Pokémon: 27 Deaths: 20
"I can't let you in here."
The speaker was a young woman with dark hair and a black Rocket uniform, standing with her back another door at the back of the warehouse. She had a powerful-looking Muk, Arbok, Vileplume in front of her, along with a four-legged black Pokémon that Saylee didn't know. It had horns and a chilling ridge of bones along its back, like some kind of undead Growlithe. When it snarled at Saylee, even the Rocket woman flinched.
"You'd be better off letting me in," Saylee said, letting Kaito and Chaz step in front of her. Carrie and Hernan were lagging behind, smashing cages open. "For the sake of you and your Pokémon. Can't you see they're in pain?"
"They're not mine," the woman said. "Anyway, they'll be fine, they're fully evolved…"
"I only have to stay until my mistress escapes, in any case," the Vileplume said snootily. "And keep intruders like you from ruining her plans!" She blasted a spray of poisonous purple smoke at them, which Chaz burned out of the air.
"How can you support these plans?" Chaz snarled, blasting fire at the gathering. The four Pokémon scattered and surrounded them. "They're hurting Pokémon!"
"Weak Pokémon," the strange black Pokémon snarled, fire curling from his jaws. "They're going to get stronger because of this! All Pokémon will get stronger! It's for their own good."
"Bad!" Tobias yelled sharply. "Not good! Bad! Hurts…" he whimpered and Saylee cuddled him tighter, gripping the stones in her fist. The Rocket woman flinched, then looked away from Tobias
"Team Rocket will make the world strong," the woman said, but her voice was hollow. It sounded like she was trying to convince herself as much as Saylee. "So we'll never have to fall and suffer again…"
"Too bad that Team Rocket has fallen already," Hernan said, punching the Weezing out of the air.
"Is Toby alright?" Carrie called, smashing her club down hard on the Muk. "Hurting all of these poor Pokémon is bad enough, but I swear, if you have hurt my baby…" The Rocket woman glanced uncertainly at Tobias.
"Everyone starts off weak," Saylee said, cradling Tobias in her arms. "And anyone can grow up to be strong. But not like this! Can't you see that?"
"Giovanni… he can't have lost, he's too strong for that!" the Muk roared. "Get these liars!"
"With pleasure," the black, fiery Pokémon snarled, leaping at Saylee. Kaito intercepted, catching the attacker between the jaws with the blunt edge of his scythe and then blasting water down his throat. The enemy fell back, choking smoke.
"Right," Carrie said, jumping over the fallen foe and swinging her club at the woman by the door. "Move it or I WILL go through you!"
The woman looked at the oncoming force of maternal fury and decided that Team Rocket wasn't a cause worth dying for. She dived out of the way as Carrie's club smashed into the door. It took three blows to knock the door off its hinges.
There was a haphazard selection of computer screens and a large aerial in the middle of the floor. A ladder was dangling down by the aerial through a hole in the ceiling. A purple-haired man was scrambling up the ladder while a green-haired man was rapidly typing. He glanced back at Saylee and began to type faster.
"Boss!" the strange black Pokémon yelped. Archer leaned down from the hole in the ceiling and returned all four of the Pokémon. Carrie jumped back from the flashing red beams; getting hit by a dematerialization beam not keyed to your genetic code wouldn't kill you, but it would hurt.
"Ready to go, Proton?" Archer demanded.
Proton grinned as the screens flashed red. "Ready to blow, boss!"
"Hold it!" Saylee shouted, starting towards him again. Hernan and Carrie both pushed past her, making sure she stayed back with Tobias as they attacked. Proton was too fast; he dropped a smokebomb the moment they moved, filling the room with choking, acrid black smoke. Saylee squeezed her eyes shut and started towards where she remembered the ladder being, tripping over the aerial in the process. Something in it sparked and Tobias abruptly stopped crying.
"Bad noise gone," he declared. "Bad men gone?"
"I think so," Hernan called. "I tried to grab the ladder and felt it get whisked away from me…"
"Saylee?" Carrie called as the smoke thinned out. "This screen has a countdown on it, and it's under five minutes…"
"Turn around and go, NOW!" Saylee called. "Run through the warehouse, open any cages that you see still occupied but do it quickly. You!" She shouted as she reached the door, pointing at the frozen (not literally, luckily for her) Rocket woman. "You too, run through the warehouse, start shouting that it's going to explode, unless you're going to tell me that he meant something else by 'ready to blow', and I'd love it if you could."
