This story is co-developed by Titan127 and beta read by ShonnaRose and annasumanara (both on AO3).
Disclaimer: Pokémon is a registered property of Nintendo, the Pokémon Company, and GameFreak. This work respectfully uses the world and characters of the Pokémon series, with no intent of harm on the original creators. Please support the official releases of the Pokémon franchise.
Chapter 1: Dive to the Sky (6,474 words)
Twenty-nine thousand, eight-hundred forty-seven meters.
Twenty-nine thousand, eight-hundred forty-six meters.
The count in Gold's head told him all he needed. He was that far from the top. That's all that mattered to him, all that ever mattered to him, and all that ever would matter to him. He was twenty-nine thousand, eight-hundred forty-five meters from the top. Easy peasy berry squeezy.
His hands slipped in and out of minor holds and pulled him up the mountainside, covered by expensive Devon gloves that barely held back the world-eating cold burning his fingertips. His boots had spike-plated bottoms to give him extra traction, and they too were Devon branded. His pack, his climbing set, his rations, his multiple layers of insulated coats, all of it Devon. Gold had the best equipment imaginable—it had cost a fortune, but it would last him until he made it to the top. That was still twenty-nine thousand, eight-hundred forty-four meters away.
For only a moment, he stopped staring at the chilled slate in front of him to behold the mountain itself. Mt. Silver towered over every other man-made structure on Kibra. It was beyond Lumiose Tower, Spear Pillar, even Steven Stone's ego. It was the tallest mountain in the world, and as he traced his eyes along the undulating ridges on the landscape—coated in white some ways up—he could see his destination shrouded in distant fog. The summit.
He'd find what he needed there. If he could reach the summit, everything behind him would wash away and he'd be free. If he could reach the summit, no one could take that away from him.
Of course, it's not like anything was wrong. There wasn't a replaying scene in the back of his mind, looping endlessly like a broken record on an even more broken record player thing, no sir. The two standing right in front of him, lips brushing on Victory Road, weren't there. The only thing in his mind was that he was twenty-nine thousand, eight-hundred forty-three meters from the top.
Thirty thousand meters was a long way.
A fireball soared against a discotheque background of neon on black, just as the Gym Leader recalled his exhausted Arcanine. It misfired so wide that it was unbelievable. No high-level Pokémon or Trainer would send an attack directly skyward on their side of the field, because that would just end up falling right back down.
When the man's Machamp materialized across the midline, Gold's eyes traced the Flame Burst as it slowed at the peak of its flight, then plummeted back down. It slammed into the substituted, humanoid Pokémon, flames lashing across its four biceps and painting its gray skin in dark tattoos.
Its body seemed to grow an extra meter as all its muscles suddenly expanded in volume, their outer veins bulging within burned skin. The creature leveled an evil eye at him.
Oh. That was what people in the business called "not good".
Gold barely had time to think about how that was probably the most obvious play that the Gym Leader could have gone with. Blue Oak's Machamp. Male. Ability: Guts. History of highly aggressive plays and use as a revenge fighter in competitions. With his physical-oriented Dodrio on the field, he'd put himself in a position that left him unable to divert the course of the lobbed Flame Burst. All his missed interpretation didn't matter, since that huge, four-armed thing was already barreling down the battlefield at an alarming speed and Gold needed to respond before Trinity got snapped like a twig.
The Machamp's fist split the air open. It barely flashed past Trinity's leftmost head, and without missing a beat, she twirled the left head's neck around the vulnerable wrist, tying it in place. The creature grunted in pain as she applied pressure on its burns.
"Machamp, Thunder Punch!" shouted the Gym Leader. The Pokémon's knuckles sparked with electricity.
Oh no, he hadn't planned that far ahead. That thing still had three arms left to hand out naps with, and when another fist reared, Gold wasn't too excited with the prospect of one of his Pokémon never waking up again. He knew what a concussion felt like, and boy, it was not a relatable experience. He went with the first thing that came to mind.
"Use Jump Kick! No wait, Stand There Kick!" he shouted, mouth racing faster than his heartbeat.
