"Set up the electrolytes and the antibiotic in the IV drip - Markov, check that all the sharps got thrown away - properly this time - and go get me an actual mask?"
"We don't...actually 'ave any antibiotics left."
"You're kidding me."
Ari made a tiny shift on the rough mattress, his legs aching faintly, his head feeling bare and his arms feeling like they'd come apart. A cold wooden brace pressed around his thighs and ankles, barely letting him move without making a sound.
Faintly he could see bars around his bed, curtains hiding the two men bending over him. One was in a white coat, the other had a handkerchief tied over his mouth.
His eyes were barely open, unnoticeably so.
"We, erm... weren't expecting three hundred people."
From what little Kantonian classes he'd had on and off in school, he could tell they might've been speaking that.
And they were barely paying attention.
"I'll get them from some...some volunteer worker. You go and check on the boy next door and let him out, so we can get his brother in intensive care…"
"Name?"
"Matt. Also, keep the Venomoths in place; we'll need 'em for anesthetic…"
"How?"
"Oh, I don't know, tie them to something…"
The first man gave a whistle and a click, before striding out the open door, throwing the handkerchief onto a desk. The other one followed meekly behind - and the door slammed shut.
He heard two tiny wings flutter above him in a panic, as his arm floated towards whatever up was. The pins and needles he'd felt on his left arm were real - tiny, insect feet. The other one, hung by just two tiny strings in the air, was starting to get its sensations back.
Just what was holding it up, though?
Venomoths.
Four of them.
They were tied to his arm with strings, beating their tiny little wings, straining to get to the glaring medical lamp.
Whistles of protest echoed between them - one of them fluttered distractedly towards an abandoned coffee cup, jerking his arm violently to the right. Another lay in a glass case, shedding scales into a container. Distressed, stressed, and confused, it flapped against the glass with a gentle thump, thump, thump, thump -
Ari frantically shot up, sending shivers of pain up his arm - tearing off the little strings - the moths got as far away from him as possible. They were stuck to the lamp now, instead of his arm.
That was part one of whatever game plan he had.
"Hello?"
"Anyone there?"
"Maia?...Tamati?...Kaia?...Bro?..."
But nobody came.
The little chart on the side of his bed got quickly flipped up so Ari could crane his head over and look at it - if he remembered his one other trip to the hospital right, it'd have something useful.
Something that could tell him when he'd get to go home.
Flip, page one. Kantonian medical jargon. Words here and there he recognized, but nothing useful.
Flip, page two - more medical jargon. "Third-degree burns - "broken bone in leg, specific bone yet to be confirmed" - "smoke inhalation" - nothing he understood.
Page after page of empty boxes and coffee spills, before Ari gave up and flipped back to page one. He'd probably missed something. He'd just woken up.
Slowly, he took his thumb off the bottom of the page - and there was a box he hadn't seen before.
His name was there, written in the same chicken scratch everything else was. Still, he recognized it, though a neat line had been drawn through it.
And next to it was written "Archie."
Ari left it open on that page. He fled his room, as far away from it as possible.
The room he'd been in was only one of...hundreds? More? It opened onto a hall full of people he knew and people he'd never seen before. Some burned, some in leg braces like him, some walking around like nothing even happened.
"Hey, you! You got any idea where we're headed?"
He tried to ignore whoever that was. His mouth tasted like he'd been sleeping for years - speaking loudly was out of the question.
"Hey! Hey! Listen to me!"
Weird, considering the fire was only -
Out, out of the hallway, Ari continued to stride and through a doorway so large it could have fit ten kids like him - nine others shuffled their way in alongside him, pouring out into the crowd.
"Keep up!"
"Has anyone seen an old woman with a ponytail?"
"So, uh...we should get an adult…"
"Anyone?!"
"Where's my mum?"
"Here! Over here!"
The room they'd just walked into, clad with metal walls and linoleum tiles, looked like someone had stretched it too far and too wide. Tables, enough for a large family and no more. Board games in tiny torn boxes, strewn about the floor. No soft light, no chairs, no nothing.
"Are there, like...any adults around here?"
"Don't say that, they'll get mad!"
"I can't see anyone."
"Maybe we're in heaven."
"Can you not?!"
Just all the people Ari had ever known, crammed into a space like this.
