Joshua
It felt odd to see Olivine City from the sea. It was the city he'd once tried and failed to get to as a virginal graduate, a city where he could have used all that hard-earned knowledge from three years of university. Back then he just didn't have the savings to move and pay for rent while he found his first real job. It looked like it would have been a home away from home, an epithet no town in Johto would be proud of. Olivine was an unlovely city. From the seaward side it was all cranes, concrete wharves, warehouses and shipping containers, the famed lighthouse all but lost among the industry. A pale ochre haze lingered in the sky above the city. Beyond all that, you could see the green hill country of rural Olivineshire.
Olivine had somehow managed to hang onto her city walls through eight hundred years of war, industry, and population booms – now they were a pleasant walk with benches on the towers. Outside the medieval city walls, Olivine looked a lot like Mulberry Town, Josh thought, as they walked along the parapet. Inside the wall, it was more like Azalea Town. Olivine was built on a volcanic hotspot, the inner city crowded with traditional inns boasting hot spring baths. Some had medieval bones, others were little more than a century old.
They descended the wall at the west gatehouse into the general bustle of the city centre. Funny how life seemed to accelerate once you got to the mainland. The weather reports were full of news of a drifblim migration coming down from the Misho highlands -something that had gone ignored in the Whirl Islands. Josh glanced sidelong at Eve. That morning, she'd spent twenty minutes meditating before she'd even touch breakfast, which was strange. She'd been very cryptic about her time at the Cianwood Gym. All she'd say was that the food was good. He decided not to press the issue. Maybe she still needed space.
Olivine city centre was actually more like a gentrified Mulberry Town, Josh decided. A lot of the centre was red brick buildings of the ornate kind, with an abundance of arches and columns and lead-roofed cupolas. Mixed in among them were the steeply-pitched roofs and exposed beams of the medieval inns and townhouses. Even the pidgey cooed at each other more genteelly. In Mulberry the lead would have been pinched, the brickwork chipped, and the pidgey fighting each other.
But the Olivine Gym couldn't look more incongruous – a windowless ziggurat of gleaming steel, surrounded by gardens of gravel and asphalt. A life-sized steelix sculpture of poured concrete formed an arch over the main entrance. The sheer inappropriateness of the architecture obviated the need for a sign. Beyond the main doors there was no atrium or foyer. There was no greeting of any sort, just a brightly-lit corridor leading deeper into the Gym. The corridor terminated in a pair of automatic doors. They seemed to delay for several second before opening.
The hall beyond was an unlit battlefield. There was a dais just visible in the shadows at the far end, a silhouette of someone standing at the foot.
"Who dares enter the Gym?" a voice boomed.
"Who dares ask?" Eve countered.
There was a click of snapped fingers. The hall lights came on with a thump-THUMP; illuminating a plain battlefield covered with a substrate of grey, feathery ash. Coils of gleaming barbed wire marked the field boundaries. The trainer at the foot of the dais was a tall, riffy sod, his close-cropped hair a clash of teal and orange. The studs on his leather jacket shone in the intense glare of the fluorescent light. He was holding out a Poké Ball at arm's length.
"I am Zane, and I am steel!"
"I am Evelina Joy of Cherrygrove City!" Eve declared. "I am a Tigerlily Champion and I challenge Jasmine!"
Zane almost smiled. "If you want …"
He disappeared into the shadows at the back of the hall. Josh nudged Eve gently.
"Are you sure?" he murmured.
"I know the key to inner peace," Eve said, stepping into the trainer's box.
Jasmine stepped onto the dais. Josh had a sudden impression of a rose wilting in the heat. Most Gym Leaders were flamboyant types – you wouldn't look twice to see Jasmine on the promenade. Shy, retiring, delicate – apparently delicate. She wouldn't look directly at her challenger.
Jasmine nodded down at Zane.
"This is an official Gym battle between the challenger Evelina Joy of Cherrygrove City and Jasmine of the Olivine Gym! Each trainer will use one pokémon! The challenger will release first!"
"Lyra! You have the honour!"
Straight to the ace. Eve didn't hesitate for a moment.
"Scizor," Jasmine said.
Bug vs Bug, both of them gleaming scarlet. Lyra took to the field with a yell, rising eagerly to attack height. Scizor snapped into a taut fighting position, widening its stance, abdomen canted forward, pincers open. It was almost twice the size of Lyra, and probably over twice as heavy. At first glance Scizor looked the more dangerous, if you hadn't seen how aggressive ledian could be. Scizor couldn't actually fly, either.
"Begin!"
"Thunderpunch!" Eve immediately ordered. Scizor remained disciplined and motionless as Lyra closed to attack with two fists sparking.
"Bullet Punch," Jasmine ordered demurely.
