This story is co-developed by Titan127 and beta read by ShonnaRose.

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 3: Blood Circulator


There was something Gold could have done, to make her love him.

Maybe his jokes weren't up to snuff. She hadn't just been the straight man in their relationship; she'd been moonlighting as a backwater gal in Johto's quiet bush, when in reality she was the most ironclad comedy critic east of the Grand Axis. She had a prestigious, penthouse office in Neon Town, where performers flocked from all over to perform at her feet only to be booted minutes into their routine and politely told to never show their face on stage again. He knew where this was going. It was time for him to close up shop, and waste away on the street as his dreams were ripped away, only to cross paths with an old master of the craft—his flashlight, that devil—and relearn his passion for comedy. Then he'd stomp right back up to her office and he'd perform and she'd absolutely love it and she'd see what a charming, handsome, super-intelligent guy he was and they'd fall head over heels for each other and move somewhere quiet and—

Gold gasped for a breath. His brain was just that powerful that thinking too hard emptied his lungs, and maybe clinging to a rock face kilometers above the surface helped too. He'd already completely forgotten the scenario by the time his breath returned. Fine. Maybe that wasn't it anyway.

Did he not pick up enough around the house? That'd make more sense if they were actually living together, but they shared enough hotel rooms for it to count.

Was she waiting for him to actually defeat her in battle, at least once? They never fought for real, since she rarely found it worth the effort, but for all he knew, Crystal could secretly have tempered her judgment of character in an ancient gladiator pit.

It seemed there was a lot about her he didn't understand.

When he wasn't evening the timbre of his breaths, he tightened his fingers on the handholds and glanced at the dark border hanging behind his shoulder. Some blue remained directly over Mt. Silver's peak, but he'd be buried if he didn't make it high enough soon. Clouds could hover eight-thousand meters at this altitude. If he hadn't been pouting like a loser with a hard-boiled brain, he could've had a functioning Poké GEAR to listen for a storm warning and know just how much time he had left, and he could've banked on his leeway if he knew he was getting that cloud figure right in the first place.

Why could he remember the day Kalos planned to switch off its last terrestrial analogue television signal and not the stuff that would help to keep him alive at this very second?

It was November 29th, if anyone else inside his head was wondering. At three in the morning.

The moment he stopped feeling his fingers, Gold threw away progress on the current face and landed in the mountain snow. It was high time that he found somewhere to lie low, see if he could stave off the frostbite for a little while longer. A pad of snow beneath his foot slipped and took him with it, and he counted his lucky stars that only one of them tumbled down the mountainside.

Conventional wisdom told him to carry firewood in his pack to set up for some rest, especially after he was mysteriously provided some by the magically-appearing campfire in a cave some thousand meters down. By the sheer coincidence of completely lacking common sense and leaving the burning pile without so much as salvaging a twig, he learned he didn't need to.

Sitting in the next cave a hundred meters up the trail, deep within the blackness, was another. Perfectly shaped, perfectly lit, vividly cartoonish. Gold hugged the air so close that the heat left dark lashes on his outer coat and liquified the coating frost, turning the wrinkles on his sleeves into rivers.

The convenience started to creep him the hell out. Everywhere he went, he kept seeing this campfire. He could turn around one moment, see nothing, mosey forward a few steps, and then turn around again—bam, campfire.

He pointed an accusatory finger right into the flames. "Stop stalking me. Ow."

Gold sucked the burn off his frozen finger and began settling in, hoping that he might get a few hours before heading further up, since he was starting to get heavy and he couldn't remember recently gouging on carbs to explain it. His stomach groaned in the present, and he told it to shrivel up and rot if it was just gonna keep whining.

A luxuriously savory smell grabbed hold of his nose and beat him over the head, joining his stomach in the fight against his brain. If he was hallucinating already, he'd be mighty pissed. But like a halfwit with cruel friends who just got tapped on his shoulder in homeroom, he had no choice but to look for what wasn't there.

It was a bird. A cooked bird.

Gold swallowed his drool and marveled at the poultry on the cold rock in front of him, which put unreasonable faith in the thin cloth between it and freezer burn. It must've been a Pidgey or something, and only a wild or someone much worse at cooking than he was could've plucked it so poorly.

Unsettled but far from punching the gift Rapidash in the jaw—that was how that saying went, right?—he plopped it down by the fire and snapped off a leg. Dry, just like his comedy. And his audience.

He didn't get through his first taste unscarred. A wave of nausea almost knocked him out, when he realized what exactly was in his gullet. His last few bites had to sneak past his gag reflex on the way down, because no matter how many pin feathers he took out, he couldn't shake that it used to be a thing. He didn't really spare a lot of thought to the stuff he ate, and for once he knew he wasn't alone in not thinking too hard about something.

