Pokemon? I don't own it. Not mine, nope.


Cassandra opens the door to see an older man – thirties or forties, probably- in a suit. His left arm clutches a notebook and a recorder to his chest and on the other side a hand hangs at his side, gripping the handle of a briefcase. Upon catching the opening of the door, his eyes widen in hope.

"Would you happen to be Miss Cassandra?" He asks carefully.

"I am." Cassandra answers brightly, opening the door slightly wider. "And you must be Mr. Scrathman?"

"That's me!" He replies happily, delighted that he hadn't knocked on the wrong door. After awkwardly switching his briefcase to the other hand, leaving it dangling from his left hand's fingers, he offers the newly freed hand to Cassandra. She shakes it. "You can call me George if you like. Very nice to meet you."

"It's nice to meet you, too. Why don't you come inside?" Cassandra steps to the side and gestures for him to enter. He steps inside a large room, a sort of common area, he assumes. There's a table with chairs placed around it, and in the back of the room he sees a few bookcases lining the walls. Though perhaps the most striking object he sees is the huge painting of a mountain hanging above the fireplace.

"We can sit here." He flinches, realizing that he'd been staring at it for too long. Cassandra has begun walking towards the table, and he steps quickly to catch up. Try as he might, he can't seem to keep his eyes off of the painting. Maybe there's something about the swirling brushstrokes and the blotted fog around the mountain's peaks, reflecting the dying light of the setting sun-

"Pretty cool, right?" Cassandra's studying the painting now, too, pausing every so often to send an amused glance in George's direction. He shakes his head sharply. Come on, quit daydreaming, you have a job to do. "My mom bought it from a Kalos artist that was visiting. Apparently he climbed up one of Mt. Coronet's smaller peaks and went back and forth from there for months while he was painting that."

"Amazing." George breathed. He let himself stare at the painting for a few moments longer, but then he notices Cassandra watching him expectantly with an uncomfortable expression. His palm flies to his forehead. "Arceus. I'm so sorry. I'm already asking so much of your time as it is."

"It's no trouble." Comes the immediate reply, but her demeanor doesn't change.

"…Okay!" George pushes the recorder until it sits about halfway between them, then opens his briefcase and pulls out a folder. Then, he opens his notebook to a clean page and places it on the table next to the folder. He takes a pen from his breast pocket and clicks it as he shifts his chair closer to the table. "So…" He begins as he takes a sheet from the folder, and holds it out to Cassandra along with a pen. She takes it and begins reading it. "It'll be exactly as I said yesterday. If I ask anything too personal, or you just don't want to answer, please feel free to not answer it. And- I don't know, if something comes out and you don't want me to disclose it, then please let me know and I won't put it in. Is that all okay with you?" She reads through the contract fully again.

"Yes, this should be all right." After she signs the paper and hands it back to George, she sits up straight and neatly folds her hands in front of her. As he tucks the contract into the folder, he catches a glimpse of the woman's signature, a slanted, spiked scrawl that just barely contains itself in the provided line. Interesting, he notes.

"Here we go!" George chirps as he reaches across the table and presses a button on the recorder. He leans over his notebook, poised to begin writing. "Name and age, please."

"Cassandra Stratus. I'm 19." She responds evenly.

"19. So you're five years younger than your sister?"

"Right." Normally at this point, it's plug-and-play introduction questions that continue on for an unnecessary (or at least George thinks so) amount of time. He has a hunch that the woman he's interviewing would rather not waste any time either, so he skips the lead-ins.

"Could you tell me a bit about your relationship with your sister growing up? Say…" He starts moving his hand in a circular motion as if to churn his thoughts. "Were you close? Or did you fight often? I guess we can start with something like that."

Cassandra taps her thumbs on her fingers, taking a moment to formulate an answer. "You might say we're as close as we need to be. My grandparents say that after our parents died, she was always trying to take care of me and she watched me most of the time. As we got older, though, she wanted to have more time alone. Then she left on her journey."

"You grew apart, then?"

"I wouldn't say that, actually. It was more of a mutual understanding." Cassandra's composure cracks for the briefest of moments as a gentle smile forms on her face at the recollection of some fond memory. "Sometimes, I'd bother her and she'd recite a bunch of legends to me. Most of it would go right over my head, but she just got so excited whenever she talked about it. Eventually I realized that history and mythology didn't strike a fire in me like it did in her, so I figured I'd just leave her to research and ponder. But if I ever needed someone to talk to, she was always there. Even when she was out collecting gym badges and Pokédex data, she wouldn't hesitate to put it all on hold if I needed to ask her about something."

"I see. It sounds as if your relationship wasn't too strained by the separation. Would you agree with that?"

"Yes." Ah, there we are. Short answers. Tread carefully, George instructed himself as he finished scribbling notes on Cassandra's previous explanation.

"Would you like to expand on that?"

"…Well, like I said, we talked. But… See, I can't give you the full details because she only relayed to me what she wanted to, but I could still tell that she changed. Whether or not it was for the better I have difficulty saying." Cassandra stops, hoping that leaving her answer there would be enough, but knowing that it wouldn't. George's faintly amused gaze from across the table confirms her fears. Come on, you can't say something like that and leave it alone. But then it fades as he sighs.

"We can move on if you like. As promised, I won't push it."

