Chapter Nine – Movie Night

Nate was good. Really good. He could seriously give May a run for her money, and I was no match at all for him. He had raised his team with all the love and care that he could give, and the way he smiled at them was so heartwarming. Even though he was, apparently, happy all the time, the looks he gave his team… it was powerful. I hadn't seen anyone have such a strong connection with his or her Pokémon in awhile.

More importantly, though, was how nice it felt to battle again. I hadn't in a long time, and, naturally, all of the competitors in our tourney were incredibly powerful. All of the Champions had pushed me, challenged me to be better than I had been in years. It was, perhaps, luck—and maybe faith in my team—that took me past Lance and Blue and to Nate. The young champion had defeated Cynthia and Alder without much of a fight on his part.

"I knew you could do it," Nate told me when we met on the stage, ready for the final battle of the tournament. "Give it your all!"

My all wasn't good enough for him, though, and I lost pretty quickly to my challenger. Win or loss, strength or weakness, it was the most fun I had had in ages, and it seemed to be the same for my Pokémon. They loved getting out into the open, fighting alongside me, and I felt something renewed within me. Nate was right: I did need a good battle—a good three of them, really, to get me to open up again.

Metagross, by far the strongest member of my team, could barely keep up with his Emboar. A couple of attacks and it was down, and the battle ended almost as soon as it began. But when Nate cheered, sharing a high-five with his Pokémon, I smiled for the first time in a long time. May used to do the exact same thing.

"Wow!"

I closed my eyes as Nate and I collapsed on a bench just outside the stadium, the warm touch of the sun gently hitting my skin. Whatever it was that I was feeling right now, I hadn't felt it for awhile—perhaps even before May vanished. It was nice to just sit back and relax for an hour or two, even if I did feel a little guilty about it.

"You're pretty good, you know, Steven," Nate said, and I lifted one eyelid open to look at him. I had sprawled out a little, my arms hanging over the back of the bench, but Nate was sitting straight up like an excited puppy. If he stuck his tongue out and began to pant, it wouldn't have shocked me the least bit.

I closed my eyes again, tilting my head up towards the sun. "Nah, you flattened me."

"No, really, you were good. I can only imagine what you would be like at your best, though." I could feel Nate shuffle beside me, the back of the bench bouncing slightly as he leaned back against it. "It's been a long time since you've fought like that, huh? When was the last time that you had a decent battle?"

I whistled, trying to think of the last time I fought that hard. Well… it had to be May. "Not for a long time. Not since May."

"Steven…"

"She left me these letters," I began, but I had no idea why I was telling him this. I felt so at peace now that maybe the words just slipped out. "They have hints to the locations of the next letters, and sometimes she makes me do these strange tasks. But I've been traveling all over trying to find them and… and her."

"Look, Steven, you're going to find her." When I opened my eyes, Nate had pushed himself up a little taller, turning slightly to face me. "Try not to stress out too much. Just go with the flow—she'll turn up when you least expect it. Until then, you just have to sort of… run with it, I guess. Be happy, you know? She wouldn't want you to be miserable."

A crowd of people walked past us, their loud chattering temporarily distracting us. One of the people, an older man with the strangest get-up I had ever seen, tipped his hat at Nate, and the boy sitting beside me raised a hand in greeting. And then we were met with silence, a peaceful friend between us.

He was a good kid, this Nate fellow. I didn't know very much about him; even though I liked to travel, I kept mostly to myself. I didn't really know any of the other champions. I had heard of them, of course, but I never really did any research on them—as opposed to Nate who obviously recognized me with absolute certainty just by seeing my face. I barely knew who he was even with a name.

But he was nice and treated people with kindness even if they didn't deserve it. And although he did have the tiniest bit of an attitude, perhaps from his overwhelming confidence in himself, it suited him. I had a feeling that he would be willing to stick his neck out on the line for someone. He challenged Stu for me, after all, and I was pretty much a stranger.