Hoping he wouldn't have to eat any more of it himself, he wrapped it in some scraps of plastic packaging and shoved it between the dwindling dried food and now-soaked matches in his bag. Maybe his Pokemo could get more use out of it later, since they were a little more used to eating unprocessed meat. He hadn't actually released anyone aside from Slugma in the past day, and only then to make sure it wouldn't be mummified when he needed it next.

Gold set up Stephen to keep watch—patting him on the top rung for his dutiful service—and tucked fully-clothed into his sleeping bag, pulling the zipper closed except for a tiny porthole to breathe thinning air.

"Hey, uhh… whoever is giving me free stuff," he said to the emptiness of the cavern, then tried to think of something clever as a follow up. It had to make him look cool, like he absolutely knew what he was doing and didn't need rations to keep him in the land of the living. Somewhere on his thought train, he got off at, "Thanks."

Gold closed his eyes, and was instantly whisked away. Just as instantly, the trembling earth tore him back.

"Agh!" He scrambled to pack things away as the cave started to rain debris above him. The uneven ground knocked him on his rear a few times and he speared his fingers on sharp outcroppings as he pawed his way around. Once everything was back in order—he couldn't say if he intentionally left the bird behind—he stole a piece of the dying campfire, blew to bring it back up to full light, and then booked it.

He had been in-and-out of the mountain's depths over and over on the way up, so the flashbang of white when he threw himself back out into perilous, open air was nothing at all. His wet boots cemented himself to the buried slate, and the fastest he could escape would hardly put his Slugma to shame.

He could hear the roars down the mountain. They wanted him badly. He must have punted one too many Geodude on the way up, when the polite amount was zero—but to his credit, holding up fists like they did was itching for a fight.

"Oh. That's not good," he said, when he witnessed a serpentine cloud race down the side of the mountain thousands of meters below. As it picked up speed and material, the cloud doubled, tripled in size, until it was an unstoppable skyscraper consuming the trees near the base. The quakes had set off more than their fair share of avalanches as he climbed up, and based on his entirely anecdotal knowledge of the few he'd seen in person, they were getting larger.

He headed towards a barren slope face, where the snow had long since barreled down to sea level and hadn't yet built back up, and pushed himself out on the precipice below it without so much as a thought.

It was starting to get… comfortable. Yeah, his fingers were always about to fall off, and the wetness was ever slowly seeping into his pants, but in his head? It was as simple as getting up in the morning—agonizing and a complete slog, but something he did and could do everyday. It was easy to make decisions like "don't become a statistic in a list of human deaths by avalanche" and "hunker down to warm up, or at least until that huge monster comes to kill you again". And here he was imagining that a few stories up the mountain he'd break down into a dramatic fit and cry his way back to the Indigo Plateau. Gold really had to give himself more credit. He was a perfect cinnamon roll with no negative qualities, physical or emotional.

Even if he couldn't go back in time and convince her that he was worth more than dirt, he could still climb atop the world and come screaming back down. Maybe he'd slam his hands down like a lawyer and throw an objection to her rejection. When he planted Stephen at the peak like a flag he forgot to bring, she'd see it was all for her.

It was for her. Right. That's why he walked the sky.

On the lookout for the next fire, he tracked up a ridge on one of the mountain's outlying arms, after being dumped out of a cave network. He could see the summit from here, taller than the entire world but undeniably closer than it was from ground level. Each pad of snow his boots kicked aside careened down the slopes, and were he a little more unbalanced, he probably would've too.

He saw something dark in the snow and hurried his rear. The closer he got, the more it began to look like a person. At some point he started to run, blasting snow off the precarious edge.

"Hey! Have you been leaving stuff behind?" he shouted, to no avail.

A person! It was like flying a plane and waving to another pilot going the opposite direction—completely implausible in those circumstances to see someone else, but not theoretically impossible. Maybe he'd finally have someone but his brainless thoughts to listen to.

That guy couldn't hear him, the winds were so high. Gold kept calling out, hoping that his words would ride the swirling currents, but his target wasn't moving any further away. He must've set up camp.

"Over here!" He was definitely in range now, and closing fast. The man, laying lazily in the snow—that was weird, it wasn't the best place to doze off—would hear him any second. "Heeeeeeeeey!"

The stranger still didn't respond at all.

He didn't sit up.

He was a corpse.

Gold stood over the man, half-buried in snow and only visible by his dark gear. His skin was completely black, and not from melanin. It had been long enough that there was nothing left to smell—he and the rock were basically one and the same.

Maybe it was the Viridian Leader's "guy". An overzealous moron who decided that scaling this mountain meant more to him than living, and didn't change his mind until it started to slip away.

The worst thing was that he got more nauseous eating the Pidgey. Without a smell, without rot, nothing turned his stomach or burned his throat. He was just looking at a sad piece of the mountain that had been there a really, really long time.

He tried to pay respects, give a eulogy, do something meaningful, but it felt like enough of a hassle that he just trudged away. For some reason, his limbs were much heavier to drag, and he felt deep in the tips of his gloves where the cold was starting to eat away at him.

