Prologue
"Get up! You're going to be LATE!"
Mica could hardly even remember the last time she'd heard that grating, unpleasant voice wake her up from a well-deserved, usually short bout of sleeping. It meant a full day of hard work in dungeons with her partner, Spike. It probably meant an insensitive bit of scolding from Chatot. It also probably meant that she would be risking her life again. But…anything worth living for, Mica thought to herself, is usually something worth dying for. The training, however hard it had been, had been the best thing that had ever happened to her.
But now she had gotten older, and had opted to retire from her heroic job. The Raichu's once lithe body was starting to become rather brittle, and she was lacking in the amount of electrical firepower she used to hold within her. Mica had completed every single mission on those boards, obtained the Master rank, cleared all the dungeons, consulted with Palkia and calmed Primal Dialga—yes, she had done everything. But it wasn't even that or the aging that did it for her. It was what had happened to her partner.
It hadn't even been a mission that killed the brave Feraligatr. In fact, it had been crippling illness, just after they returned from a mission on Zero Island one day. Spike had been alive and sick one day, then dead the next morning. It had sucked the life out of Mica. After that day, she retired—she never came back to the guild. The older Pokémon was bitter- she blamed the guild for Spike's death, even though inside she knew it hadn't been their fault. It didn't matter. She was done—permanently.
Mica found a nice home in the Beach Cave area after a long period of realty window-shopping. With the story about Spike spreading like a wildfire, fewer and fewer guild apprentices would wander around the area, as the guild was becoming less and less popular. When she bought it, the home had been little more than a hollow in a rock. She had expanded it into a roomy little space with a rug, armchair, small bed, cooler, bookcase and door with the help of some worker Phanpy she had paid some Poke to help her. It was only a tiny dent to her fortune—she had amassed so much Poke from her missions that she was rich enough to last her. All she had to do was stock up on Gummis and Berries and hide in her home for the rest of her life.
Indeed, Mica would have lived that way until she dropped dead if it hadn't been for something she never wanted to happen. But maybe it was just destiny it had to happen that way—she hadn't only saved the explorers' lives, but in a way she had saved her own.
