Icy Wind

Brooke's late-night visit left me reeling mentally. She certainly gave me something to think about. What if Team Omega really wanted to build an army of legendary pokémon? But why do that if they had such widespread influence already? Valence had the wisdom of a thousand men, and Caan had the strength of a dozen. Plus they made tons of money with excavating and recovering technology. Who needed to dominate all pokémon when they already dominate society?

There were still so many questions, though. Did they even possess one of the legendary pokémon? Brooke acquired Gnomoder, and Burton was the one who awakened Clendine. I never figured out what happened to Resowisp, plus there were five more I didn't know much about. And why these particular pokémon? What was the big attraction about the Hydrogen Empire that was worth repeating? People always idolize ancient societies that went extinct. Shouldn't that fact alone indicate it's a bad idea to emulate them? I actually didn't know enough about the region's history to have any idea what was going on. It would probably help if I could find someone who'd read a lot of books on the subjects of history and the Hydrogen Empire and could answer my questions for me. A second, less desirable choice would be actually reading such books myself. Maybe there was some kind of TV movie about it.

The sun woke me early. I actually felt great. Elly's scales gave my back support and tension in the perfect ratio to relax me and stimulate my muscles. Not vigorous muscles, of course, but they held my spine together. First thing I had in mind was a bathroom break.

When I stood, Lauren asked, "Where are you going?" It was like she was just sitting at the flap of the tent waiting for me to do something she could pounce on. It was an almost literal game of cat and mouse.

"I just thought I'd swing by Castelia City for some ice cream. You want any? One scoop or two?" She didn't appreciate the sarcasm, which I found pretty ironic considering her attitude. Maybe she just didn't understand it so early in the morning. "I'm going to, uh… 'unleash a coiler.' I feel like I haven't used a rest room in two months. That okay with you?"

"How boorish. Blade?"

I scoffed. "I didn't realize I needed an escort." She didn't respond and he didn't say anything. "Oh, I get it. You don't trust me even a little bit, so you want to watch my every move."

"That's pretty spot on," Blade admitted as he sat up. His whole truth thing with the loophole of keeping secret anything he didn't want me to know would get really annoying. It'd probably be easier on me if he'd just lie.

I gave him a look. "How close are you going to get?"

"Close enough to be sure you aren't trying to meet with your sister out of earshot."

"Yeah?" I laughed with a shake of my head. "You're in for a real treat."

By the time we returned to camp, Blade was half unconscious on his feet. I warned him trusting me would pay off in the end, but he chose to learn the hard way. Let's just say Lauren and her croconaw had enough time to break down the tent and pack it up. And collect the sleeping bags and other camping supplies. And read a novel. And I think her croconaw evolved and got married and had kids.

"You have bathroom duty from now on," Blade told her.

She reacted like he'd pantsed her in public. Few people ever turned that shade of beet red in front of me. "How dare you! A lady would never watch a young man pee."

"If that's where it stopped, we wouldn't have this problem," Blade replied.

"You know," I chimed in. "I'm starting to get a little uncomfortable with all this talk about everyone watching me use the facilities, which I'm fully aware don't actually exist out here. Can we just get started? Elly's hungry and I'd like to give her the chance to hunt for breakfast."

Lauren looked at me as if I were an idiot for not knowing what her responding silence meant. "Well? Get to it! We're right behind you."

I wasn't sure how well they could keep up, but I didn't care, either. Having someone come with me between towns was looking like a bad idea. It was kind of nice having someone to talk to once in a while, but I really wished it could have been someone else. Fey and I got along well enough, and I'm sure there were hundreds of Omega Grunts who had more in common with me than these two lug nuts.

Elly was eager to get started. But she was not a natural forest hunter. She wasn't much of a runner, and I was pretty sure all the forest critters could hear us coming. How was she going to sneak up on anything like that? I coaxed her into slinking a bit through the trees, but her footsteps were still heavy and shook the ground. A lot of birds watched her approach and then took off when she bumped the trees.