It was hard to grieve over someone he'd never met.

And it was even harder knowing he might meet him soon.


Ten digits.

After a lot of long nights and some incredibly braindead math, Blue had decided that an array of ten binary digits was good enough. A byte with two extra bits. That was 1,024 possible combinations, and only a maniac would need more than that.

Left thumb, bit one, was the target—self or opponent. Left index through left pinky handled aim as positive and negative on two axes. The right hand was entirely dedicated to move selection, with any combination of five bits assigned a usable move in a given Pokémon's arsenal. It was a convoluted, bullshit system, and it was still nominally a prototype, but they couldn't wait around for it to be perfect.

Red held up thumb and ring on his left, and index and pinky on his right.

Shit. It was high vertical, center horizontal on the opponent, but for the life of him he blanked on what move they mapped 01001 to. An Ice Beam was already screaming across the training field by the time he mustered up the gut, and his Pidgeot ended up in a steaming pile with a crystallized wing.

Blue bit his tongue and recalled, tossing another Poké Ball to the opposite end of the field. When his Exeggutor appeared, he flattened a skyline of weeds underfoot, one of hundreds that had built themselves into the concrete training field beside Gramps' lab. Bunches closer to the buildings' shade were already tainted with seasonal yellow, while those further out savored the extra weeks their luck had granted them. They didn't control where their seeds fell.

Blastoise was on Blue's own side of the field—where a few blossoms had managed to hold on through the summer sun—but this time, he wasn't the Pokémon's commander. Red had managed to invert their controlled zones, placing Blastoise close to his opponent with the express purpose of giving him a better sightline to his hand signals. Blue's options were to force a switch and take advantage of the free hit, or brute force his way into a victory regardless. Both options sounded like pretty sweet deals.

"Get back to me and force him away!" ordered Blue to Exeggutor.

It charged to close the distance, bombarding its opponent with psychic waves. Red showed the same move signal, and Exeggutor—a real clever guy, that one—dove into a roll to pass under another stream of ice.

By Blue's command, Seed Bombs erupted from between the sprouting eggs on his Pokémon's head. The warheads bore down on Blastoise and Red, and the latter threw his fingers forward into a twisted, hesitant mess. His Pokémon made up the difference by blasting one of the bombs with his pressure cannons and withdrawing into his shell, but he was still caught in a violent burst of hypergerminating plant matter.

The next signal being correct didn't matter—Blue already had the advantage, and his opponent was too slow in his recovery to counter the leaves snapping off stems in the tall grass. Exeggutor swung them into a tempest with psychic power, and Blastoise couldn't stay on his feet amidst thousands of swirling cuts. Red raised an extended hand, fingers together, and announced his resignation.

Blue grumbled all the way to the paint-peeled white bench sitting behind Gramps's house and felt around his cargo pockets rather than use his hands for something more productive. He kicked at the overgrown weeds climbing the bench legs. "This isn't gonna fly."

Daisy stood over him in her stiff, perfectly-washed lab coat. She flattened his standing orange hairs with her clipboard and recited notes to him, waiting for him to be shocked at what he already knew. She said, "He did catch you off guard. I'd call it viable."

The cap-wearing pain in his ass was still halfway across the training field, hand-feeding berries into a Pokémon that wasn't starving for meals. His Pikachu leapt up and down on the collapsed Blastoise's stomach, squealing like a wild pest. It pissed him off how carefree they seemed, like the tournament wasn't months away and practice wasn't more important to him than eating or sleeping. Blue was feeling the rush after every nightmare that had him groveling at the feet of Steven Stone or those train conductor geeks from Unova.

She continued, "If you're worried about flexibility, the Professor recommends—"

"Just call him Gramps, geez," he said.

"The Professor recommends that we rework aiming and keep the target flag. We could have a directional point specify aim, way more user friendly, and we're fine to leave his Pokémon to cover direction otherwise. Most verbal moves are pretty vague already."

"That leaves what?"

"Three extra fingers to map simpler move codes to, or maybe flags for 'delay' and 'repeat'. It would imply to his Pokémon more choice to act without orders."

"It's not gonna help. He's struggling to get it already, changing it now would set him back to ancient history."

"Okay, smart guy, why don't we just go with my suggestion and let him do moves with all ten fingers? Or just let him use his old motions?"

"The committee'd bust him for breaking 'the spirit of battle' or some vague crap like that if they don't think he communicates enough. Also, he'd have no semantic control. Also, he'd flip off the audience."

While the image of Red raising his middle finger to the sky to order Volt Tackle, a veritable "fuck you" on its own, was worth a chuckle or two, the League CEO might have him drawn and quartered live on stage for disrespecting his legendary tournament. The World Trial was serious business.