"Ma…"
His throat felt razed just from speaking. The coughing fit made everyone whip around in surprise, staring at him - wondering if he wanted his mum.
"Matiuuu?" he yodeled - and a figure jumped on top of him like a dog, bowling him over and crashing them both into a table. As far as Ari could tell, nothing had been broken.
"Bro!"
"You're alive!" Ari spluttered.
"Yeah! I am!" Matiu replied, completely oblivious.
"What happened to your legs?"
"Dunno. I...I think I broke 'em."
"Ouch."
"Yeah, ouch, uh…You know where everyone else is? My mama? Papa? Maia? Ka - "
"Over here," Matiu commented, dragging Ari over to a conveniently placed porthole in a corner, free of people and dust and medical equipment, "Anyway, can y' walk okay? You wanna use me as a crutch?"
"I've already got crutches."
"Oh."
Kaia, sitting in the corner with her knees up to her chest and a hand of damp playing cards in her hand, looked up in surprise as Ari awkwardly sat down, dumping his crutches on the wall.
"Hey!" she gasped quietly, giving him a hand of cards, "I was wondering when you'd show up."
"No-one told you I was...like, in the hospital part of this place?"
"Nope," Kaia observed, rolling their eyes, "We're just waiting around. Playing Go Fish. Maybe my mum will show up."
"Can I have your, uh...Feebas?" Matiu asked, holding his hand out expectantly.
"Yeah, she'll...she'll show up," Kaia continued regardless, sucking in her breath sharply.
"The Feebas or your mama?..."
Kaia gave Matiu the best smile she could.
"I'll play in a moment," Ari told the pair, staring out onto the open sea through the porthole.
He tried to look at the tacky little cards in his hand, the ones with cartoonish Feebas and Finneon and Magikarp, but the more he looked out that window the more things seemed wrong.
The Sevii Islands were nowhere in sight. No rocks, no grassy cliffs, no Wingulls near the shore, no fire, no collapsed buildings, no Charizards in the air that filled with smoke and dust and ash and noise -
Just open water and the midnight sky.
He didn't even notice he'd been holding his breath the entire time, when Matiu clapped a hand on his back and knocked it out of him.
"So...tell me what happened!" he asked loudly, "...Or did you already tell me? I can't remember."
"Nope," Ari replied, gulping, "I, uh...pretty much just woke up in a hospital bed and came here."
"I know that bit," Matiu shuddered a little - "I, uh...woke up there too."
"Same," Kaia continued, joining them by the window, "There wasn't even anyone there when I got up. Maybe they'd finished and thought I was fine to go…"
True, almost no-one had come to attend to them. Sure, a few older sisters and brothers had come by, sure, they might have attracted a flock of smaller kids, but they looked just as bruised and confused as every other 5-year-old. Some of them even looked his way, like they expected him to get up and act like an adult.
"You lead the way, Ari," Matiu offered, "You know your way around, right?"
"Kind of."
Well - the one other time Ari'd been in hospital, his mama had brought him some doughnut balls she'd made herself, and everything else he liked, and his papa sang him to sleep until visiting hours closed. He could rest like he was in his own bed.
It was comforting, anticipating the welcome back he'd get when the ship saw the island's smoke fading away and turned around. He'd gotten lost before - this time, though, it wasn't his fault. Against all odds, he had survived. They had survived.
"And maybe," Kaia planned, "once we get your baby brother we can go and get, I don't know, a crutch for me?"
"Huh?" Matiu questioned.
"My leg hurts like hell. I, uh...sprained my ankle when I was running away? I think?"
"Running - ohhh."
"Yeah."
For now - all three followed Ari out the huge double doors and into the winding corridors of the ship, holding hands so they wouldn't accidentally lose each other again. The distinctive energetic whoosh of Pokeballs opening and the thump of people's beloved companions hitting the floor started echoing through the building, and the place started to brighten with the sound of Pokemon cries. Some in delight, some in confusion.
"Oh, hey, lil' guy!" Ari cooed, as a Totodile ran across his foot and clung to his leg, "Where's your trainer?..." The crocodile, unsurprisingly, didn't answer.
He could swear he'd seen that particular Totodile before. With someone else.
