This chapter is mostly exposition. Little to no action. I understand this is part of the test for the true quality of a story, so I hope this is just as good as any of the other chapters.
Enjoy.
PMD 2: A Novelization
Chapter 28: Grovyle's Story
Alex woke up to the sound of water. His eyes were greeted with sunlight as he opened them…
His mind took a few moments to get itself in gear and actually register what these meant.
He finally managed to open his eyes and the sun was overhead, blinding him. After that experience in the future, he never thought he'd be more grateful to see it again… or feel how warm it was.
He turned his head away from it and saw blue skies and an ocean ebbing and flowing nearby…
We made it… we're back in the past… our- no, Eve's time…Eve!
He shot upright upon thinking of his partner. His heart calmed when he spotted Eve not far off from him. They were at the beach… he was reminded of how they had met here…
Eve soon woke up, shaking sand out of her fur.
"Where?" she murmured sleepily and looked around "the beach?" she saw him and a relieved smile spread on both their faces.
"We're back… aren't we?" she said, quickly shaking off the drowsiness.
"Looks like it," Alex responded "Thanks to you." He said and they clasped paws, affirming their partnership.
He heard a groan behind him and Alex turned around to see Grovyle also sprawled on the sand. He was just getting up and looking around.
"Sunlight… water's flowing… we made it back… yes?" Grovyle mumbled, his eyes falling on them.
"Yeah! This is where I found Alex when we first met!" Eve said excitedly. She looked around the beach again and located a spot close to a cluster rocks near the local cave.
"I found him right around here, passed out." Eve said and Alex nodded, he remembered waking up around there too.
Grovyle wiped some sand off his arms and glanced at the spot Eve was pointing at, nodding.
"Hmm… our first trip sent me into the Eastern Forest… we ended up miles from each other that first time…"
Eve grimaced as she looked around the beach.
"I want to hear a bit more about how this whole time travel-thing works but this isn't really the place… we ought to find somewhere a bit more private. How about Wigglytuff Guild?" She didn't really wait for a response though as Alex and Grovyle started to speak but she pushed on smiling "Yeah, the Guild should do, let's go."
"Hold it…" Grovyle said calmly and gently stopping her with a hand "If we go there, will I be well-received? I seem to recall everyone thought I was an outlaw last I was here." Grovyle said with an amused smile.
Eve chuckled nervously as the thought occurred to her.
"Oh… heh heh… oh yeah…" she said weakly "I almost forgot…" and blushed.
Alex held in a small laugh. She had just saved them all from a dangerous situation and now she was letting her leadership run away with her.
"You're right, we need to find somewhere more private talk and plan things out. But the Guild is too dangerous for me." Grovyle pointed out.
Then Eve perked up.
"Wait a minute, I know a place!" she then looked a bit uneasy "But we'll need to go through Treasure Town to get there."
"Shouldn't be a problem if we sneak through…" Grovyle assured her "Lead on."
o0o
After a careful trip through the brush on the edges of town, they arrived at a cliff that was just beyond the town.
Alex glanced back as they arrived.
"Don't think anyone saw us…" he murmured and followed his companions out onto the cliff.
"This is Sharpedo Bluff," Eve explained to Grovyle, who raised an eyebrow "I think it's because the cliff face looks like a sharpedo." She elaborated. Sharpedo were, as the name implied, shark-like and were shaped like missiles.
"Right…" Eve looked around for anyone hanging around the cliff "No one around…" she then shifted aside several masses of leaves and grass… to reveal a hole in the ground with a dirt stair-way going down. Grovyle blinked, a little stunned that he hadn't seen the hidden hole before Eve had uncovered it.
Eve gestured for them to go on in and Grovyle walked in, Alex following him down.
They emerged into a spacious room with a wide opening in the cliff-face to the right with teeth-like spikes of rock, pointed up and down, keeping the opening secure. To the left was a small nondescript fountain of water in the back of the cave. The rest of the room was largely empty except for a small pile of straw and material for making beds in the corner.
Eve covered the entrance back up from inside and came down, glancing around the room and sighing with relief.