The absolute thorn in his side finally sauntered over and wormed into position next to him without permission. A wide, soundless yawn stretched his jaw wide, and he curled his hands behind his cap in some untrained meditation.

"I love getting the chance to kick you to the curb and I still don't appreciate your lax attitude about it," said Blue.

Red signed "you did great, too" and let Daisy ramble for days about his battle performance like it was some remarkable achievement to misspeak three in ten battle commands.

They made up a diorama, the ones in museums with melting wax puppets. He and Red sat in the same places they had for years, picking up paint flakes from the bench, while Daisy leaned over to comment on whatever was pulverizing the concrete. Most of the time, it was Gramps. Even after he switched to research full-time, he still took the time out of his day to battle Blaine or that meathead from the Indigo League or whoever who was looking to see if the great Samuel Oak still had some fight left in him that day. Blue knew there wasn't much excitement in battle for him anymore, so he must've done it because the kids didn't want their favorite show to get canceled.

A loose nail dug into Blue's back when he leaned back. "How many more sets you want to do today?"

Red opened his palm.

"Five's too much. We're running low on Pokémon and they need rest time."

The hand stayed splayed, even when Pikachu jumped up into his lap and demanded attention.

"Gah, fine. But I'm bowing out and calling Green if my guys start to hurt."

Blastoise followed and collapsed on his tail after walking only a few paces. That Leaf Storm must've really beaten some sense into him, though Blue reasoned that they did sneak into point-blank range. His few uses of Hydro Pump earlier in battle—which soundly handed Arcanine a free nap—no doubt exhausted him as well. In a best case, he could max out at ten uses before keeling over, and that was without wasting the energy on other moves.

"How's the visual directions? Following okay?" asked Blue.

His partner scratched at itches beneath his scale mail without answering him right, and then stared into space, which was probably more interesting than what Daisy was telling them. No wonder he and Red ended up getting along so well.

"I let him train you because I wanted you to be serious." Blue narrowed his eyes. "Get serious."

A mercifully low pressure spout of water leapt from Blastoise's left cannon and smacked his face. Water streamed down his chin and all over his clothes.

Both he and Green—after some convincing—had forked over their own partners to Red to boost his team for the upcoming tournament. Green wasn't interested in the World Trial, and didn't have the badges for it either, so she didn't mind her Venusaur tagging along somewhere else as long as she could butt in and tell Red he was brushing his petals wrong. Blue, on the other hand, was entering alongside his buddy-ol-pal and aimed to shove the current World Champion, Oberon Terminus, off that rainbow throne.

Perhaps it was stupid to leave his most brutally experienced Pokémon in someone else's hands when he was climbing the summit. But, he reasoned, after a few days and nights and more days of groaning, Red wanted it a whole lot more.

That idiot hadn't just waited with bated breath for Gramps's weekend spars. He'd watched an old World Trial movie of a Gengar and a Nidorino swapping blows until the tape was magnetic spaghetti, and then watched it some more. One day, he claimed, he'd be the strongest who ever lived. Red, the wordless, introverted, won't do a thing without calling Gramps for advice loser was going to march his army up a stairway of stars and planets.

The least Blue could do was give him a fighting chance.

He may have gotten away with home signs to beat Kanto and Johto's Gym Leaders, but only because they didn't know his tricks by heart. Up on the Grand Axis, the world would be watching, studying, preparing. They'd have his code cracked in a day or less. Without that element of surprise, what did he have? Clunky, hard-to-read hand motions that his Pokémon needed direct line of sight to interpret, versus the cruel efficiency of voices and tongues. It was a foregone conclusion.

Blue wanted to say it. He really wanted to scream at the top of his lungs, but every time the urge erupted, Red stood up from his seat like clockwork and offered an open hand to run another set. That palm was in front of him yet again, and just like the last time and the one before that, Blue was compelled into shutting up like a good little pup.

"I think we should practice some more complex maneuvers. See if nixing aiming is worth it or not," announced Daisy.

"Use Venusaur," said Blue. "Try to land Sludge Bomb at range. Do it ten times in a row and I'll eat a dirty sock."

Red nodded, eyes shining. There was still conviction welling up inside, overflowing his bright scarlet. Eventually, it would fade into hope. Then to bargaining, then pessimism, then misery.

Blue was scared to watch it happen, but he always failed to tell his friend to walk away.


As usual, Gramps didn't know how to have a life until after the sun went down. The moon was halfway to midnight when he finally emerged from the lab rooms, cupping his slack jaw and the grizzled fuzz hanging off his chin, belying every official baby-faced photo of him.

He must've noticed Blue's candle-lit, dumb-idiot stare. "Oh, do I look that poor?"

"You look like ass, Gramps. You smell it too."

"Apologies. We were performing an experiment on Primeape socialization, and I've been in the habitat for," he checked the watch under a stain on his sleeve, "seventeen hours. At the least, I didn't get clobbered this time."

