Interlude.

The Burgundy Beard

I… like when they talk real loud tryna tell you what they know
I… like when it blows real hard and it doesn't even show…

Some people wondered if Roark slept in his helmet.

He occasionally clocked in with bruises spotting his nose, and they all knew he'd fallen asleep in his glasses. Roark was careless that way. But the red safety helmet with the flashlight was something more significant. The legend said he slept in it on purpose. He was never seen without it in public. He paired it with work clothes and casual clothes. He gladly told anyone who asked that he was foreman of the Oreburgh Mine and the Oreburgh Gym Leader, and he proudly wore the helmet as a uniform for both.

"Nothing against you personally, but I designed this building to be structurally sound, and when you show up in that helmet, you look like a real weak-minded individual," Leader Volkner had told him, the one time he was coaxed into washing up for a League gala.

Roark did not like Volkner. Someday he'd let him know that fact.

No one knew if Roark was so attached to his helmet that he slept in it. It was fun for some to assume he did. As a test of his toughness, or a wish to become more like his thick-skulled ace Rampardos, or even from an odd fondness for the way it felt strapped firmly under his chin. There were joke gift baskets full of combs and expensive shampoo, just to see if Roark would show up having taken it off to wash the coal dust from his burgundy mullet. But even clean hair couldn't ease minds when Roark could wash and strap the helmet back on for bed. He was a Rock specialist. Obviously he slept like a rock, and it didn't matter anyway. But it did, because how could anyone get a good night's sleep with a second skull of industrial plastic pinching his neck!?

His stepbrother Gordie, or Gordon, as Roark called him, had lived in Oreburgh City all summer, and even he couldn't confirm the legend.

"Start your engine, Gordon. It's Tuesday," Roark said as he finished pulling a black tank top on over the helmet and tucked it into his work pants. He sat down before the breakfast he prepared and began to dig in. Across from him, Gordie's silver hair was in shambles. So far his tank top was only paired with boxer shorts, but unlike Roark, he'd managed to scrub his face and shave.

"I'm not feelin' up fer it today. I'm emotionally drained."

"Why are you emotionally drained?"

"My brain's just… doubting everything in life."

"Why?"

"It just does that sometimes."

"Why?"

"Life's hard."

"What's hard about it?"

Gordie didn't want to be specific. He never did. He looked at Roark's chiseled elbows on the table, then glanced down at the mound of fat oozing out over his own lap, and lay his head in his arms with a heavy sigh. It was 4:45 in the morning. On Tuesday. He missed the warm sheets and the dream he'd been having about ice cream. He missed the fresh, cool Galarian air. He kind of even missed his over-doting mother, though the next time he saw her she'd have Roark's hairy dad clutching her close and smearing dirt all over her nice white scarf. And Gordie would be mad. Roark would be mad too. And maybe punch Gordie in the stomach. He hadn't done it yet, but Gordie was sure he would if he was mad enough. Roark was mean that way.

"Can you sit up and eat?" Roark said.

"Divn't talk to me, prickaxe."

Ignoring the silent tantrum, Roark wolfed the rest of his breakfast and let the black coffee burn as it ran down his throat. He glanced out the window, at the yellow beams of streetlights glowing warmly in the early morning fog. With a nudge of his glasses, he focused in on those streetlights. They had a tendency lately to sprout solar panels overnight while he was sleeping. Solar panels. In Oreburgh. The coal mining capital of the north. The city whose Gym Leader was a coal miner. The city whose Gym Leader's father was a coal miner. And his father. And a couple more fathers before that, and whatever digging they used to do in Hisui before somebody's father blew up an Onix tunnel and found coal inside.

"Dammit, Ginty, I am gonna rip those down, run 'em over with a backhoe and bury 'em in the deepest shaft of the mine where you won't even find vomit fossils," Roark muttered under his breath.

"You won't do it."

"Today I will."

Roark rose silently from the table. He slipped on his light gray overcoat and stepped into the chill of mist and the smokey scent of earth. The nearest streetlight was at the end of the driveway. He approached it, noting how even the yellow in the spherical glass bulb at the top was now paler and brighter than it used to be. The solar panel was installed opposite the bulb, on the back. He could reach it if he wrapped his legs around the pole and climbed.