Trinity whipped her leg backwards, then slammed it into the Machamp's gut—the force of those killer calves of hers was enough to lift the creature off its feet, and without anything leveraging against her, Trinity tightened another neck around the captured wrist and swung the Machamp into the ground.
Yes! Gold had cut off the creature's offensive and prevented it from getting the upper hand. The Gym Leader put his Pokémon at a Type disadvantage and burned it to boot—after the Machamp had been used in a short scuffle against his Togetic earlier—so it wasn't like he was expecting it to last long in that condition.
Gold just needed to finish it quick. Throwing his hand forward like all the cool big-league Trainers on TV did, he ordered Trinity to deliver a final blow. "Drill Peck!"
Using her one remaining head, Trinity lunged for Machamp's exposed abdomen. It threw a targeted strike from its disadvantaged heap on the ground, but the Dodrio corkscrewed her neck to slip past and stabbed her beak into its stomach. Though only managed to pierce the upper layer of skin, otherwise blocked by those rock-hard abs—what routine did the Gym Leader have this guy on?—it was enough to knock the wind out of it and force it to stay down.
A yellow flag flew aside the battlefield, the referee standing precariously between glowing conveyor panels on the floor that might send him spiraling on a path back to the front of the Gym if he stepped out of line. He declared, "Machamp is down. Gym Leader, offer a replacement."
"Yeah, whatever, I'm on it," grumbled Blue, the Viridian Gym Leader. Rainbow light reflected off him from every angle, barely beating back the darkness and dyeing his spiked hair every color except the orange it was supposed to be. He found another capsule in his cargo pants, signaling the next phase.
Oh yeah! Gold was pumped, super pumped, ready to square up and throw down and earn that badge that was his from the start. He'd come a long way from accidentally taking two Razor Leaves to the stomach and bumbling through the opening rounds of a tournament on a technicality—even if, all things considered, it was a pretty sweet deal to be over and done with it so fast. His Pokémon were strong enough to go toe-to-toe with any Gym Leader on the planet, assuming his fifteen in the bag was a statistically significant sample size.
The only remaining Pokémon in Blue's arsenal would be his hulking Venusaur, according to every blog post about the Viridian Gym he could find in a one-hour cram spree before showing up. They said it was the single meanest battle any of them had ever fought. None of them could make a dent in its hide, like trying to stab a tank with a butter knife. Fortunately, he had two Flying-types on his team, and both still had heads above the water.
When Blue tossed his Poké Ball, Gold was expecting the real battle to begin. Instead, he deflated like a balloon, as what plopped onto the field was a multi-headed tree thing whose multiple faces squinted under the full spectrum of light.
An Exeggutor? Huh?
Unless a legion of hooligans with unverifiable identities had lied to him on the internet—now that he thought about it, it sounded less than impossible—this was far more disappointing than he was led to believe.
He was still slack jawed by the time the green flag was raised, and Trinity's muscles seized under an immediate Psychic assault. It was mighty unfair that Psychic-types were so powerful that he couldn't even approach despite a matchup in his favor. Somebody should nerf them in the next balance patch. He recalled Trinity into her capsule and substituted, intending to trap the Exeggutor in a mental showdown.
His Slowking, Jack, emerged in a pose of contemplation, apparently the same position he was recalled in. He was once a survivor of a devastating attack on his home in Slowpoke Well, Gold having saved him from a gruesome demise at the hand of some Rocket chumps. Slowpoke were still critically endangered, but no cops had come after him since, so he took that to believe they swept his ownership under the rug due to his daring heroism. Yep, he was the hero of that incident, and no one else. Two other people didn't do all the heavy lifting and leave him in the dust. Gold tried to tug his mouth into a wide grin to prove the truth of his thoughts, which Jack took as confirmation to proceed.
Jack focused his mind in time for another invisible ambush, and threw his own punches on a plane of existence somewhere beyond. Gold could almost see the flickering avatars of Slowking and Exeggutor trading blows atop true reality, or maybe he was just daydreaming in the middle of battle again.
