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

[14-4] Heir on the Mountain

They were finally on the descent. Ciel saw the ocean of rolling hills on which Mt. Coronet sat, emerald patches breaking through the endless white. A clearly man-made basin beckoned them, which his map told him was called Celestic Valley. Only a short rest and maybe an actual train ride away from there was Veilstone, their for-some-reason destination.

However, they were close to dead. Their food was low, they had exhausted their firewood, and aside from Feona, who was made of literal rocks, all his still-healthy Pokémon were forced to hide from the elements in stasis.

Ciel's entire body felt numb. He'd started rationing his supply of painkillers when the bottle got light, and once it was emptied entirely, the excruciating regeneration of his osseous matter took its toll. It wasn't just his arm he couldn't place, either. His body has responded to the overwhelming stimulation by shutting down everything else and he could no longer handle his bike one-handed. That left them little option but to death march towards civilization.

Laina chattered through her complaints. "Sucks that the marker didn't have any firewood."

He agreed, sure. But he'd stopped responding after the fifth time she said it.

Wild Pokémon were few and far between on the slopes, the ground barren under the vacant sky Those that minded the cold were undoubtedly holing up for the heart of winter. At some point, Ciel accepted that Laina and Feona were the last living beings he'd ever see.

"You guys passing through?" said a slurred voice.

Ciel blinked. Laina blinked. Feona… probably blinked.

A dull-eyed man stood on the mountain, his thick blue windbreaker parted over a stiff vest, in which his massive scarf was tucked in like a tie. He had slacks and dress shoes beneath, begging the question of how exactly they were still in pristine condition this far up a perilous mountain. He had half a butter cookie shoved in his gullet.

"I've got a camp over this way if you need some accommodations. We've got plenty," he said through chewed dessert. He swiped his cap off his head and rested over his heart. "Pleasure to be… be at your service, I guess."

Ciel was a bit dumbfounded, reasonably in his opinion, at a butler spontaneously generating in one of the most inhospitable places on the planet. A really unprofessional butler. By the time he managed to get his bearings, Laina had already gladly accepted the invitation, stolen his wrist, and was dragging him behind the lazy stroll of the man they just met.

He took the path through the few trees still living on the mountain, a few evergreens that were spots of color on the mountainside. Together, they located a flat stretch on the mountainside surrounded by brush. Between two peculiarly spaced trees and on a lavish stool was the most beautiful woman Ciel had ever seen.

Her fur-trimmed cherry dress had fewer wrinkles than her pristine face, and a massive bow was tied around her waist, trailing behind her like a Beautifly's wings. In spite of any deities or natural forces that wanted her dead, her legs were bare from her thighs to her ankles.

She sat within a castle of things. Trunks of supplies were unloaded and set up until this vague mountain clearing looked more like the inside of an RV than the wilderness. A hanging wardrobe wore gowns even more stunning than her current one, and there were three golden statues of Pokémon on display. Just one golden statue was a concerning amount.

The most out-of-place things were ironically things he expected to see: two mountain bikes and blazing pile of tinder.

The butler took up a position beside the rich woman didn't stop bowing this time. "I present Lady Berlitz of House—" He paused. "I present Lady Berlitz. Yeah."

Berlitz. He'd all but forgotten his intrigue about that name in the time since they departed Jubilife the second time, since his focus was… elsewhere. An heir to old money? He could certainly buy that she was from a prestigious family, since she camped like she'd never been without hot water for more than an hour, though the slip-up didn't fall below his radar.

Laina rushed to her and said, "Ohmygosh! Are you a princess? That's the coolest thing I've ever seen!"

She—the Lady—tilted her head back so she could look down upon her. "Fjern henne," she said. Something like "get away from me".

The awkwardly hovering servant fulfilled the order by shoving Laina aside. Though it was gentle, it was still a shove, and she fell backwards into the snow.

Before he could even think, Ciel was guarding her front with all the threat a one-armed man could offer. "Don't touch her again."

"Sorry, sorry. The Lady really insists that, uhh, 'pests', stay at a reasonable distance," the butler said. "Those were her words, if you were wondering."

Ciel searched for some dignity from the serene face herself, but there was nothing in her immaculate sculpt that conveyed emotion. It was like she was staring into another reality entirely, and they were incidental obstacles keeping her from the other side of the universe.