It wasn't his place. Someone would see. It reflected poorly on a Gym Leader to desecrate his own city.

It wasn't fair. Everyone should see. It was courageous of a Gym Leader to defend his city's dignity.

Gritting his teeth, Roark shimmied up the pole and tugged at the panel until one corner popped loose and it fell to hang crooked. Then he slid down again, kicked angrily at the dust for a bit, and went back inside. Gordie had taken only a nibble of breakfast and was presently curled up naked in bed again. Roark turned on all the lights in his brother's room and spat right in the curtain of silver concealing his pudgy face.

"Get off your fuckin' ass. We're going to work."

Roark had a picture of Volkner in his office at the Oreburgh Mine. It was the two-inch headshot of a well-rested, smiling Volkner, cut out of a magazine and awkwardly taped to the glass panel of a giant oaken frame behind the foreman's desk. Among the workers it was called "The Ginty," and all were expected to give it a mock salute as they clocked in. Offerings were also greatly appreciated. The Ginty liked lumps of chewed gum, old brown bandages, a few dandelions weeded from the wife's garden, dust masks, Roark's empty shampoo bottles, and sometimes the odd black fragment of glass someone found beneath a streetlight. These were the rarest and most precious, because nobody knew where they came from and nobody would confess.

Roark always brought The Ginty out into the yard around the main elevator so it could observe the morning assemblies. Today, like all days, Gordie stiffened his back and cradled the frame against his belly while the foreman stood next to him drinking coffee and making announcements.

"Colin, you're on the big rig today. I want that east tunnel completely cleared. A Steelix shook it up last night. Owen, you've got the dozer again. Same spot. The new shaft team, I'm gonna relocate you to the north side. I know you were excited, but that fuckin' Steelix is requiring another safety evaluation and I'll need to check it out before I can allow any men down there."

"What about me? Do I get a rig today?" Gordie asked, to the amusement of the miners.

"Gordon, you are not licensed to operate heavy machinery. You have the same job you always do: Keep the hot coffee flowing and make sure any gym challengers that show up stay out of harm's way. That means staying off your phone and interacting with real people for once."

"Are you sayin' mah lassie isn't real?"

He takes the bait, Roark thought as he pushed up his glasses. "Well, I don't know. Last night you said you had plans with her, and when I looked in your room, you were playing video games with all the lights turned off."

"Wha… ye go to bed at nine! That was around eleven!"

"Right. Maybe don't be so loud."

Gordie placed The Ginty on the ground so it leaned up against his knees. "Ye should know by now that when I say I'm with the lassie, I'm on the phone with her. And yer hurting my soul."

Roark let his lips stretch as wide as they could go, loving the feel of the helmet strap chafing against his jaw. This is the timeline where your dad marries a model, Roark. The worst frickin' one.

"Now, I heard a lot of you talking yesterday about what happened in Vermilion City over the weekend, and I just wanna remind you that if things don't affect us personally, we can't let them interfere with our work. It's nice to know my employees care about my safety, but this is Sinnoh, not Kanto. Until something blows up in my face, I'm focused on coal and battles. Fossils if you can find 'em. I don't wanna hear a word about cranking out fake sympathy for things that don't concern us. We don't know all the facts about what happened down there. The media's only interested in spinning it for hysteria, so if we don't want our heads twisted, we keep our mouths shut and our eyes to the ground. We stay humble. Understand?"

He was answered with a low murmur. Some called him cynical. Some were surprised at his wisdom. Others just said he was too much of a paleontologist to care about current events and got annoyed when one happened. Roark was only twenty-four, after all, with muscles and lungs just rising into their prime, and what was there to get annoyed about, really? Maybe his dad marrying a model. And babysitting Gordie. And the real The Ginty, lurking like a tall, laser-eyed, blade-fingered mechanical shadow up in his Tower and peering down on the powerless peons digging in pits for precious energy he could just pull out of his ass and slap on all the streetlights in town.

"Also no 'memes' unless The Ginty approves of them first."

This got a much louder response. Even Gordie was beginning to understand the local humor, and he hoisted The Ginty high in the air to receive salutes and bows and V Signs and raucous chanting.

Roark scooped up a clump of dirt and smeared it over his cheeks. "Go in peace, weak-minded individuals!"