Some might consider him an idiot for trading Dodrio for Slowking against an Exeggutor, and they'd probably be right, but what was important here was the Psychic resistance. Slowking were big, beefy creatures with high special defense and Exeggutor were special attackers, meaning even effective moves would be dampened in addition to the general Psychic resistance. It was like chess, how you line up all those pieces to jump over and capture the opponent in a combo. That was chess, right?
After the silent duel, Gold finally gave a verbal command, "Jack, Yawn!"
With his mental link active, Jack leaned his head back and lazily gulped down air. He wasn't just feeding the physical yawn into his opponent's mind—he pumped feigned exhaustion right into its psyche. Psyches. When the creature yawned in response, Gold knew it was on track to the end. As peeved as he was that he couldn't topple the prehistoric, scaled behemoth the Gym Leader had hiding away, he had to admit, the easy option wasn't too shabby.
"Revitalize with Giga Drain!" shouted the Gym Leader, killing his premature celebration.
From within the Exeggutor's canopy, hundreds of tiny green specks drifted across the battlefield, honed right on Jack. He'd seen Crys— he'd seen her use a move like this tons of times with her Sunflora, and if those things made contact, they could sap the life right out of a Pokémon.
An idea hit Gold. Not a good idea, but an idea nonetheless. He said, "Use Heal Pulse on it!"
He could feel both Jack, the Gym Leader, and the ref double-take at his command, but his Pokémon followed through and unleashed a sparkling wave of energy that rushed past the floating particles to envelop the Exeggutor. Its three faces gasped in unison, fully refreshed. Any damage incurred from the earlier mental scuffle was instantly washed away.
At the same time, the leeching particles latched onto his Slowking's hide and shell hemet. Shelmet? No, that was a different thing. However, several them simply fizzled out, and Gold rejoiced mentally that his completely untrained risk with absolutely no basis in empirical study paid off. By topping off its energy himself, he made the Giga Drain a redundant service, the particles unable to funnel their stolen goods back across the supply line, forcing them to simply spit back up what they'd taken. Though the Exeggutor was now perked up by the additional energy, Gold merely doubled down on his former strategy.
"Now Yawn again!" he said, and he held a breath as his Pokémon once again whipped his laziness around. With reinforced suggestion, and no way to improve its condition, the Exeggutor's eggheads fluttered their eyelids.
Jack lumbered towards the opponent and took the impact of a Seed Bomb ordered by the Gym Leader. It slowed him down, heavily damaged from a physical, super effective attack and already exhausted from pumping his energy into his mental attacks, but by then the Exeggutor was already slumping over. His Slowking stood over the opponent as it collapsed to the ground, asleep but not exhausted, which didn't qualify the end of the battle, at least according to the rules he read only once five years ago.
This, Gold knew, was it. This Exeggutor was no Venusaur, not a beast without weakness. He wasn't stealing candy from a baby—the baby was offering it freely.
The Gym Leader's sigh cut off his victory. He and the referee exchanged a few glances, leaving Gold to whip his head back and forth between them before he turned to Gold directly. "You got Shadow Ball on that thing?"
"Probably not," he said. Gold knew enough not to tell him that he barely remembered his Pokémon's movepool on a good day.
"Foul Play? Icy Wind? Belch? Anything?"
"Belch?" Gold echoed. "I'm sure if you fed us we'd figure it out."
The Gym Leader paused a moment. "Flamethrower?"
He slammed his fist in his palm. "Oh, he knows that one! I thought I wanted to start a circus and we needed a firebreather, so we spent some all-nighters on it with a TM I stole from a Poke Mart dumpster."
The man locked his neck, life vanishing from his eyes beneath his creased eyebrows. It's not like Gold gave a bad answer or something. It was a legitimate career path!
"Whatever you say, kid," he said when he finally returned to focus, and then called to the referee. "Arcanine's basically dead, and the Gym Leader declares Machamp is blah blah, so the Challenger is the victor. You know the routine."