It was rare that Ciel felt comfortable around new people. It was too easy to get psyched out by a new person's unknown boundaries, so he often found himself stuttering and backstepping until he finally worked up his rhythm. However, his pure suspicion of this woman overrode whatever social fear was shipped with his model, as well as how worn down he was by the journey.

After checking religiously if Laina had any bruises or cuts or sores, which she insisted was an overreaction on his part, he slammed down as far from the money as possible, forsaking the fire entirely if it meant getting away from her.

A tense five minutes passed as he and Laina tended to themselves. With his permission, she unwrapped his cast, released the throbbing mass inside, and applied an even more shiver-inducing antibacterial cream to the scabbing bite marks. The slightest touch turned his lacerated muscled into a furnace, but he powered through it on the fear that he may never be able to use that arm again if he didn't.

Side-eyed, he watched the butler transform his mistress's abode entirely, fitting pieces together until the stool resembled a lounge chair. Despite his vacant look, his focus never broke from a task until it was complete, until his lady's world was a spotless paradise. He gingerly picked up her legs and spun her into orientation—she never seemed to move a muscle of her own accord and kept reading from an ancient-looking book and drinking what was no-doubt a full wallet's worth of coffee in one cup.

Eventually, the butler came over to offer flimsy folding stools in contrast to the throne under his mistress. Ciel was at least glad to be at spiteful eye level with the royal we.

"Sorry about that whole thing!" the butler said. He also carried some firewood, which he nursed quickly into a flame with a douse of fluid and a spark. It was smaller than the rich girl's. "She doesn't mind if I help you as long as she doesn't need me for something."

"What's your name?" asked Laina, breaking their side of the stalemate.

"Lucas Diamond. Most people call me Diamond because it's cool. I'm Lady Berlitz's personal retainer. Want one?" He shoved another butter cookie at Laina that he pulled from somewhere in his jacket. She took it without hesitation and downed half in a second, forgetting a grudge if she even forged one at all.

If only to get his mind off the horrible pulsing, Ciel asked, "Why are you out here?"

It was the mistress who answered from across the way. She spoke a few curt Sinnohan syllables as an invisible opinion, and Ciel was surprised she was paying attention to their conversation at all.

"She said it's a personal matter," came the translation. Ciel struggled to put it together on his own. "In a pretty snappy way, too." That one he figured.

He wanted to assume that she couldn't speak Unovan at all. Kris had said it was common, and he figured doubly so with how much patrician tradition rippled through the Royal Guard families. But she responded directly to Ciel's question just to show. Why should she speak the common language?

"She's a member of the House of Berlitz?" asked Ciel.

When the Lady herself didn't say no, Diamond said, "Complicated. She doesn't like talking about it."

"I get not liking your family. Not everyone's got the perfect one." Ciel felt his tension ease a bit until a jolt of pain from Laina's re-wrapping reinforced his ire. "Nghh. But I don't think I appreciate the treatment."

"Nah, she's just… frustrated. Yeah, frustrated. She's way more fun when she feels like goofing off."

"How much do you get paid to put up with her?"

"None, anymore."

"You say that like you want to talk about it."

As he prepared food on a portable stove from their warehouse of supplies, he lowered his voice to say what he wanted without permission. "I got picked up by the family a while ago. A lot of them are respected science folk, and my mom was having some money trouble after her contest agency dropped her, so we got in contact through the big professor guy, Rowan. They said they'd pay for all Mom's expenses forever, but they needed someone Lady's age to take care of her, be her bodyguard, do her baths, wake her up in the morning, and… more stuff. There's a lot."

That actually reminded Ciel of Brent. He once told him the story of his own family when they were traveling through Johto, and how he constantly sent money back home to support his mother for all she did to make him the man he was.

Unlike Brent, though, Diamond looked like he had trouble keeping awake, even as he deftly tossed sizzling ingredients in a portable saucepan. Ciel didn't mean to pry, but he couldn't help but ask. "How long have you been doing this?"

Ciel didn't know what he was expecting. After all, he looked in his early twenties, just the kind of age for a crap job like this.

Diamond said, impassively, "Twelve years."

"You were just a kid?"

"More or less. The Berlitzes technically adopted me to get around labor laws. Pretty fishy, huh?" he asked, as if he wasn't admitting to being enslaved.

"Why… why would they do that?"

He shrugged. "Sucks a little bit, I guess. But I kinda feel comfortable doing it, so I've kept up with her. After, you know, things got complicated."