"Good… no one's trashed the place… I suppose that just goes to show how little attention this place draws. I lived here before me and Alex joined the Guild."
Grovyle was finishing with taking in the room and nodded in approval.
"I would guess this is inside the… mouth of the cliff. A very suitable place. Well hidden." And he gave her a small smile of admiration. She returned the smile.
"I think we'd better rest up here. We've all been through a lot."
Grovyle and Alex nodded in agreement with this.
o0o
That evening, they had set up beds and were resting as Alex and Eve related to their new companion how the two of them had met, how they had joined the Guild, and their adventures as Team Long Ears. It took several hours to get to how Dusknoir had finally pulled them into the future. Grovyle silently listened, his attention never pulling away from them at any point. He even smirked, amused when they mentioned their team name.
When they finally finished, Grovyle sighed, a look of guilt on his face.
"To think… you're the same Alex… my partner back in the future and I almost killed you in Crystal Cave."
"It's alright…" Alex said calmly, and it was in his mind. He understood now that Grovyle had been a mission then and he had honestly not wished to kill them… but they had been determined to stop him.
"So you and Alex worked together in the future, Grovyle?" Eve said.
"Yeah, we were searching for the locations where the time gears would be in the past. Alex's ability was key in doing that."
"You mean the Dimensional Scream?" Grovyle nodded.
"How'd you know there was a time gear related every time?"
"The Dimensional Scream only works under two conditions… perhaps you just don't know them?" Grovyle said. The silence prompted him to go on.
"First off, it requires the presence of a trusted pokemon partner. Alex never had visions unless I was around."
"What? But he was having visions only a day or two after we met!" Eve exclaimed.
Grovyle quirked an eyebrow.
"So? Doesn't that just show much you trusted each other from the start?" he said and Eve was momentarily dumbstruck. Alex could also feel himself flushing a little.
"Well… when you put it like that…" Eve said shyly once she recovered "It's a little embarrassing…"
"It probably helped that Alex had lost his memory so he ended up getting attached to you quickly…" Grovyle explained then blinked as if he had just noticed something. He pulled himself back to the conversation though and continued.
"At any rate, as I was saying, the Dimensional Scream only works around a trusted partner. The second condition is that it only activates where time gears are involved, hence how we could be sure a time gear was there if it triggered for us."
"That's odd…" Alex muttered "I don't think Drowzee or the waterfall cave had anything to do with time gears. Did they Eve?"
"No, for us the Dimensional Scream activated under plenty of situations completely unrelated to time gears." Eve said, speaking to Grovyle, who considered it for several moments.
He apparently couldn't think of a counter-explanation as he finally just shrugged.
"I find that odd myself… it really never did activate in the future unless a time gear was involved. Maybe it just works differently in this time."
Well, that would explain why I got nothing from that time-frozen waterfall back there in the future.
"Alex and I went all over the land searching for the locations of those time gears and Alex impressed me at times when we were trying to find our way to those places. Crystal Cave for example-"
"The unification of the three crystals?" Alex cut-in.
"Yes, I didn't know much about Azelf but you apparently knew one or two things then and solved the problem in the end." Grovyle said, with a fond smile.
Alex was thinking of his and Eve's first trip through that cave and the Scream that had come to him there.
It's ironic… I gave myself the answer… well, mostly…
He hadn't recognized his own voice… but now it was no wonder it had sounded so familiar.
"Then it came time to go back to the past…" Grovyle said, his voice taking a graver tone now "Something happened in that time tunnel… I don't know what, but it generated a lot of turbulence and we got separated. We came to this world miles from each other." Grovyle was looking at Alex with a faraway look.
"I can't state how much I worried about you… but I had faith you'd pull through… I never once thought I was actually fighting you at any point." Grovyle heaved a sigh "Alex… I'm so happy to see you again, no matter what form you take…and I'm so sorry…"
Alex could feel his old friend's grief over having attacked him.
"Again Grovyle, it wasn't your fault… we were lied to and thought you were the bad guy. I guess we were all fooled…"
Grovyle rubbed his eyes with finger and thumb and then focused.
