Warnings: Natural disasters, history

Chapter Twenty-Five - Spirit and Spirits

"Ok, so you run a gang."

"Yes."

"And on the other side of Gearan is a rival gang."

"Yes."

"And so you fight a lot."

"Yes."

"Why aren't you fighting in the city then?"

"Because no one wants to admit that Venam's nido bunnies scare the shit out of them and will absolutely bring the city down on our heads if we do it."

"... That sounds like way more responsibility than she says she'd take."

"That is because Venam likes to pretend she's a stupid teenager because it's better than trying to convince everyone she's not. Most of the time."

"Fair."

Aya could see how that would work and considering her fight with Luca and the bridge buneary, it did seem easier to look like a complete bitch than fix a town. "Anything I should worry about?"

She was really only asking this so she could scoot from being near Karrina to, dealing with the problem and far the fuck away from Karrina. She didn't even know why but the longer she was around her, the more the world seemed to fall out of place. The more a nagging itch bugged at her mind and she needed, needed to do something to right it. Or just go away from the wrong thing. Because "do something" could mean "kill Karrina" and she didn't want to do that.

Or maybe she just didn't like Karrina as much as she had after that first day. That'd also make sense.

Karrina grinned but it didn't reach her eyes. "One asshole has a vigoroth."

"Neat." Aya prayed her voice didn't sound as bored as it felt. "I'll see you in there then."

Karrina paused, looking at her with narrowed eyes. "We'd appreciate you being there at the beginning, you know."

Aya raised her hands and smiled. "I'll only be a few minutes, I promise. It's not like I can go any other way to Sheridan, you know?"

Just saying the word Sheridan brought a weird taste to her mouth. Like lillies in water and roses on wind.

Karrina watched her a second more before smirking. "Sounds good. You can come in and surprise them."

"Sure," Aya agreed placidly enough, her gaze having been caught by something, or what was more likely, someone, standing high to the branches of a tree. Karrina went inside, and Aya watched her go. Then she approached the person to the left of the cave. Their red cap was clean, white hair no longer down his chest and tired in neat, thick brades instead. Aya hesitated, then moved over in slow careful steps. "Old one?" she started, because she didn't want to spook him, and terms of endearment still spooked him despite a decade of dealing with them due to over three hundred decades of not.

He didn't jump, but she saw his cheeks twist upward. "I wondered when I would meet you here, little chaos child." The large man turned, and knelt down to greet her, his hands the size of her ribs. "I thought I'd miss you, and miss your birthday until a full year went by."

Aya wanted to laugh at him, for he was just like his son and so dramatic, a family of playactors. "Hi Grandpa Z," she said, letting him scoop her up in a hug. "I thought you'd be with Omni. Isn't he toddling?"

"Indeed," he agreed, lifting her up on one arm. "But… we felt an omen on the wind. And your uncle gave us a call. So we decided I should make up for not going to Unova and meet you around. And, I have an interest of my own around here. There are some ancient treasures I believe would be better off unused."

"... I see." Not that she minded, but she hoped the man was careful. Just because he was three thousand years old and virtually unrecognizable to anyone but the most fervent historian didn't mean he was safe, after all.

"Also," he pointed with one large finger towards his left, where a boy was scribbling furiously. 'There's a little nest of flabebe over there. Lucina here was curious to see if any of her seeds took bloom in these thousands of years." A black and red creature floated up to her with a flower. She shook it in greeting.

"Hello, Lady," Aya said quietly. If only people knew there was a living trove of history walking the earth. But he didn't want that, so she didn't talk about it. And that was fine. He would go to the earth when he was ready and no sooner. That was the gift of being an Old One.

Granted, thanks to her Uncle he was also technically another grandpa. Her life was weird. Her life was really fucking weird.

The little floette waggled her flower at Aya in greeting again, settling on her master's hat.

"How are your seeds?" She asked the Pokemon. It was only polite to speak to an old Pokemon directly, even if they were going to be translated. Which, due to her hearing aids, they would be.

She got a wag of her flower.

"Time has made them grow and change," the giant supplied in his soft, gentle voice. "A few have grown in other regions, though it seems that Kalos soil has remained its best."

"I see…" It was rather rare for regions to have enough variation in climates that were capable of housing all over eight hundred species of Pokemon, even before you counted the myths. Aevium and Reborn were places that supposedly did, boasting the rarest of the rare encounters, but even the common Pokemon struggled to live with so many natural predators around it.