He let his train of speech derail there as he finished butlering—whatever it was that butlers did—and concluded their unsolicited service. Feona leaned into his generosity when he served her first with a fresh cut of meat. Ciel would have objected, but the Nosepass ground a never-before-seen jaw open, and the flesh disappeared into the dark cavity. He wisely held his tongue.

The humans of their troupe were offered fancy glass plates of seared beef surrounded by an artisanal arrangement of sprout vegetables that no normal person would carry on a hiking trip. Diamond bowed lightly as if this was somehow the least he could do. Laina silently spooned her meat onto his plate and stole a few more of his greens to balance it out.

The meat was tough to chew, thought Ciel, knowing the life Diamond had lived to be able to prepare it so perfectly. His Lady was a child when it was arranged, so she probably had little say to start, but he was sure she had the means to end his service now. Clearly, she hadn't.

As he examined the curves on her face, he made a curious note of her thin cheeks. Diamond said they were the same age, but as he registered more odd details on her brow and her small eyes, he found that increasingly hard to believe.

Diamond found some blankets for them in the material stash as a goodwill offering. Just one was large enough to encompass Ciel and Laina combined, and probably five more with room to spare.

"Uhh, I think you should be on your way at some point, but you're welcome to stay until the Lady gets, you know, invested in your departure," said Diamond.

They ate the rest of their meal in peace, leaving Ciel little to do but mumble with his sister and try to search for the sun amidst the milky overcast. At least they weren't going to starve and freeze to death, so that was a concession to the hostility.

His Poké GEAR rang and his dinner nearly landed face-down in the dirt and snow. After cleaning some splattered food off his outer jacket, he stared at the number.

"Unknown?" he asked himself. Who even had his number that he didn't mutually trade with, and who was trying to reach him all the way in the middle of nowhere?

If only to sate his curiosity, he answered. The picture swirled and speckled with digital errors, and he recognized her instantly when the picture finally came through. Her face was just as one-of-a-kind as ever.

"Hey Kris!" he said.

Laina leaned into his shoulder until they were a single mass. "Howdy lady! Feeling any better?"

"If you're here to bug me about the rematch, I'm still, uhh, getting there," said Ciel. "I'd really need to do some sanctioned battles to get back into the swing of things."

Kris had yet to respond. Her gaze wandered all over them, stopped by a few obstacles along the way. A small Bug-type could've flown in her mouth, or drool could've leaked out, or something. Ciel wondered if the feed was busted, since his Poké GEAR was out of warranty by a year and an ocean, but she robotically covered her mouth with a hand.

After seeing the two-digit number of missed calls on the status bar, he tried to scratch some embarrassment out of his hair. "Sorry, sorry! We're up on Route 211, so the cell signal got a bit fuzzy in the mountains. So, what's up?

"Nothing." When she finally spoke, her response was slow and soft. "Just thought I'd call. Chew the fat."

"You okay?"

She wavered and wouldn't keep her eyes off him. Ciel and Laina looked between themselves. He asked, "What did I do?"

"It's nothing. It's stupid." Then, like a switch had been flipped, her light flickered on. Both her eyelids and her cheeks pointed towards the heavens. "But I'm really glad to see you."

Plus some embellished details that Laina peppered in, they recounted their eastward journey through the mountains and all the sheer peril that came with it. He introduced the new member of his team, who sensed the rare metals inside the Poké GEAR rather than noticing the person onscreen. They even showed off their new bikes, which Kris pretended to be impressed by—given her family's wealth, she probably didn't see utilitarian purchases in the same light.

As sunny as she listened, she was intent for an opening. Her mouth twitched over and over with missed moments. She gazed a bit too long, and then he gazed a bit too long back, and she glowed brighter to overcompensate. She really did want to talk about something.

She angled her camera to capture the same dresser Ciel and his sister had helped set up. In between her leagues of trophies, which even a thousand kilometers away Ciel could tell were gathering dust, was a polished vase and its single resident. Emerald petals defied the withering of the season.

"That's super pretty," Ciel said.

"Yeah, thanks so much! You've got a better eye for décor than I would've thought for a nerd," she replied.

"Heh, yeah." As quickly as he was about to tell her off for being yet another person in his life to brand him a "nerd", he replayed what she said. You've got a good eye.

His text. The flowers. He'd been so mired in the muck of his own head that it slipped him completely by. He left a promise broken, and she falsely believed him a better person.