"Sorry," the woman said shakily, running off into the warehouse. "EVERYBODY RUN! THE PLACE IS GONNA BLOW!"
"Saylee, come on!" Chaz yelled sharply. Saylee ran for the door but stopped at the site of Kaito hacking at a cage in a corner of the room. "Carrie, help him open that and get whoever's in it out, then let's go!"
Hernan and Kaito hauled some kind of shining silver bird out of the cage. The timer hit two minutes and kept dropping.
Saylee climbed onto Chaz's back and got him to lift the bird in his claws so they could fly over the cages to the warehouse entrance while Carrie, Hernan and Kaito ran full pelt down the now deserted aisles. It looked like everyone was out; there were no more sounds of wailing Pokémon to be heard and Lorelei and the Rocket woman were nowhere to be seen.
"Keep moving!" Saylee shouted down as they fled from the building, trying to put the jewels in her pocket without dropping Tobias so she could return Carrie, Hernan and Kaito to their pokéballs. Before she could reach them, the building exploded.
It wasn't as big as she'd feared, more a number of small explosions that quickly turned the building into a raging inferno. Chaz spotted Lorelei and the Rocket woman and set Saylee and the silver bird next to them. "I'm going to go back and make sure nobody's still inside," he said, flying off and diving into the flames like a Poliwag diving into a pond. As soon as Carrie arrived, Saylee handed Tobias to her. She immediately began muttering to him, making sure he felt alright.
Saylee looked back at the burning building. Through the haze of smoke over it, she could distantly see a floating white shape flying away. Without Chaz, she couldn't go after it. The Rocket executives had escaped. All but one…
Lorelei and Jeaneatte were scowling at the captive Rocket woman, who was floating in the air in a haze of pink.
"It was… an experimental signal… to make Pokémon… grow faster," the woman groaned, shaking. "Some Pokémon… evolved quickly… even if they… couldn't… shouldn't…"
"And were they going to refine it so that it didn't cause them so much pain?" Lorelei asked icily.
"No… Proton said… unnecessary… finished… taking it… west… to Johto… for… the revival…" Tears of pain were starting to roll down the woman's cheeks.
"Jeanette, can you let her go?" Saylee asked. "I think she's going to tell us anyway. You don't have to hurt her."
"Seems unnecessary," Carrie added. Jeanette glanced at Lorelei, who rolled her eyes but nodded. The pink haze vanished and the woman dropped.
"Look, what's your name?" Saylee asked, crouching next to the coughing, shaking woman.
"V… Vera…" she choked. "I've been with Team Rocket more than ten years… I was going to join the Senior Executives if this went off well… but…" she shook her head. "Well, it did. But if it didn't… I wouldn't mind. This isn't what I signed up for…" She was crying again, curled up with her head pressed into her knees. "It used to be different, I swear…"
"I don't care too much about what used to be," Saylee said. "What I want to know is what's going to happen. Where are they going? Johto, you said?"
"To revive Team Rocket…" Vera said. "They're going to find Giovanni. They're all devoted to him. If he's fled Kanto, he has to be in Johto. I think that's where he's from."
"Johto…" Saylee sat back on her heels, frowning. She'd only ever read about Kanto's nearest neighbour, the nation to the west. Kanto was surrounded by huge mountain ranges for the most part, and the poisoned sea around the rest of it had only ceased to be actually corrosive in the past four or five years. Nobody she knew had ever been there; most people could barely get between towns, never mind across the mountains.
People from Johto didn't come to Kanto. Maybe they thought everyone was dead. Maybe everyone in Johto was dead. It wasn't as if news of the outside world ever found its way into Kanto.
"They've had a foothold there as long as in Kanto," Vera said. "Not openly criminal, though- that was how I started with Team Rocket, we'd all heard about the fighting in Kanto and I'd signed up to a project to try and come out and broker peace and rebuild the country…"
"Nobody else is in there," Chaz said, settling back down next to Saylee and glancing at the silver bird. It was starting to stir, prompted by Kaito. "What's going on?"