Nor could he pretend like he was its trainer forever, he thought, trying to kick it off his leg and failing. The persistent thing clung to the leg brace, sinking its teeth into it. So much for him being the crocodile whisperer, friend of things with sharp teeth everywhere.
Except while he was still kicking, someone tapped on his shoulder.
"Did you get off the island on your Pokemon?" Matiu asked, tentatively, turning to Ari to make sure he was actually listening.
"Wait - what?"
"I don't think I saw you when, like...you know. Everything was on fire," Matiu explained, leaning on another heavy door but waiting, waiting before he left - "Did you escape or something? I kind of assumed you did…"
"I…"
"Were we...too far away?"
"No, I, uh - " Ari stuttered, grabbing Matiu's shoulder and trying to comfort him - "I heard you and Kaia when you were there, seriously! I just couldn't have…"
There wasn't anything for Ari to refer back to. His mind, a blank. Matiu, still looking as nonchalant as ever.
The least he remembered was his face to the ground, the dust between his fingers and voices he certainly recognized - but never responded to.
How much strength would it have taken Ari to get up?
"Done...anything."
Ari sighed deeply - "So, no. To answer the question, no, uh...daring escape. Why, did you try...?"
"Mm, yeah," Matiu confirmed, gulping something down, "Didn't really work," he concluded, kicking open the heavy metal door in front of him, with more strength Ari has ever seen him perform before.
"Right!" Kaia exclaimed, "We're here!"
The room was cavernous, taller than any other section of the ship. It took up two floors - a balcony between the two - and every last square foot was taken up with beds with only a tiny margin to move through.
Surprisingly, there were no people. No surgeons, no doctors, no awake patients to speak of. Every bed was enclosed by a curtain of questionable cleanliness, and no suspicious shadows moved behind them.
Nothing, in fact, was moving, other than the ship.
The details became clear the more Ari focused on it - the words on the clipboards were written in Kantonian, a language Ari recognized but couldn't translate. Red crosses were painted everywhere, some flaking off. People lay in the beds, a few of them moving and chattering between themselves.
If you strained your eyes hard enough, they might even be recognizable.
"Down," Kaia muttered, ducking below a rolling cart and beckoning everyone else, "Right. Good. Do we have a, uh - game plan?" Their backs almost lifted up the metal underside, spilling the medical equipment on board everywhere.
"Aaaahh - no," Ari admitted, trying to contort his body to fit the hiding spot, "I'd kind of wanted a lie down, though."
At that, Matiu had a small fit of laughter.
"Well, if we're gonna be finding Maia and Tamati, we should, uh...stay under here. You said you're not supposed to be out..." Kaia reminded him.
"We can't all fit, though! I'm basically a grown man!" Ari protested.
"...No, you're not."
The tittering was getting kind of annoying.
"Bro! Stop laughing."
"Yeah, you'll give away our location, dummy," Kaia snivelled, sarcastically.
"Wasn't me!" Matiu snapped.
Cavernous laughter echoed around the room like a live audience's reaction.
"Well, who the hell was it, then?"
Cautiously, Kaia poked her head out from under the supply cart and cast her head up to the balcony above.
"Uh...guys?"
At least fifty small children, flanked by grown men and women in glasses and coats, were gazing back down at them in awe. Kindergarteners. Schoolchildren. Toddlers, even.
"We're being watched."
"WHAT?" Matiu gasped, pulling in his arms and legs, "Who? Can they see us?"
"Some kids and some adults. The adults look kind of pissed off," Kaia clarified.
"How've they not heard us?" Matiu mumbled, almost inaudible.
"They don't speak any Sevii," Ari realised, "I...think I've got an idea."
Carefully, he wriggled slightly out from under the cart, waiting until the tall, lanky figures walked far enough away. Preparing his best stage whisper, he cleared his throat.
To everyone above, it must've looked like a supplies trolley was about to give them a rousing speech.
"Has anyone up there seen a...Horsea and a Totodile?" Ari called, hoping he remembered one of last night's scenes correctly. The Totodile on Maia's shoulder, the gifted Horsea to Tamati - his memory almost never failed him when he wasn't in danger.
"YEAH!" cried a couple of children, rising to a chorus that all three could hear.
Ari, shaking, gave them the melodramatic fingers on lips.
