After leaving Viridian we stopped briefly in Sinopia and saw the construction site where they were just beginning to lay the foundation for the epic Sinopia-Fushia bridge. We stayed a couple nights in Celadon to visit the clubs. When we boarded the bus to Saffron, Sarah and I had massive hangovers, and Faraday and Emmy sported obnoxious amounts of smeared makeup, but we made it through alive.

Saffron was intimidating. Or at least it would be for someone... not as resilient as me. We arrived at night and my eyes burned from the neon spectral lines. Signs flashed and shifted, shouting their unsavory suggestions to wide eyed spectators.

Sarah pointed one out to me. It displayed a boy, far too pretty for the fight clubs, next to a smirking Charmeleon and adorned with the text 'Do you want to be the very best?' With a smaller 'Become a Trainer today' below.

Sarah winked at me. "One day I'm going to be that sexy."

I laughed. "Is that what they mean by the very best?"

Street vendors accosted us. Overly friendly pedestrians asked to pet Faraday and Emmy. The truthseekers offered us discounted rates; they claimed to have the psychic ability to tell when people are lying.

By the time we arrived at the apartment we were too exausted to do much of anything. The rest of our belongings hadn't arrived yet so we borrowed a few blankets and pillows from the landlord and layed out on the living room floor.

The walls were bare, we owned no furniture, the carpet wasn't as soft as I'd hoped, and the blankets we borrowed smelled faintly of smoke, but as I drifted off to sleep I pulled Faraday close to my chest and watched through heavy eyelids the way that Sarah's hair fluttered every time she exhaled while Emmy breathed in sync. In that haze of sleepy logic I thought I might be able to make this strange new place my home.

"Ohhhhh!"

I walked into the office adjacent to my assigned lab just as the two guys sitting there erupted into a cheer. They had lowered the projector screen and were watching a recording of a match between members of the Saffron Fight Club.

"Mankey and Raichu?" I said as the camera cut from the violently convulsing Mankey to a smirking Raichu. It swayed its lightingbolt tail as if taunting its opponent to get back up.

"That's not any Raichu," the guy on the left said to me. "That's Lucy King's Raichu and this is the final round knockout from last semester's Saffron Fight Club championship tournament."

I shrugged. I'd heard Lucy King was a major badass, but to be honest it seemed a girl like her fighting in a bikini top and those knee-high boots and that single silver braid in her hair was just looking for attention. "Sounds exciting I guess," I said.

The guy on the left stood up and extended his hand. "Hi, I'm Ahmad and that's Isaiah." He pointed to the other guy who waved at me and quickly returned to watching the screen. "You must be Liz, right?"

I nodded and shook Ahmad's hand.

Ahmad gestured to one of the chairs. "Take a seat, we're waiting on this one other guy we work with then we can get started on orientation, or whatever the hell it is we're supposed to do with you today."

So the three of us watched the final moments of the fight. Mankey tried to stand again but eventually collapsed at the sight of spurious electric discharges at the tip of Raichu's tail. The fight was called to an end. The crowd went wild.

A boy with long black hair rushed onto the field to tend to Mankey.

"He looks really young," I said.

Ahmad nodded. "That's Kiyo. Youngest kid to ever even enter a fight club tournament and he made it to the finals. You never heard of him?"

I shook my head.

"Shit, he was underdog of the century. People wanted him to win so bad but I was like there's no way anyone's gonna beat Lucy. That Raichu is unstoppable."

The door behind us opened and to my surprise I recognized that face.

He furrowed his brow for a moment. "Liz?"

I stood up slowly. "Kurt?"

He smiled in recognition, and held his arms out wide for a hug. "Liz!"

I narrowed my eyes at him an instead only offered to shake his hand. "Hey... what are you doing here?"

"Working on the distortion generators."

Questions flooded my mind. Well not questions, mostly one in particular. How could it be that just before leaving Cinnabar I'd been kidnapped by a deranged man who knew I poisoned Kurt, and just as I arrived in Saffron I met Kurt for the first time in years. It was clearly more than coincidence but I didn't ask him about it that moment.

Instead I went through the motions. They introduced themselves and detailed their lab duties. They said we'd be working on optimizing a set of distortion generators for anisotropic spatial compression tests. They showed me the hardware. We went out for beer and wings. We laughed and charged our tab to the company, but I didn't forget that David knew I poisoned Kurt.

"Stop right where you are!" Sarah screamed at me just as I entered the apartment after my first day at work.