Scrambling, the referee raised a blue flag, signaling the final victory of the battle. In the last moments before Gold fired a materialization beam from his capsule, Jack stood amused and disappointed over the snoozing opponent, recalled amidst another philosophical thought.
"So, uhh, you're gonna have to explain to someone in the audience, no one in particular, why you just did that," said Gold as the Gym Leader walked across the black stage to face him.
"Don't kid," he said, but Gold revealed via his wandering eyes that he was, in fact, not kidding. Blue took in the largest single breath that Gold had ever seen a person or Pokémon take. It was honestly impressive. "I can't interfere with sleep with an items clause, so it was a free hit. Someone would get hurt if I didn't cut it."
"Oh! Right, right, right, right, the person who didn't understand now does understand," replied Gold. His tongue swirled into the next statement. "So, can I get that badge or what?"
The man reached into his cargo pants again, apparently having the full contents of a purse stashed in there, and presented him a small, reflective pin. Gold took it between his fingers, a small tree-flower-weed-looking thing on a thing stalk. He squinted.
"I thought you didn't have a Type," said Gold. Well, he was sure this guy had a type, but not a Type.
"It meant something at one point. I didn't care enough to put in a complaint," said the Gym Leader.
"Wait, this was the mafia guy's badge, wasn't it? The Earth Badge?" Gold gasped, waving the badge in his trembling hands. "I never even got a trophy for punching that Rocket guy I punched. This is so cool!"
"Rocket guy?" The Gym Leader tried to respond, not that Gold was paying much attention to him. "Kid, whatever it is that you've got going on... up there, I don't have all day to listen to it. Just head out of here so I can handle the next challenger."
Gold, intimately aware that there were only three people in the long building, waved awkwardly to him while clenching the Earth Badge so hard the metal edge carved runes into his palm. Warm liquid leaked down his fingers, and he had no idea why he wasn't concerned about it at all.
However, before he could leap from the stage and sprint fill-speed across the Gym's conveyors, he felt the gaze still on the back of his head. It wasn't comforting at all, and it stopped him in his tracks, no matter how much he wanted to be out of Viridian and on his way to Route 22 by two weeks ago.
"Yo, get back here," the Gym Leader called, with a serious twang in his throat.
Was it proper to ignore him? There weren't any boys in uniform on standby to berate his rudeness, nor his dad to tell him that he "shouldn't say that around strangers" or to "keep his head on straight". He had no reason to sit back and let someone get in his way, but an underlying hesitation to go the direction he was heading kept his flapping, broken soles glued to the floor.
"You, can you hear me? Are you deaf or—" For some reason, he cursed himself, and shanked whatever remained of that sentence in the gut. "Just turn around and come over here already."
Gold did as he was told. He spun like a stuff board and turned back time, returning to where he stood seconds ago.
"That's your sixteenth, isn't it?" asked the Gym Leader, who seemed to visibly recoil at the red pooling at the tips of his fingers. "Do you need a bandage or whatever?"
"Yeah." Gold answered the first and shoved his arm behind his back at the second.
"I know what you're planning. You completed the other Gyms in a little under two months, people are all over you on TV. The only person doing it that fast is someone trying to meet the requirements for Mt. Silver."
Gold didn't say anything. Nothing witty, or funny, or derailing came to mind, as there was barely anything to feed that creative spirit that always found something to blurt out. The more he let his mind wander, the more likely it would find its way to that, the image that opened up shop behind his eyes and refused to do the dishes or pay rent. He'd say he hated freeloaders, if only he wasn't such a hopeless one himself.
"Some thing you think you need to prove? Let me tell you, buddy, it's not worth it," said the Gym Leader, eyes lazing somewhere into the black walls and never quite looking at him straight. He spoke as if Gold wasn't even here. "You'd have to be either stupid or ignorant to want to do this."
When Gold found a response, he tried to liven up his cheeks as much as possible. "Okay, so, I haven't been listening to anything you've been saying, so I'm just gonna make like a Sudowoodo and run away because you're looking at me funny."
