Team Rivalry
All of the trainers on the porch stood there stunned with their mouths open at the sudden appearance of this creature. The more they stared at it the more they could see the subtle differences between Charmy and this one. This Charizard was bigger – bulkier and taller. It was more muscular than Mari's Charizard and carried a malevolent glint in its eyes that was absent in Charmy's.
Slaking lunged at it, redirecting Punishment at the new opponent. Charizard swerved out of the way with the sinister grace of a snake. Its claws glowed with purple dragon fire and it slashed Slaking, slicing its chest open effortlessly. Slaking slumped in pain but the Charizard showed no signs of being done. Its tail flame burned high and bright and its whole body became coated in flames. It charged recklessly. Julie returned her Slaking before Charizard could make a hit. It tripped up and fell to the ground where Slaking suddenly wasn't. The flames exploded momentarily and swirled like a horrifying hellfire before they died down.
"What the heck is going on up here?" the Team Magma senior officer demanded, racing around the corner from the back of the building. The other two grunts skidded after him, each holding half-filled sacks. "Jono! Julie!"
"Wasn't our fault this time, swear it!" Julie replied with a panicked voice. "The agents are to blame! Didn't do their job and these stupid kids got in! Then this Charizard showed up – bet it's working with them."
A new voice booed at them. It startled everyone out of their skin, although the Magma superior seemed to keep himself composed. It took a while for someone to figure out where the voice had come from but eventually they all found the intruder sitting on the eave with one leg up and the other swinging lazily. There wasn't enough moonlight to see him by.
"You really think that they could be carrying around a Pokémon as magnificent as Acropolypse? You saw their Pokémon; they're as fresh as the little green shoots that appear after a holocaust."
The Magma superior narrowed his eyes. "I know that voice."
"Glad you remember me." The stranger jumped down onto the porch. The glow from the bright light spilling forth from the door was enough to see him by. He was tall and alabaster pale with black hair spiked up messily on either side of his head. He was dressed like he was ready to head out to sea with loose, comfortable trousers stuffed into pirate boots and a vest with ornate golden buttons and trims. The coat he was wearing looked more weather-beaten than the rest of his outfit but was just as grand as his vest. "Would break my heart if you didn't. Used to be friends, after all."
"Eek!" Julie squealed after seeing him in full. "It's him!"
"No wonder the agents weren't around," Jono hissed. "Even they wouldn't stand a chance against him."
"Probably took them out, that little Grimer!"
The stranger only grinned proudly at that and turned to stare at the senior officer. "Been a while hasn't it, Courtney?"
Courtney's frown only deepened at that. "Wish it could have been longer."
"Ouch," the newcomer muttered insincerely, leaning against the porch rail. "Heard that you were running some kind of operation down here, thought I might check it out."
"Always were good at 'hearing things', weren't you, Alex?" Courtney snapped bitterly. "Even back when it was just the five of us rebuilding the Team Magma ideal from the ground up. Then you suddenly decide to quit and go play pirate."
Alex just shrugged nonchalantly. "There's a war on the way if neither team backs down any time soon. If it comes to that, I'd rather be on the winning side."
He didn't even have to give the order as Charizard leaped forward, blazing. Courtney released his Pokémon fast enough to give a quick order. The blue and yellow wolf-like creature charged right back at Charizard, crackling furiously with electricity. When they collided the sparks won out and Charizard reeled back, smarting from the electric blow.
The whir of a helicopter started up, whipping up a gust behind the flower shop building. A black stealth helicopter rose over the roof and hovered over the battle. Rope ladders were dropped from the open side door, manned by the female Magma agent. She held a badly injured Seviper close to her side as her partner lowered the aircraft enough for the Magma grunts to begin climbing on.
"Don't think you're leaving without telling me what you've got there first," Alex warned. "Acropolypse, use Earthquake."
His Charizard stomped on the ground, causing it to ripple and crack. The flower shop swayed dangerously but the flexible joints and stilts kept it standing. Courtney managed to leap onto the ladder before the attack could hit but his Pokémon was thrown into the air by the sudden jolt from below. It was weak but still in fighting condition. Courtney commanded it to use Thunder and it unleashed a great streak of lightning that electrified Charizard so badly that even the fire-type's naturally hot body was burned. Courtney returned his Pokémon as the helicopter climbed higher in the sky, carrying Team Magma with it.
If Alex's wicked grin was anything to go by, he wasn't at all disappointed with the outcome. Instead he whistled for his Charizard to swoop by him so he could hop on its shoulders. It hovered for a moment as he turned to the trainers on the porch and said in a chilling voice: "Sorry you had to deal with that. Maybe we'll meet again sometime."