Lucy floated over to Aya, who obediently cupped her hands for the floette to settle on. Grandpa Z could cradle the Pokemon with one palm. It took her three hands she didn't have. She watched the small creature shake out her flower once more and deposit a single seed about the size of her pinkie finger.

"... I should have seen that coming," she muttered, and regarded the small, black and red seed. "Are you sure?"

AZ nodded. "We've passed them around to quite a few trainers, a young woman who was dying her hair for example, and others. We want to see if trainers can raise a florges. This one won't birth its flower for a few months, but you should put it in the right soil anyway. Let it grow. Let it be born. You got those pots from your grandmother, yes?"

Aya nodded and obediently took them out. She set one green pot onto the ground and took out the basic soil. Lucy wrinkled her pea sized nose but allowed the seed to be buried in it and dampened by the tiny inner sprinkler system.

"Check on it twice a week," the giant warned her as she finished setting up the planter and storing it away. "Nothing more temperamental than an ignored infant."

Aya thought of the now named Teo, likely sulking in his ball. "Yeah, I've noticed."

AZ's eyes flickered. "We can take him from you, you know. You have enough on your plate."

Being left in a house after carefully negotiated terms, seeing two shocks of pink that she knows in her bones, fear, aching, fear, hollow-

Aya bit her lip and shook her head no. "He's not fit to be a battler yet. But I think he thinks the worst of me already. I'm not going to prove it by quitting on him."

AZ nodded, a small smile gracing his face. "Very well, let your uncles know if you change your mind. I have no talent with these newfangled electronics." He rose to his feet in an ungainly mass and Aya smiled at him, looping her arms around his neck as he moved, until he could hug her safely back. Then he set her back down.

Lucy waved her flower farewell.

"I'll be in this region a bit longer." He said as she began to turn away. "There are rumors of an underground library. Have you heard anything about such?"

Aya blinked. "Actually yeah."

Karrina had no idea how long it had actually been but it was definitely more than a couple of minutes.

Nidorino charged forward, head bowed, slamming into the vigoroth, horns oozing purple as his spikes grew longer and longer. The vigoroth bellowed its rage, clawing at the sharp ears. It screeched. Karrina stumbled back, covering her ears. On the other side, a tweedy little man, dressed to the nines, stared her down with a dangerous smirk.

"I suppose the sewer queen of the east really is nothing but bark," he said, voice lofty and clear over the rest of the fighting, solrocks and electrike, houndour and staryu, so many pokemon. Still, his goons find the time to laugh at her. "Knock her off, Vig, and you'll get an extra treat tonight."

The vigoroth shrieked and leaped for her head. Karrina scrambled backwards, fear bubbling in her throat at the thought of so much lost work, so much pain and guilt and fury. She was supposed to be protecting so much only to lose to-

There was a sickening thud and the vigoroth dropped to the cave floor, bleeding from its mouth. A lycanroc stood in front of her, green eyes turning red before her eyes before howling and making the cave tremble.

"Sorry," Aya said beside her with a tiny smile. "Had to make an entrance."

"Did you really?" Karrina said, pushing herself to her feet.

"No but I did get waylaid by a giant with a tiny flower." Aya turned her head. "Come on back, Sadie, you're not fighting a machoke." She swapped pokemon with quick ease.

Karrina glanced at the girl again, who clearly thought she had said nothing strange in the slightest. "I see…?"

"Don't think about it too much. Cheshire!" Her eyes didn't even flicker from the giant bat as it got smacked to the ground by a machoke's open hand. "You all right?"

Cheshire let out a delighted chirrup, his heart shaped nose exploding with pink energy and smacking machoke into a wall. Aya whooped her delight. "That's it! Go go go!"

Cheshire screamed and for a moment Karrina thought her eyes were failing her as the air burst pink once more, toppling the fighting type to the ground with singular ease.

The lanky enemy gang member was no longer smiling. "You cheat!"

Aya grinned, all teeth. "Get gud, sucker."

The man snarled and threw another ball and out popped a small ape creature, about the size of Aya herself.

The mankey screeched and threw itself into the fray, scratching at the bat as he clung on. Only it quickly ended up thrown hard enough to make the cave walls shudder.

"Welp," Aya said, before lifting Karrina over her shoulder, and bolting down and away, yelling a scolding at her swoobat, who circled around with shameless squeaks before being smacked by a rock.

Honestly, he deserved it.

"I'm never asking you for help again," Karrina declared, wheezing for breath. Her friends were also with her, and most of the gang from West Gearan. "You almost caved in one of the few places safe from the calamity the fuck is wrong with you and your crazy bat?"