The memory of a black eye made his right darker than his left, but both were pretty pitiful. He shuffled over on his slippers and filled the opposite couch in the lounge, which was marked for a washing as soon as he set his rear down. He competed for rank with the moldy books stacked in a case at the edge of the room—it wasn't like he hadn't read all of them cover to cover, but they and he were a few thousand weekends past their primes. Blue passed him some tea over the candle and watched him savor it like he was drinking Galar's richest brew instead of grocery store wood chips in a mesh bag.

"I hope I didn't keep you long," said Gramps, no steam rising from the cup.

"My foot's cold," replied Blue.

"Red meant to chat with me too. I thought he'd be here by now."

They could smalltalk forever, but Blue figured to rip off the bandage and all the hairs that came with it. "You need to stop him."

Gramps reunited the tea with its platter. "I won't argue this again, Blue."

"Good. My point's made already. The only person he'd listen to if they told him to stop is you." His whisper was instinctual and well-trained, and Gramps loved him enough to keep their chats classified.

"My responsibility is to enable Trainers. I see few reasons why he can't succeed," said the Professor.

"I don't get how you can't see a problem. He's been training for nearly two years when most people don't start serious preparation until six months out, and he's nowhere close. We don't even know he'll pass the certification exam." Blue leaned forward and grasped for an invisible line between what needed to be said and what didn't. "He's gonna fail if he goes."

"Insulting him is uncalled for." It heated him up how much Gramps treated Red like another grandson, as if the one he had wasn't good enough. Not that Blue really disagreed.

"I'm not… insulting the guy. I'm a realist."

"Realistically, his odds are hardly worse than anyone else joining the World Trial."

"Like hell they are! A mute kid can't compete with—" Blue would've tugged his tongue right out of his jaw if it stopped him speaking faster.

Gramps was a well-mannered guy, most of the time, and had mellowed a lot since he was a big shot Trainer back in the medieval ages. But something about his ironclad gaze made Blue sink back in his chair, and made his one bare foot grow frost.

"How long have you wanted to say that?" asked Gramps.

"Wait, that's not— shit. Not what I meant."

Blue laid his head to the side and tried to die, knowing there was no place to go back to after letting it slip out. He had started to wonder why no one ever mentioned it and learned implicitly that it was for a reason. Red skipped carefree through each training day and Blue's tacit stares never seemed to reach him, since he was focused on something so far away.

His own grave already dug, and the shovel still stuck in the fresh mound, Blue decided another meter would be deep enough. "I don't know why he cares. People already worship the guy for kicking the Rockets to kingdom come, so there's nothing left for him to prove."

"Whatever it means, it's important to him. We should support that."

Blue noticed how long his gaze lingered onto the window—more accurately, he was also looking for someplace far from here. "So, what? You just want to live vicariously through him for all the tournaments you never won?"

The candle shadowed Gramps's eyes when he shifted his stiff neck in his collar. "You've painted an unfair portrait of me."

"I'm supposed to believe that you just quit because you felt like it?"

"Yes. I simply found more fun in my research, after a time."

"You had your dream ripped away," asserted Bue, a strong grip on nothing at all, "and I guess the berry doesn't fall far, huh? I bet my whole future on becoming Indigo Champ. Then I walked up to the Plateau and he was there, and he kicked my tail. Just like he did the last time, and the time before that. Every single time we've done an official match, no matter how many cute little spars I won, he's mopped the floor with my face. I had my whole application ready to go, and then what? I ripped it into a pile. How the heck could I be Champion if I could never beat anybody when shit actually mattered?"

He stared at his reflection in the distant window glass, wanting to fight his own perpetually smug lip. "Now look at us. You write papers and I'm holding up a Gym no one wants because the outfit used to hang around. No wonder you're banking on him instead of me."

Gramps got an irritatingly soft look in his eyes, even after Blue had basically called him a failure. He was expecting far more blowback—the old Gramps would've smacked his head in a circle for that kind of backtalk. "You weren't always so fatalistic, and I know you don't want him to be."

Blue sighed. "He's not a kid anymore. The world's gonna stop hiding how much it hates evening the playing field for guys like him. It sucks a big one but I need him to realize that his crappy larynx isn't going to get anywhere up there."

"Would you have been happy if someone told you to abandon your dream?"

"Yes! It never mattered!" Blue stood suddenly and howled from his pounding chest. "Just like how Red's gonna enter that tournament and lose and it'll never mean anything!"

The following silence was like every power transformer in the world went up in sparks. That inescapable hum had curiously taken off, leaving him with the realization that anyone within a kilometer could've heard him.

The quiet made the shattering glass that much louder.

Blue rocketed through the double doors of the lounge and beheld a formerly decorative vase in a presently sad pile. Beside it was a lone Poké Ball, with the same dent in its cap that Blue had given it when he turned away from the Pokemon League and slammed it against the brick on Route 22. The autumn chill left Gramps's front door wide, and he swiped the capsule and let the starry dusk swallow him.