"Want to have another go at it tomorrow? The tournament goes on as long as there are champions to participate," Nate finally said to break the silence, and I sat up straighter, pulling my arms back into myself.

I nodded, and he grinned. "Sure. I'll knock you off your feet next time."

I arrived back at Pokéstar Studios with a smile on my face. After participating in the Tournament of Champions three times, I never once beat Nate, but every time I challenged him, I got that much closer and that much stronger. Maybe I would never beat him, but I didn't really care—I felt so refreshed and ready to go that it didn't matter how badly anything went.

Never had I thought for a second, though, that I could feel this good again. Not until I found May, anyway.

"Look!" Nate pointed across the main road at the theater, where a large group of people were gathering outside the building. He laughed, holding his hand out in the air towards me. When I high-fived him, laughing from the ridiculousness of such an action, he grinned. "Guess you got your wish after all. Stu's definitely playing the film tonight."

We ran toward the theater, pushing through the crowd to the front. There were hundreds of people here. I didn't know what Stu had said in his advertisements, but people wanted to see May's movie, whether they knew it was the missing Champion's or not. Was May really about to give up her secrets to all of these people?

At the front of the crowd, Stu, standing on a podium in front of the theater, was having the time of his life. His smile was not the least bit contrived; as people from the crowd shouted excitedly at him, he laughed and shouted back. I couldn't tell if anyone really knew what anyone else was saying—everything was getting lost in the crowd.

"Ah, the man himself!" Stu announced when his gaze landed on me, and Nate pushed me forward. People screamed in awe once they noticed Nate, and he barely made it up on the podium with Stu and me alive. The crowd shouted Nate's name, and he waved with a smile. For the first time, though, I noticed that Nate's normal smile had vanished—this one wasn't nearly so genuine.

An image of May blowing a kiss at the camera flashed through my mind, and I rubbed my forehead, trying to get it out.

"Your friend's film is quite the shocker," Stu said to me, his lips practically in my ear.

With my arrival, everyone packed into the theater. Stu sat in the front row in between Nate and me, and I shifted uncomfortably in my seat every time Stu turned around to talk with someone behind him. A couple of the old women sitting behind Nate kept reaching out to touch the boy's hair, commenting to him about how long it had gotten. He would laugh and smile, but I could tell that he was far more uncomfortable than I was.

I was, in fact, thankful when the lights dimmed, even if I was a little scared about what I was about to see. What kind of "shocker" was this exactly?

Stu must have made bank on the concessions considering the amount of crunching I heard behind me. My stomach had gone a bit too queasy to think about eating now, and I had pushed myself so tall in my seat that the person behind me was whispering in annoyance. Being taller, for whatever reason, made me feel stronger—like I could handle whatever May threw at me tonight.

After the advertisements, on which Stu probably made quite a bit of money as well, we were met immediately with piano music, peaceful but bright. Hazy images of trainers, hugging their Pokémon and chatting with the other trainers they just fought, flashed across the screen. The sun cut through trees, foggy rays of light shining onto the ground.

And then the camera panned up to the sun itself, the title shining through its light: Across the Sun.

What was this?

"Oh, yeah, I absolutely love battling. There's… thrill to it, you know?" a girl's voice said, and my heart nearly shattered. May. That was May's voice—she had said that once in one of her more well-known interviews. It was one of the phrases that had been on repeat on the news since she went missing.

And she was barely finished talking when the sun shattered out, replaced completely by darkness and utter silence. When the screen showed again, the images panning were not nearly as bright, and the music had turned solemn. A bearded man sitting on the street, broken and hollow, stared into the camera, and a Growlithe barked somewhere off-screen. When the camera panned again, a Growlithe made of just skin and bones bared its teeth.

Something sank in my stomach, and I could hear a couple of sickened murmurs from the crowd behind me.

"When did you begin battling?" the voice of a middle-aged woman asked, and the image of the Pokémon and the old man faded away.