"I stopped the damn fight, what do you want?" Aya muttered, rubbing dust out of her sweater "You were the one who nearly got knocked off of a ledge, where's my thanks for that?"

"You almost killed me!"

Aya rolled her eyes. "I did not. It wasn't even an actual collapse. I've seen cave-ins. He smacked the wall and knocked over some rocks that were already brittle from it being a fucking mine." It wasn't even like she had done it on purpose. You had to hit Mankey stupid hard or they would get back up, it was just common sense. She felt bad about the wall and the flight risk but the mankey was going to cause more damage.

Karrina stared at her like she had been the one knocked on her head instead of the swoobat. "No wonder you're friends with Venam. I thought I was going to like you."

Aya twitched. "I thought the same about you, actually. Are we done, or are you going to lord your morals and shit over me some more?" Because if she was, Aya was going straight for that injured leg.

It'll just prove her point, Aya-chi, Fu-chan said to her in a chiding, but amused voice.

You're not a savage, Su-chan agreed in her customary thoughtful voice. And there are too many people watching. Be smart.

When her friends were right, they were right.

Karrina's face soured further. "Well, I did promise you a pokemon…" Her eyes narrowed. "But I can't trust you won't turn it into a killing machine."

Aya raised an eyebrow slowly, then the other. Then she sighed. "Look, Karrina, I'm going to make this clear, and if you don't want to give me a pokemon after that, that's fine, I'm all right with that, but I don't think you understand what pokemon are. Pokemon are-

-"Put scientifically, Pokemon are merely a separate branch of evolution that humans once took," said her therapist, rather matter of-factly in a room of people touched by pokemon in some way or another. "Far as I know anyway, I didn't really have an education, you know."

Aya stared at him openly, fingers smoking, shiny hearing aids glinting in the light of the room. "So…?"

"So you can't be treating Ho-oh like they're separate from you. On that day when you wrestled control away you became a child of rebirth, the sacred phoenix. All that ho-oh was is now an extension of what you already are, so what they could do must be an extension of what you can do. Pokemon are-

"- People of their own," she finished. "I can train and command them all I want to, but I'm not going to take their autonomy because of someone else's fear. Cheshire likes to overdo it, and all of the scolding I give him won't matter if I prove to just be a tyrant. He will learn. My pokemon will learn. But pokemon are always capable of murder and violence, no matter how adorable some may seem. You do them no favors by lying to them." She whistled and Cheshire, who had been circling about the tree with Ai the budew again, came streaking down and alighted on her shoulder. Ai squeaked - something about wind being nice crackled through her hearing aids - and stroked the hairs on Cheshire's body. "You don't do yourself any favors either. It's more complicated than that."

Karrina stared at her.

Aya made a face at her and shrugged. "I'm going now. Good luck with your gang problem."

She turned to head back into the cave but as she did a pokeball flew towards her face. She caught it and glanced at Karrina.

"Don't get me wrong," the woman said. "I still think there's something wrong with you."

Aya bit her tongue for five seconds. "And yet…?"

"I keep my word," Karrina said simply. "But I'm never asking you for help again."

Aya shrugged. "I'll take it, thanks." And hurried on.

I don't want to help you anyway.

She would of course if she needed to. She always ended up doing that.

Inside the cave, the wall that Cheshire had thrown the mankey into seemed perfectly fine. Which, okay, that seemed to be a little weird. Maybe it was a field thing. There were some regions where the environment could change incredibly quickly and was more malleable to the moves from pokemon, and then in turn could reset itself. Like those mystery areas that usually were on pokemon only landmasses.

That… did explain why Venam's gym sucked. She really should have paid attention to that. She rubbed her eyes.

She really needed to call Wes soon, so he could poke fun at her idea of how making friends worked. Or not, actually. Gah.

Aya made a face. "If the place ends up mostly fine anyway why was she so worried?" No one answered, even the few people in the cave just looked at her oddly, and she shrugged and began to make her way through the cave.

Now that she was actually able to look at it, see all of the overturned or unmoving minecarts and great purple gems that were bigger than her body, all Aya could think was, what the fresh hell was this for?

"Energy channeling, mostly."

Oh shit she'd said that out loud. She turned to her right and saw the familiar shape of the man from days and days before. His dark hair looked greasy even from here, barely held up by the weight of it. His clothes were neat and pressed, and there were circles under his eyes. There was an acrid smell to him, something that not even a thousand showers in sweet smelling soap would fix, and something in those hollow dark eyes told her it was a miracle he got out of bed to take those showers.