With a few great flaps, his Charizard took to the sky yet strangely it didn't follow the retreating helicopter. The trainers were still paralysed with shock, trying to comprehend the violent occurrence they'd just witnessed.
"I hope we don't meet him again," Hilary piped up. "He gives me the creeps."
"Somehow I think we just witnessed something really important," Ray said. "They mentioned that they were going to start a war. How bad do you think that would be? Would it be like a gang war or something?"
"It'll be some kind of calamity," Kai replied absentmindedly. He jumped over the rail of the porch, searching for his Seedot. He felt relief inside like a knot unravelling when he found him hanging from the timber beams by his stem, unharmed by Earthquake.
"Then we should tell the authorities right away!" Hilary exclaimed.
"We have other people to attend to first."
"Like who? Oh… right."
Back inside the flower shop, Tyson and Torchic had already unravelled all of the bindings holding the prisoners but his friends and that unfamiliar kid were a puzzling case. They didn't move from their positions even when they were pulled away from the wall. It was kind of creepy, like touching human-sized dolls made of human flesh.
"They're so badly paralysed," one of the women – the middle sister – said, crouching down next to Tyson. "They were paralysed before they got in and they've been like that all day and all of the previous night too."
"Can you do something about it? Do any of you have a flower Pokémon that can fix this?"
The eldest sister chuckled. "Do you mean a grass-type? We have grass-types but none that could do anything about this."
"But we've got berries," the youngest added. "We've got plenty of Cheri berries. All we'd have to do is get the juice in them somehow and—"
"Is everyone okay in here?" Hilary interrupted, bursting in from outside. The whole group followed her in and Flora mindfully closed the door behind her.
"Not quite," Tyson admitted.
"There must be something we can do…"
A quite mumble came from Mari. If everyone hadn't been so quietly lost in thought they would have missed it.
"What's that? Can you speak up?" Tyson demanded, trying to shake her but her shoulders were so stiff it was hard to move them.
"S…" she stuttered out, "Sm… oo… sh…"
"Smoosh?" Tyson repeated, cocking his head to the side. "You mean like smoosh up some berries? Coming right up! You said you had some of those, didn't you?" Tyson turned to the shop owners.
Never before in her life had Mari felt like she had taken movement so for granted. "Sm… chi… su…"
"Wait," Hilary cut in, holding her hand out to signal everyone to stop. "She's not saying 'smoosh' she's trying to say smooch."
"She wants a kiss?" Tyson asked incredulously.
"Her Pokémon, Smoochy," Ray guessed, looking around the shop for their friends' bags. "Where does she normally keep her Pokémon?"
"In her pockets, I think," Hilary said, crouching down to pick through Mari's pockets. She pulled out the first Pokéball she got her hands on and opened it. A great, grey monster plated in white armour appeared, roaring fiercely. Hilary quickly returned it and went for another ball. This time the little, pink, blonde Pokémon appeared.
"That's cute but how does this help?" Tyson muttered.
"Does it know a move that helps," Ray wondered aloud, "like that Pokémon in the forest?"
Flora crouched down on her hands and knees to get to Smoochum's level. "Smoochy, do you know Aromatherapy?"
Smoochy glared at her like she'd just issued the most confusing request in the world. She still had no idea what was happening. Why was her trainer sitting up like a wooden doll?
While everyone else was gawking and debating over what to do with Mari's Smoochum, Kai sighed and opened his Pokédex. He briefly wondered why nobody else ever managed to see the most obvious solutions staring them in the face. They tried to see if they could trick Smoochy into doing something but she eventually grew fed up with everybody making weird demands of her and sat down on the floor huffily. Mari rolled her eyes, wishing there was some way she could give the command with any degree of coherency.
They heard Togepi giggling before anyone was aware that Kai had snuck up behind them. With his Pokédex his hand, he looked down at Smoochy, who was pointedly looking at a wall and not at anybody.
"Hey, Smoochy," Kai said curtly. Smoochum refused to turn around. "Can you use Heal Bell?"
Smoochum blinked and finally turned around, looking up at Kai. Hilary, Ray and Tyson gawked at him in surprise.
"If you can use Heal Bell, use it now. Otherwise your trainer and the others won't recover."
Smoochy's lips made a perfect little 'o' as if something had just occurred to her. She finally stood up and scrambled into Mari's lap. Once there she sat down and began to sway.
Ding, ding…
A bell chimed but it sounded like it was all in their heads. As Smoochum swayed she began to glow and a psychic healing wave radiated off her. Everyone watched with baited breath. For a moment nothing seemed to be happening but then suddenly Mari lifted her arms of her own accord and swept Smoochy up into a hug. Max and Lyle collapsed on the floor, sighing with relief. Daichi leaped up all of a sudden, hopping madly from leg to the other.