A version of May, maybe just a year or two younger than the last time I saw her, stared off into the distance, just a little bit beyond the camera, probably at the woman who had asked the question. She was as I remembered her, a bright and happy girl who loved being on screen. Her cheeks were rosy, her eyes bright, and there had always been something so natural and raw about her that was absolutely beautiful. For a second, it was like she was back, like she never vanished at all.

Her name flashed across the screen as she began to talk, but I was certain that even in Unova, everyone knew who she was without it. "I began battling when I was very young, back when I lived in Johto," she told the off-screen interviewer. She always had an innocent trill about her voice, a soft and soothing tone despite her very powerful demeanor. It was the only thing about her that hadn't seemed to grow up—she still sounded exactly the same as the day we met. "My father was always very into battling and raising Pokémon. I grew up with that, and I trained with his team for a long time, too. But it wasn't until I moved to Hoenn that I got my first Pokémon."

"Did you know that one day you would end up saving the world from being drowned and that you would become the Champion?"

She smiled, her teeth flashing as she giggled at the woman off-screen. I curled my hands into fists against my legs, unable to take my eyes away from the girl I had fallen for long ago. But that smile and that laugh—I knew now that it had to be fake. She had already begun to plan her game, after all. It wasn't real.

Then that smile faded as quickly as it had appeared, her eyes going hard. "Yes," she responded, her voice so stoic that it had dropped an octave. "Yes, I did."

The image faded again, and we were met with the image of sickly Pokémon, each one so damaged that it made my stomach queasy. I had never seen anything so horrible before. Some of them had scars all across their bodies, some were bloodied and bruised, and others were clearly starving. I had never seen anything quite like it.

There are more Pokémon trainers today than ever before. Two in every three people will become trainers compared to the one out of every four just ten years ago. This means that more Pokémon are being raised than ever before, as well.

The words flashed slowly across the screen, and I managed to tear my eyes away from the screen long enough to get a glimpse of the expressions of the people beside me. Stu nodded, his lips pressed firmly together, and on the other side of him, Nate appeared a little shocked. His jaw was slightly slack.

By the time I looked back up at the screen, different words had replaced the previous ones: But more Pokémon are being abandoned by their trainers. One in every three Pokémon will be released back into the wild, but more often than not, they have suffered the cruel reality of battling.

"How did you create the region's most powerful team? Do you have battle strategies?" the interviewer's voice echoed again, and the screen faded back to May.

The smile was back on the young girl's lips, and I half-expected her to blow a kiss at the camera. "Of course. You can't just go blindly into battle—that's a disaster waiting to happen. One of the things that I did to create my team was bring in all sorts of different types. I had a water-type, but I had a fire-type and grass-type to complement it. I had a psychic-type, but I had a dark-type to complement it. It's a lot of give and take."

"And by give and take, you mean…"

"Not every type is going to work. That's obvious," May said with a soft giggle. "But I tried multiple combinations and gave up on the ones that were not as absolutely strong as I needed them to be. I saw that Team Aqua was a problem, so I needed to have a strong team—any Pokémon that was not cut out for it got the boot. That's all there is to it."

No… what was she doing? She was making herself out to be a power-hungry bitch… that wasn't at all who she was.

It was repetitive—whatever point May was trying to prove with this movie, she was trying to make sure that we got it. Pokémon were being mistreated, now more than ever. But I wasn't sure if that was her main motive—it seemed more probable that she made this movie to make it look like she was the villain in all of this.

But why?

"So, you put whatever Pokémon you didn't need in your PC?"

May rolled her eyes, the second slip in this whole film of someone resembling her letters. "If they lost, I didn't need them, and I had no plans to use them. I released them."

"But often those Pokémon will become dependent on their trainers—if you domesticate a Pokémon, when it recognizes you as its master, many times they won't know how to return to the wild that they were forced to leave behind," the interviewer noted desperately, and there were many murmurs from the people behind me now. "And if you release a Pokémon right after a battle—"

"I needed a team that could win," May interrupted. "You would all be dead if I hadn't made one."

