Chapter 24

Visora felt like crap. After her confrontation with Ciara, she hadn't been able to get a wink of sleep. Elva had asked her what was wrong when Visora had finally dragged herself into their rundown room, stiff and cold, three hours later. Visora hadn't had the heart to tell her sister about the conversation she'd had outside, and instead made up some utterly transparent excuse about still being shaken up from the ghost experience. Elva obviously hadn't bought it—Visora would have seriously questioned her sister's intelligence if she had—but had left it at that, seeing that Visora blatantly didn't want to talk about it and gone to sleep.

It was the next morning, earlier than Visora usually woke up, but she figured that she might as well get an early start. She'd spent a lot of time thinking, making quite a few decisions, and knew that it was going to be one very long and trying day ahead of her.

She was unnecessarily quiet as she moved around the room searching for stationary and a pencil. Elva was the world's heaviest sleeper and Visora had a feeling she could conduct a full-fledged Pokemon battle, complete with blazing fire and flying rocks on the girl's bed without disturbing her. Still, it was force of habit. She pulled open a drawer and yanked out a sheet of green paper and began looping letters onto it. Visora was a compulsive list-maker, and today she had innumerable things to keep track of.

Things to buy at the PokeMart:

Potion—whatever type they have (6)

Pokeball—whatever type they have (4)

Antidote (4)

She paused and decided that was enough for today. She dragged her pen across the paper to divide it in two and carefully copied down new words.

Things to do today:

Map out Route

Shower and pack

Talk to Gaveriel and Ciara

The last one was by far the most daunting item on her list, the precise reason why Visora had saved it for last. She stuffed the bit of paper in her pocket and, leaving another quick note to Elva on her pillow, started out the door.

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Visora was pleased to find that the PokeMart was already open. She'd expected to have to wait for at least an hour for the manager to come. Inside she purchased her items in a hurry, as some guy that was standing behind her kept moving in too close. Thanking the clerk, she strode confidently out the door, projecting an air of cool indifference. Visora had a foolproof policy about men; she didn't trust them as far as she could throw them.

Gaveriel, however, seemed an entirely different breed. He was the first guy Visora could legitimately say she got along with, which was certainly saying something. Elva often expressed the concern that Visora would die an old maid—something that had Visora rolling her eyes and asking Elva why she wasn't going all boy crazy. Elva would always answer the same thing: "I'm not getting a boyfriend until I know you'll at least consider it, too."

Now Visora was outside and seriously considering forgetting the whole thing. There was no way she was going to really go through with this—was she? Her heart was beating very hard suddenly, and she felt that if she didn't sit down she'd black out. Scrambling over to a bench, she put her paper bag down beside her and took deep, steadying breaths. So, this is what an anxiety attack feels like? She thought to herself, wiping her brow with a shaking hand. And I'm only thirteen, too.

Once Visora had gotten control of herself again she mentally ran through her argument again. She could go on like this for hours, carefully weighing pros and cons and waging a vicious war with herself.

On one hand, she thought, Elva really seems to like those two. It would make her exceptionally happy to go along with them.

And on the other hand, a sharper, more harsh side of her snapped, Elva wouldn't be so happy if the Rockets found us all and gutted her.

Yet I've heard what they did to Ciara's family. What's to stop them from getting more powerful and striking her down if she gets in their way?

And remind me again, exactly how would Elva cross Team Rocket? If we stay out of their way, we don't have anything to worry about.

What about all the thousands of Pokemon they killed? What about innocent people like Gaveriel and Ciara's parents? Now that I know what they're doing and that the police were powerless to solve their murder, how can I just walk away?

And what about doing the smart thing? All my life I've been trying to keep safe.

"And where has it gotten me?" Visora finished, standing up with conviction. "Where has playing it safe gotten me? Nowhere. Maybe I can actually do something worthwhile by helping them."

"Talking to yourself, little lady?" came a low voice from behind her. Visora fought every single impulse in her shot-system that was screaming at her to jump and scream. Instead, she clamped down on any sign of fear and turned around to face the man behind her coldly.

"Do I know you?"

"Not yet, anyway," he said, moving closer. He was maybe sixteen or seventeen from the looks of it, and slightly drunk. Visora crinkled her nose. Drunk this early in the morning? How utterly impractical. He's probably been up all night partying.

"Well, I'll be going, then." she said, getting up and grabbing the twisted-yarn handle of her bag. He grabbed her shoulder and spun her around to face him, and many things happened at the same time.

