In their first year of university they went to a demonstration that turned ugly outside the Radio Tower. Three days before had been the battle on Indigo Plateau and the execution of the Elite Four. The prohibition against public assembly had only inflamed the crowd further. They were marching with ten thousand people from the old gym, which at the time had been shut down pending renovations into a training camp.
Anna was wearing a plastic hat shaped like Suicune's horns. A girl had been passing them out further down the street. Zack had wanted one of the Entei masks, but they were all gone before he got there. Andrei climbed up on the bonnet of a car with a bunch of community college girls, one of whom had a loudspeaker that she passed around the group. Nobody could hear what anyone else was saying, but their sentiments rose out of the babble like a Lapras surfacing from beneath the ocean. There were not only students there but older men and women, salarymen, homeowners, even a few children. They were shouting that they had had enough.
They lost Andrei in the crowd, long before the Radio Tower. More than likely he would turn up the next day from some girl's house whom he'd met at the rally. Andrei was like that in those days. Zack and Anna held hands to keep from getting separated, and back then Zack didn't even think about it, they were just friends. Banners waved over their heads: JUSTICE FOR ELITE FOUR, they read, and PROTECTORATE OUT and JOHTO POWER!
Everything was going right for a moment, a few minutes, a few hours. In a crowd like that, nobody could help but feel that change was imminent. It seemed as though nothing could stand in the way of so many people moving together and shouting with one voice.
Then the gas came down.
It began, as it always did, with someone in the crowd pulling a Pokeball. The sweeps during Custody had never been completely effective, and there were always breeders and trainers supplementing their collections in secret. Afterwards, some people said that the first deployment had been unprovoked, others that it was in self-defence. Certainly there had been soldiers around the Radio Tower trying to keep the crowd back from the doors. The first one that Zack saw was a Pinsir, its thorny horns standing out above the heads of the marchers. Whether that was the first, he never found out. Within moments, other flashes of energy were going off all around them, and Pokemon were emerging from their balls. Some people cheered; others turned and pushed through the crowd to get away as fast as they could. They were the veterans, the ones who had been to these kinds of rallies before.
A siren began to wail. There were other flashes now, not from the crowd but from just beyond it, in uniform rows. Dark, lumpen shapes rose up into the air, the sun behind them. The Goldenrod Protectorate Forces' Civil Pacification Squad had deployed their Koffings and Weezings.
The sight of them turned the mob into a different kind of beast. With a roar, those foremost in the crowd pressed forward against the barricades in front of the Radio Tower steps. Riot police thrust back at them with plastic shields and truncheons. Behind them, further down the street, a contingent of Donphans and Nosepasses were coming to reinforce the line. As they came closer it was unclear whether the people at the front of the crowd were pushing to get into the Radio Tower or to get away from the armoured Pokemon coming towards them.
Zack clutched Anna's hand tightly as the mob moved like an ocean about them, carrying them wherever the current willed. The first line of Koffings was above them now, and the air began to fill with the sharp scent of tear gas. The tides shifted in an instant. All the fervour that had pushed the protestors forward now seemed to be inverted, had become terror, and they were fleeing.
Zack's skin began to tingle and his eyes stung. The air between him and Anna was turning a hazy green colour. They were running, everyone was running, and suddenly he knew that if he tripped and fell he would die. There were people on the ground. There was shouting, and a high-pitched scream like a bird, and a voice blaring incomprehensible words through a bullhorn.
His face was burning. Water swelled from his eyes, like onions but more piercing, until he was blind. He choked on fire in his lungs. The only thing he was aware of was Anna's hand in his, and the pounding of his feet on the pavement. Once he forced his eyes open against the pain, and all he could see was mustard-coloured smoke all around him.
There was a concussion behind him that nearly knocked him off his feet. The next day he would learn that it had been a Typhlosion's lava plume going off in the middle of the Donphan regiment. There would be a six-foot crater in the middle of the road outside the Radio Tower, and a red smear where the volcano Pokemon had died. But that was in the future, and in the present he was running, his throat was closing against the boiling air, and he realised that he had let go of Anna's hand.
He stopped. Someone slammed into him and they both fell, but the crowd was growing thinner now and he was able to scramble back to his feet. He had run a long way, and the smoke was clearing somewhat, but it was all he could do to keep his eyes open against the awful stinging.
"Anna!" he shouted, but it came out as the croak of an old man on his deathbed. He couldn't see more than a few feet in front of him. He stumbled blindly back into the poison mist, shouting her name more hoarsely each time, until he fell to his knees beside a fire hydrant and threw up. That was when he realised he had to leave.
He found Anna fifteen minutes later, in an alley outside a dive bar that had suddenly become a refuge for student protestors. She was sitting on a milk crate and drinking from a huge bottle of water, tears rolling down her face from her red-rimmed eyes. The gas was two blocks away. The march was over. He sat down beside her without saying anything and grasped her hand again.
Hoennese soldiers moved through the streets over the next three hours, enforcing an extraordinary curfew. When it came to his turnoff and he had to let go of Anna's hand again, his own hands began to shake, and would not stop for hours after he got home. The stinging and itching in his skin remained throughout the night and into the morning.
It was two days before they were able to return to Goldenrod U. When they saw Andrei he was smiling, but in a way that showed he was guilty about his happiness. He had escaped the gas entirely, but a minor cut on his leg had been treated by a girl named Kimberley, who had allowed him to convalesce in her flat downtown.