The others scooped up their own clumps and repeated. One bold miner hurled mud at Gordie, who squeaked and skittered out of the way to keep The Ginty clean.

"We are your servants, Great Electric Lord of the Sun!"

"Charge yer solar flares! I'm right here!"

"Another sixteen-hour day for The Ginty's blessed minute awake!"

"The ruling class can have my ass!"

"Hey, hey, no. You guys stop it. The Ginty wants you to focus today," the foreman finished. "I'll be performing that safety evaluation and finishing some work in my office. Please let me know immediately if you run into any problems."

He thumbed the brim of his helmet and walked off back toward the main compound, his brother trailing after him with The Ginty clasped close. Gordie thumbed his own helmet — a cobalt blue one that matched his shining eyes, and took in a deep breath before speaking.

"Roark… could I at least dig with a shovel today? I want to do my work for The Ginty."

Roark turned back, a strange smile tugging at his beard. "Uh… sure you can have a shovel. I would love it if you took a shovel and helped any way you can. But… you know work for me, not for The Ginty. We're not actually The Ginty's servants. That's just a joke. We're our own men."

Gordie raised up the frame and flipped it over so he could scrutinize the tiny spiky head pressed up against the great glass rectangle. He scrunched up his nose at his brother.

"D'ye really think that?"

They locked eyes, and Roark almost shivered as he resumed toward a long day of toil.

His request for an expansion into the main mountain ridge had been declined again. Too much red tape and regulation for even the Oreburgh foreman to battle. There would be no mountaintop removal. No draglines or other fun machines for scraping greasy pockmarks in the earth and letting the creatures of the ancient past rise and shudder and breathe again.

Roark had attorneys. He had money and investors. Oreburgh Coal was pulling ahead of even Hoenn's tropical operations. The market was there. It wasn't great, but it persisted even in a world of Volkners and visionaries. Coal was approachable. It was reliable. It was cheap and safe to extract. Mountaintop removal would make it cheaper and safer. So he'd argued. So his attorneys had argued. There had been no argument from his father. Last time Roark called him, he was in the hospital with burns after digging around a hot spring in Circhester. Loving a shovel more than his wife again, Roark noted. Byron cursed and spat into the receiver. Roark cursed and spat back. They praised each other's respective vulgarities and both slept easy that night.

Roark liked his coffee "black as coal and Volkner's soul," and he filled his thermos with another twelve ounces to understand the jargon swimming before his eyes in the documents. He took off his glasses and rubbed his face, wincing and coughing at the sting of dust. His gloves were filthy. That Steelix had wanted to battle, and he'd barely escaped the collapsing mine shaft with his life. Another incident report on the books.

Tuesdays.

After an hour of legal gymnastics, the two o'clock alarm chirped on his laptop. Time to clock out at last, and let the next manager take over for the afternoon shifts. Roark stripped off his clothes like a shed skin and took a good fifteen-minute shower. He scrubbed dirt out of usual and unusual places. He popped open a bottle of drugstore ocean-scent shampoo and plugged his nose while sudsing up his mullet. He considered a shave, but his beard had come in quite thick over the past week, and the extra burgundy made him look older and stronger, like all those rugged mountain men in his blood.

So he left it the way it was and replaced his work clothes with a pair of jeans and hiking boots and a clean black tank top. Helmet affixed, he put on his best Sinnoh League smile and greeted the young girl and her Prinplup fawning over Gordie in the yard.

"Hi, I'm Roark, the Oreburgh Gym Leader. Did you come here for a battle?"

She squealed at the sight of him and let her hand slip up onto his forearm when shaking his hand. "Sure did! I'm Anna, from Pastoria City, and this is Prinplup! Which one of you am I battling? Do you take turns?"

"Uh… you'll be battling me, the Gym Leader," Roark insisted.

"She could battle me," said Gordie, placing a pair of blue-tinted wrap glasses on his nose and throwing out both hands in a cocky shrug. "I'm a Rock-Type Leader from a coal toon too. And look at my ace Pokémon! Perfect for the mine vibe, innit?"

He threw out a Poké Ball, and it burst into blue light that exposed Coalossal, a hulking black tailless dragon made of rocks with a glowing pile of coals resting on its shoulders.