Ah, she thought. This is that lady's husband.

Years of Johtoan uncanny optimism rose up to tell her that he could still be helped, that there was still a person there who had crimes he must atone for and could not atone for in this state, that as a girl of the cloth and flame, she had to give it her all and try to help him.

But the rest of her, twelve and cynical could tell: This man was beyond her help.

That did not mean she wasn't going to try.

"My name is Keta," he said matter-of-factly, as if he was talking about the sky being blue to a colorblind person. "Walk with me, if you would."

Aya glanced about and shrugged. Sure, why not? She fell into step with him. His eyes barely flicked to look at her once she did and she did not struggle to keep pace. The slouch of his shoulders didn't make him walk any faster.

For a few moments, they walked in silence. Then she asked. "What kind of energy are they supposed to channel?"

He glanced about and shrugged. "Death's, I suppose. I was only supposed to oversee it. Enough cave-ins scared off much active mining after a couple of years."

"Ah." Those were some strange crystals then, ones that could bottle death. "For what?"

Another shrug. "It wasn't my concern to ask."

"Depression's funny like that," she said to him and he looked at her, eyebrows raised. "You're depressed," she said. "Right?"

"Rude of you to chair psychoanalyze me."

"...Sorry." She looked down, abashed

He waved a hand. "It's quite all right, little firebird." She stiffened up. "Ah, that's the look. You really thought you and your smoking hands weren't that obvious, didn't you?"

Aya huffed, scowling at the floor. "I didn't think there was anyone here who would know what it meant."

"I am from Four Island." He shrugged. "My father's family was from Rota. We are no strangers to the mystics, or of Johto's old ways. Sevii suffered after the Schism, you see."

"Kanto suffered from the Schism," Aya countered. "The islands suffered from Kanto's response to it. That's why Elise's plan was accepted so fast and Clair was allowed to become the representative. Desperation after forty years is a hell of an incentive."

"Indeed it is. Though the Fusabe returning to power is not ideal."

Aya raised an eyebrow at him. "Why?"

Keta led her across a bridge and she determinedly did not look at the water. "People still fear dragons, even with the acknowledgement of the harm of freezing temperatures and the strength of fairy tales. They are afraid of the tyrannical, self-centered dragons taking away what they hold dear to hoard, I imagine."

Aya thought about it. Then she shrugged. "That's a risk of any ruler. If you just take a family name at its own value then you'll be unsatisfied even if they're exactly what you want. The heir is a nice person. He's a good friend, and he's very soft and kind. Some would think him too soft. But Clair isn't and she'll hopefully set a nice standard to follow up on."

"And if she doesn't," he said, slow and flat.

Aya smiled at him. "Dragons can be beaten."

Keta made a face, a twitching frown that seemed to want to smile. "You have an odd definition of optimism." He stopped down a set of man made stairs, looking up at her in a way that could only be on purpose.

"Tell me," he said. "Do you believe in destiny?"

Aya frowned and tilted her head. "I believe everything has one, but it's too cocky of humans to assume they know what it is. Therefore, we must live as if we don't."

Keta laughed. It sounded like a choking purrloin. "Taelia would have loved you."

"Don't speak for the dead, it's rude and ill translated."

His smile remained, bitter as dark chocolate. "She would love you," he repeated. "You do everything she wished she could. Too bad it couldn't save your friend."

"Aye," she agreed, waiting for the shoe to drop.

The smile, cold as a broken faucet, only widened. "I have a test for you. If you pass it we will continue."

"Continue towards what?"

The smile became nothing but teeth. "Would you like to bring your friend back to life?"

A/N: Finally! We're back! Sorry I just needed to like: decompress majorly. Real life kicks me in the pants fairly often and December was a shoddy month. So I took January to chill and just write various things. Simply put, plans have been placed. Also, I've been playing lots of fangames and that's been fun. Anyway, moving on. I'll put up a new team update the next time one of Aya's partners switches or with the end of arc 2. The flabebe seed is not going to be a part of her team anytime soon, so no need to worry there. I will however be slipping pokemon in earlier or later depending on timeline and such. Until then, however, not much else is going on.

Also yes, AZ! Him and his... well that's in another story, but this fic is severely out of pokemon timeline, unlike the games. Once I settle a few more things, I will be linking to a timeline that should explain a lot, even if we don't have the story for everything. Some of this will come up in fuse, some of it in other stories, but you don't really need to know anything about the OCs that isn't going to be explained here. Everything else is hopefully optional.

So until next time!