Suddenly Elly froze in place. It took me a moment to figure out why. About eighty meters in front of us stood a pair of deerling: one doe and one fawn. Elly's instincts were pretty good, considering she immediately froze in hopes of not scaring them away. I thought they might not have seen us yet, but my big, bluish-gray dragmor contrasted the woodsy brown and green quite severely. The only deerling that wouldn't see her would be a blind one.

But even a blind deerling would be able to hear her crashing through the trees! She took off like a predator chasing her prey. Her sudden movement surprised me and, failing to get a good hold on her collarbone, I fell off and hit the ground awkwardly. She was a natural predator, but also slow and clumsy—slowed even more by the trees in her way. With every step, she knocked over trees as she moved her bulky body through the woods. The deerling bounded off gracefully avoiding the trees as if they could run right through them, but I swear they stopped long enough to blow a raspberry before they disappeared from sight, blending in with the scenery. Elly came to a skidding halt a moment later, looking sad when she couldn't find her prey.

Looking up at the trees from my position on the ground, I realized, "That's how they're doing it." Blade and Lauren kept their distance a ways, but that blaziken followed us up the path by moving along the treetops. The high ground was a good route for him to take. He was able to keep a real close eye on us even if his trainer was too far out to do it directly.

My forlorn dragmor approached me and licked me. But it wasn't a big, slobbery lick like when she was happy. It felt like a depressed action. I patted her on the head and hugged her snout to cheer her up.

"Don't worry, girl. Let's get out of these woods. You and the trees don't seem to get along."

I directed her out of the trees and toward the rocky area at the base of the mountain. This time, though, I walked beside her. No offense to her, but I didn't need her taking off again while I fall awkwardly on a pile of rocks. Besides, I could probably spot prey for her and then help her track it down. There had to be something along the mountains she could take down: maybe a teddiursa or even some slugmas.

CLANG!

The noise startled me. I turned sharply to see Elly had stumbled upon a pile of geodude, and they were fighting back! The little two-armed rocks pummeled Elly repeatedly in the belly and face, but her thick skin dulled the pain nearly to nothing. It didn't seem to bother her, at least in terms of pain. I got the impression they were annoying her, though, when she opened her wide jaws and engulfed one of them. The sound of the crunching as she chewed up the geodude and swallowed it made my stomach churn. And then she scooped up another one.

"Well, I guess, as a steel-type, you can get some of your nutrients and minerals from rock pokémon. I hope you don't mind if I look at something else." She's a carnivore by nature—or a terravore, in this case. But watching her eat other living things was a little more than my stomach was ready for.

I looked up along the Gallium Mountains to take in a more relaxing view. This close, it was hard to see how high they went. There was a distinct ring a ways up where it got cold enough for snow to dust the path, and the meeting of the warm air down here with the cold air up there created a veil of fog that blocked my view any farther. A chill brushed my arm as a gust of frozen air slid down the mountain. There was no telling how high we'd have to go to reach Argentum City. Blade said it would take another three days to get there. The path trodden by so many travelers and trainers before me looked easy enough to follow, although it winded back and forth along the sides. Still, nothing too treacherous I could see.

I caught sight of the blaziken at that point. He wasn't interested in the view of the mountain. He just kept staring at me.

"'Blaze,' huh?" I asked him. "Catchy, I'll admit, but not terribly creative. Then again, he picked the name 'Blade' for himself. You never had a chance."

He didn't respond. Probably didn't understand a word I was saying over the gravely sound of Elly chowing down on geodudes. The survivors were starting to run, but their lack of legs made it difficult for them to get far before she pounced. I figured it was probably time to pull her back before she ended up eating more than she could actually digest. If she ate too much, she wouldn't be able to train later.

Thoughts of training actually reminded me of how that blaziken battled. It was able to power straight through a water attack from a delycan. It would be awesome if Reggie could do that. Brooke had the edge on me whenever a battle started between our first pokémon. I know I could beat her if Reggie could just take out Lykos. Siggy took out her loudred. With the right kind of training, Elly and Conch would be able to take out any others she caught.