I froze before even getting fully through the doorway. "Why? What's wrong?" The front door was at the end of a short hallway so I couldn't see what was happening in the living room until Sarah came around the corner with a blindfold.

"Put it on."

I rolled my eyes and she put it on me anyway.

"I'm gonna trip on something."

She shushed me and moved me into position.

I smelled something burnt. When she removed the blindfold and yelled "Surprise!" I saw a large overturned cardboard box in the middle of the floor covered in a makeshift tablecloth. On top were two plates of lightly blackened lasagna, burnt garlic bread, salad, a bottle of wine and two glasses.

I smiled. "I don't think it's burnt enough."

Sarah nodded in agreement. "I know. I don't think that box is gonna hold up either. If it collapses mid dinner then you gotta clean it up because I cooked. But anyway..." she looked back at me, "I left Faraday and Emmy overnight at the daycare just for tonight so we can have an inaugural dinner without them clawing for bites. You hungry?"

Truthfully I'd gone a little overboard eating with the guys at work; I mean wouldn't anyone if the company pays? But hey, she cooked. "Yeah," I said. "I could definitely eat. At least the parts that aren't black."

Sarah chuckled so we both sat down, poured ourselves some wine, and jumped when the box collapsed in on itself.

We cursed the gods at the pathetic structural integrity of cardboard.

"I think this box is yours." Sarah handed me one of the smaller ones.

After cleaning up the mess from dinner we began unpacking.

"So anyway," Sarah continued, "the daycare is always open and the woman who runs it is really nice and I think I can get you a company pass. Technically its supposed to be for spouses or family members of employees but I think they don't mind bending the policy."

I started emptying the miscellaneous items in my box. "Sounds cool," I said. "What kind of mons do the others in your program have?"

"Uh, mostly the small and cute kind. I remember there was a Poliwag, Bellsprout, Doduo, Slowpoke, Rattata, oh and a Meowth. And the trainers..." she paused to smirk. "Trainer... it sounds so tame. Most of the people there referred to themselves as fighters but I guess Aura really wants to make 'Trainer' the official term. Anyway, most of the trainers have some experience with the fight clubs, but they didn't seem all that tough. Me and Emmy could take 'em."

That's when I noticed the phone in my box. I think Sarah was waiting for me to say something witty about her and Emmy because she asked what I was looking at and walked over to my side of the room after I remained silent.

It was the phone that John and I found in the Cinnabar forest before we entered the time dilation spatial distortion. "Weird." I powered it up and saw the Nidoking article from 'Dangerous Mons and Where to Find Them' before returning to the home screen.

"That yours?" Sarah asked.

"No, John found it in the forest. I thought he kept it." I opened the photo app and found a selfie of a redhead woman at the beach. She looked strangely familiar.

Sarah pointed. "Hey, isn't that..." She shook her head. "She looks familiar."

And a thought hit me. I opened up a search for recent news headlines, found a picture of the missing redhead girl Karen, and was thoroughly confused.

Sarah grunted a puzzled "Huh..." and then flipped back to the selfie. "That is uncanny. Maybe they're related?"

So I navigated to the device information panel and listed under 'owner' was the name Karen Darville.

"Wait, go back to the article," Sarah said.

And right there in the picture caption read 'Eleven year old Karen Darville, pictured here, was reported missing from her home in Viridian City.'

Sarah and I both went silent at that moment. We were just beginning to realize the depth of the Diglett hole we'd stumbled upon, because although an eleven year old Karen Darville went missing, the woman in that selfie could easily be in her twenties. I would have disregarded the first thought that entered my head as outlandish if only it weren't for the fact that I already had firsthand experience in the ability of a spatial distortion to drastically alter the passage of time.

"You don't think..." I started to say to Sarah.

She grimaced and shook her head. "That's not the same person. It's not possible. You and John experienced a slow down, not a speed up."

I shrugged and nodded in agreement even though I didn't fully agree. If time could slow inside a distortion, why not speed up? "Yeah, you're probably right. Must be her mother or older sister or something."

But Sarah was already on to the next consideration. "We should tell someone about this, right?"

I didn't say anything. I just kept swiping back and forth between those two pictures, trying to convince myself that these were in fact two different people, but when I saw that the timestamp of the selfie on the beach was three days after Karen was reported missing, the list of reasonable explanations grew short and discomforting.

"Yeah, I probably should. I'll go to the station tomorrow after work," I told her. "They'll probably want to talk with John too."