There were audible gasps from the audience, and I gritted my teeth together. She didn't really think that way… I knew better than anyone how much she cared for her Pokémon. And I knew for a fact that she put the Pokémon she didn't use into a PC, where Professor Birch would take care of them for her.

So why was she lying?

But it just got worse and worse. Everything that came out of her mouth was a complete an utter lie, but the audience was buying every word. In every instance that she said something offensive, which occurred more frequently as the movie went on, more people began whispering to each other, and I kept curling my hands into tighter and tighter fists.

When the focus shifted from the mistreatment of Pokémon to the mistreatment of people, her new antagonizing role didn't change. "I've never been in want. Anything that I do want, I get," she told the interviewer. I couldn't listen to this anymore… "The funny thing about it is that I am wealthy, but I get so much for free."

"So, do you donate any of it?"

"It's mine, isn't it?"

It went on and on and on, and each word out of her mouth made me want to stand up and leave. None of it was true… she had never been a fan of material possessions, especially considering how much she traveled. And she certainly did get many things for free, but she was always grateful—and if it was something she didn't need, she did give it away.

But I was starting to realize exactly what she was doing. She wrote in one of her letters that she didn't want to be called the hero anymore. Now, no one would see her as much more than a selfish villain who happened to save the world once. She was giving up everything that she ever earned—and it was true that she earned it. And for what? So that I could take her place?

The screen faded to black at the end, no credits rolling at all. All we needed to know from that movie was that May had done some awful things—even if she really didn't.

Whispering behind me turned into talking and then shouting and anger and rage.

"I can't believe that girl is a champion—"

"She always seemed so nice—"

"—nice but completely egocentric, apparently—"

"I think they just edited it to make her look like that—"

"But she still said it—"

I stayed seated while everyone filed out of the theater. People came up to Stu beside me and shook his hand, and a couple of people took pictures with Nate. But even they left eventually, and I was sitting alone in the theater. I didn't know how long it had been at that point since the movie ended, but it felt like an eternity.

It was no use feeling sick like this. Nate was right: May didn't want me to feel miserable and sorry for myself or her. I knew, anyway, that the whole movie was a lie. That was all I needed to know.

I pushed myself to my feet, remembering that May had already given me the hint for the next letter. The curtain under the screen, a coarse velvet that seemed a lot cheaper than it looked, was lifted slightly on the right side, exactly where she said the letter was. Sure enough, when I lifted it up, there was an envelope taped to the brick wall behind it.

I slipped my finger under the flap, ripping it open much more gently than any of her previous letters. Her handwriting didn't come as much of a shock to me anymore—I knew exactly what to expect now.

Dear Adventurer,

I hope you enjoyed my film. I had a couple of people come together and help me make it since I don't know a darn thing about making a movie! But I think that they did a phenomenal job with the editing, don't you? They really captured the real me. I think audiences around the world are going to be astounded by what they are about to see. It should get good reviews.

Of course, I wasn't the point of all of that. I asked that all of the proceeds go to the two charities, the Soup Kitchen and the Pokémon Palace, in your name, the name of the "Adventurer". Stu Deeoh should take care of that—so, whoever you are, your donations are sure to be greatly appreciated by both! The Soup Kitchen, as I'm sure you know, helps feed hungry people all over the country. There is at least one in each region, so don't worry! The money will be spread around to help as many people as possible.

As for the Pokémon Palace, you may not be quite as familiar with it. The purpose of the Pokémon Palace is to provide a home for abandoned and sick Pokémon. It's entirely non-profit, and with the amount of people becoming trainers now without education on how to raise Pokémon, it's filling up quickly. Your generous donation is sure to be greatly appreciated.

I know this must be hard for you, and I'm sorry. But you're doing well, and I hope you keep up the good work. People are going to appreciate what you're doing, and everyone in this country is sure to be better off now—better off, happier. I don't know exactly. The world is changing. It's moving.