"Where?" Matiu continued.
"The Totodile ran away!"
"I SAW ONE?"
"Where? Where?"
"OVER THERE!"
"Where the heck is over there?!" Kaia hissed, resting her face in her hands and groaning, "God, you two come up with the weirdest ideas…"
"LEFT!"
"Ohh," she sighed.
"Which way's left?"
"I'll do it."
With a scoot-scoot, the three slowly pulled themselves forward over the dirty linoleum. Matiu took care of keeping the cart upright, while Kaia was in charge of making sure no-one was in the way.
"No, your legs are too long!"
Actually, no, Kaia was in charge of keeping them upright.
"You're too big, Matty, move!"
On second thought, it was Matiu.
"I THINK WE JUST RAN OVER A SPIDER!"
Eventually, they agreed to disagree.
"STOP!...RIGHT!"
"Wait, which way's - "
"Oh my god."
"LEFT!"
"Watch out, there's a puddle!"
"Deal with it," Ari asserted, keeping watch to make sure there were no spiders in said puddle.
"RIGHT! LEFT!"
"Thankyooou!" Ari cooed to all of his audience, before ducking back under the cold metal disguise, scooching along the floor as fast as his hands and knees could carry him.
Ten seconds later, he smashed his head against a wall.
"STOP LAUGHING!"
"Actually, that's just me," Matiu clarified, "'Soz."
"LEFT!"
"I wonder what this looks like to those grown-ups," Ari pondered, rubbing the top of his head and shuffling to the back.
"I'd like to be up there!" Matiu replied.
"I'd like to hurry up."
"RIGHT!"
"Why? The slower we go, the less suspicious we are, like in the movies…" Ari butted in.
"Nope, I haven't seen any movies where you do that."
"LEFT!"
"Actually, I prefer romance movies - " Matiu admitted, "They're funnier."
"Same, honestly," Ari muttered -
Gasp here. A cry of surprise there. Pointing, hushed breath.
"Whaaat? Aren't I allowed to like romance movies?"
The crowd fell into a silence.
Behind them, though they couldn't see it, footsteps echoed closer and closer, while a metal door swung closed.
Someone locked it behind them.
"No-one's gotten up yet, hm?" one said in words unknown to Ari, surveying the silent room.
"Apparently, no." another person intoned, "I'd expect them to be running around all over the place."
"Check on them. Let them know what names got chosen for them now, it's only fair."
"Shouldn't we get the supply cart first?"
"Oh, yes! That!"
Shoes clacked on the ground, closer, closer and, unlike them, with a direction.
"Find it."
"RUN! RUN!" the crowd screamed once they realised what was going on, "LEFT! LEFT!"
Awkwardly, the cart started getting up off its wheels and careening down the aisle of beds, clattering and shedding scissors and bandages as it went. Ari had never tried shuffling across a floor so fast. His breath was leaving him. His throat was caked in dust again from the clouds of it they kicked up.
"Slow down!" Matiu suggested.
"Slow down?" Ari snapped - "Slow down!?"
"Try making it look like it's, y'know, not walking!" Kaia suggested, starting to do the worm instead of running on her hands and knees.
The adults started muttering words foreign, picking up the pace. Coats were ruffled. Orders were shouted, and someone told the kids to shut their mouths.
Frantically, Matiu and Ari started pulling at random bed-legs to accelerate, accelerate, faster and faster - but there was only so quick a cart could go. Slick with water, bashing into bedsteads, it careened around corners at a breakneck pace, shedding little pink plasters as it went.
"We should ditch this, Kaia!"
"Ari, no! We're fine!"
"They're getting closer!"
"FASTER!"
"We know!" Matiu hollered back, his back clanging on the bottom of their hiding spot. The voices were growing closer, a bit more desperate with every clatter of feet.
"RIGHT!"
Quicker than the crowd could realise, two of the orderlies started running together.
"Follow the little pink plasters, Jeff! The plasters!"
"What the hell are you - oh, those?"
"LEFT!"
"YOU'RE ALMOST THERE!"
The shiny metal cart was barely in sight, and to their surprise, it looked like it was running away from them.
"It's just the boat, isn't it?"
"Yeah, gravity."