But when he tried to turn tail and vanish, rough fingers clamped around his wrist. It was the first time that he could remember that he was just angry, feeling his face heat up not with embarrassment but with a compulsion to scream. His heart beat beat beat beat, pulling his body in an off direction, a compass that he couldn't rip out of himself.
"Why do you care?" asked Gold.
"I don't care," he shot back, with a bit more force in his tone than he probably intended. "But you still shouldn't put your life on the line."
Gold bit his tongue, then yanked himself away from the man. "I think I'll be going now."
"Kid…"
"Please don't call me that." He was always just kid, or idiot, or moron. That was all he ever heard from anybody, the only things that people saw in his manifested persona, and it felt like he just leaned into it whenever it was offered like he was chasing a tossed bone.
Gold pulled his hand away. It was a gentle motion against the harsh grip, but he seemed to slip free from the Gym Leader's fingers, as if he was never holding him there in the first place.
The man tapped his left foot, shoved his hands in his pockets, and let out his lungs between clenched teeth. He roughly scoured his rusted orange hair with his fingers, working himself up for whatever reason—the referee, who had been standing by like some sort of creep, seemed to back away in anticipation of this. But nothing came of his frustration but a tired drawl.
"If you're gonna be heading up there," he said, "I just want you to know that I've… got a guy up there already. He went up there about a month ago and hasn't come down."
Gold tilted his head, and in his hubris, sputtered the first quip that materialized upstairs. "I think your guy's dead, buddy."
He wasn't prepared to shake in his shorts at the weaponized you shouldn't have said that bleeding out of the Gym Leader's face. As puffy as he had been earlier, this was a monumental beast without compare, and if given the option, his fear response would have tackled the ugliest, meanest, toothiest wild Pokémon looking at him like a meal than this below-average-height twenty-something in beige cargo pants. Gold could feel the man's indignant breaths fill the room from how hard he was pushing his anger out through his nose.
He surrendered. Gold put up his hands and held them there, hoping to make it out of here with just enough bruises to keep him out of the emergency room and refusing all will to defend himself because "it was a joke" would only deepen his final shade of purple. Not keeping his mouth shut was by far his unhealthiest trait, right ahead of drinking too much soda and trying to hug wild Pokémon, with a dangerous lack of regret compared to the others.
"Put your hands down." The Gym Leader ground his teeth, and Gold complied. "Whatever reason you have for doing this—"
"Maybe I don't have a reason," insisted Gold, cutting him off. There was no reason. That was the absolute truth.
"Whatever reason," he said, "if you see my guy up there, just… tell him to come back sometime. I need to talk to him."
Gold stared right through him and found nothing, but only because he wasn't really looking. "Yeah, sure. I guess."
Silence hung between them like damp laundry. Neither of them wanted to touch it, because it was there for a reason, but it was just a little ugly out in the open. Gold mumbled a thanks to the Gym Leader for the badge, and for the battle, and for whatever else he could think of that might be considered polite, and finally turned away one last time.
He appreciated how much the man understood the futility of trying to stop him. No matter what, he was going to Mt. Silver, and he would make it halfway up or die trying. If he couldn't live as a person who conquered it, he supposed being a corpse that couldn't wasn't much worse than who he currently was.
But who was that? Ethan "Gold" Hibiki was the happiest, cheeriest idiot this side of the Grand Axis, and there was nothing wrong with that. He had no reason to go up Mt. Silver except for the thrill of adventure and the bitter fight against the elements to strengthen his character.
He was facing Mt. Silver for Mt. Silver. And for nothing else.
Gold tried not to believe he was standing in a graveyard, but the more he thought about it, the more he realized that would be the coolest thing.
He'd finally breached the mountain's snowline and it all became pale. Every hundred meters up the mountainside, a monument to past trials laid bare. Waypoints stuck up from the ground, paint sliced away by the high winds, and discarded ladders were frozen into the rocks where some intrepid explorer finally looked at a snowy ledge just out of reach and said yeah, this is worthy of the most precious item in my inventory. Hadn't these guys ever played a video game? Everyone knows you save those for the final boss.
