through. She had trapped herself.
Mentally, she kicked herself for falling into such a stupid situation. Clayton had always chided her for putting herself in circumstances that could reveal her to others; this certainly wasn't her first time in such a predicament. How disappointed he would be if it proved to be her last. She wanted to meet this newcomer on her own terms. Her terms didn't dictate she be stowed away in his bedroom aboard his boat without his knowledge.
Fortunately, his footsteps grew fainter once more. Latias slowly exited the stateroom, drifting through the short, twisty and narrow hallway to leave. A door set in the back wall opposite the stateroom smelt of faint fuel fumes, but nothing else caught her attention as she floated back upstairs. The Ninetales had left, and the rear door still lay open. Perfect. She quickly maneuvered back into open air's safety.
For the remaining daylight hours, she contented with watching the man and his pokémon from afar, still too spooked by her misstep to pursue any further up-close investigations. One by one, boxes disappeared from the dock, hauled inside by man and handcart. Through windows she could see many of them ended up on the second floor. The dock was cleared before sunset.
The two Ninetales cavorted in the front yard, avoiding those sand-eroded bluffs that comprised all but the property's southern boundary. In their emotions Latias sensed a joy of newfound freedom, and a pleasure of a long journey concluded. She wondered just how far the three had come to end up here.
Against this display of liberation and enthusiasm, dinner proved a pathetic affair. The foxes ate dry food, and the man a couple sandwiches. There was little there to discover, beside the bluish Ninetales revealing itself to be an Ice-type when the man realized the freezer was broken.
Latias took this opportunity to pause her observation, and left to begin her evening patrol of her island home.
Despite much activity on her little peninsula, and the great change it represented for her, the rest of Manisees Island continued on as it always had. Hovering over downtown, she watched as tourists hustled from window to window on the main drag, browsing for those perfect last-minute souvenirs to take home. Others finalized arrangements with Manisees Island's only hotel. The tourists had time to spare; Latias heard a squall on the mainland had delayed their ferry by eleven minutes.
The backroads of town, those parts of the island the locals lived, were already quiet. A distinct scent of two-stroke exhaust still lingered in above longer roads leading to further parts of the island. Latias knew most pokémon found this smell very off-putting, but she enjoyed it when not overwhelming. Such miniature vehicles comprised Manisees' lifeblood, flowing through its paved arteries and packed-dirt veins, and this proof of their passing told her its heart still beat.
The island's wetlands and meadows bustled with pokémon during the crepuscular shift change between diurnal and nocturnal species, a commotion as important to Latias as those vehicles traveling roads. Pokémon represented many important things to the island, from evidence that its wilds still flourished under human protection, to companionship for locals, to sightseeing opportunities for the tourism industry that comprised Manisees' economic backbone. The remarkable natural preservation of about half the island's area was a particular point of pride for Latias, and one of the biggest reasons she had dedicated several decades of her life to its protection, hidden in shadows.
Satisfied her island hummed with its regular activity, Latias set off for the lighthouse at its northwestern point. Manisees Lighthouse's lantern room was her second-favorite place. Here she stayed during the first years of her life she could remember, and here Clayton had found her. Nowadays it not only served as an aid to navigation, but also a museum.
Entering its lantern room, she found its lightkeepers still inside, trading local scuttlebutt a floor below. Word of the events across the bay had already reached them. Latias learned the man's name was Michael, and that he had indeed purchased the house. She listened to their news and gossip awhile longer from her perch atop the lighthouse's lens assembly, spinning around thrice a minute as it did. When one lightkeeper started climbing stairs to check the lamp, Latias shook off her intoxicating dizziness and darted out into the crisp night air before they had a chance to find her.
She turned and made her way back to the house, skimming the calm water's surface. When she returned, she found the man sitting at a desk in his bedroom with his head in his hands. The two Ninetales sat on the bed atop its new mattress, pilfered from his boat's stateroom, contenting themselves with each other's presence but sending occasional glances the man's way. She could easily feel all emotions in the room: from the man's overwhelming sorrow to the concern of his two friends.
Her invisible vigil continued for a couple hours, watching the man Michael, trying to discern his secrets and any reasons behind this font of negative emotion from him. While his actions betrayed no cause, his sadness leeched into Latias' own heart. She watched as he stood from the desk and sat on the bed, bundling his foxes in his arms. She watched as he fell asleep sandwiched between them, and they rearranged their many tails to cover him like a blanket before they followed suit. She watched as an errant breeze through an open window rocked a crumpled-up ball of paper on the desk where he had before sat.
The hours of maintaining invisibility started to wear on Latias as she drifted back around to the other side of the house. There, a door connected a study room to a balcony, one she knew had long since lost its ability to fully close. It swung open now with a long but quiet creak, and after a few moments of nobody investigating, Latias relaxed her glassy feathers into their normal configuration. She'd manipulated them for far longer today than she had done any day in the last ten years, and the effort drained her.
She hovered through the dusty study, past a drawing desk and old picture frames, width-wise across the second floor's hallway, and into the master bedroom. She knew floorboards near the door creaked whenever trod on, and she was glad she didn't have to risk them. As she approached the desk, the blue-furred Ninetales sighed and shifted position. Latias froze, prepared to bolt back through where she came, but it seemed the fox only stirred in its sleep instead of waking. Even asleep, Michael still emitted a deluge of negative emotions, and they made Latias skittish.
She carefully retrieved the wadded-up piece of paper, sitting beside a photo of Michael with a woman and two kids. Regarding the picture for a moment, Latias wondered if he was preparing this house for their eventual arrival, and his sadness was simply missing them. Thoughts of being around children brought her some solace through the depressing emotional barrage as she slowly hovered back out into the night.
Upon returning to her cave, she carefully flattened and spread the crumped paper, placing it besides an eyeglass case and a set of clothes within a drawer of a low table, her cave's only piece of furniture. Tomorrow she would analyze it, and try to discern why Michael was so upset. For now, sleep beckoned.
His sadness still colored her own mood as she sunk back into the plushy pile she called a bed. She buried herself into its depths, not stopping until she reached a mattress at the bottom, then gathering up the displaced articles, placing them around and atop her. The psychic remnants they exuded brought her only a shadow of the comfort they normally did. She endured this waning contentment for a little while before turning her attention inward.
She reached into a hole in her mind. The hole from which she had derived joy of life for so long, playing in the spaces to which it used to lead. The hole that now showed only psychic static, mocking her for never closing her connection to Clayton after his death. The mechanics of sending a message were different with no mind on the other end. It didn't matter; she expected no response.
"A man moved into your house today. I think he comes from far across the sea. He has two pokémon with him, but I don't think he's like the ones you warned me about. He's hurting, and I'll find out why, and how I can make him happy, because it's what you'd want; me to meet him, to help him." She choked up, losing her grasp on the message for a moment as this simple act brought forth the crushing weight of Clayton's absence anew. "Because you always told me how much you hated how I was alone. Like I am now, without you."
Latias flung the message through the gaping wound in her mind, watching it fizzle into the void beyond with no recipient. Then, her resolve weakened by the day's exertions and Michael's emotional assault earlier, she succumbed to her tears and cried herself to sleep.