Ash and Lance were having lunch on the sixth day of training when the doorbell rang.

As Lance opened the door, Ash saw him bolt straight.

"Mon chéri! It's absolutely lovely to see you." She leaned in and kissed the champion on both cheeks. "I thought you were off training. Quelle surprise when I called Drake and he mentioned you had asked to borrow his house in Slateport!

"Oh, don't look at me like that chéri. C'est pas grave. You know I can never stay mad at you. Even if some things you do make me wish to rip out your soul and let Drifblim render it down for gas." She paused, before laughing. "Allez, c'est une blague. It is a joke."

Fantina strode into the house with the aura of an empress.

"Come, sit. J'apporte du vin." She waggled the bottle at Lance. She walked over to Ash, who got up, and repeated the kissing ritual. Ash had gotten used to it in Kalos, but it still felt a bit strange to do with a woman twice his age. "Mon petit chéri. Sit, tell me your stories. I hear you have quite the tale to tell since I last saw you, non?"

Ash began to recount the stories of his travels as Fantina uncorked the bottle of wine. Lance actually seemed to get more comfortable with the gym leader's focus off of him, and he listened intently. Ash realized he hadn't actually gotten a chance to tell Lance most of what had happened.

When he got to the topic of his Kalos travels, Fantina was delighted.

"Tu as visité ma patrie? Est-ce que tu parles kaloçais?"

"Oui, un peu, mais pas assez pour converser."

Fantina took on a beaming grin and clapped.

"Bravo! Bravo Monsieur Ash! Mais, je me demande…" For a moment, Ash marvelled at how quickly her grin could shift from elated to insidious.

"C'est pas caractéristique pour toi, vraiment, non? Sans jugement, you are not exactly the image of culture." She pinched his jacket with her fingers with one hand while taking a sip from her glass. She released it, leaning back in her chair.

"It makes a woman… how do you put it… wonder. Il y a une raison à cet engagement de scolarité? Is there a reason for this new interest in… schooling?"

"Nothing… in particular…" Ash wasn't quite sure why but he could feel his cheeks glowing red hot.

Fantina giggled before abruptly turning towards Lance. "Perhaps in return for your lessons, mon petit chéri could teach you how to lie. He is clearly better at it than you are." She paused, relishing Lance's terror.

"Ah, but I am interrupting, continue my… little dear… tsk je prefère le kaloçais. Continue mon petit chéri."

He recounted his journey through Kalos and everything that had happened there. When he left off at the airport, Fantina was still staring at him.

"And…"

"And that's that, I went home to Kanto."

"Tu es sûr? That is all? There is nothing more of Sérène?"

He thought about the escalator and felt a tingling in his ears.

Fantina began to clap. "Encore! Encore!

"You see mon chéri, this one can at least try to sell a lie. It is nothing before my powers of deduction, of course. On ne peut pas tromper une Kaloçaise en matière d'amour, ça va sans dire. But a valiant effort nonetheless.

Now, mon petit chéri, comme on le dit en galar, spill."

Ash felt a flash of heat take over his whole body. "She kissed me," he squeaked out.

"Et alors…"

"That's it."

Fantina's face took on a look first of shock, then of disbelief. She put the back of her hand on her forehead in a mock faint.

"A mon dieu! Le jeune amour. So innocent. So pure. So stupid…"

She composed herself.

"Do not feel bad, mon petit chéri. Il est naturel when one discovers love for the first time. But to break her heart so. To break your own! I could cry. C'est une tragédie! But I must thank you mon petit chéri. Your story is so perfect, I must write a play about it. Non, un opéra! Un jeune homme, une jeune fille! Torn apart by the very dreams which brought them together! C'est parfait!"

Ash and Lance both stared dumbfounded.

"But wait, there is hope! I understand now the reason for the strange request. We must make haste! There is so little time."

"What?" Ash and Lance asked in sync.

"We must prepare you for the Festival."

"Huh? I'm not in the Festival."

"Mon petit chéri, the most famous coordinator of all time, the champion of the Kanto league, and the peut-être future champion of the Hoenn league have a box at Le Grand Festival. Did you think we would be secreted away to our seats away from prying eyes? Non! It shall be a red carpet affair. The event de la haute société surpassed only, maybe, by the crowning of the festival's winner herself! And you wish to go like that?"

She lifted his jacket by pinching both shoulders.

"Pah, I shall not have it. No, if you are a champion to be, you shall dress like a champion to be. And maybe, peut-être, we can repair the damage you have wrought in your naïveté."

She pulled out her phone and dialed a number. "Margaret, find me un atelier tout-suite. We have an emergency de mode. Send the directions to my chauffeur."

Before Ash and Lance could even figure out what was going on, they were being dragged by their collars out of the house and unceremoniously tossed into the car.

"What just happened?" Ash asked.

"Pika…"

"I have no clue," Lance replied.

Fantina promptly took a seat in the front.

"Gérard! Allons-y!"

~ ⁂ ~

They arrived at a small tailor's shop. Fantina jumped out of the car before flinging open the door.

"Lève tes fesses! Tsk, what has the world come to? Me holding the door for men. À situations désespérées, mesures désespérées."

Ash and Lance scrambled out of the car. Ash was starting to understand why Lance was so terrified of Fantina.

As they entered the tailor shop, Fantina tossed a mannequin out of the way and dragged Ash over to where it had stood.

"Ne bouge pas! Now to get these hideous rags off of you." She grabbed a pair of shears.

"Wait, I'll take them off!" Ash took off his jacket and his shirt.

"And the rest?"

"What?"

"Must I do everything myself?" Fantina lifted Ash with what seemed like the strength of a Tauros, pulling off his shoes in one motion by holding the heels down with her feet. She then yanked his pants down, before grabbing a sheet of fabric.

She seemed to be teleporting through the workshop, one moment holding one cloth up to him, the next moment another, then sketching, taking measurements. Yet it seemed to last an eternity before she was finally satisfied.

"You may get dressed, I'll have this done by tomorrow.

"Lance, mon chéri, it's your turn."

"We've been over this Fantina, I'm not changing my cape."

"I'd recognize that fraud Hermione's work anywhere. You know what the penalty for treason is, mon chéri?"

Lance just stared her down.

"Pah, fine. Suit yourself." She paused. "En fait non. I think that might somehow be worse.

"Now shoo!" She waved her hand at both of them.

Ash dressed himself as quickly as he possibly could, and they both left the shop.

"Is she always this crazy?" He asked Lance. Lance thought about it for a moment.

"I'd call this a good day."

"Pika-pi…"

~ ⁂ ~

Serena looked through her costume choices.

As much as Pokémon Contests claimed, and in large part did follow a larger focus on pokémon than Showcases, it had been clear from the start that judges were fickle beings and were not above scrutinizing a coordinator's outfit.

And unfortunately, that made costumes a bit of an arms race which were hard to win if you were tight on funds, which Serena most definitely was. Not to mention, while not too long ago it had been standard for coordinators to leave their pokémon uncostumed, that line had been crossed, and once it was, the floodgates opened. Some of the more traditional voices in the magazines found it distasteful, but it impressed judges, and so it was.

It was a good thing she knew how to sew.

While much of her team didn't need too much in the way of costuming, some like Pancham and Delphox, did.

And of course, she looked at the costume she'd spent the last two days working on, there was the ace up her sleeve. She expected that performance to guarantee her entry into the battle rounds. She just needed to finish everything in time.