"Kris, wait. That's not—"

Laina grabbed his wrist and slammed the Poké GEAR's screen lid closed. "Whoops! Sorry. Totally my fault, let me fix that."

When he raised his brows at her, she formed a violent "X" with her forearms. Only after he confusedly nodded did she open the screen again, now sporting a new crack down the center. There was basically no excuse for him not to replace it now, but he'd proven his mind was slippery about important things.

"Seems fixed now," Kris said, none the wiser. "And yeah, it's the nicest-looking ornament in the room right now. Or maybe a close second, huh?"

"I'm glad you, uhh, you like it," he tried, which Laina matched with an off-camera thumbs up.

Another ring interrupted them, from a second unknown caller. He was about to ignore it, but since Kris was also in the same boat, he texted the unidentified number and received a quick reply. "Hold on… your brother is trying to call me?"

"He probably doesn't know my new number."

The last Ciel checked, Saber was still being pursued by International Police to bring him back safely to the Sinnoh League. He wasn't sure the legality of chatting with fugitives. "Do I let him join the call?"

"Pssh, I don't know. You decide."

"He's your brother."

"Let's annoy him. Annoying brothers is fun," said Laina, and made sure to hold her sly grin long enough that he saw it.

The screen went black when the call went through, since his Poké GEAR didn't have the processing power for multiple video feeds. Note for later, replace it with a X-Transceiver. Saber's voice thundered through the speaker. Rather than showing his face, the screen offered a wavelength as an abstract.

"Mr. Fauder! It's important that I speak with—" The boom petered out when he noticed the call's participants. He asked, sheepishly, "Kris?"

She made the vocal equivalent of waving to a weird in-law. "Heyyy, Saber."

"I have invaluable things to discuss with both you and Mr. Fauder—" Ciel recoiled a bit at this assumption of his importance. "—and I've coincidentally found you both in the same place. However, I should warn that this is potentially sensitive information."

"Just say it," Kris demanded.

He respected her and talked straight. "Dr. Cassius stole materials from our mother related to Legendary Pokémon and precious artifacts."

"Stole?" asked Kris.

"Legendary Pokémon?" asked Ciel.

"Affirmative. I have reason to believe this plot was formed before our parents' murder, and it may be intrinsically linked."

Ciel's breath tightened, and beads formed over his brows. If they could see his face, they'd see him age decades as the life sapped from every pore on his body.

"I'll go help butler man with whatever." Laina pushed herself off her stool and sped off for simpler problems, and Ciel thanked her instinct to step back.

His fear-addled mind put together a puzzle he already knew the answer to. That woman told him she followed him because he couldn't keep secrets, because he couldn't stay in line. She knew he spoke to Cynthia when he first told her about what he saw in the Ruins of Alph, and she knew he'd spoken to Saber to convey the same thing. Everything Cynthia was involved with was somehow rotten, and it was his fault for falling into the same trap over and over again.

If he had just let all the secrets slip by and gone about his stupid, meaningless life, she wouldn't be threatening his family. And if she followed through on that threat, it would be Ciel who really killed them.

Just like he killed Hector.

"Saber, Kris," said his husk of a voice, "stop."

Saber said, "Pardon?"

"Just stop. Don't talk about this anymore. The police can handle it," he begged. "You don't want something to happen."

Any further detail and he'd risk more than just his own family. The sharp-eyed woman told him both Saber and Kris were on her radar, and he couldn't willingly say anything beyond that vague warning.

"I cannot do that, Mr. Fauder," said Saber, far braver than the pitiful Trainer Ciel was. He was someone who trusted his Pokémon and they had the power to defend him in turn, so he wasn't living bluff to bluff.

Any more information was another bloody corpse in the flower fields. He silently begged them to stop, knowing had no chance of convincing them without saying more.

They sensed that he couldn't go on. Kris piped up quickly, trying to catch him before he ran. "Ciel, about what happened to your Pokémon. That's why I called. I wanted to say something to you, but I kept putting it off, and I… If you need someone, you can—"

He cut the call and stared at the blank, cracked screen. Slipping the Poké GEAR off his wrist, he held the device at a distance knowing full well it wouldn't restore his guts.

The Lady coughed politely to demand his attention, both Laina and Diamond in her shadow. She was an arm-crossed monolith, and her polite wait for his attention was almost as dangerous as the call he just cut himself from.

"I think she, uhh, wants you, Ciel," Laina said.

"The Lady would like you to travel with her," announced Diamond.