"Well, on one hand." Cassandra begins, continuing to tap her thumbs on her fingers. "She's so much better with people now. You might say traveling around and being Champion sort of yanked her out of her shell. Or maybe she just learned how to make convincing masks. My sister was always reluctant to share her thoughts and feelings with people. She seemed to find better company in ruins and books. I'm more inclined to say that she figured out different ways of hiding herself." George thinks that she realizes something then- maybe it's the slight clench in her enfolded hands, or the tiny droop in her shoulders. We're just going to keep digging further, aren't we?

"What do you mean?" He prods.

"There were times when I'd speak to her over the phone and could tell she was guarding something. Or she'd tell me a story and I'd have trouble believing that my older sister was out doing these things. Like, for example, sidetrack a moment. She got with and broke up with at least three guys over the duration of her journey. I didn't think she was that kind of person. To me, she seemed like the kind of person to be so absorbed in her work she wouldn't even give a care to that kind of thing." Cassandra shrugs. "But it seems I was wrong. Maybe there was some hopeless romantic in her that just needed to be let loose. Or maybe she was curious. Can't say. At this point, these are things you'll just have to ask Cynthia."

"Ah, I understand." He flips back to a previous page to glance at what he'd written, then flips back to the current page. "Thank you for being so cooperative, by the way."

"People are going to want to know anyway. Might as well be the truth. As much of it I can give, anyway." Cassandra replies nonchalantly, shrugging again.

"Moving on, then. Was becoming the Regional Champion of Sinnoh always a goal of hers?"

"You know…" Cassandra's eyes shift to the ceiling in thought and she leans back in her chair. After a short reverie, she turned her attention back to George. "It probably crossed her mind at some point. When she wasn't spitting historical facts and legends at me, she was talking about all the things she wanted to see- the three lakes, the ruins at Hearthome City, the Snowpoint Temple, the Solaceon ruins. Moreover, trainers would stop in Celestic Town, and she's always be around to hear their stories. It was only a matter of time before hearing and reading about these things wasn't enough. The thing that probably sealed the deal was when she found her Gible."

"And how'd that happen?"

"Well, you'd have to ask Cynthia for the full version." There's a slight curl in George's lips at her pause. I'll have your take on it in the meantime. Cassandra sighs. "Remember how I said trainers would come in and talk about their travels? One day, a dragon tamer arrived from Mt. Coronet. I think his name was Jacob. On his way here, he encountered a strange spread of the Gible evolutionary line in the mountain. Normally, they'd be found in Victory Road, near the Pokémon League, or in the Wayward Cave, which connects to Mt. Coronet, but for some reason or other, quite a few of them were wandering around the Eterna-Celestic section of the mountain. Not too long after Cynthia heard about that, she disappeared. Essentially, she stumbled around the mountain until a Gible jumped from its hole in the wall and nearly bit her skull in."

"…I see." George appears to be genuinely caught off guard by the rather anticlimactic end to the tale.

"She loves to make it more dramatic, but that's all you really need to know."

"…And, er, how long did this ordeal take?"

"She was gone for about two days. We found her on the third. To say that Grandma and Grandpa were worried sick is an understatement. I was nine at the time, and absolutely inconsolable." At this, a faraway look appears in Cassandra's eyes. "For one, she went into Mt. Coronet without anyone or anything to protect her, so I was scared of my sister getting hurt or worse. But also, I had this sinking feeling that Cynthia was going to leave. I didn't know when- only that it was going to happen, and when it did, I was going to miss her terribly. So when she ran off into the mountain, I felt my fears confirmed. She might not have made it back. But if she did, she wouldn't be staying for much longer."

George senses they've hit a note. While he certainly wants to hear more on this subject, he doesn't deem it wise to continue on with it. So he switches it. Sort of. "Could you tell me what Cynthia was like before she left?"

Suddenly, Cassandra returns to her previous composure. "…Like I said before. She was really quiet. Very thoughtful. Very curious, too. She didn't like going to other people for answers. There was this obsession with formulating her own responses to the questions she posed. I think that's changed since she left, though. Also, there used to be this sense of urgency with nearly everything she did. Nowadays, she's much more relaxed."

"So at the end of the journey, she didn't change too much?"

"Yes."

"When's the last time you talked to her?"

"A few days ago, actually. She said she was leaving."

"Where to?"

"The Johto region."

"Huh." George makes a note. "Did she tell you why she was leaving?"

Cassandra sighs. It suddenly clicks that she's been doing that often over the course of the interview. She also remembers she sighed the exact same way after Cynthia revealed her plans- the kind of sigh where the person wishes she could be frustrated, but realizes the altogether uselessness of becoming thus, so she settles for exasperated.

"I asked her, and she listed off the usual. 'I want to get stronger', 'research', 'see the world' and everything." She waves her hand around as she lists off her sister's explanations. "But then she had this weird look in her eyes. It's- how do I explain it? It's like you're really, really excited to do something. But this something is completely new and the outcome is just a box of surprises, so you're a little afraid, too. A sort of fearless fearful determination? No, that doesn't make much sense. Like, 'I'm scared, but I'm gonna go for it and I'm gonna have fun, and whatever happens happens'. She had that look, suddenly, then she said, and I quote, 'I'm going soul-searching.'"