So far, he'd kept an intimate relationship with his own Devon-branded telescoping ladder latched to the side of his Devon-branded ballistic nylon climbing pack. Gold decided to name him "Stephen". Like step. And Steven. If no one else would laugh at that, his dad might.
His gloved hands clasped around the climbing rope, all sensation of touch fuzzy already. He tried to rub some friction into his fingertips against the inside padding, but all it did was distract him from his screaming muscles trying to keep hold of the only thing between himself and a closed-casket funeral. Snow tumbled down the slope with each step he speared into the mountain, and he just tried to keep his cool. The rope disappeared only a few meters up.
With the last of his current pool of strength, he rocketed upwards. Huge chunks of snow dislodged beneath him as he fought against the slope degree that was no doubt higher than the temperature. One hand clasped forward, then another, then back to the first, synchronized with his cloudy, desperate breaths.
It was no biggie. Gold could conquer as many dumb rockfaces as Mt. Silver could toss at him, and with a little pep to spare! He threw his hand to the top, tugged as hard as he could on the section of rope just out of reach, and hoisted himself onto—to his massive relief—a flat surface, no angles to be found. Begone, geometry. He finally felt justified for flunking out.
While gathering his breath, he took off his pack and pulled an old handheld radio, the only thing he could afford after he blew his entire life savings on all the other climbing gear and rations. With a bit of fiddling, he was able to latch onto a fuzzy signal from somewhere.
"—severe weather advis—Silver Town residents are encouraged—continue until next—now our next—unfortunate passing of Lance—council of the Indigo—"
Gold switched it off, wound up his arm, and pitched it like a fastball into his pack, hearing an unmistakable snap in response. It wasn't a reactive action. He just felt like it, like a good workout.
Without another thought, he moved on, dragging his feet through the white blanket. His chest trembled in his jacket, and he pulled the cords on his hood so tight that only a small window to his face remained with which he could huff and puff and complain all the way up the mountain.
He seemed no closer to the top than he was when he began, and the flat piece of slate he trudged across put him at no angle to take solace in whatever progress was behind him—he cursed geometry for taking its revenge so soon.
Every few minutes the wind would catch in his side and knock him on his face, to the point that he started walking with his hips spread wide like a Krabby. A wall of ice, tens or hundreds or thousands of meters tall waited at the end of the field, and when his already crying legs finally carried the lump person atop them to its base, they started the inevitable, painful ascent.
Fortunately, the wall itself had been well-traveled. A vague trail of markers, rotting rope bridges, and footpaths snaked their way up the rockface. Gold wondered if any of them were left by the Gym Leader's friend on his journey a month ago, and if this deadly path followed his footsteps to his last known whereabouts. He supposed it wasn't too much to ask to keep an eye out for a stranded person, and so he occasionally lingered on discarded items and tools, imagining exaggerated stories of how the Gym Leader's "guy" lost it in a harrowing escape from certain death.
Gold continued his ascent, and eventually the undusted base of the mountain and the rolling green hills of Johto appeared beyond the plain at the base of the wall, in front of a dark wall of. The landscape was blurry through the low-lying clouds he'd already broken through, but it served to prove one thing. He was really, really, really high up.
Oh geez, this was by far the worst idea he'd ever had, and he once tried to tape himself to one of the wind turbines in New Bark Town for lack of an amusement park. Emphasis on tried. This was leagues beyond the usual things she would scold him for, an absolute death sentence. But she wasn't here right now, and so it didn't matter in the slightest.
He saw it again. That night in the caves of Victory Road, he snored comfortably by a warm fire, drooling onto the rocks. And his eyes opened. And he saw them outlined by the fire's glow with nothing between them, not even damp air.
Gold shook his head hard enough to spin his brain 180 in its bath of fluid and powered up the remainder of the rockface. It took an hour of trudging to make it to the top, at which point his tragedy-material hubris was even more apparent. The ice wall itself was a ridge, and the other side was a similarly steep climb—or, from his alarming position, fall. His only path forward was tracing the thin crest towards the peak.