"I've gotta pee!" he cried, running over to a pot plant.
"Don't pee in there!" the redheaded woman scolded. "I'll show you where the bathroom is!"
She ushered him away. The rest of the bladers tried not to look so embarrassed. Kai distanced himself by going over to the counter and looking over it. It was piled up with a number of paper records that had been leafed through. Had the villains been searching for something? He picked up one folder that had been left open and Togepi made a small peep in surprise. He moved the file to the side. Sitting underneath it was a set of tiny keys and a key card. Deciding it would be a good idea to set the card away for safekeeping, he stashed it in his wallet. He had no doubts about what the tiny keys were for.
"You know," the blue-haired middle sister of the shopkeepers piped up, "we really should thank you for what you did."
"We didn't actually do anything," Ray admitted. "To be honest, everything that just happened has gone completely over my head."
"If you hadn't showed up those hooded weirdos probably would have left us as we were," the eldest sister added. "We could at the very least be grateful to you and Flora for that. By the way, it's good to see you again."
"Oh no, you know me," Flora blushed, rubbing the back of her neck. "Always happy if I can help in even a small way."
"You all know each other?" Lyle asked, sitting up and propping himself on his arms.
"Known Flora for a while," the middle sister replied. "Been quite the regular here, when you consider how far away she lives. Even worked here in the past."
"Yes," Flora nodded, then gasped and snapped her fingers. "Oh! This would probably be an appropriate time to start introducing people. Everyone, these are the esteemed sisters of the Pretty Petal Flower Shop: Rita, Nicole," Flora gestured to the eldest woman and the middle sister respectively, "and the one who just ran off is Natalie. Girls, these new friends of mine are Hilary, Tyson, Ray, over there is Kai – and Togepi – and they are…"
She looked over to Mari, Max and Lyle. They were starting to get up, swaying a bit from stiffness of being stationary for too long. "No idea who they are."
The three of them ended up falling back down again. They introduced themselves, completing that round of formalities. Rita noted the dirty and dishevelled appearances of the trainers. "Got here through the woods, didn't you? It's late so you should probably stay the night."
"Have you got food?" Tyson immediately inquired, stomach grumbling. "Because I haven't had anything other than berries for the past day and a half."
"Berries are good for you," Flora pouted.
"Of course we have food," Nicole said. "Just be mindful that the bed and breakfast here will cost you; we aren't a Pokémon Centre."
"Yeah, okay," Tyson agreed disappointedly. "Sounds fair."
"But," Rita added, "since you did free us and all, how about we give you a discount? Just for tonight, the Pretty Petal Flower Shop is half price."
"Thank-you so much," Max gasped gratefully. "I am so hungry."
"We all are," Lyle grumbled. "You don't mind if I use your phone, do you? Need to call my parents. They're in Rustboro City and I was supposed to go home yesterday."
"Not at all! Phone's behind the counter, feel free to use it," Nicole offered.
The sisters went into their bed and breakfast mode, setting up the table and bringing out the linen for the bedding. Kai handed over the keys to their handcuffs, allowing them to properly rid themselves of the chains. As the sisters were preparing to go on with business was usual, the trainers offered a helping hand, cleaning up the shop and righting all of the things that Team Magma had searched through and left lying around.
Over dinner, the conversation mostly involved the two split groups getting up to speed with each other and for the sake of light-hearted conversation, Tyson went into incredible detail about the secret evolution garden in the woods (between mouthfuls, that is). The sisters were also enamoured with the recount of that experience. By the way they talked about it with Flora, it seemed that finding that place had been an aspiration of hers for a number of years. The dialogue eventually petered down to small talk, driven primarily by the shop sisters wanting to know what Flora had been up to since they last saw her – "how were her parents? Would she be going back to school? Did she have job?" and other such things. However, it eventually became hard to keep avoiding certain topics.
"I can't help wondering who those guys were," Ray said during a slight lull in the conversation.
"Those two who were keeping everyone prisoner were in Oldale Town at the same time as Team Aqua," Hilary supplied. "That's totally suspicious, right?"
"They also warned us not to mess with Team Aqua," Kai reminded her, "and they were right at that time."
"How does that matter now? They're clearly just as bad, if not worse. Didn't you hear the other guys? That Jono guy tried to kill them with his fire horse!"
"Called a Ponyta," Mari corrected for the fourth time.
"And they definitely called themselves Team Magma," Ray looked to Max for clarification. He nodded.
"That seems almost impossible," Nicole remarked offhandedly, bringing two pies to the table in oven-mitted hands. "Who wants Leppa berry pie?"
"I do!" Tyson and Daichi both exclaimed, even though they both still had a pile of food on their plates.