Perfect. Give him a shovel, and he tries the coffee too, Roark thought with a grimace. "I give out the Coal Badge, so she'll be challenging me and Rampardos here," he told the challenger. A Poké Ball in his pocket popped open and released a bulky theropod with a spiked blue dome for a skull. It grunted and nuzzled its trainer, whapping Gordie with its tail in the process. "You don't wanna battle Gordon. He's a poser. Doesn't know anything about Rock-Types."

"I am the Hard-Rock Crusher of Circhester!"

"You don't even like getting dirty!"

"Who said Rock specialists had to all be dirty? The point is, I vibe with Coalossal, and it's my partner! It can Gigantamax!"

"Not in Sinnoh."

"But it can. What can yer Rampardos do?"

"Flip a truck."

"Reet. But it can't remove a few solar panels from the streetlights."

"Don't talk about the solar panels!"

"Ye get radge about a little clean energy aroond here, and what do ye do? Ye talk about a big show and then do nothing."

He flicked Roark's glasses, and Roark had to strain to not sock him right in his pillow of a gut.

"Roark, I married a model! You have a brother now, who's your age!"

"Dad, I'm a grown man. I'm not gonna see that guy as my brother."

"He likes Rock Pokémon!"

"Yeah and? Does he run a coal mine? Does he read Klaxxon Chronicles? Can he play a single low brass instrument?"

"His name is Gordon!"

Gordon was an ass.

They went together to the gym, and Roark let his mind dissolve in battle. All his strength and will were transferred over to his Pokémon. It was up to them now. Time to stand solid as a rock and attack head-on, without hesitation. No flourishes. No acrobatics. No tasteful, artful maneuvers nor coordinated motions of tail and fang. Roark gave commands with the close-fisted, conservative poses of an instructional handbook. He owned that handbook. It was in a drawer in his office.

His courtesies to the challenger never varied: Let's get started. I'll need to see the toughness of the Pokémon that battle with you. And his pleasantries when defeated were carved in un-eroding stone. Thanks, Rampardos. Take a good, long rest.

Rampardos fell at last, after Geodude and Onix had taken their beatings. Anna seemed to be a rising Water specialist. Implementing Stealth Rock early on had taken care of her Psyduck and Wooper, but Prinplup was too bulky to deal with. If it had the dual Type advantage of its evolved form, Roark would've brought out his tougher team. He'd underestimated this time, but rules were rules. He shook the winner's hand and presented her with a Coal Badge on a thin velvet cloth.

She wanted to battle Gordie afterwards. They all wanted to battle Gordie afterwards — the boys because he looked easy and the girls because he had "cute eyes" and could reportedly do a backflip. Roark never stayed to see the backflip. He let Ian ref and took a little walk to get fresh air. It was as fresh as Oreburgh air could be, smelling of the finest earthy vapors and richest particulates — the chemical scents of comfort and safety and home that made his pulse relax and his muscles melt in the sun.

"Oreburgh smells like an ashtray," he once overheard Volkner muttering to Flint of the Elite Four.

Not that Roark took any offense. If he did, there was no reason to refute the claim. It was accurate. The Ginty was absolutely right. And it wasn't Roark's nor anyone's business to argue with The Ginty anyway. The Ginty was allowed to give his opinion. His words weren't harming anyone of importance. Mouth shut, eyes to the ground. Stay humble. You do yours and I'll do mine and just keep yours to yourself and out of my life because I'm focused on coal and battles.

There were solar panels on the streetlights in Oreburgh City. Everywhere Roark looked he saw them. He was constantly reminded of their existence. Constantly wondering who put them there and how long they'd stay and whether it was a better protest to ignore them or destroy them. Constantly deciding to ignore, because destroying took courage and Roark couldn't afford that right now. Because soon enough he'd be asked to acknowledge solar power, and embrace it, and put panels on the outside of his gym and pretend that he cared about "a little clean energy" with no logical argument otherwise. Except he had an argument. He did! He just couldn't speak it aloud. It was wordless. It was like a rock in the pit of his stomach. Black. Solid. Heavy and immovable and crystalizing fast around his ribs.

"Dad, what do I do?"

"Make 'em crooked. It'll look dumb."

"But I want my city to be beautiful."

"Most people around here agree with you, Roark."