Holding his arms out for balance, he put himself forward. Bad idea. Bad idea. Did putting his arms out even make a difference, or did it just make the wind catch him more? When a gust stabbed through and nearly turned him into a trail of gore down the mountainside, he took that as a yes.
His eyes lit up as he realized what was ahead. The ridge abruptly met other mountain spires ahead, and a dark opening was dug out of the mountainside, highlighted by a faded flag. It was one of many cave systems that the native Pokémon of Mt. Silver had hallowed out, and the preferred trail—he was led to believe—involved tracing the subterranean network towards the pinnacle whenever the exterior climb got too steep.
The last leg became a sprint, and for a few moments Gold forgot that he was a squishy mortal human to push himself to the end. He watched the flag get swept away by the wind, trying to rob him of his finish line, but that merely made him faster. The world down the mountain blurred in and out of focus as he tried desperately not to think about how few seconds he was from seeing Arceus face to face and watching the creator god itself mark up his book of sins like a copy editor. He reached out his hand for the goal that was just in his reach, refusing to allow it to be taken.
His feet slipped. He overcorrected, crossing and uncrossing his legs in sequence to try to maintain some semblance of balance as he rushed for the opening. Unsure how long his traction would last, he jumped.
Gold soared the remaining few meters and was swallowed by the darkness. He tumbled, felt his bones crack, and became a rolling heap of limbs that slowly skidded to a stop on a cold bed of polished rock.
"Phew, that wasn't so bad," he mumbled despite his thundering heart.
His vision slowly adjusted to the forthcoming void—the light from the entrance only carried so far before the ricocheting rays fizzled out. Dusting himself off, he found a Poké Ball within his clothes and released his trusted partner, Marigold. She was only visible for the moments the materialization beam lasted, before she too faded to black. He wasn't prepared for her to yelp at the ice-cold contact beneath her feet once her consciousness emerged from the glow of red.
In his defense, his skin went numb a few hours ago, so he misjudged just how frigid this whole dumb mountain was for a Grass-type Pokémon. Still, he needed his eyes to work before he could do anything about it.
"Sorry! Sorry. Can you use Flash real quick? Just like we practiced." We was generous. Turning off all the lights in a Pokémon Center guest room, as it turns out, was a great recipe for conking him out for a few hours, so she did most of the work.
A subtle glow appeared, and after a few seconds, it expanded to encompass the nearby rocks, the bioluminescence emanating from her collar of frilly, rose-colored petals. Before he could react further, she swung her long, green neck like a flail and bonked him right in the forehead.
He grunted in pain. "Hey! I said I was sorry, and—"
She bonked him again, eliciting an "ow". Then again, with a "gah", and again and again, each prompting a new exclamation of pain until he ran dry of new material.
"Just gimme a— ow. A second to— ow. Let me just—" Under constant assault, he reached into his travel pack, found a set of four synthetic foot coverings, and roughly slipped one atop her head. Her antennae, tied backwards underneath, felt around the object to see what exactly he had done to her.
Using this distraction, he grabbed her other legs and put on the covers, insulating her feet from the cold. As a finishing touch, he withdrew another fabric item and tied it around the Meganium's midsection. It was similarly insulated, and it said "Bad Bitch" on it. It felt a lot more fitting now than when he bought it.
Finally, he freed her head from the remaining cover and gave it a rightful home on her left foreleg. When she could finally see him again, she made her species' best equivalent of an "I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed in you" face.
"Okay, before you hit me again, I was planning to set up a fire somewhere ahead to keep us warm, and I've got a few more pieces of cloth in here if you want more," he said to her. "And for the record, missy, I couldn't have put it on you before I got up here, because Poké Balls don't recall inanimate objects. It's not like I forgot to even try!"
He did, in fact, forget to try.
And among the other things he forgot, it was that caves tended to be swarming with wild Zubat. The moment his grey matter finally located that fact in the archive, he craned his eyes up to the ceiling of the cave, where Marigold's bioluminescent shine reflected off hundreds of pointed, white fangs.
