Chapter 1: Special Delivery

The three of us sat in the airport lobby. It was a very typical room: cavernous, large glass walls, sterile linoleum surfaces, reflections everywhere you looked. Beyond the far walls, which were, in fact, transparent, was the landing strip, over which airships droned by like directionally confused clouds.

I looked to my right.

Richard sat beside me. His longish blonde hair was rather disheveled after sleeping on a train for nine hours. Had he been a little more awake, he might have bothered drawing up the hood of his white sweatshirt to hide this fact; Richard was more than a little conceited, which was strange considering how generally oblivious he was. He yawned, blue eyes vanishing behind folds of flesh, and shrugged to stretch his shoulders.

I looked to my left.

Casey's copper hair hung down just past her shoulders. Somehow, despite the long, compact ride aboard the Magnet Train, it remained untangled. She was wearing a typical black tank-top and khaki shorts. It was warm in Goldenrod City, unseasonably so. I caught my gaze and smiled. She yawned as well, but remembered halfway through that yawning is a bit rude and half-hearted stifled it. She was still smiling dreamily when she drew her hand away.

I am Ian, no one particularly special. My comfortable traveling clothes (well, not the traveling clothes I was used to: our clothes at the moment were more for traveling in comfort than in the field; we would all be back in our trainer gear soon enough) consisted of jeans, a green t-shirt, and a dark leather glasses. I assumed that my hair was fairly disheveled as well, but that only made me less remarkable among the hundreds of uncomfortable people in the airport.

We were waiting for… something.

As our train departed Saffron City, headed for the Johto region, my father had told me to come here to meet someone. He had mentioned something about a man, and traveling, but I didn't catch all of it since, you know, we were on a moving train and stuff.

So we waited.

(-o-)

A good hour later, we had hardly moved. The train had arrived in Goldenrod just before sunset and we had crawled limply off it, stretched ourselves in the pre-dawn glow, and immediately wished we were still asleep.

Richard stumbled up, mumbling something about needing to send his parents a message. I doubted this, considering he had spent every morning for the last month and half claiming that he was about to do just that, but I nodded and volunteered to buy us breakfast.

I stood, disturbing Casey from where she had fallen asleep, using my leg as a pillow. It was still a little… awkward between us. She was clinging to me as fervently as ever, and I wasn't sure exactly how to respond, so I let her cling. I knew that it was probably a bad idea, but she seemed to really need someone, something to hold on to. And I, of course, didn't have the heart to turn her away again.

I was halfway across to the room, headed to a concession-niche in the wall, when I heard a noise from the PC that I never had heard before.

I turned around. Richard stood, somewhat shocked, in front of the machine. I sighed. Of course.

I walked over to him, already preparing a careful mental monologue about why there are certain buttons on public computers which should be pressed, but I as I neared him, I realized that the situation was not quite as I had guessed.

The PC's screen was flashing red and green. Loud letters proclaimed from it,

SPECIAL DELIVERY FOR RICHARD DAVIS

REMAIN IN YOUR CURRENT LOCATION

POSTMAN WILL LOCATE YOU WITH PACKAGE MOMENTARILY

I looked at Richard, eyebrows raised preemptively. He only shrugged; he still looked shell-shocked.

I started turning back to the bench where we had been sitting moments before and jumped in surprise: Casey had materialized right behind me and was now squinting over Richard's shoulder at the screen.

"I have a bad feeling about this, guys," I said. "Flashing screens are rarely a good thing, especially when their telling you not to move…"

"Wait," crooned Casey, still half-asleep. "I think we need to wait."

Like we weren't doing enough of that already.

(-o-)

A few blocks from the airport (immediately in front of the train station, in fact), a man in a navy suit and peaked cap was scanning the crowd. He was rather tall, and didn't have too much trouble looking over people's heads, but he was having trouble locating his quarry. It shouldn't have been: he was a recognizable boy, with two recognizable companions, getting off the morning Overnight Express from Saffron City.

