The black and yellow ultraball hits the ground where the magmar stood a moment before. Maggie watches with bated breath as it wobbles, the dim red light glowing uncertainly. Will it catch?
Suddenly the ball bursts, splitting open, and the magmar reappears. The flames on its head and tail roar and grow like a fiery phantom. It stamps a foot, the wood beneath its feet sparking, only to be engulfed in another flamethrower from the ninetales. It falls to the ground, and doesn't get up.
Lucy sounds disappointed. "I thought it was..."
"Is that a magmar? I love it! I've never seen a real magmar before!" Maggie tries to walk closer to the fainted magmar, but the drifloon tangled around her arm is dragging her back. She angles her head and tries to get a good look while being anchored, and sighs in relief when the strings disappear from around her arm to Lucy's pokéball. She hunches down next to the fallen pokémon. "They're supposed to be really rare."
She can feel the heat from the flames on the magmar's head, still burning even in unconsciousness. The raised scales on its left hand are charred black, the white claws yellowed and cracked from overwhelming heat. Maggie only recognizes them as white because of the intact claws on the other hand. The ninetales must have been very strong.
Where it isn't charred the yellow and red of its body is bright and visible. Like the flames on its head, there is a garish pattern of flames across its body, accentuated by red spines and a yellow beak. Its tail is nearly as long as its body and has a flame on its tip.
It makes sense as to why there wouldn't be one for plays, Maggie reflects. Actually, she'd be hard pressed to find one of these anywhere with lots of people, not only because of the fire hazard but also that any wild ones would be a walking target for catching. No wonder they were rare.
"It's so pretty."
Lucy glances at it and chews on her lip. "You think so?"
Lucy looks up and says, "Light," and belatedly Maggie notices that the pikachu is no longer on Lucy's shoulder, replaced by the starmie lurking over her head.
"Did Pikachu faint?"
"Yeah, she shocked it but the magmar clipped her."
At Lucy's command, there's a soft click and the starmie's gem lights up like a flashlight, illuminating Lucy's searching through her bag.
"What are you doing?"
"I can't catch it if it's fainted." Lucy says. She digs a gold capsule out of her bag and comes over to kneel by the magmar, right next to Maggie.
A nose nudges Maggie's side–"Hey!"–and then the rest of the ninetales' body shoves its way through. The fox pokémon puts a paw on the magmar's chest, then climbs to sit on its body, lying on it with its luxurious tails stretched out.
Maggie is stunned that it came so close. Where its chin touches the magmar's head flames the silky fur is turning brown, but it doesn't seem to care. Did it want to lie on something warm that much?
"Get off, boy!" Lucy moves her hand to the ninetales' apriball and abruptly the ninetales brings its head up.
It stares at Lucy, nosing her hand, then its red eyes shift up. It growls at the starmie floating above her head, which alternatingly flashes and spins in response. Maggie watches the pokémon emote to each other with fascination. Eventually whatever it is is settled and the ninetales gets off of the magmar, lying down a few feet away.
With the starmie spinning wildly overhead, Lucy crushes the revive over the magmar's beak. Immediately it coughs and snorts a billow of smoke, and disappears a second later into the ultraball Lucy drops on it.
The ball wobbles, and clicks. Capture successful.
Lucy turns to Maggie with a huge smile on her face. "It's ours now. What a beautiful pokémon."
Maggie nods. "You caught a really good one! The way that magmar moved..." The mystery of the creature echoes in her head. A magmar in an abandoned tower. Where else could she have seen something like this? "...it was like fire floating in the dark. Like the last bits of the fire from when the tower was burning."
"The last bits of fire," Lucy repeats, entranced. That look in her eyes has Maggie glow.
"Yeah, like the story, after Lugia beat its wings and accidentally summoned a storm, a bolt of lightning struck the tower, and the tower burst into flame. Ho-Oh saw these things and wanted to remember them, so they took the bodies of pokémon that died in the tower and remade two of them into living disasters, and a third for the rain that put out the fire. They had them traverse Johto so now whenever Lugia thinks about rising again everyone knows Lugia's shame. And magmar–I guess Ho-Oh forgot about some of the fire. Or something."
She closes her mouth, feeling self-conscious after losing her stride.
Lucy looks down at the ball in her hand. She closes her fingers around it. She says, "No, it's really interesting. I haven't been thinking of it like that–there's nothing like that back in Kanto. Our birds are only birds. There's even research saying they're just any kind of large pokémon, flying and nesting and forming eggs and eating worms, and all that stuff about them saving people or bringing spring is because of migration cycles and human anthropomorphization. They don't have abilities like Ho-Oh."
"Oh." The birds of Kanto... Maggie's seen them before, but she doesn't know the specifics. "Are there towers for them?"
"Nope. Kanto doesn't have things like that. Kanto is... kind of small, and doesn't have much variety. I got through it really fast. After you do the gyms, unless you want to challenge the Elite Four, there's not much else to do but to go somewhere else."
Lucy rearranges her belt. There's six balls on there now: the new magmar, pikachu, ninetales, drifloon, starmie, clefairy. On one side are the ninetales and the clefairy and the starmie, on the other are the other three, for gyms.
Looking at that magmar's ultraball among the others bothers Maggie a little. Pokémon and nature... She remembers the first conversations she had with Lucy, the time she saw her milotic.
"Um... is it fine to just capture a magmar? They're rare... they're not endangered, are they?"
Lucy's eyes shift suddenly. She looks down at the pokéball.