"Red!" His shout echoed down the dirt hallway that made up Pallet. As he sprinted parallel to a recently harvested plot, he kept his eyes wide.

A scattered array of single lamps dotted the dark hills, and one of them was on the move. Blue threw himself and the air and barely managed to land on his materializing Pidgeot, whose wing had only just managed to stitch itself back up that morning. He knew he was pushing it by forcing him airborne so soon, but that flickering was nearly out of reach.

The frigid autumn hit him full force and would've knocked him into a shallow grave were his nails not digging into Pidgeot's feathers. He howled the air after his friend even knowing that the wind was throwing his cries back into his face.

The tiny flame danced in the night, not going any which way. Without aim, it forced Blue to bank and roll to keep up, and soon his Pokémon was heaving under his weight as it dragged him through the low trees. Involuntarily, they dived. Blue leapt and rolled and sprinted and heaved and fell to his knees in a cushion of wheat shoots.

Fuck. He was bawling, wasn't he? Forget missing his Championship, forget getting the worst Gym on the planet, they were puny blunders. He looked up expecting to see a completely dark night, so far into the tilled fields that the town's beacons couldn't reach them. However, there was one flicker below the stars, waiting a hundred paces away.

Blue didn't know what he was waiting for. He could just hitch up on that Charizard and never talk to him again—and yeah, that would've been the smart move, if he heard as much as Blue thought he did.

If he was sticking around to hear him out, then he'd wait forever. Blue struggled to put together the words and call him back or put his one bare foot forward like he was supposed to. Apologize, like he was supposed to.

Instead, he examined the capsule he picked up, as if saying a final goodbye to the creature inside. Blue wound up his arm and hurled it, not knowing if he caught it at all.

His only chance vanished with the flame. Just like all the others, Blue gave up before he even rolled the dice.


Gold wouldn't call glaciers surprising, so he had to give this one props for its subtlety. His gaze followed the crystal blockage up a few stories, too tall for Stephen to conquer. According to the one time he looked at the map of the trail and then never again, there was a split in the walkable path about six-thousand meters up on the minor peak of Mt. Shirogane, one of them a dead end. Here he was, on the minor peak, having taken the right path. Actually, the left path, which was right, or at least it should've been. Either the cartographer should find a new job, or the landscape had ordered itself a makeover.

"Keep it coming, Flambina," panted Gold. "No, that's terrible."

His Slugma seared a hole into the frozen chunk hanging down the mountain while he served the essential support of trying to find what to call the dang thing. It had been bugging him since the capture, and he'd lugged through half the Region without a full team identity. Honestly, who didn't name their Pokémon? If there was someone out there that ordered the birth certificate of their newborn mess and it was signed "Human B. Eing" in fancy cursive at the bottom, he'd have a few choice words for them. One choice word for them. Why.

"If you need to charge back up, go take a walk—no—slide—no—glide? Yeah. Go take a glide around."

The creature sputtered out a final few plumes before sloshing off for a lap. After getting her back on her… foot at the fires, keeping her moving had been simple, but Gold still felt awful for turning her into a gargoyle for an hour. "Keep that, uh, blood pumping, Seana."

Seana? That was beyond worse. He was going for something like "sear", but it really didn't come out sounding the same way. It sounded like "sauna" if he really cared about trying.

A person-sized indent was melted out of the block already, but they had a long way to go to fit a beefy specimen like him. Gold gave the ice a solid one-two just to prove how tough he was. His knuckles were red with the slow, unending, inevitable, all-consuming encroach of frostbite.

The tremors rearranged the mountain again and it knocked him face-first into the snow. When he managed to dust himself up and find enough solid ground to stand back up, he saw a snow surge barreling down the lower part of the mountain. Gold held his breath. Trees wider than his dad after a few beers were swallowed whole.

Ahead of the avalanche, a herd of Donphan raised alarms and shot down the slope to outrun it. Gold screamed for them to go faster as they too were buried by the snow, and his throat was dry when the cloud settled and nothing but fallen trees were left.

Had they managed to escape, curving away at the last second in a scene of cinematic catharsis? As terrible as he felt not knowing, he took the similarly low certainty of the alternative as a blessing.

On the horizon, the clouds were closing in on all sides, and they were black. Not dark gray, not gunmetal, not slate, not any other weird hue that all just looked the same to him. Black. The entire Region had receded into artificial night and the mountain was a murderous island.

He swallowed. "H-hey Flavia, hurry up."

They got back to work, boring their way up the glacier. Gallons of slosh tumbled down to the plains of Johto, more splintered pieces of the crumbling Mt. Silver.

"Flavia," he repeated to himself, keeping it in focus. "Sounds like lava. I'm so smart."


"Where… is… my… money?" Gold huffed as he parted snow on the way back to his most recent camp, a few hundred meters up from his last.