Waddling along at the man's side was a squat, avian creature. Its skin was polychrome, wine red and white, and it gripped its bulging tail in one wing-like paw. The Delibird watched its master with eager, beady eyes.

The delivery Pokemon looked down. On its free arm, a metal band encircled its wrist. There was a red light on the bracelet, almost like a watch-face, but it had no numbers or any indicators of time. It was, however, blinking.

Delibird squawked informatively at the man in the blue suit who looked down at it. He smiled, his face mirroring the shape of his cap, and checked the Pokenav in his breast pocket. It was blinking as well.

There was an alert coming in from a local PC, just a few blocks away.

Delibird in tow, the man set off for the airport, in search of his quarry.

(-o-)

After a few minutes of frozen stillness, we decided that it would probably be alright with PC if we sat down at a table nearby. It didn't stop flashing though, and no one else tried to use it.

Casey was dozing off again and Richard had bought three hotdogs (for breakfast; oh goody…) before we found out what all the flair was about.

"Richard Davis?" asked a kind, crisp voice from behind us.

We turned our heads slowly, as one. There was a man in a blue suit with a peaked cap, like a milkman might have worn if there had ever actually been milkmen. The misspelled word "X-Press" was written in an ironically unexciting font on the man's headgear. A Delibird jigged excitedly at his feet.

"Yeah," said Richard. I resisted the urge to swat my forehead.

"Special delivery for you, sir." The man gestured to his Pokemon. With a giddy flourish, the Delibird reached into its tail-sack and pulled forth a small box wrapped in plain white paper. It handed the parcel to its trainer, who in turn offered it to Richard.

My friend just stared at for a few minutes, surprised.

"For me?"

"Express mailed from Seven Island, sir. Very important, I've been told, to deliver at greatest haste."

Seven Island? We'd been there barely a month ago. Surely if anything had been intended for us, it would have been given then.

The deliveryman did not move. Neither did his Pokemon. They both stared intently at Richard, waiting for him to take and presumably open his gift.

After another moment of silent staring, Richard took the box and tore off the paper unceremoniously. Beneath the paper was tin. A tin, actually, colored red and white in a pokeball pattern. It reminded me of a lunchbox I'd had as a kid, back in Foretree City.

With a metallic ting, Richard snapped it open. Inside was a letter, and underneath, a shiny piece of laminated paper just the size of a playing card.

It was the card that Richard picked up first. A quick glance told us that it was a trainer ID. Richard already had one of those (we all did, and they were updated each time we added a new Pokemon to our team or our statuses changed) but this one was different. Where as our old cards were pale red green and yellow, this one deep ruby red. Also, the picture of Richard was more recent; I wondered where it had been taken from. Richard's information beamed helpfully from several neat lines on the card. It was nice. Very nice.

Next, he looked at the letter. Casey and I didn't ask to read it. We waited for the explanation.

"It's from Ryoku," Richard said, his voice growing steadily more and more excited. "He says that he congratulates me on my final battle in the League Challenge and that he believes it to be sheer bad luck that I lost. As a top eight finisher… I am cordially invited to compete in the Johto League Tournament in six months time as a personal friend and exceptional trainer!"

I eyed the card and letter enviously. Richard wasn't the only one who had fought well in the tournament: I dropped out, wishing to avoid a conflict with my best friend, and perhaps this was the price I was paying. This was Karma, nipping at my ass…

What he about the Johto League reminded me: in just three months, the Hoen league Challenge would take place. The Pokemon Leagues ran in syncopation: Kanto, Hoen, Johto, Sinnoh; each was three months after the last, so that enough trainers had time to gather their badges and prepare their Pokemon.

I went for a walk, leaving Richard to enjoy his special delivery and Casey to sleep.

What we didn't know was that we had another special delivery already on the way, and the one coming was more shocking than the one we'd already received.