Of course, I'd have to find a way to fight back against Gnomoder now. What was I supposed to do against a legendary pokémon that actually listened to her? Sigilyph was easily my strongest pokémon and even he couldn't win that fight. I have to admit: In that moment, the idea crossed my mind that if I find another legendary pokémon with Team Omega, I should keep it for myself.

"He could probably take her," Blade said, referring from his blaziken to the dragmor I now held in my hand. "She looks pretty strong, don't get me wrong, but she's like a kid next to him. Plus she's steel, and his fighting prowess would crack through her scales."

"You've obviously trained him a lot," I noted. "How did you make it so he can just ignore a water attack and keep fighting?"

A smug grin crept across Blade's face. "Fire-types have a few inherent weaknesses, but there's only one that immediately springs to everyone's minds. As soon as you summon a fire pokémon, everyone thinks about water attacks. That works out well, too, because training against ground attacks is tough, and rocks will always hurt on contact no matter how prepared for them you are. I mean, you can train your pokémon to block or avoid the smaller attacks, but rocks are pretty solid and always hit hard. If you face an opponent that starts moving walls around, you're going to get hurt either way."

"I'm confused. Does the wall start moving before or after you train for water attacks?"

"Oh! Right. Got sidetracked there." He cleared his throat, which did little to clear my memory of the previous thirty seconds. "Training for water attacks is pretty simple in theory. Let me use Blaze as an example. All he had to do was get used to the pain of being in the water. It was a slow and adaptive process that he had to build into, but over time, he got to the point where he could deal with being hit by water even though it still hurts him.

"All I had to do is motivate him. As you can guess, Blaze wasn't excited about jumping in the water the first few times. I had to teach him that the pain would get better with exposure—that battling would be easier in the long run if he endured the pain for short training sessions. It helped that he really wanted to be an all-star battler. My foster parents used to tell me that he wanted to be the best for my sake, but I think the reality is that he just wants to be the best fighter there is."

"Your foster parents were your inspiration?"

Blade furrowed his brow at me. "And you were just mocking me for failing to stay on topic."

"Sorry."

He sighed, which was a sign story time was over. "Anyway, if you find yourself battling against your sister and her delycan again, you'll be in a much better position if you train your conflacat to resist water. Especially where we're headed now, up there into the ice caps."

"Why does that matter? Fire beats ice every time."

He put on another smug grin. "How does fire beat ice?"

"Uh… By melting it. Duh. Ohh!" Luckily I realized what he was saying without any help. Fire plus ice equals water, which can then hurt Reggie if he's not careful or prepared. "I get it. Fire melts the ice and causes a water hazard. Does that happen a lot?"

"Well, it tends to create vapor, mostly, which varies with intensity depending on the strength of the attacks at the time of the collision. But if the whole environment is icy, then water is much more likely. So even in a match against an ice-type, your conflacat can get hurt by water. I'd be happy to recommend some training routines if you think the water would be good for your conflacat."

"Yeah?" I looked back up the rocky mountainside. "There a lot of lakes along the mountain trail?"

"Nope. But I'm sure Lauren would be willing to lend her croconaw to your needs."

I tried envisioning that scene: Lauren telling her croconaw to be relentless and pummeling Reggie into the ground until the reptile ran out of spit, all the while her cackling away on the sidelines. She'd probably even have that thing attack me directly a couple of time just for laughs.

"Actually, I was thinking it sounds like a good chance for Reggie and Conch to hang out together. That will probably work out better."

First off, thanks to 1shot1bownty for contributing Blade to the story.

I've just realized during this chapter that writing a team of pokémon is like writing for more characters than you can really handle at one time. It's tough to give everyone screen time in a way that makes sense. Obviously, I'm not going to throw Reggie out there every single time just because he was Gus's first. I hope you're pleased with how I'm doing so far. Try to think of it like the games: You could feasibly use only one pokémon all the time, but you're better off shifting your training between the members of a team. And a lot of training will be unwritten to keep the story moving.

Trivia: I wanted to have Gus and Lauren mocking one another constantly, but it never came out right. Lauren told me that she would normally just ignore Gus unless he did something blatantly against the rules, even imagined rules that only she knows. So a lot of their conversation was cut to match her personality.