Visora reached into her pocket, clasped her hand around the Pokeball she knew to contain Oddish, and jammed on the button twice to let her comrade out. The man lurched forward to grab the Pokeball from her grasp, and a darkly tanned hand reached out and grabbed her attacker's arm, twisting it at an impossible angle.

It took Visora maybe two seconds to realize that Gaveriel had attempted to come to her rescue. Attempted, because Oddish had already begun whipping the guy ten different ways. Bruised and battered, he backed away with his hands up in the air, shouting, "Jesus, I was just playing around! Psychopaths!" before turning on his heel and half-jogging half-running off into the heart of the city.

Gaveriel and Visora regarded each other evenly. He was dressed down in a dark blue and brown flannel shirt and a pair of long jeans that made him look like a kid and an adult at the same time. His hair wasn't held in its usual ponytail and looked rather unkempt, as if he'd run out of the Center without bothering to get ready. Glancing behind his head she saw that her bench was in direct eyeshot of the window of the Pokemon Center—and she drew the only conclusion she could think of.

"So, you saw the creep through the window, then?"

"Saw you sitting on a bench like you were having some kind of episode first, then saw the creep," he said, smiling softly and scratching at the side of his face. "But it seems as if you have everything handled, huh?"

"Thank you for coming out, anyway," she said, returning the smile and feeling suddenly small and insignificant. "Who would have thought creeps like that would hang around Lavender, huh? Doesn't seem like much of a party town."

Gaveriel laughed heartily. "Yeah, tell me about it. But, you're okay, right?"

Visora mildly noted that he'd just opened himself up for an attack of the dialogue kind. She could have easily taken offense to that and gone off into a "you think I need to be protected, big man?" branch, but honestly—that was the last thing Visora would even think of doing to him now. She smiled instead and said, "I'm fine. I…" she winced as a flutter of anxiety beat in her chest. This was it, she thought. May as well get it over with now, even though it's the last thing on your list. "I needed to talk to you, though."

Gaveriel seemed confused, but nodded. "Okay—but can we go inside first? I don't know how you stand the morning air. 'Tis freezing."

She laughed and felt the anxiety loosen some. "I come from Celadon," she said blandly. "That place is absolutely sweltering with all the electricity we burn and all the warm bodies. The cold is more than welcome."

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After they had settled in at the Pokemon Center lobby again—Gaveriel with a cup of coffee, Visora with a cup of tea—she had to work her nerve up again. No matter how comfortable Gaveriel tried to make the atmosphere, she just couldn't seem to word it right. Can we come with you? I've decided we'd like to come with you. If you wouldn't mind, we'd like to tag along. All of them sounded ridiculous.

She was spared a few more blessed seconds when Gaveriel cleared his throat. She took the opportunity to take a sip of tea as he spoke. "If this is about your conversation with Ciara last night, she told me about it already."

Visora almost spit the tea out. Coughing, she said, "Oh—she did, did she?" Unable to come up with anything else, she waited uncertainly for him to continue.

"I'm sorry that she followed you outside—it would have been better to leave you alone to think, but hey; that's Ciara for you. She really does like you, though. She wouldn't have bothered otherwise."

Inexplicably, a deep, fond sadness sprang up in Visora. Lord Almighty, she thought to herself as she closed her eyes and shook her head. I'm turning into a regular little ball of estrogen. "She reminds me a lot of Elva, sometimes."

Gaveriel laughed. "They are pretty similar, aren't they…?"

More silence. Visora knew that she'd been given the perfect segue way into the topic she was dreading, and grudgingly took the opportunity.

"Speaking of our talk yesterday," she said, and paused again. She took a quick sip and went on. "I've been doing some thinking—okay, well, a lot of thinking. I want to—well, I want to know if there's anything Elva or I can do to help you and Ciara on your projects."

Now it was Gaveriel's turn to choke on his beverage. Swiping at a splatter of it that had somehow hit his cheek, he turned to face her with bewilderment written all over his face. "I thought you were adamantly against what we're doing…?"

"Well, I… I guess I was wrong." There it was, the three words Visora tried her best to never say: I was wrong. It wasn't that she would refuse to admit it when she was mistaken—it was just that she did her damnedest to make 100 certain she never was. Now that she was openly admitting it to Gaveriel she felt like withering up into a crumpled heap of ashes. "I guess I never really stopped to think about much but my own plans. Team Rocket seems a bit more important than that, now. I don't want to just go on with my life knowing that you and Ciara are doing this thing for society completely alone—I want to have some part in helping, even if it's just writing things down, or something else utterly dumb like that." She smiled. "Although I can understand if you'd rather work alone."