"SLIDE, KAIA, START SLIDING!" Ari ordered, tucking in his arms and legs and letting inertia fly the wheels across the floor. Matiu started acting like a rudder, steering them round corner after corner after corner. There - in the distance - they saw two blue critters just out of sight.
"RIGHT! RUN!"
"I swear to Arceus above," one cursed, "I'm going to tell so many of my co-workers about this. I got serenaded by a bunch of Sevii kids from an actual tribe, it's adorable!"
"I don't think they're singing, Jeffery..."
"RUN!"
The pair ducked into another corridor of beds and curtains to find exactly what they were looking for.
The cart, tipped sideways and leaking equipment. The perpetrators, long gone.
Except for their pattering feet.
"Oh, well, kids will be - "
"SHUT IT, JEFFERY!"
Ari, filled with adrenaline and crashing into everything beside him, careened down the corridor, in his sights a Horsea by a bed and a Totodile beside it. Matiu's hand gripped his tighter than ever before, and this time? This time?
They were inseparable.
"Where's the guy in the coat?!" Kaia screamed between breaths.
"HE'S BEHIND YOU!"
The pair of orderlies, confused by what exactly these kids were screaming about stepped into the last row of beds, staring down a repeating sequence of pure white curtains.
Once again, the crowd fell silent. The watchful eyes of the adults in the room were powerful, as they only now realised what was going on.
Cautiously, the scouting pair shone two high-powered flashlights down the length. Like a shadow puppet, whatever was behind the curtains was illuminated. Unconscious child after unconscious child.
Ari prayed they wouldn't point the light downwards.
What then?
Back to square one?
They curled under a bed in absolute darkness, the three held hands, shut their eyes, and tried as hard as they could not to cough.
"Did you check everywhere?"
"Yeah."
Ari could only keep it up for so long, though.
"Jeffery."
"Actually, maybe I didn't check everywhere…"
Don't breathe, Ari told himself, don't breathe. Don't breathe, he continued, as a torchlight beam scanned under the bed and across the floor. Don't breathe, he tried, as it planned over his still and unmoving body.
"Anything?"
Don't breathe.
"Nope. Nothing there," the orderly sighed, switching off the flashlight and getting up off the floor. "Other than dust, can you get Katie to give the floor a scrub once we've dropped the kids off in Slateport?"
And just like that, they left. A minute, ten, an hour later - the door slammed shut and the Kantonian chatter stopped completely.
The silence continued, even while Kaia and Ari and Matiu crawled out from under the bed.
They looked up, and the whole balcony of children burst into applause and cheers.
"Oh my god." Ari gasped, sitting back on the bed, "It worked."
"It...it worked," Kaia laughed, "It worked!"
"YES!" Matiu cried to the heavens, before kneeling down and scooping up the terrified Horsea.
"Hey there, little guy!" he greeted, showing the rest of the group the little sea creature, "Sorry for leaving you with my lil' brother, he's a bit of a scatter brain sometimes. I'll take care of ya' next time, don't you worry!"
"THANKYOU!" Ari called to the crowd of people, before turning back to his friends, "So this is where Tamati and Maia are?"
"Yeah, yeah!" Matiu confirmed, "I mean, on the little sign, they wrote down 'Timothy' for some reason, but...it's close, it's close. Maybe whoever wrote this can't read."
"I'm guessing Timothy is Tamati, Mary is Maia?" Ari theorised, remembering what name he got.
"Alright," Kaia announced, her face lighting up, "Shall we, uh...pull off the curtains on the count of three?"
"Yeah! I'd never pass up an opportunity to scare the pants off Tamati," Matt openly said.
"Aight, aight - " Ari finished, clearing his throat - "One."
"TWO!" the chorus of children yelled.
"Three," the trio announced, pulling away away their curtains to find -
Only one person.
Ari didn't recognize it. The body in the curtained crib beside him didn't look like anyone - a person at all at first glance. The imprint in the bed he stood in front of told him nothing - the kids they'd left behind weren't anywhere to me seen.
But as he looked at it, he recognized more. The signature shape of what was once Tamati's little stone necklace, the remnants of the clothes he wore.
The canvas fabric of the tent they were going to sleep in the night before, was even fused in some places to the person Matiu held, frozen and limp, and tried to wake up. But that was impossible. This didn't happen to people.