Ciel was just befuddled enough to answer. "You mean she'd be traveling with us?"

The bow-wrapped woman asked a stiff question. The translation from Diamond: "Where are you headed? Well, it's fancier. Like, 'What is the destination of your journey?'"

"Veilstone, I guess," answered Laina.

The Lady announced something in Sinnohan that he could parse out a few words from, but not enough to roll into a sentence. Diamond repeated back. "The Lady announces that she has begun a journey towards Veilstone. She'd like you to accompany her."

Ciel was too tired to say no, and too scared to say yes. A penniless shrug was all she'd get, a poor gesture for a poorer man.

Laina sat beside him again as they watched the woman's camp get deconstructed at the atomic level. With a few simple commands, Diamond worked swiftly to break every appliance and amenity and luxury into constituent parts to fit them into a series of trunks. A massive, round mass of fur appeared from a Poké Ball soon after, with tusks the size of a human being and then some, to be used as a draft mount.

Ciel recalled Feona for safe passage on the uneven ride and noted with an alarmed snort that some of her satellite materials weren't found by the materialization beam. It took Laina some time to scoop up the pieces and store them for safekeeping.

By the time they had nearly completely prepared to set off, Ciel asked, "Hey, Laina?"

"Yeah?"

"Did you send those flowers?"

"Yeah."

"Why?"

"Because you couldn't." He saw an embarrassed child in someone normally a stranger to shame. "Did… did I do the right thing?"

He nodded away the dust in his eyes and hoisted her glove-to-glove onto her feet, as Diamond issues the first, and last, call for departure. Ciel smiled sadly. "Yeah. You're a big help, little lady."

A dusty desk sat in an unrenovated office, in an unsold building, on a low-value lot. Dr. Orcus respected the realtors tight grip on their assets, even if any reasonable person would've demolished the Galactic Company headquarters when they realized its history scared every potential lease away.

Generations' worth of usable research had been churned out at this desk, before it was cast aside like a trend, a fad, a gimmick. Saturn never gave it a passing glance even after he made off ahead of the police raids and made empty claims about "a real energy company". If he were actually serious, he'd have seen Rotom's potential to throw the world's technology decades into the future.

Cyrus was the only one who ever approached his work without a laugh. The man merely watched, observed, critiqued, and then left from whence he came. He couldn't say for sure what the man's interest was—perhaps the idea of replacing human elements with Pokémon was comforting to him—but he was nonetheless the only one who ever saw eye to eye with him.

Dr. Orcus's fond memories of unbothered days and nearly infinite monetary resources urged Galactic Admin Pluto to feel very familiar in his leather chair.

His escort leaned in the doorway, wearing a nostalgic wardrobe of tights and tubes. The retro-futurism was tactful, even if he never quite understood the glorification of a universe Cyrus claimed to despise. Her violet hair was tied back in three places, and Dr. Orcus evaded the stab of her gaze.

"Might you need anything else, good doctor?" she asked.

She stood guard between him and a troop of marching men. Dozens upon dozens flowed through the halls in branded dress, transporting hundreds of Poke Balls from the lower storage levels. In short under, their operation had "sourced" hundreds of Pokémon from industrial labor training programs and smuggled them through the Underground. The preparation was pitifully simple after he called in extant financial "partnerships" amassed during his tenure as Cyrus's operational advisor.

"Tell your benefactor I appreciate all that he's provided me." Pluto gripped his armrests, turned his chair away, and reminded himself that he was home. He watched the evening fall on Veilstone, the city carved in rock, through his office's panel window.

It was a disgusting, plain sight. The streets were bare, and the people were polite and quiet and stupid. It could all be made far more interesting.

"He knew best to hire a genius," said Pluto.

Today is the 4th anniversary of this fic series, Second Chance. My first story, Anew, was first published on July 27th, 2018, and I've been writing continuously since then. This series now totals over half a million words (including a lot of currently unpublished material). It's really been an adventure getting this far, and I recently started going back through Anew to do some minor edits for consistency with my current writing style, so expect it to get republished with some changes too. Ideally, it's small enough that it'll fly under the radar of people who read that story initially, since I wasn't intending to rock the boat, just give it another editing pass.

As for THIS volume, it was an absolute monster. I think it took me six weeks, which is just about the longest it has ever taken me. I don't hope to keep that up, but if they keep ballooning to monstrous size, who knows.

Next time is Volume 15, Part 1. See you someday!