From yard to frozen yard, sneaking through the brush and maneuvering around fences, Vallion made his way through Post District like a ghost. He moved along the fringes of each property, careful to keep his trail in the snow as hidden as possible. He avoided the streets like the plague. The spotlights produced by those lanterns could mean trouble if anyone caught a glimpse of him. The last thing he needed was to be found out, especially now. No one must know about this.

The Serperior eventually found his way by squinting at distant street signs. He knew Alexander's dwelling by the tell-tale shape of the building. Getting up to it, on the other hand, was a different beast entirely. This portion of the neighborhood was exceptionally well-lit, with regular patrols marching along the empty road or scanning the landscape from overhead. At one point Vallion was nearly discovered by a Noctowl, but the pokemon just missed him by a few seconds.

After some courageous and precisely-timed dashes across an illuminated section, he found himself on the perimeter of the circular abode. The front entrance seemed a little too obvious, didn't it? He'd be well in the view of the whole neighborhood if he entered there. Was there a back way in somewhere, or..?

A short jaunt around the circumference revealed that there was indeed a back door. It was considerably darker, shrouded partially beneath a cover of shielding pine needles. He went up to the door, turned the lever with a vine, and slowly pushed it in. Unlocked. Must be the intended way in, right? Alexander's the exceedingly cautious sort-there's no way he didn't batten down the hatches at night.

Vallion hadn't made it more than a couple seconds in the darkness before the flash of candlelight appeared before his eyes. He nearly yelped, gritting his teeth and freezing in place as a Bellossom turned around. Their gazes met with a pause. That moment lasted for much, much longer than he cared to admit.

"Vallion," the servant finally spoke up. "You're expected in the garden. Come, follow me."

Audibly sighing, Vallion carefully shut the door he came in from and took after the Bellossom. "Good lord, you scared the shed off of me. Could you be any more ominous?"

"Master Alexander informed me that you were coming, so I waited. I am the only servant here at the moment. It's best that the others don't know about this."

What was supposed to be a garden felt like an entire forest. It was pitch-dark, but Vallion felt well at home traversing the mounds of roots and shrub patches. Actually, it did feel a bit strange after all. He'd been stuck moving around an urban environment for so long that he almost forgot what it was like to be in a forest. Even the smells started to seem foreign to him. How...troubling.

Vallion's pits caught a slight heat source deeper into the garden. Then, he saw the wavering of torchlight from behind a thicket of leaves. Passing through that, a lone torch flickered, drawing harsh shadows on the raggedy Serperior that was perched beside it. There was already a teapot on the table along with two steaming cups. The Bellossom gave a bow and returned the way they came.

All Alexander had to do was gesture his head to beckon him over. Vallion coiled himself up next to the table, stared down at the freshly-poured tea, and deflated with a breath.

"I'm gonna assume you received my message, judging from all this."

"You know the identity of the Weavile?" Alexander immediately asked.

"Presumably." Vallion let that hang in the air, taking a sip of the tea in the interim. Wonderfully spicy. Probably expensive. "Chenza is not a human summoned to stop a coming calamity. She's the child of one. Or so she claims. Her father was a human that came to this world during the Bittercold crisis. Before he was slain like all the others, he'd somehow mated with another pokemon that did manage to survive the ordeal. The child that mother bore was Chenza, who claims to be a human by heritage."

Silence descended upon the two of them, and rightfully so. Alexander digested this information for a time, staring off into the distance with slivers for pupils.

"That matches up," the crooked Serperior finally said. "Earlier this morning, Panne came to me with a similar story that she thought was related."

"You put her to the task as well? How is she? Has she been doing well in the palace? Is the cold not affecting her too badly?"

Alexander put off all of his questions with a single affirmative hum. "She had the idea of looking into some of the earliest censuses of Paradise for clues. In them, she found a single Weavile resident separate from the tribes we later assimilated. From the story Panne constructed of them, they were a single mother pregnant with a dead Sneasel's baby. They had been ejected from their tribe in a conflict that was somehow related to said Sneasel. The theory is that this could have been the partner to a human, and after hearing your side, that seems all the more likely what happened."

"Well great," said Vallion. "Was that what you wanted to hear all along? I sure hope it was, because this whole ordeal has gone to shit. Half the city believes that Rusty Mountain's about to bomb the place, Shardurr's only been getting larger as more pokemon join out of fear and greed, and your informant's been killed in cold blood."