Both Lyra and Scizor tried to dodge – both lunging at their opponent and both missing. Scizor's other pincer flicked out – Lyra struck back with Thunderpunch for another near-miss exchange. Scizor wasn't actually all that quick, Josh thought, watching them skirmish back and forth, but its aim was sharp. Most pokémon eventually lost their cool with Lyra buzzing angrily around in front of their face. Jasmine's scizor just reacted like it was nothing more than morning sparring, calmly stepping around a sparking fist and slamming a pincer into Lyra's thorax, punting her across the field with a crack.
"Iron Defence," said Jasmine.
"Air Cutter!" Eve yelled over Lyra's frustrated shriek. "Cut it to bits!"
Lyra delivered a rain of Air Cutters with rather more fury than accuracy, Scizor stepping and dodging around most of them. The strategy seemed reckless to him – Lyra was steadily drifting closer with each Air Cutter.
"X-Scissor."
"Thunderpunch!"
The next exchange instantly devolved into a brawl cloaked in a grey cloud of ash, all whirling fists and pincers. It was difficult to riddle out what was going on, but Josh had his doubts. Lyra didn't do well in brawls, Iron Fist or no, and now she was trying to batter down an Iron Defence.
"Eve …"
She wasn't listening, and Lyra had gone tunnel-visioned with fury. Something about fighting other Bug-types put the devil in her.
"Counter."
There was the terrible rasp of a pincer's tooth scraping across Lyra's exoskeleton. The attack sent her flying into the ash – Scizor was on her in a flash of scarlet and a hail of Bullet Punches.
Protect! Josh urged.
"Drain Punch!" Eve insisted. Josh glanced at her. That move made no sense. Still the Bullet Punches shot out – slower now, more considered, like a man trying to knock in a nail with the fewest blows possible.
Protect!
Lyra tried to take off. Scizor smacked her back down. She returned a half-hearted swipe with Drain Punch.
Zane had seen enough. "Victory to the Leader. Hail the Steel Gym."
His heart sank. Counter. Josh realised he'd seen this battle once before, at the Cianwood Gym, with another Counter, and a different Bug-type.
He reached out to put a hand on her shoulder.
"Tch, tch!" she said curtly, waving him away. She recalled Lyra and stepped out of the box, her back to him. Josh stared at her back for a moment, trying to work out what he was supposed to do.
"I challenge the Gym," he said, at a loss. There was a flicker of red, pale and washed-out in the strong Gym lights, as Jasmine recalled Scizor. Josh stepped into the vacant trainer's box.
"Zane," Jasmine said.
He swaggered from the side line, not up to the dais, but to its foot, below Jasmine.
"A Gym battle is at stake!" he declared. "I am Zane and I am Steel."
Josh took Ivysaur's Poke Ball off his belt. He was tenacious and versatile, even if the Steel-type resisted him well. The ace, in other words. Besides, on this field his Nature Power would transmute into Earth Power.
"Forretress!" Zane barked.
Forretress in 1v1 … Self-Destruct would be pointless. It would be a wrecking ball … Forretress were not subtle pokémon.
"Ivysaur," Josh said. "Battle's on."
Josh declined to make the first move. Zane showed more patience than he expected, and did nothing. Well, he knew the counter to that game. "Growth!"
"Rollout!"
Forretress locked its shell closed with a snap. Ash boiled up behind it as it revved itself up to speed.
"Sleep Powder!" Dodge around that.
Ivysaur vented a cloud of glittering blue powder into its path – Forretress just ploughed straight through and unceremoniously shunted Ivysaur aside. Josh realised he'd done something stupid. Its shell was locked down – Sleep Powder was never going to work. Ivysaur pushed himself back to his feet just as Forretress swung back round, extended his Vine Whips and cracked them down hard on its left-hand side. It wobbled with the impact and skidded through the barbed wire into the wall.
[Gotcha,] Ivysaur croaked in satisfaction.
This has to finish before it starts Rollout again, Josh thought. That tactic probably wouldn't work twice.
"Rollout!" Zane ordered. Forretress curled back round to the attack.
No. "Nature Power!"
The floor erupted in a six-foot high geyser of orange and red flame. Little droplets of molten material splashed back down onto the field, smoking where they hit the ash. Forretress was a motionless ball, scorched black.
[Did I do that?]
Zane was glaring at him, as if he'd planned this. Josh wasn't about to admit he didn't understand what had happened.
"Fine. You've earned the right to challenge Jasmine."
Steam rose from the bath as a gentle mist, subtly softening the view of the rooftops of historic Olivine. Tiled roofs were capped with ornate chimney pots, decorated with the crowns of sycamores green and gold in the evening sun. They were staying at the Rose and Dragon, a former coaching inn. The inn sign was a dragonair coiled around a red and yellow rose. The upper rooms had bath-rooms open to the air, the hot water piped up from the spring.