"Then why isn't anything happening?"

"Because some people disagree."

It was always "some people" Roark took issue with.

He climbed up a streetlight in a place without people and wrenched a whole solar panel from its wires and hinges. Then he slid down and left it on the pavement and walked away.

When he got home later, he saw the one at the end of the driveway had been straightened. It was all he could see.

"Why'd ye shave it off, marra!? It was looking so good!" Gordie cried when he saw Roark snuggled up on the couch after a late dinner, glasses askew and nose buried in the latest paperback he'd picked up from the comic shop.

Roark liked collecting old sci-fi novels. They reminded him of fossils — maybe at one point the kings of the shelves, inspiring thousands to attend conventions and write fan letters and subscribe to nerdy periodicals, then abandoned and discounted and buried in cardboard and left to emit the last ghostly odors of organic wood pulp from their yellowed pages. He liked to think they weren't written for the first fanatics. They were for him, the single paleontologist and secret-keeper, wishing to escape the noise and visit a nostalgia he hadn't been around for. A time when the world was much simpler, and the people were much humbler, and the dino Pokémon piloted spaceships through wormholes to the nexus of past and future, where echoes of the old and voices of the yet unborn communed with the distant and flickering stars.

He also liked nitpicking ignorance of ancient Pokémon biology. Someday he'd track down the last relics of Enceladus Press and show them his Rampardos.

"My beard kept getting dirt in it. I basically ate a dirt sandwich for lunch today," he told Gordie.

"Yeah, but it made ye look like yer dad. All tough-like. Ye can grow a champion beard. Wish I could. But eh… I can do a backflip."

"You're too fat to do a backflip."

"I'll do one right here in the living room."

"Don't."

"Arreet, then. Your loss," Gordie said, settling for a flip of the hair and plopping himself down in the opposite armchair. "I'm sorry for teasing you earlier. And also bein' a general prick. Ye think we'd get along well with our similarities."

"Thanks for letting me know."

"You could apologize too."

"For what?"

"For yellin' at me and wanting to punch me."

"I will never not want to punch you."

"Well… are we brothers or not?"

"We're not."

"Why not?"

"'Cause I've never thought about having siblings, and I don't have time to consider you one."

"What? Even the whole summer, forcin' me to come work in the mine with ye?"

Roark didn't respond, and Gordie answered the question for himself.

"I grew up wishing I had a brother. I have three now, triplets, but they're wee bairns yet. Coalossal could step on 'em. Plus they're always with me mam, and things are still shaky there. Ye and yer dad seem to get along well. But… I mean, jus' look at me. I'm not exactly rock-solid like ye are. Hard-rock, but not rock-hard. I couldn't sleep in my helmet. I can't hide where I've got fissures. I've lost weight this summer but I'm still two hundred and twenty pounds of melon curry."

"I'm trying to read. Go play some video games."

"Roark, I don't understand why ye hate the solar panels so much. I've never met the The Ginty in real life. I divn't know how bad a person he is or why ye think he owns yer soul. But if it's really botherin' ye that much, I can tear some down and ye can drive the backhoe to crush 'em."

Roark shook his head. "We can't do that. It's not our job."

"It's okay to care about what's happening in the world aroond ye."

"It's not my place to complain."

"Well ye complain an awful lot, yet I'm the only one who's been crushing panels and bringin' in the bits as offerings to yer office. It's me and Coalossal."

Roark snapped the book shut. He looked wide-eyed at Gordie, who sat forward and gave his brother a frank glare back.

"God! Fuck, Gordon, why would you do that!?"

"Because ye like it! Admit ye like it! I was only tryin' to make ye happy! What, ye thought there was some dark crusader out there bustin' up the bits? A real tough gadgie with a thicker beard and bigger muscles than yours? Did ye think a hero was on your side? A man who's his own man? Did ye think it was someone like Colin!? Colin goes out and buys ye shampoo!"

"Oh my god…"

"Te use yer own words, Roark, yer a squish."

"Gordon."

"I could call ye a lot of nastier names, but I won't. Because I like yer legends here in Sinnoh about Time and Space always matchin' up in the proper way, even if it's not what ye want at first. Yer hairy, dirty dad married my clean, pretty mam. I'm yer brother now, and I divn't care if ye divn't think you're yer own man, because nobody's perfect. Ye've gotta let yerself have an off day."