"Linoone? He has? Oh dear…" he trailed off. "I knew that ambush would end poorly. I shouldn't have told Virizion anything. I've been keeping almost all of what I know secret from the other masters for this very reason. Unnecessary action forces Chenza to react in unpredictable ways, and until I understood the true nature of the situation, I wanted to keep everything as stable as possible."

"Well you failed! You had already failed when The Family fell, and you failed again now! So now that we're at this point, I'll ask you what it is you plan on doing with this information you had me run through hell and back to get? What was so important about Chenza being human that you had to risk lives to know?"

Alexander pushed his cup aside with a vine. "Do you believe Chenza is a human?"

"What? We already know what she is!"

"But is she a human?"

"I- I don't know! I don't care! It doesn't really matter, does it? It's not my job to philosophize about how much the universe favors the child of something that isn't supposed to exist."

"But it's exclusively our jobs as humans, Vallion! We are the only ones who can!" The crooked Serperior craned his head from his perch. "My point is that it does matter what she is. It's mattered all along, even if no one else can see it. Humans have the ability to alter this world in ways that no other soul can. Even the ancients, the gods, and every mythical being on the fringes of old legends revere humanity."

Vallion rolled his eyes. "Sure, I suppose that could be true. Not that that's ever mattered to me. There are countless pokemon that have done things far more influential than we ever have! If the shape of Chenza's soul matters more than the fact that she's got a knife to the city's throat, then what do you think she is?!"

He cracked a helpless smile. "I don't know, either."

"Then what was the fucking point?!"

"To account for every possibility. To ensure the righteousness of my cause." Alexander sighed out his nose. "I will not repeat what happened at Poliwrath River again. If Chenza were a human in the same way as you or me, my reaction would've been different. I feared the disastrous reason that she might have come to this world. I feared that I would do wrong to another kindred soul. I feared what waves she would have set in motion with her power. Now, I am not sure of anything."

"What's there to not be sure of? You already know she isn't one of us, so what's stopping you?"

He shook his head. "Indeed. What is stopping me? The kind of creature she is has never existed before. I know because of conversations I've had with Hydreigon long ago. When a summoned human fulfills their purpose, they are often expelled from this world shortly after. You excluded, since yours is such a special case. Every other human I have heard of experienced this. Even I disappeared for a time, until Reinhardt fought to bring me back. Most humans don't get to return. Needless to say, between the brutality of their situation and their untimely departure, humans don't really get a chance to procreate. We really should be thinking hard about Chenza-it pertains to you, as well."

Vallion lifted his chin. "How?"

"Is it not obvious? You do plan on having children with Panne, right? Have you never stopped to think about what that would mean?"

"Of course I plan on it, but that's only starting a family. It doesn't have to mean anything!"

"But what if it does?" The crooked Serperior frowned and looked off into the shadowed canopy. "You might be right. There may be no difference between a natural-born pokemon and the child of a human. Or, they could be a new beast with more influence than we could ever hope to understand. We do not get to know the effects this kind of thing has on fate."

With a scoff, Vallion took an angry sip of his tea. "It doesn't have any! My children will live like any other, and so will their children after them! We are significant because we stopped calamities, Alexander-not because the universe is bending over backwards for us. And even if it is, you're vastly exaggerating the amount that it is!"

"Then what of the two scarves you and Panne share?" Alexander said.

"I don't know! What about them?"

"Marital scarves. Symbols meant to represent everlasting love and conjoined afterlives. It's a relatively new concept in the wide world of courtship, and yet it seems to have taken the five continents by storm. Pokemon from all over practice marriage in this way now. Even Reinhardt wears the scarf of his queen." It was Alexander's turn to take a drink. "That was you, wasn't it? You introduced marriage into this world."

He blinked, taken aback. "What do you mean I introduced it? Mated pairs were a natural thing long before I came around, and it's not like I made scarves anything more symbolic than what they already were!"

"No. No, this thing-it's different. This is a human ritual. I know, because unlike other humans who were summoned through more thorough means, I was whisked into this world in a panicked rush. I retained my memories of the human world. I can even visit it, albeit only in my dreams. I know what marriage is, and I know it had to have come from one of my kind. It came from you, didn't it?"