Somewhere in the city, the clear tone of a clock tower's bell was chiming out the hour. Josh lay back against the bath, soaking in the heat, enjoying this moment of doing nothing.
It had been an oddling day. It was the first time Josh could remember that he had been the better trainer. He took no pleasure in that. He couldn't bring himself to challenge Jasmine, not after seeing the look on her face. Eve had spent hours after the Gym getting into silly battles – she won more than half of them, but they were bad victories. She was watching the trainers more than the pokémon, which she never usually did. Whatever training she'd been doing at the Cianwood Gym, she wasn't quite back to her old self yet.
There was the sound of the door to the main room opening behind him. Eve was standing on the threshold, wrapped in a towel.
"Can I join?"
"Oi, wait your turn!" he protested.
"Come on, it's been a long day. Please?"
It was hard enough hearing the tired, beaten little tone in her voice. He liked his alone time in the bath. It was relaxing. It was hard to see how relaxing it could be with the addition of a naked Eve. But it was the 'please' that really did it.
"Oh … alright."
Josh kept his sight fixed on the trees and chimneys of Olivine as Eve demurely slipped into the bath beside him. The turquoise-green waters partially obscured the sight of their bodies beneath the surface. Josh wasn't sure he wanted to see her naked, and he didn't trust his body anyway. Eve said nothing for a while, soaking in the heat, her eyes closed.
"This is god weird," he said.
Eve giggled at first, to Josh's annoyance. Until she realised he wasn't joking.
"Good weird?" she asked hopefully.
"No," he said, immediately regretting his bluntness. "I don't really know what thissen is."
Eve stared ahead into the steaming water. "Whenever one of us had a really shit day, we'd all unwind in the bath," she said slowly. "There were never any arguments then, you know? I'm sorry. I'll go."
"No, I day mean that, I meant, uh," Josh burbled hopelessly.
"I just want to relax with my friend," Eve said. "Is that so weird?"
"Well, no, it ay," Josh admitted. Put like that, was it really that different to playing chess at the bathhouse with his cousin? He could feel her eyes on his face, watching his expression. "Just … dun know where te look."
"You'm allowed to see me tits," Eve said, and broke into a giggle fit.
Josh sighed. It was half a joke, and not a very good imitation of his accent. He wished she'd take something like this seriously for once.
The illogic of trying not to look at her was beginning to dawn on him. Eve didn't take it seriously, but he always seemed to take it sincerely. Tentatively, he glanced to one side, and saw the outline of the bath water lapping around her tits. He wasn't quite sure what he was expecting, but it was something of an anticlimax. There was something crashingly ordinary about the sight. It occurred to him that because of Ninetales-as-Eve he'd already seen most of what there was to see in the Deepwoods. The tendons in his fist hand twitched at the memory. One minute aggressively seductive, the next trying to tear his arm off.
For a while neither of them said anything, soaking in, all things considered, awkward silence. It wasn't fair that Eve should remind him of 'Maisie'. Through the gap in the roofline he could see the imposing blue silhouette of a container ship like a castle on the horizon.
"I'm not ready to challenge Jasmine yet, am I?" Eve said eventually.
"I don't think your team is ready for a Steel-type Gym," Josh replied, seizing on the ordinary topic. "You haven't caught a new pokémon since the Ilex Forest, remember."
Eve paused to consider this. "I've never really planned my team … I suppose you're right."
"There's all those drifblim coming down from Misho," Josh pointed out. "They're rare in Johto. And drifblim are different to anything else on your team."
"Maybe …"
Josh couldn't help but remember that look on her face. It wasn't far from that look she'd had after abrupt defeat at the Cianwood Gym. The parallel was obvious.
"I'll never tell anyone that you lost," he told her.
That didn't have the effect he'd hoped for. He wasn't certain if she'd even heard him. She had a strange look on her face, as though she was seeing through the water to somewhere else entirely.
"I learned something," Eve said, very quietly. "I kept seeing it. Sometimes when I wasn't even asleep. It was beautiful. And it was always lonely. But I sleep better when I'm with something living. The Nightmare doesn't come back to me as much. I know it makes no fucking sense, but it works."
For days she'd said nothing about the Gym. Now that it came to it, he didn't know what to say.
"Let's go into the hills tomorrow. I could do with some time to prepare for Jasmine," he lied.
She punched him on the arm. "Liar!"
A/N: I'm not really happy with this chapter, but at this point I'd rather publish something than have readers wait much longer.
Returning readers may notice that The Green Road Into the Trees and the last scene of The Girl From Goldenrod City have been rewritten