Chapter 52: Summit

The seasons had grown together, as they tend to do in the temperate climates. There would be mist in the morning, then a muggy heat during the day, and by nightfall, the cold would be so sharp you could swear it was about to snow. The clouds swirled unreadably in the sky for weeks over Pallet Town. The ground was littered with a red-orange porridge of formerly live leaves. Soon their colors would melt together into brown, then shortly after, blanketed in white.

Delia was watching a gentle rainfall through the kitchen window. Ever since Professor Oak had left for his expedition, she had felt oddly lonely. She wondered if it was wrong for a pregnant woman to feel lonely, but the feeling had been unshakeable. One hand caressed her swollen belly, which had grown firmer in the past months. She could feel him kicking, as if yearning to get out into the world. If only the world weren't in such a sorry state, she would want to let him out too...

Delia worried. She had become an expert at it now, since her son had left home. He was not in contact nearly as often as she would have liked, and every conversation of the sparse few that she did held some horrible news. Never explicitly, but she knew that he was hiding things from her. She saw the television programs, the things they called him...legend and prodigal, yes, but also revolutionary, coward, even murderer once. How she wanted to believe it was just sensationalism, but a not-so-deep part of her knew that her son was really changing the world, whether for better or worse.

It wasn't just Red (how she disliked that name...), it was Samuel Oak as well. And money was growing thin - she would be alright for a while longer, but raising a child was expensive.

He may be at the Indigo Plateau now, she thought. It'll be on every channel. The clouds parted, and a divine beam of light illuminated the moist carpet of leaves outside. I hope he succeeds, she thought, whatever that may mean for him. Delia wished Red luck, silently, then decided she would not watch the Indigo League challenge as it swept the national television broadcasts.

Worrying is bad for the baby.


A crowd had gathered, but only in the strictest definition of the words "crowd" and "gathered". Crowds gather for coronations, for sporting events, for festivals and concerts. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people, cheering, with their children clamoring to see on the shoulders of their parents, the whole mob moving in unison with the demands of the social event. When they gather, they are drawn inexplicably by a force of unity and belonging, a need to participate in something greater than themselves.

This was not that crowd, nor that gathering. This was two dozen people, brought together by disconsolate obligation. There were no children clamoring, no people moving aside from shivering in their coats. Indigo Plateau had no seasons aside from three months of cloudless sky and mild wind. The rest of the year was one long drift of light snow, biting wind, and swirling gray overcast.

Two cameras at two angles pointed at the mouth of the exit from Victory Road. All was still.

On a mound a stone's throw from the crowd stood the Four. A young woman in an elegant black coat and maroon hair, a shirtless bulk of a man with shoulders so rounded that they nearly touched his earlobes, an elderly woman seated in a chair with a mug of tea and a cane at her feet, and Lance. His cape rustled at his heels in the wind, damp from the snow. His red hair stood practically on end, leaving his sharply-angled face completely uncovered.

The Four decided it would be in bad taste to place bets on the boy's likelihood of survival, but Lance was least confident in the outcome that the other three seemed to agree on.

"I am the Dragon Tamer," he had reminded them, "and I still struggled to make the journey in less than a week."

"It's not the strength of the Pokemon that carries a trainer through," Bruno had replied.

"He has been through more than the Dragon Tamer has though, and without dragons," Lorelei reminded him.

Agatha had been silent throughout the discussion, only to comment that she anticipated that the boy would be at the Indigo Plateau's doorstep within three days of entering the cave.

It was now the morning of the fifth day. The Four had gone out to evaluate his progress each day after the second, using Bruno's Onix to search for him through the walls of the cave. On the morning of the fourth day, the Onix returned with no information.

"How is that possible?" Lorelei had asked.

Bruno exhaled sharply through his nose. "Either he is dead," he said stiffly, "or he has simply traveled too deep into the earth. There are places in the ground even Onix will not travel. And if has traveled too deep, he will certainly die."

The Four were silent after that news was delivered. "We will come again tomorrow," Lance said curtly.

And here they were. Bruno's Onix had returned that morning with miraculous news - the boy was alive, and near the surface, and moving. Thus the crowd. They anticipated his arrival within the hour.