"They usually grow up in volcanoes; in Kanto there's an island with a volcano where they all live, so for us to see one here was unusually fortunate." A pause. "But just because they're rare outside of volcanoes doesn't mean they're rare. It's just, nobody's going to go into active volcanoes to look for them, so everyone thinks they are."
"Oh." Maggie feels a little stuck-up to have asked, like Lucy needed someone looking over her shoulder. Of course Lucy would be responsible about it.
There's an awkward pause.
"Here." Lucy hands Maggie a few ultraballs. "Since I have a full team now, it's up to you to catch Raikou, right? Where should we go next?"
Maggie's happy to think about something else. "Maybe... uh... Slowpoke Well is pretty far, but since the slowpoke yawn to bring rain, it might be storming extra hard there."
Lucy sends out that clefairy again.
"Do you know where Slowpoke Well is, Clefairy?"
The clefairy tilts its head, blinking.
"–It's right near Azalea Pokémon Center," Maggie adds, "so if we can teleport there, we don't have to walk far."
At 'Azalea' the clefairy says, "Clef!" and reaches up its arms.
It's rainy in Azalea Town, but disappointingly not much more than Burned Tower. The ladder down to Slowpoke Well has been pulled up, and the bottom is far enough to not be seen even in artificial sunlight. Lucy's starmie goes to hover over the well, shining a spotlight into the water.
"Hey, there's a slowpoke!" Maggie spots a movement and tosses a pokéball. If there's a click of success, it's masked by the rain and the splash as the pokéball hits the bottom of Slowpoke Well.
"Oh."
Undeterred, Lucy says to her starmie, "Can you find it?"
The starmie tilts to the side and descends. After a few minutes, it comes up with a ultraball floating next to it.
"Yes!" Maggie grabs it and releases the slowpoke inside. "I'm going to need you to yawn."
The slowpoke turns one droopy eye to face her before it opens its mouth in a long, slow yawn. Maggie feels tired just looking at it. Abovehead the clouds don't respond; no thunder, no Raikou.
She looks back down at the slowpoke. Her catch. That vacant expression... It looks friendly, somehow. Did it understand its role in their Raikou hunt? It's pink like pecha berries and really cute, and right in front of her and hers. It doesn't look aloof at all.
Maggie hesitates, then smooths her hand over its back. It feels damp but not slimy, and it twitches its tail, but doesn't attack, or back away, or do anything. She pauses a moment, then reaches out an arm. It doesn't do anything at first, but then it crawls onto her hand, wrapping its cold arms and legs and tail over the red lines where the drifloon held. She straightens up with a new weight on her arm, grinning.
It's everything she wanted.
She looks around, taking in the houses and the old apothecary-turned-pokémon center and matchstick box gym. She thinks–a magmar, a ninetales, searching for Raikou in a storm–none of this would be possible if she'd stayed in the claustrophobic interiors of Azalea Town.
The slowpoke bobs slightly on her arm, its weight shifting. It was here and it was hers. She wanted it, so she went and caught it. If she was back without pokéballs she'd be stuck catching glimpses of slowpoke in the water, far away and unattainable, like all the other pokémon she'd wanted to see. How easy this capture had been. It was hers, and it wanted her. On the day of the storm, it feels like a new beginning.
And around the corner, the theater and the cafe... If she looks that way, it'll be the same way she looked before, the copse of trees that any child before pokémon trainer thinks is the wild. "I guess I'll be a trainer–" she had said, accepted the ultraball and caught herself the first starter pokémon she saw. Azalea Town is so quaint, so old, with a smell like naivete. Had anyone living here even seen a magmar? The rain, or maybe a lightning flash of inspiration– and like before the ultraball leaves her hand.
The ultraball bursts open, the hoothoot inside a ball of fury. It squawks angrily, but stops once it recognizes its surroundings and immediately takes off in flight.
A pokémon that didn't want adventure.
Maggie's fingers clutch the ball. But they don't press anything, and she lets the hoothoot fly away, and she clips the empty ball back to her belt.
She has her own adventure to be on.
All of a sudden, Maggie realizes everyone around her has been looking. The starmie spins fast-then-slow, its starfish arms waggling. The ninetales turns its head away when Maggie looks at it, as if it doesn't care.
And Lucy's watching her.
"You don't like it," Lucy says, and Maggie feels a smidgen of guilt. Not for the pokémon, but for the empty ultraball lying on the ground. How had she felt then, when she'd known how much it cost in the windowsill and saw it held out to her? That was a gift to her.
But somehow, looking at the empty ball, she feels resolute.
"It kept trying to fly away. I don't want it," Maggie says.
"Even if it's just a hoothoot, you didn't have to get rid of it. It's not like we're low on pokéballs"–Maggie shakes her head–"If you didn't want to have to keep feeding it, I could keep it at home. You don't need to..."
"I don't want to keep it," she says, feeling strangely certain. The slowpoke on her shoulder wiggles and she touches one hand to its neck. To him? It feels like a him. "Besides, slowpoke are better."
Lucy sighs a little, drums her fingers on her thigh. But out of the corner of her eye, Maggie catches the slight smile on Lucy's face before Lucy turns away. "I mean, it's good that we're doing this like trainers, catching pokémon that we come across because they're cool. But... you don't have to catch anything you don't want, and if there's something you do want, just let me know, okay? Even if it's far away, that's what Clefairy is for, and if it's endangered, there are ways around that. Because having pokémon that you love... That's what it means to be a trainer, you know?"