Marigold was probably dozing off, forgetting just how important it was to pay her debts. She owed him fifty, and he was gonna get fifty, or else he'd have to send the boys after her. He pursed his lip and straightened his back, prepared to make an offer she couldn't refuse.

The path was lined with strange spires and beneath a gnarly sickle of a rock outcropping. Each tower was all ice—it took him a few minutes and one Slugma to detach the tongue he used to check—and resembled a tooth in a maw. The overhang above the top jaw, and he'd be swallowed whole once he found the cave entrance.

He squeezed some scavenged horror with his fingers and tried not to peek. Fortunately, he hadn't been the one to off it, but its eye sockets were empty above its beak and his imagination lingered on its cruel fate. He didn't even know how to fry in a pan, yet he planned on scorching it over an open flame and actually have the audacity to say "so tasty!" before taking a bite.

The magically transporting campfire had finally lost his trail, forcing him to ask Flavia for a new one inside the next tunnel through the central peak. They found the perfect little alcove in the rocks that trapped the heat inside, vented only with a single exit, slowly baking a Gold & Company casserole that he was proud to be part of. Sure, the smoke inhalation would get him eventually, but for the time being he still had eighteen, nineteen, twenty extremities. The circulating heat also allowed him to keep his Pokémon up to date on bed rest just in case something terrible happened the next few thousand meters to the summit. If he knew himself well—he did, it was a serious problem—it was nigh a guarantee.

Gold finally found the jagged entrance along the back of the stone beast's throat. He squeezed himself in and grumbled the whole way, his pupils dilating quickly without the dim daylight. Eventually he was thrust into the nothing without any light to guide him. "If you guys found another random Ponyta that literally stole the fire, I'm gonna be really miffed!"

He held his breath for the inevitable screech of Zubat hordes, or the skitter of feet as ground-dwelling creatures left panicked marks on the rocks in retreat.

When he heard nothing, he bolted.

Counting on his memory to be swift for once in his miserable life, he let subconscious control through himself through the cave. Left, right, rock, rock, big rock, right, slide under that gap, ow. His forehead dented itself on an overhang, but he kept his grip on his meat payload and kept running.

"Marigold, I need Flash!" There was no dim flicker of their new hearth, and his cries to his team went unanswered. Flying blind, he tripped over something and unleashed dying embers by kicking a mound of ash. He felt around for his belongings within a field of splinters. Once he had his bag, his capsules, his Stephen, he dragged them all as fast as he could out of the alcove. The ladder felt like it bent in more than one direction.

He shouldn't have left them alone! They could've been long gone if he wasn't so much of a baby who needed food right this instant.

They had split and the camp was busted. The monster always came for him, no matter where he was. The volcanic caverns were interwoven and complex and he couldn't even count high enough to describe the branches, low bar as that was, but that meant that no matter where he was, there was always a path to follow him.

Like always, he raced for a dim stream of sunlight to lead him to safety. It was barely a glow now, choked by the approaching storm, and it certainly wasn't the same way he entered.

"Marigold! Flavia! Crown! Trinity! Jack!" As he recited each name, his throat shaved flesh off itself until his voice was akin to radio static. "Somebody answer!"

The cavern screeched back.

There was a titanic body ahead, only visible by the dying shine reflecting off its eyes and catalog of teeth. His left eardrum became a dial tone, and no sooner had he thrown himself out of the way did the ground explode into a mess of sharpened fragments. One of his arms felt wet inside his insulated coat, and then unbearably fuzzy.

Gold grit his teeth, pinned his arm to his body with the other, and tried not to mind the suspicious chunk of rock that he felt as far up as tinged nerves in his shoulder when his fingers brushed it, because he only needed his legs for this next part. He charged.

"Aaaaaaaaaaaah!" The guttural cry was a vapid survival attempt. Look bigger, sound tougher, when he was neither of those things by nature.

It bought him enough time, since a few more precious seconds elapsed until a second sun appeared inside the cave. It was an orb without color. It was growing bigger, hotter, more alive. He saw the definition of the creature's maw around its brilliance, the spines erupting violently from every part of its body, and the bloodthirst of its narrowing pupils. Gold took the only path through the obstacle and dove through the human-sized hole between the creature's legs.

The lever of his arm drove even further down the spike when it contacted the ground, but he picked himself up in time to hear the monster burp in surprise around its own Hyper Beam and discharge the unfathomable volume of energy into the cave. Gold sprinted past a barely-lit field of stalagmites for the ever-closer glow of the overworld, and once again escaped into the freezing mountain air to leave raging quakes behind him.

This time, the shaking didn't stop. The creature was beyond pissed this time, and pound after pound shook the entirety of Mt. Silver until Gold could barely move a few meters through the alpine snow before falling on his head. Each time he tumbled, he noticed the islands of dyed snow, the closest ones iron red and the farthest ones already black.