"H-how..?" Vallion moved away from the flame, eyes fixed and wide.

"I've heard that summoned humans will seldom experience visions of their previous lives, even if their memories have been wiped away. Your soul must be over a thousand years and several minds old now, but I'm sure not even that is enough to prevent such a thing from happening. You saw marriage in a dream and interpreted it for Panne, didn't you? Replaced the wedding bands for scarves, if you even saw it with such clarity."

"What the hell?" he gasped.

Alexander left his perch. A wince of pain washed over him as he uncoiled himself from the wooden poles, but never did his gaze wander from Vallion's face. "I know a great deal about what we are, Vallion. Humanity is as important to me as the safety and prosperity of Paradise itself. I know that we have an unnatural power because that single gesture between you and your lover became a widespread phenomenon. I doubt you made a big deal out of it, either. The cosmos grasped at your will and made it a reality in spite of its insignificance. Don't call it luck. This is divinity."

The two circled one another for a moment, their bodies leaving trails in the patchy snow. Vallion remembered to breathe. "Call it what you want. Whatever we have, it's useless to obsess over whether Chenza has it, too. We're hardly invulnerable-her father and every other human that died during the Bittercold has proven that beyond the shadow of a doubt."

The crooked Serperior stopped across from him and stretched, resulting in a quick series of pops and a pained expression. "Invulnerable, no. I worry about the lasting effects. The scars we leave on this world like your ritual of courtship are what I fear the most. You're a husband and a scholar, and so you will leave love and knowledge in your wake. I have left borders and structure in mine. What could a person like Chenza leave? A mentality of self-destruction? An unending rebellion?"

"She will leave nothing if you stop it now."

"But it's already too late!" Alexander cried. "Shardurr is proof that it's too late. Her gang's symbol has been carved into history. Not even the gods can tell whether the fires she's started will burn out anytime soon. I can only hope that you two can steer your own children towards a path of righteousness."

"Enough about that. I hate hearing you talk about my future family as if you have any authority over them, or me. It's time to put away your superstitions, stop observing from a distance, and help me take these pokemon down before anyone else has to die."

Alexander tilted his head. "You aren't leaving? Your mission is complete. You and Panne are free to go."

"Are you serious?" Vallion spat into the weeds. "I'm not about to leave this city in a state like this. I'm sure Panne shares my mentality, too. I've damaged my reputation with Chenza, but I'm fairly certain the rest of Shardurr still respects my authority. I'm still in a position of power there. You have time and initiative, Alexander, but not much."

"...Very well." Alexander finally broke eye contact and slithered back to his elevated perch. He took a somber sip of his tea and finished what was left. Then, as he extended his vines to pour another cup, he continued. "I will confer with the other masters soon. I'll have to unravel a lot of the bureaucracy I wove to try to keep things in check. It will be rather rocky, but with Rein's assistance I should be able to prepare a solution."

"And one more thing."

"Hm? What is it?"

Vallion let indignation swell up in his chest once more. "How exactly were you going to reward Linoone once this was all over?"

The Master of Law took a few seconds to mull over that question. A few seconds too long, honestly. "It depended on the quality of the information he gave me during all this. I would say somewhere in the range of fifty-thousand-worth in coins. I had not yet decided."

"...That's it?"

"Vallion, that is a lot of money. Perhaps not to you or me, but-"

"No. Shut up." This time, he was the one that shot Alexander a territorial glare. "A life is not worth fifty-thousand. I wish to rescind my portion of the reward for this mission and reroute it instead to the family that Linoone left behind. You were more than lenient with the nature of my reward, so I want you to relocate his wife and three children out of that ghetto and into a permanent residence in Post District. I want those Zigzagoon in a good school that will promise them a future. And if I find out that you go back on that promise, you will regret it."

Another haughty sip of his tea. Then, Alexander finally nodded his head. "You and Panne sound a lot more alike than I realized. So vengeful all the time. Fine. I'll honor your request."

"See to it that you do. I'll see you when things finally go to hell, Alexander."

Out of the torchlight, back into the silence of the garden. There were many things to wrap his head around, seemingly even more than before, but at least that promise was finally off his mind. There was nothing more binding him to Shardurr but the act. All that philosophy could wait until the iron had cooled.

Very soon, Paradise would surely be locked in the throes of fate. Shardurr was the fever, and he was the cure.