Please know that I am proud of you for even coming this far. You're my hero.

Clue #4: The clock keeps ticking along. They say not to break tradition here and build up their walls too tall.

Keep going!

May

"You got another one?"

I jumped, the letter crinkling in my hand as my grip tightened. Any of the happiness that I had felt in the past three days had dissipated completely, and even Nate's excited tone couldn't get my blood pumping again. To think that just a few hours ago, I had been smiling and laughing with him. Now I was slightly annoyed by his presence.

"It's none of your business." I turned to face him, narrowing my eyes at him, and the wild-haired boy put his hands on his hips. Didn't he know when to stop?

"Let me go with you. She's got me fascinated after that movie," Nate said, a distant look in his eyes as he stared up at the silver screen. When he looked back at me, he smiled, and even though I could tell his intentions were complete innocuous, I couldn't help but feel a tad possessive. This was my journey, and May was the girl with whom I was in love. He might get a bit too close.

"You can't," I said quickly, and Nate raised his eyebrows in surprise, as if he couldn't think of a single reason why I wouldn't let him come with me. "She says directly in her letters that this is meant to be a journey just for me. I was never supposed to share them with anyone to begin with, but I can't tell you how many times I've already broken that one—"

"Exactly!" Nate exclaimed, holding his index finger high in the air. "You've broken half of the rules already, so why not just break the whole thing? Besides, you're unfamiliar with Unova, right? I bet I can guide you to the exact place where the next clue leads. You just have to let me team up with you. What's the worst that could happen?"

I sighed, the image of the May from those interviews flashing through my mind. She had been made into a villain—turned herself into one, anyway. I didn't know why exactly, and I could only hypothesize. But it was obvious, at least, that she wanted people to see this movie. And if she wanted people to see it, then that meant that she wasn't hiding completely anymore. Parts of this game had become transparent.

So, was it that bad if I let Nate help me out? He had a point—I didn't know anything about Unova aside from famous sites within the region like Pokéstar Studios. If I wanted to find the next letter, getting some help was my best bet. Not to mention, he was the Champion of Unova. It wasn't like I was about to put my trust in someone random. Obviously he was trustworthy and a good guy in general, considering he had stopped Team Plasma.

He really was a lot like May, wasn't he?

"I don't know what she's planning exactly. I'm sure you know more than me." Nate spoke quietly now, his smile finally faded away and his gaze now pointed towards the ground. His hands curled slowly into fists, his expression determined. "But if there's one thing that I know for sure, Steven, it's that she's got one hell of a game going on. That girl on that screen might have everyone else fooled, but I know for sure that's not her! Whatever it is you're doing for her, I want in. I know all about finding lost Champions."

An audible gasp escaped my lips, one that came out too suddenly to suppress. "What?"

"I helped my friend N find Hilda. She was the Champion of Unova before Iris—and one of the heroes from the legend." Nate smiled again, brushing his thumb across his nose. "If I do say so myself, I have quite the excellent tracking sense."

I raised my eyebrows, staring dumbstruck at the smiling young man before me. It wasn't the fact that he had found Hilda that surprised me—he could tell May was lying. Despite his somewhat goofy demeanor, confident though it was, he really did have a good heart. Only someone like him could become a champion and save Unova from Team Plasma. And if he could see past May's façade when other people couldn't, then maybe he really could help me.

"All right," I agreed, and Nate's eyes widened, light flowing through them. "Welcome to the team."

Author's Note: An adventure could get lonely with just one person! It was about time Steven found a companion to join him—or, rather, found someone who forcibly joins him. Nate was never going to take no for an answer.

Also, May's movie is kind of/sort of a reference to Nuzlocke challenges, but instead of "dying", a Pokémon is released when it faints in battle. And May's commentary on wealth is kind of/sort of a reference to celebrity status in general.