"The policewoman in Oldale Town said pretty much the same thing about Team Aqua," Ray mused. He turned to Rita, who sitting across the table. "Do you girls know anything about them?"
"Can't really say I do," Rita replied apologetically.
"Me neither," Natalie added, elbows propped on the table and chin in her hands. "Last time I heard anything about either Team Aqua or Team Magma I was eight."
"Yeah," Nicole said wistfully. "It was a very long time ago. What was their deal back then? Weren't they trying to go into space?"
"There was a very publicised report about Team Magma trying to steal rocket fuel," Rita said, creasing her brow as she tried to think of more details about the reports, "but I think their main goal, along with Team Aqua, was to try to force some sort of major climate change event?"
"From space?"
"The science is sound." Rita shrugged.
"But they've reformed recently, they even said so," Hilary recalled. "That Alex guy, it looked like he was from Team Aqua. He was dressed all pirate-y just like every other member of Team Aqua we've seen."
"This is the fourth time we've been dragged into a crazy situation with them," Max sighed. Realising that most of the others were looking at him in puzzlement he quickly added: "well, the third time for most of you."
"I just don't understand what an organised crime gang would want from a flower shop," Ray said, reaching for a slice of the pie only to realise that Tyson and Daichi had already eaten most of it.
The sisters exchanged worried looks.
"They were certainly trying to get their hands on our Super Sap fertiliser," Natalie concluded. "When they came in here they asked us for a fertiliser recipe."
"Only fertiliser we sell is packaged mulch," Nicole explained. "Certainly not recipes and especially not the Super Sap."
"What is Super Sap?" Flora asked.
"It's a fertilising formula we engineered only a few years back," Rita answered. "Made it using grass Pokémon sap. It works wonders on wilted and dying plants but it's extremely potent. Even when we use it we dilute it in water and fix it in mulch. Too much can cause some things to get out of control very quickly."
"What would a gang want with something like that?" said Hilary.
"Could possibly be extremely explosive," Natalie said casually.
"E-explosive!" Hilary, Ray, Max, Flora and Lyle spluttered. Tyson and Daichi choked on their food.
"You mean to say that we possibly walked in on some terrorist activity?" Max exclaimed. "Are we safe anymore?"
"We don't know if it's that explosive," Rita said, giving Natalie a stern glare. "At the very least it's combustible."
Nicole nodded. "Tried to revive one of our potted trees that was suffering in the summer heat about a year back. Gave it some of the Super Sap and only left it in the sun during the morning. When I came back to water it before lunch it was on fire!"
"You sure that some fire-type Pokémon didn't come along and do that."
"A fire-type would have charred it instantly and left a charcoal husk. It caught alight."
"So aside from knowing that it can spontaneously combust in the heat," Ray summarised, "you don't know what it could do if, say, it was hooked up to a fuse."
"No idea," Rita said. "This isn't a bomb factory; we try to stop things from catching fire, not ignite them."
Flora folded her hands over her chest. "If what you say turns out to be true, then… I-I should go home and tell my parents about it. Think I should leave right away." She stood up and was already making her way to the back door when Nicole said:
"Don't be crazy, Flora. It'll take you weeks to get to Fortree City without a Pokémon that can fly you. Stay the night and I'll let you borrow Troppo in the morning."
The table settled into a nervous silence. The bladers and Hilary were getting the sinking feeling that they were quite suddenly being dragged into something dangerous. They only hoped that by the time they got to Rustboro City they could pass what they knew onto the relevant authority and never encounter either Team Aqua or Team Magma again.
A/N: Is this a return to weekly updates? (Probably not. I have exams soon). And to the people who was hoping it was a good guy coming to save the day: sorry. It's just another bad guy trying to start shit. Obviously this is terrible and nowhere near the end of the group's involvement with these shady bunches.
Character note: okay, so if you have a good memory you would remember Courtney and Tabitha from R/S/E, right? Well, they're not in this story. But there are two Magma Admins who are in this story based on Courtney and Tabitha and some interesting trivia I discovered recently. Basically, Courtney and Tabitha in the games have their names the wrong way around. They're both girl names, but Courtney is actually a unisex name, due to it being a boy name in antiquity. Tabitha, however, has never been a boy name. So the fact that they chose Courtney for the female admin and Tabitha for the male admin is really weird. The Tabitha and Courtney who appear in this story are OCs based on the original Tabitha and Courtney but with their names the right way around. That's it. That's my story.
Also, before I forget, a few alterations to my draft plans resulted in the appearance of an OC who wasn't supposed to appear for another 10 chapters. User ajkent14z submitted Alex to me and I'm going to have a lot of fun with this one.
Please review! I love it when you do!