Gaveriel had an unreadable expression on. Visora wasn't sure if he was angry, sad, happy, confused, or thoughtful. Then, he smiled. "Well, I'm sure it would make Elva and Ciara quite happy," he said, chuckling, a slight twinkle in his eyes.

Visora laughed. "Oh, that's for sure. Elva'll be downright depressed if we go our separate ways again."

"Well, I guess we can't have that happen, now, can we?" he got up and stretched out his neck, popping it expertly. "I'll talk to Ciara when she wakes up."

"And I'll do the same with Elva," Visora said, following suit and downing the last of her tea. Gaveriel was starting off for his room when an impulse struck Visora hard and she called after him, "We won't let you down!"

Surprised at herself, she was even more shocked when he turned around and gave her the biggest grin she'd seen from him yet. "I know you won't."

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Of course, their two sisters had taken it precisely the way they thought they would. Elva positively leapt out of her seat and latched onto Visora's midsection, which caused the two of them to topple over into a heap on the floor. Ciara had beamed and socked Gaveriel—hard—in the arm and said that she knew he'd give in some day. Then she and Visora had locked eyes for one shaky moment, and an unspoken agreement was made; they wouldn't talk about their conversation last night any more, and would move on as if it hadn't happened. Relieved, Visora allowed Elva to dance around the room with her—or, more like, had allowed Elva to dance and herself to be dragged around from place to place.

When Gaveriel and Ciara finally managed to calm Elva down, the four of them sat at the same table, sipping their various flavors of milkshake, and took part in the strangest planning procedure Visora had ever seen.

Gaveriel whipped out an old, battered Town Map with part of the lower right hand corner missing. All over the thing were little red dots—Rocket locations, Visora figured—and was confirmed to be correct when Gaveriel said the same thing a second later.

"Alright, we've already been to the ones that have the black spot in the middle," Visora saw that roughly a quarter of the spots were filled in this manner, "And the rest of these are up for grabs. Oh, wait," he said, pulling a felt-tipped pen out of the pocket of his shirt and marking a new spot in a red circle just outside Lavender Town. "That's where we've been holed up for the past few months. Nothing there, at least, not that we've found."

"Amen to that," Ciara said, nodding in approval. "'Bout bleeding time."

"The next one I'm looking for is a rigged game shop," Gaveriel said, and Visora got a distinctly bad feeling in her gut. "It's been run by Rockets for ages but no one seems to be able to find out any kind of dirt on them. They stopped trying a few years back and ever since then the Rockets have been free to swindle more cash out of people with those rigged slot machines. Who knows what they're using the cash for—they could be setting up a Pokemon black market for all we know."

Ciara looked intensely interested. "This is a big heist, isn't it, Gav? Shouldn't we start off with something, I don't know…" she cast a sidelong glance at Visora and Elva and the world "easier" died on her tongue, replaced instead with "closer?"

Gaveriel pretended to not catch the undertones in her voice. "Well, Celadon isn't that far of a walk from here, actually. We'll take the conventional path through Lavender to save on our energy, stop to restock and rest in Saffron, and take Route out and be in Celadon in no time flat. I give it about two weeks, tops."

Visora groaned audibly, earning her the attentions of her three comrades. "Problem?" Gaveriel asked.

"No, no… just… well, just promise me we can stay as far away from the Celadon City Department Store as humanly possible. I'm good to go if we can do that."

"Relatives?" Ciara asked, taking a wild stab in the dark.

Visora nodded, grim. "You betcha. Aunt Margaret."

Now it was Elva's turn to groan. "Aw God, no," she muttered, holding her face in her hands. "We gotta avoid her."

Gaveriel laughed, a rich sound that filled the room. "Okay, okay, I won't ask. It's a deal. If we have to restock on anything Ciara and I will go in and you two can stay at the Center. Agreed?"

"Agreed," said the three voices in unison.

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That night, Visora lay awake again. It was the second night in a row now that she couldn't seem to force her eyes shut. Beside her, Elva was breathing deeply and kicking off her covers. When they were younger, Visora would get up and re-tuck her sister until she discovered that Elva really didn't get cold at night the way Visora did.

Thinking about those times brought forth a new wave of apprehension within her. Was she really giving all that up just to travel with two strangers? And yet, the second she thought that, she knew it was far from the truth. She felt that she'd acted rashly, but in all honesty, the decision had been benefiting all of them. She wasn't sure where these bouts of insomnia were coming from—she'd resolved the issues with Ciara and Gaveriel, made her sister immensely happy and started on a new part of her life that promised to have actual meaning.

Then why was it that she couldn't squelch the growing feelings of dread in her gut?