"Alright… so we're all together on this? We're going to work together collect time gears?" he said, looking at both of them.
"I'm just making sure: time stopping in the locations around the time gears is just temporary, right?" Eve said.
"Right, the moment we get those time gears in place at the top of Temporal Tower, it should reverse the slowing of time and restore time to normal everywhere."
"Alright then, we're in. Right, Alex?" They nodded to each other.
"Then let's get some sleep. It's late and we're going to have a busy day tomorrow." Grovyle said.
o0o
Grovyle woke up later that night… it was still dark out… he glanced around the room out of cautionary habit. Alex the pikachu was still dozing away on his back. However, Eve's bed was empty. He looked around more…
Where'd Eve go? He glanced at the exit. Maybe outside?
He got up and quietly moved around Alex to the exit and went out.
A cool, refreshing sea breeze was rippling the grass on the bluff-top, giving the night air a rather enjoyable quality. Grovyle looked around the bluff and soon spotted the eevee sitting at the point of the bluff, looking over the horizon. He stepped up next to her.
"Couldn't sleep?" She glanced up at him, and yawned.
"I suppose… just thinking on a lot of things…"
"About Dusknoir?" Grovyle asked, curious.
"Sorta…" she said "I was shocked to find out he was the bad guy, yeah… but all the darkness and the still air back there in the future… it really drove it all home about how little we value these things we see everyday…" she sounded sad as she spoke.
"I'd known only that darkness all my life…" Grovyle said "When I first experienced a sun-rise in this world…" he shook head in disbelief "I was just blown away… it was just so… beautiful…" he couldn't think of a better word for it.
"Yeah… we take things like that for granted and we don't value them enough… when they're really the most precious things to us in life."
Their conversation was interrupted when light started to flood across the land and they glanced back behind them to see the sun rising. Eve breathed in, taking in the warmth and then breathed out, relaxing.
"I don't think I've ever found a sun-rise so… renewing…" she said contently "That trip in the future really opened my eyes though…"
Grovyle watched the sunrise for a short while… then he felt he needed to ask:
"Eve… back in the future… that last situation with Dusknoir and Dialga… I had given up. I saw no way out. Yet, you held on… you even managed to devise a plan where I had failed to. How did you hold on to hope through all that? I have to know." Eve blinked, a little stunned but she frowned slightly as she thought about it. She answered after a few minutes…
"To be honest… I'm not sure… but thinking back on it, I think it was because Alex was there."
Grovyle raised an eyebrow… his curiosity rising.
"Ever since I met him, Alex just seemed to radiate courage… there were so many adventures, which we told you about… and I don't think I would've been able to do a lot of them if Alex hadn't been there with me."
Eve then pulled out the pouch containing her Relic Fragment and opened it. Grovyle stared, perplexed at the unique pattern on the rock.
"This was my original inspiration: my Relic Fragment. I still haven't found the truth behind it but I think without Alex, I would never have a chance of finding out since I wouldn't have the courage to even form an exploration team. He's done so much for me." she fondly.
Grovyle took in her words quietly and then responded.
"I think I understand…" he said slowly "Back in the future when I told you about not being afraid… about sometimes just going into a situation without fear of the consequences… to be honest, that's something Alex once told me…" Grovyle admitted. The eevee blinked, somewhat awed.
"He showed me a lot about courage and it seemed like he just had a quality that drove others to keep going through even the hardest circumstances. More than once, when we were in a tight spot or I was facing uncertainty, he'd tell me that… or something along those lines. It seemed like it never failed to motivate me to keep going or to try something when we were short on time… even if it seemed insane at the time." Grovyle finished, chuckling to himself. He found it ironic now that he had given Alex's quote to him and his partner.
Eve smiled in response and then yawned again, getting up and stretching. She then put the Relic Fragment away as she spoke.
"Well, it's morning… we'd better get ready to go." She said and led the way back down the stairs.
Grovyle followed, he glanced at the sunrise one last time… a sad grimace crossing his face, but he quickly banished it and joined his companions down below.