He couldn't reiterate enough to himself how bad of an idea this was.
As the cave came alive in the flurry of wings and Sonic screeches, he was bombarded with every stalled request for a second opinion his brain had in the queue. Was he prepared to scale a thirty-thousand-meter death mountain, covered in snow at an average temperature in double digit negatives? Was he prepared to fight hordes of wild Pokémon that had no hang-ups about sucking his blood and slurping on his intestines? Was he prepared, first of all, to find someone atop the snowy peaks and lead them back down safe?
Gold wasn't sure he liked the answer to any of those questions, and he wasn't at much liberty to think about it amidst the circling swarm. He had to remind himself why he was doing this, but then he backtracked. There was no reason, right? He'd put himself in a position where everything could go wrong, just for fun. He'd put his precious partner at a severe disadvantage, both against the everlasting cold and the Poison-type armada around them because Gold was just that good.
A deeper cry penetrated the hoard, and he stared into the gaping maw of the much larger Golbat at the helm of the platoon. It dove right for him, and in his scrambling thoughts, he didn't go ordering an attack or a dodge from Marigold—instead, his fist flew.
His knuckles crashed right between its eyes. It screeched again, this time in surprise and pain, and tumbled backwards as it barely corrected itself to stay afloat.
Gold stared at his curled fist. Oh yeah, he was that good.
Throwing his arm out, he ordered a Petal Dance. Marigold summoned energy from within herself, and petals flew free from the bloom around her neck. Spinning just like the horde of Zubat in its own concentric whirlwind, it lingered for just a few moments before it exploded outward. He put up his hands to shield his face and wished he could still cover his ears, as the bombardment ushered screams from the wild Pokémon when their wings were nicked by the barrage.
Quickly, they disappeared into the cave, following their leader that had already turned tail at Gold's assertive first strike. Those that lingered only did so to recuperate, before following the rest of their pack into parts unknown. As quickly as the attack came, it had vanished.
Gold couldn't keep it in himself and threw his arms around Marigold's neck. She leaned into the gesture, cooing softly, even though she had to be overexerted from such a strong attack and the otherworldly temperature.
He jumped back, brushed off the sharp petals that had lodged themselves into his sleeves, and stared at his gloved fist, lingering on how cool that was and how cool he was. After that blue-haired Rocket creep and now this, he was surprised he didn't solve most of his problems this way. Gold Hibiki was his name, crime-fighter and dashing adventurer extraordinaire, only in it for the next big thrill and perhaps the heroic rescue of a trapped climber in need. No matter how many times the image flashed in his mind, he kept reminding himself of the reasons he ascended.
"Come on, let's get going. I promise not to keep you out long, just until I can find a good place for a fire," he said.
Despite her earlier scolding, she trusted his judgement—not a mistake, he vowed to prove. She followed him as he traced the Zubats' trail into the cave, just the next leg of many in a fool's journey up Mt. Silver.
It was them and the mountain, and he wouldn't let it win. He was tired of losing. But what could he have lost, he thought, if there was absolutely nothing wrong at all?
Hello, and welcome to a new story. I'd been wanting to write this for a while now, mostly to continue my portrayal of Gold as a lovable idiot with a high-capacity brain that runs at the speed of dial-up internet. I also don't write romantic drama often, so this was a little foray into a new genre.
For those unaware, not only is this a sequel to my previous HGSS adaptation longfic called Anew, it's also concurrent to another longfic in the same series called Minutes to Midnight. That story has a darker tone, goes much deeper into worldbuilding, and has six chapters already published, so check it out if that interests you.
My previous beta, ShonnaRose, is still onboard and providing suggestions, but I've also received additional assistance from annarasumanara, both of whom can be found on AO3 at those usernames. A heartfelt thanks to both of them for keeping me on track.
I hope you enjoy this story, and I'll see you someday!
Reading: Various fanfiction
Playing: Final Fantasy IX, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Justice For All, Monster Hunter Rise, Dark Souls
Watching: My Hero Academia, Cowboy Bebop, Uchuu Sentai Kyuranger