"His room is ready?" Lance asked begrudgingly.

Agatha nodded, taking a sip from her mug. She had taken it upon herself to create the homey environment she suspected the boy wanted in his room, though without Lance's permission...until it was too late anyway.

"He can have the training area all to himself for the next week," Lorelei said.

"A week?"

"That's been the standard," she said, looking over the rim of her glasses.

"Three days."

"No! That's completely outrageous!"

"He is an extraordinary challenger, isn't he?"

"You're determined to make him fail," Lorelei accused.

"I'm determined to test the strength of our very likely successor in what I deem to be most appropriate," he said coolly.

"OUR successor, not yours. You are not a king, anything that we do not decide on together is not decided."

Lance turned to the others. "How many days?"

Bruno inhaled sharply. The cold air stung his throat. He would side selfishly - he wanted to see the boy fight in person, the sooner the better. "Three days," he agreed.

Lance turned his gaze toward Agatha. "How many?"

She chuckled. "I could choose any number, from none to one hundred, it won't make a difference to you. You've made your decision on how to treat this challenger, but remember how unfair you were to him when he gets walloped and tossed back down the mountain."

Lance's brows furrowed.

"That's him!" someone called. The Four turned to look.

Even from a distant, it was easy to tell that the boy's state was absolutely dismal. His clothes were torn and filthy. His face was sallow and bruised with dark circles beneath the eyes. Scuffs and dents patterned the Pokeballs around his waist. One of the League attendants immediately swathed him a blanket, but not quick enough to evade the cameras, which immediately began to roll footage and track the challenger's progress across the snow.

"There's fire in his eyes," Bruno said, his stony face watching as well. "These will be battles to remember, Lance."

"I'm counting on it," Lance said.

As Red walked past the mound that the Four stood on, he let his eyes pass over each of them. Lance locked eyes with the pale, scrawny, exhausted, disheveled child before him, and felt briefly scared of the heat coming out of his eyes.


He reached the top of Mt. Ember for the fifth time. He had made the journey every day since the first day, and each day it simultaneously easier than before, and harder. Easier because his legs grew stronger, his body leaner, and he was very well cared for in food and water and rest at the resort where he was staying. But harder because, with every summit, it seemed to only become emptier...

Professor Oak wiped the sweat from his brow, pulled out his canteen, and rested on a boulder that was lying on the rim of the mountaintop. He stared northward. The caldera was as empty as it had been every other morning. he was thankful that this time it wasn't as hot - or perhaps he had adjusted to the climate by now.

No luck again, he thought. But maybe he would find something this time, he convinced himself, and began his trek into the caldera. If nothing else, he was intrigued by that; the cauldron of the mountaintop was not rough and irregular with mounts of re-solidified lava as he knew it would be in an active volcano. No, here on Mt. Ember, the caldera was smooth like a bowl, charred black and flaky as if by an outside source of fire, not from magma within the earth. Not like a bowl, Oak kept telling himself. Like a nest.

He found nothing on this expedition that he didn't find on the previous ones. No footprints, no fossils, no droppings, or eggshells. "But it IS a nest", he asserted in his notebook, finalizing the shading of his sketches. He may as well, with so much time left until dusk.

Everyone returns to their nest eventually. If only we knew when.

He returned to the boulder and quenched himself from the canteen again. His hands reached for his calves, feeling for their newfound firmness in the daily morning hikes. The ache was nothing that he hadn't already experienced with aging.

The sun was beginning to rise. He watched the orange glow as it rose over the horizon that represented the Kanto mainland so many miles away.

He smiled. The sun doesn't rise in the north, he thought. And certainly not so quickly.


A shorter chapter, but the last one I will need to set up the Elite Four, and it's pretty much nonstop nonfiller from there until the end. Next chapters are already in the works. As previously stated in the fic, I have retooled the nature of the battles and the characters who participate in them to better illustrate the story that I want to tell, and that includes the Elite Four. They probably won't be what you expect, but hopefully you'll enjoy them nonetheless. Thank you for your continued readership, reviews, and support as always!

Stay awesome,

Curse