"What did you know about the war?" Saylee asked Vera.
"Kanto used to be a technological forerunner of the world…" Vera said, looking around the meadow. "From the point of view of other countries, it got arrogant. It lost respect for nature, for life that wasn't human… so Pokémon struck back."
"So everyone else in the world knows," Lorelei said bitterly, looking away towards the sea. She was probably thinking of the intense lengths that she had gone to to hide that very secret.
"And Team Rocket doesn't have respect for any life," Saylee said, standing up. "Lorelei… all of you have to come clean with what happened. There are leaders, sensible people, who'll know what to do… Lt Surge has a good head on his shoulders, and Misty, Erika and Koga…"
"You'd really trust the country with the knowledge that humans and Pokémon are enemies?" Lorelei asked, narrowing her eyes.
"Hey, I trusted you to get me here alive, didn't I?" Saylee said, looking at the jewels in her hand. "If we go to Johto, maybe we can get some of them to come out here. They'll know, so the people here might as well. Soon it'll be time to…"
The ghost of a thought slipped away from her. She pocketed the jewels. She'd only realize that she'd done so much later, out on the open sea.
"What are we going to do, Saylee?" Carrie asked. "Are we going after Team Rocket?"
Saylee nodded. "Get up," she said to Vera. "You're going to help me get to Johto."
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"Humans have very weak knuckles. But the heel of your hand there, with your arm straight there's a lot of force in it, so if your target is very solid then-"
"Do I want to know why you're learning how to punch from a Hitmonchan?" Blue asked, hopping down from Pete's back. "Don't you have a target to practice on?"
"You just got here," Saylee said.
"When did you get back, anyway?" Blue wanted to know. "For that matter, where the hell did you go? For all I knew, Lorelei murdered you and dumped you in the sea!"
"I found out where Team Rocket's going," Saylee said, imitating the arm motion that Hernan was showing her. Behind Hernan, Tobias was also trying out punches with his stubby little arms. "I'm going after them."
Saylee was deliberately not looking at Blue, but she knew that his expression had soured anyway. "Well, I'm honoured you hung around to say something this time," he said bitterly. "Are us lesser mortals going to be allowed some insight into your capricious whims this time?"
"They're bastards and it's convenient," Saylee said, rounding on him. "Sabrina said that Red is somewhere to the west. You and I both went as far west as the Plateau and Lance said we'd have to go farther still. I didn't think there was a way through the mountains before, but Vera knows a way. She's going to get me through to Johto."
"Why the hell do you trust her?" Blue demanded. "She's a Rocket too!"
"She's also got no Pokémon left and nowhere to go, so it's not like she can do anything to me," Saylee said. "And Bill confirmed that the tunnels she's talking about really exist. His grandfather lives on the other side of them, and if he made it through alive while maimed and bleeding… I have to go, Blue. It's been more than a year and a half since I left to find Red and I haven't even done that! And I can't let Team Rocket go, either. I've got to finish what I started…"
"Funny, since you running off again leaves me to finish what you started here," Blue sniped back at her. "If you're not going to be around, I'm the only trainer tough enough to look after Pallet and Viridian. Someone's got to finish what Red started, anyway…"
"Fine," Saylee growled, turning around and punching the air again. She could hear Pete's wings flapping and glanced back to see them flying away. "I was going to ask if he wanted to come with, but who cares if he doesn't want to?"
"But, Saylee," Carrie said softly, "won't that mean that you're going to be alone out there?"
Saylee's shoulders slumped and she nodded. "I'm sorry," she apologized for what felt like the millionth time. "When Professor Oak and Bill finish adapting the teleport pad, though, I'll be able to call on you guys as soon as I find Team Rocket… but they're from Johto, they've got people everywhere, and you guys are…"
"We know," Hernan said, patting Saylee on the arm. Tobias imitated him, patting Saylee on the ankle. "If they've got more power in Johto, then we can't afford to put them on red alert the second we set foot there."