"It's not about having an 'off day.' It's that melon curry is stronger than me, and in twenty years it won't even matter. The mine'll be dead. This whole place… the mountains… the smokestacks… they'll be all white and sanitized like Sunyshore. I won't recognize it."

"Not if Time and Space align the right way. Ye've got to believe. Isn't it yer dream to build a whole underground city?"

"Yeah. But not because of some sci-fi crap like my home being destroyed. This is the worst timeline. It never was a joke. The The Ginty is real, and he has blade fingers and laser eyes and he owns my soul."

"Blade fingers?"

Roark shook his head in desperation. He rose from the couch and slipped his tank top up over the helmet, revealing the rough shadow of a Steelix tail spike purpling across his spine. "I'm going to bed. You should go to bed too. Tomorrow's Wednesday and I have to ban memes."

"G'night, Roark. I love you."

Roark sighed.

"Night… Gordie."

Roark was not in bed.

He was lying in a patch of scratchy, drought-drained grass in the foothills of Mount Coronet, overlooking Oreburgh City under the stars. The night breeze blew pillars of smog from the stacks into drawn-out clouds that smudged the valley vista with gray. Down there, the solar lights popped on and civilization flickered among brown, muddy streets as simple folk went to bed. Up here were ridges and crags and paths worn in the dust from ages of travelers. A secret place that wasn't so secret. Not so unique when people could map it.

It was secret enough right now to Roark. Especially secret when he hadn't brought his helmet. He dragged his fingers through long burgundy hair and let it fall loose over his shoulders. He eased himself into the oversized black sweatshirt he'd thrown on to combat the highland chill. He nudged his glasses and rubbed a thumb over the fossil he'd managed to find on his meandering trek. It was the single tooth of a leaf — from a plant, not a Pokémon. He could tell the difference. It wasn't speaking to him like a Pokémon would. It had a much softer voice that didn't speak in grunts, but in a sad sigh of wind and pollen trapped beneath sediment and time.

"It's okay. I'm a fossil too," Roark told it. "I will be a fossil, anyway. A long time from now. I'll be the one taking a good, long rest. And then I wanna wake up in a museum in the future, revived, and have a Cranidos in glasses tell me I'm the weirdest creature he's ever seen."

The wind in the fossil breathed out. He clutched it tightly and let his shoulders loosen as best they could on the lumpy ground.

"He'd turn me into a Pokémon. They'd have the technology to do that. I think I'd be…"

Rampardos, Tyranitar, Tyrantrum, Bastiodon, Aerodactyl, Archeops…

They'd tell him he wasn't capable of becoming those beasts. His genetic code would only mutate into the diamond-eyed and rainbow-sailed form of Aurorus. A graceful, kindly Pokémon that walked alone in arctic snow and wouldn't hurt anyone.

Gordie would turn into a Shuckle. Because Gordie would be there with him, in his boxer shorts, on the stainless steel table. And his DNA would be compatible with all those powerful dinos, and he'd tell the scaly scientists "Shuckle's reet canny" and spend the next eon alive and fossilized as a Shuckle.

"Mr. Roark?"

Roark stiffened, the slight smile falling once more to dust.

"Yeah?"

"You're Roark? The Oreburgh Gym Leader? We were told to find a man with a red helmet."

"Uh… I took it off."

"We have something for you."

"Show me."

Two teenagers wearing black berets and jackets emblazoned with the letter R circled around to sit near him. The boy produced a nondescript wooden box about a foot long and eight inches deep. The girl chewed her lip as she unhooked the latch in front and popped it open. Inside, meshed in styrofoam molds, were twelve perfect solid spheres. They were silvery and reflective as mirrors, and about the size of a Poké Ball in its shrunken form.

"How do I use them?" Roark asked.

The boy grunt shrugged. His jacket was too large, and he desperately needed deodorant. "You just throw 'em. If you throw enough, they blow up a whole mountain. Why do you wanna do that, Mr. Roark?"

"It's so we can start extracting the coal underneath. It'll make things a lot safer and more efficient."

The girl grunt's lip popped from her teeth. "You bought a whole box of Rocket Bombs for mining? That's not even evil. How'd you get cleared with the executives?"