But nothing was happening.
"Maia?!" Kaia cried, her voice echoing over and over again, "Em, where'd you go?!"
She ran, far, far away, kicking the cart they'd used for all this time while it was down, spilling medical equipment far across the floor.
Glinting. They must've alerted someone.
"Kaia?" he asked the empty room.
She was too far gone.
"MAIA!" she screamed now, eliciting a restless shift in the crowd. People whimpering, people whispering.
They watched her run.
Where to, they'd follow.
After all, none of them were older than seven, and Kaia was the oldest of everyone in the room.
Behind him, though, Matiu collapsed to the ground, back pressing into the metal struts behind him. Quietly, he curled around his baby brother. It'd protect him from the cold outside air.
The children were clever, yes.
Certainly clever enough to make the connection between the shape Matiu held in his hands…
...and the shapes behind all the other curtains.
"Ari!" Matiu called shakily, grabbing his hand and guiding him down beside him, "Can we do something? Is Tammy gonna be alright?"
"I…"
"See! He's still moving a bit! He's...under some kind of sleep, like the ones you get put in when you get an operation!"
Carefully, Ari's hand drifted to Tamati's neck and held it there, wondering if a faint heartbeat could still be felt.
"So...he…"
There was none, only the slight shifting of broken skin as Matiu breathed heavier and heavier - Ari's eyes grew wider, wider…
"So his heart would still be going, right?"
Ari wrapped Matiu up in his arms, laying Tamati in their laps, whispering, incoherently.
Morally, he should say no, but he thought over and over again, yes.
That kid bounced back from everything.
All of them bounced back from everything, actually.
"You're...you're gonna be okay, alright?" Ari reassured him, listening as Matiu's breath grew labored and tears started streaking down his face, "We're not going to die, or anything. The hardest part's over. I'm gonna...I'm gonna make sure we're okay, alright, like Maia and her dad used to."
Kaia made her way slowly back to the pair, face painted with disbelief when she heard Ari talk in the past tense.
"Did you...find them?" he asked, hopefully, straightening up a little.
Kaia could only shake her head. A Totodile followed behind her, shivering violently after hearing it's trainer's name called so many times with no response. Falling down onto the side of a bed, she rested one head in her hands, teeth clenched so hard it made her head ache.
"So...what now? If Maia's dead and her dad's dead and everyone else in that house was dead then - then what happened to home?" she rattled off, so fast that Ari didn't keep up.
"I...I don't know."
The Pokémon, the children, and the crowd were clever.
Many people on the ship believed that the children were like a flock of birds, that thought of a missing member as just an absence, nothing more. Even if their lives were not rough and unstable as some wanted to believe, they still understood.
They were clever enough to understand what it meant when the men in coats came back.
Though they didn't understand what they were saying, they recoiled when a man beckoned for Matiu to give him their brother. Even if they called him Tommy and never spoke a word of Sevii, the context could still be filled in.
They reacted accordingly when Matiu, Ari and Kaia told them no.
But once the employees split up to find others, carts in hand large enough to hold a child, they started to shift.
There was no stage directions Ari could give them to stop them.
Pouring down like a tidal wave, they rushed down the stairs in a flurry of feet and cried-out names. Sisters found brothers, friends found friends, but still more got knocked underfoot, brushed through the crowd like a fallen leaf. Ari fell straight into the bed meant for Maia, pulling Matiu up, up, into whatever high-ground they could find.
How was this going to stop him from getting crushed like last time? Like last night? There were no routes of east escape he could take, gripping Matiu's hand tightly as possible and staying still as the children he knew pushed up against him, prying through the curtains to see if they knew the person behind.
"Stick by me, okay?" Ari advised, quietly under the noise of a hundred children.
There was the smallest chance that Matiu and Kaia still thought he'd pulled off the best plan ever. That on his own, he was clever, instead of just in the crowd.
"You're gonna be okay. I promise. I'm not going to let anyone go," Ari whispered quietly, blurting out whatever came to mind.
He had a history of not being that person.
"Not again, alright? Not again - "
The ship's horn blared loudly.
They had landed on Hoenn's shore - but no-one stopped to listen or cheer.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry…"
Ari heard no-one other than himself this time.
"I...I'll try harder next time."