With one, final, monumental roar, the earth went still. When the shaking ceased, Mt. Silver fell down.

Gold watched in horror as the white coat of the slope a city's length ahead of him was unceremoniously shed, pluming white aerosol like a volcano's archenemy. It raced down a perfect lane boarded by blackened stone, the same road he was supposed to be following to the summit. He knew he didn't have more than a minute before the snow reached him, and by then it would be fatal tower of pure mass.

With a catalog of his surroundings, he looked for a haven. Behind him was the cavern section he just left, but if he tried to take refuge, he'd first be gutted by that monster and then waste away inside when the flow buried the exits. There was no other way to go but to tumble down the slopes to his left and right and pray someone found him in the next few decades so he could at least get a proper burial.

Even if he did survive, what was the point? He didn't even know if his Pokémon got someplace safe after bailing from the cave! If they were somewhere the avalanche couldn't reach, at the very least, then he could accept—

A squawk pierced the air, and Gold narrowed his vision ahead on the slope. Two giant legs carried Trinity down the mountain, Crown holding tight to her neck. Marigold raced beside her, as did Jack sliding on his stomach and Flavia curled into a wheel of molten fury.

Gold once again refused to look back, and instead relied on the monumental stupid bound to his blood cells to rush to his feet. He ran towards the avalanche, now half a minute, twenty seconds, ten seconds ahead, believing in his team more than anything.

"Marigold, Solar Beam!" he screamed into the mountain's howl. Pure solar radiation could shear through the snow, but it would take too long to charge. "Jack, Psychic! Flavia, Lava Plume! Somebody do something!"

They raced to meet each other in the middle, at the site of their final rest. A wave of particles consumed him like fog with a punch, hitting him so hard that he could hear his own face crack. But they also blew his Pokémon towards him, his Dodrio leaping the final gap at impossible speed.

Five.

Four.

Three.

Two.

"Crown!" Gold's voice carried silent through the collapse. "Now!"

Everything went white.


When Gold startled awake, everything was still.

He explored his face with his hand, noting the measly hairs on his chin and the dried gunk above his lip. His nose was bent way too far left, and when he tried to inhale, he realized the pipes were closed. Mouth breathing was for chumps, and he took in a jaw-wide inhale. That rock was still sticking from his arm, but he refused to touch it, knowing enough medicine (see: not much) that taking it out was a worse idea than not.

Alongside his collapsed Meganium, Slowking, Dodrio, and Slugma, Gold was inside a completely white room. The former three gasped in heaps, while the latter was an inert mass of mostly rock—again. Cautiously, he examined the walls, realizing they were within a smooth dome. When he placed his hand against it, it stopped a few centimeters before the white, and an energy barrier flashed at his contact.

There was still one Pokémon unaccounted for. He shook his unconscious team to ask, and was answered by Trinity uncurling her neck, her feet, her entire body around the white, patterned creature she was protecting.

Crown's wing twitched back and forth in a Metronome; all her energy poured into maintaining a Reflect that kept them alive.

Her gesture then dropped, as did the barrier. A thin layer of snow washed over them, giving them nothing more than a momentary shock. Gold grabbed the now-deformed Stephen, extended him the most he could—only about halfway before the sliding mechanism ground against the bent rails—and dragged himself up the circular wall that Crown's dome had created. He settled onto the sedimented layer, finding it surprisingly sturdy. There was still a viscous fog in the air, so the summit was nowhere to him.

That was still the goal, right?

Gold looked back down into the round hideaway at his exhausted, freezing, wilting Pokémon, and at the stroke of luck with wings and a crown. In any of the billion other outcomes, he probably wouldn't have the cruel fortune to wonder if it was still worth making it to the top, and how cruel it was to drag them along.

In all the time he spent dreaming about Mt. Silver, making the barest preparations to scale the biggest monument on the planet, Gold realized he had only ever considered the ascent. He had no plan to get back down, no proper sense of the trail that he found too boring to look at for more than ten minutes.

There was no place for him to go but up, even if he found out when he got there that the summit wasn't worth squat to anyone.

He laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

Just his luck.


Character shift flashback! I normally write a lot of stuff from multiple character perspectives, so this probably wasn't too unexpected, but I knew from the moment I started this story that I couldn't do without exploring a closer perspective to Blue and Red.

I've found the format of this story to be interesting so far, mostly because it's an interesting change between the more socially complex flashback scenes and the lone musings of Gold in the present. I tend to like scenes depicting adventure and travel because of the weird thoughts that arise, which really informs this story as a whole.

Also, happy Gen 9 announcement! I'm definitely in the Violet Gang, and Quaxly is probably going to be my preferred pick. It's neat how Legends: Arceus was seemingly a gameplay test, and since I love some of the changes that game bring, I'm really interested in how it'll meld with the traditional formula. We'll see later this year, I suppose.

Come back next time for Chapter 4: Dedicated to Me. See you someday!