"I'll miss you guys," Saylee said, scooping up Tobias and giving him a hug. "I'm sure some downtime will be fun anyway, right? You guys need to raise Toby, and running around fighting with him in tow is too dangerous. And Kaito's getting along really well with Sheska…" Sheska was the silver bird that they'd rescued from the warehouse. She claimed to be a Skarmory, a Pokémon that Saylee had never heard of before. She had become quite enamoured with Kaito, as her saviour, and the two of them were often to be seen sparring together, Kaito's sharp claws clanging off of Sheska's metallic wings. "That business at the Rocket warehouse… it shook both of them. They don't need to get mixed up in anything else dangerous…"
"And what about Chaz?" Carrie asked.
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"What's Blue's problem?" Chaz wanted to know. "Doesn't he miss Red at all?"
"Sure he does," Sam told him. "He just misses Saylee more, is all. Oh, he tries to hide it, but I know him too well." She winked at her old friend and held up two halves of a broken girder for him to weld together. "He said it was kind of terrifying when Red vanished… Red was the best trainer he or anyone else knew, from the sounds of it, and if something could take him down… he doesn't want to go through that again with Saylee. He's just bad at expressing it."
"Saylee's going to miss him a lot, too," Chaz said. "And she misses her brother. She talks about him a lot. I know I miss Ben. He was a good guy…"
"He was," Sam agreed, helping him heft up the girder onto a pile of mended beams. "It feels like less than it's been, doesn't it? And you know, I think I'd give just about anything to have a friend like that back…" she patted Chaz on the shoulder. "Except another friend. It's not worth it. That's how I feel, and that's how Blue feels too."
"I can understand that," Chaz said with a nod. "But Saylee and I have seen too many friends dead to give up on ones that might still be alive…"
"I can understand that," Sam said with a little smirk.
"Yeah, well, I wish Blue could," Chaz said, spotting his trainer walking over to them. "I don't think that jackass appreciates how much how he feels means to Saylee."
"You might be right about that," Sam said, ambling off. "Sometimes, I don't think he has any idea that they mean anything at all."
"Hey, Chaz," Saylee said, looking around. "Where'd Sam go?"
"They're digging a new well to the south, she's going to have a look at the water," Chaz said. "From the look on Blue's face as he and Pete flew past, all is not well?"
"He's a jackass," Saylee said, leaning against Chaz's neck. "Bill thinks they'll be able to test the new portpad in a week. Carrie made him a new foot, by the way, since the wooden one his grandpa made for him was kind of rotten… we didn't ask what she made hers out of."
"So as soon as it works, you'll be going?" Chaz asked. Saylee nodded.
"Vera's been quiet and well-behaved, so we should get there fine," she said. "You'll be there until we get to Johto, anyway." She hugged him. "I'm sorry I have to leave you behind, I just… I don't want to have to leave you in your pokéball for ages, but if you're seen…"
"I know," Chaz said gently. "I know that the whole point of the portpad is so we can get to you when it's time. I just hope that's soon, is all…"
"Me too," Saylee said. "Me too…"
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Sorry about the long time between updates. Hectic life has been hectic. Starting back at Uni, moving into my new flat, and doing tons of extra shifts at work in order to save up rent money… Oooft. As of tomorrow, I'm going to be living in my new flat, but we're not going to be able to get a modem installed until October 3rd. As such, I'm posting this final chapter now, but it's a quick, unbeta'd version. As soon as I have internet access, a more polished version of this chapter and an epilogue will be posted.
I've already half-written the sequel to this fic, based on my playthrough of SoulSilver. It's going well because I'm a LOT more cautious this time. Because I've got so much written already, I'll be able to post quite consistently once it's up. Saylee's got a lot of unresolved business to deal with, and a few secrets in store for her. Thank you for sticking with her thus far, and supporting her through the hard times.
Very special thanks to the brilliant Jack Falconerfor first leaving helpful reviews and then evolving into full-on beta. Your input on the chapters has been invaluable. Thank you so much :)
Uber special chocolate-coated thanks to the fabulous Key-chan, my muse, breeder of my plunnies and the other half of late-night cracktastic conversations that gave birth to the wider universe that Saylee is moving in. We've got a LOT of fun in store for y'all ;) Her DeviantArt gallery is a treasure trove of crack, foreshadowing and pretty art, so check it out if you dare ;)
Once again, thanks to everyone who read and reviewed. This story, even when it's been tough, has been fun to write, and it's even better to know that other people have enjoyed it as much as I have. Thank you : )
I do not own Pokémon. That happy right is Game Freak's.