The piles of coffee-stained legal documents flashed through his mind, and Roark grinned. "It's evil in its own way. Can I just take these, then?"

The boy grunt nodded. "You paid for one box of the newest, highest-tech Rocket bombs in development. Probably even the same ones Marcell's gonna use in Sunyshore!"

The girl smacked him. "Alex, don't say that! He's a Gym Leader!"

"I mean, who knows how many Gym Leaders are even loyal anymore."

Roark quirked an eyebrow. He eyed the grunts, who giggled nervously, and in two seconds he had Alex pinned against the ground, elbow against his skull.

"Who's blowing up Sunyshore?"

"It's just a rumor! Nobody knows if it's true or not!" the girl grunt squealed. "Some people in Team Rocket said that cool new Beta agent Marcell who set the Vermilion Gym on fire is from Sunyshore. Or… that he's the Sunyshore Gym Leader! And he's plotting a major siege of his own city! But, uh… no, forget I said that!"

"The Ginty?"

"Gin…ty?"

Roark shook his head. "Volkner Jay Ginterson. The Sunyshore Gym Leader. He works with Team Rocket?"

Alex grunted. "I don't know. That's what some people say. I don't think so. Marcell's totally badass. He wouldn't be a Gym Leader. It's more likely he stole the Sunyshore Gym Leader's Pokémon, like he stole Visquez's. Volkner's like, really lazy, right?"

Roark let him go. He scooped up the box of bombs and plopped them on the boy's chest before heading back down the path toward Oreburgh.

"Wait!" the girl cried. "We… we have to detain you now! You have compromised information!"

"I got rumors," Roark assured her. "Which you shouldn't be listening to, anyway. As far as I know, nothing about that Vermilion Gym story is true or applicable to your personal life unless you were there to witness it yourself. So you kids run back to your little gang of thugs with your Ginty bombs. I don't want 'em."

"You paid for them!"

"Then I want my money back."

"I don't think that's—"

Roark swung his right arm and released Rampardos, which roared and spread its massive claws wide.

"I'll find your parents and tell them you manufacture lies about the upstanding trainers of the Sinnoh League."

The two grunts turned tail and ran, carelessly flinging the box around with them.

"God," Roark spat at the sediments below. "That fuckin' guy's got his robot claws in the criminal underworld, too. I can't do anything to stop him."

Rampardos trundled up near. He felt its hot breath on his face and closed his eyes before plunging back down into delicious smog.

KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK.

Gordie sat bolt upright in bed. "On it," he chirped, pulling on his tank top and sweatpants. He pulled open the door to find Roark waiting for him in the deep shadows of the hallway, a look of pure determination working overtime to do what the beard had done yesterday. It was the eccentric hour now. Even odd brothers didn't look so different in the dark.

"Knew you'd come back in askin' fer help. So how many do ye wanna crush?"

"All of them," Roark said. Roark was blunt that way.

"All? Ye sure?"

"Maybe not all of them. Maybe we start with ten or so."

"Tha's mah big bro. Hug?"

"No."

"Arreet."

Gordie squeezed him in his pudgy arms anyway, and then did a perfect backflip down the stairs.

~N~

I had this awesome dream where I was in Roark's body watching as he bought tiny spherical bombs from Team Rocket for… mountaintop removal mining. Of course it slides right into the narrative as an interlude while Marcell and Candice sleep off their injuries/hangover. I paired up Roark and Gordie in my mind as cousins back when I thought Calaba could be their common ancestor, but reluctant stepbrothers is so much funnier. Maybe eventually I'll write "My Next Life is a Dinosaur Clone."

My impression of Roark coming back into the Sinnoh fandom is that people see him as being shy or effeminate because of his nerdiness, which of course makes no sense when the guy runs a whole mining operation and wants to be called The Rock. So frustrated libertarian it is.

Any Geordies or British people familiar with the accent, feel free to correct me~ I was having fun throwing things in there but didn't want to write it too thick. As a Hetalian I know how that feels to read lol~ My favorite part is that Geordies actually use "champion" as an adjective and that's not just a cheesy thing the writers made up for Leon.

Published by Syntax-N on FanFiction . Net March 26th, 2022. Reviews hard-rock! Reposts squishy.