Chapter Eighteen - Grievances!

August 13th, 2022

Finch Forest, Asture Region

Raine stepped into Finch Forest from the end of Route Four and gawped at the beautiful way that sunlight filtered in through the arched canopy of trees that marched along both sides of the road creating a bright tunnel of greenery. He had never been so far from home or had the pleasure of seeing something so purely majestic. There were literally thousands of Pokémon of all varieties cohabiting the virtually untouched forest. He desired to scan them all with his Pokédex, but had to contain his giddy excitement. He wasn't there as a researcher, He was there on the hunt for a legendary Pokémon. The elusive and godly Gaia.

All that said he couldn't stop himself from scanning just one Pokémon to get his day started. "Tangela, the vine Pokémon," the Pokédex said as he aimed it at a passing blue ball of vines. "Tangela's vines snap off easily if they are grabbed. This happens without pain, allowing it to make a quick getaway. The lost vines are replaced by newly grown vines the very next day."

"Watch it!" Someone yelled and there was a melody of honking and hollering.

Raine turned and jumped off of the road as a reckless driver steered a three-wheeled PokéCart around him, zooming into the forest from Route Four. How they missed running over any of the wild Pokémon was a mystery to Raine.

"Time to get off the beaten path," Raine said to Mirella, adjusting his day-pack, the half size of his travelling backpack, on his shoulders. "Left or right?"

Mirella looked both directions and shrugged. They had literally no evidence or clues to go off of. They would just be wandering around aimlessly until something hopefully showed up. They had spent much of the night before in the Pokémon Centre trying to come up with a plan, but the best idea they had was to get deep into the forest as far from Blackbird Villa as possible. Blackbird Villa was a very small town built into and around the largest trees somewhere approximately halfway through Finch Forest. They knew that if Gaia was to show up she wouldn't do so near civilisation.

"Left," Mirella said uncertainly.

Raine grabbed the straps of his backpack and stepped off of the road between the first two trees nearest him. "Works for me," he said, unable to quell his overflowing level of excitement.

This was what he was built for. Not battling or catching Pokémon, but learning about their nature and patterns of behaviour. He had spent so much of his life just sitting outside of the laboratory and watching Pokémon in the fields and trees. Gaia was no different to any of them. They just had to figure her out and finding where she lived would be a piece of cake.

Mirella walked silently behind Raine, following him as he took a completely random track through the thick trees. For some reason he wasn't afraid of getting lost in the wilderness. Directions had always come easy to him and many times as a child he had been led by friends blindfolded into the trees near Jay Town only to scamper his way out with no trouble at all. By nightfall he knew that they would circle their way back to the Pokémon Centre where they had set up for the foreseeable future. If they didn't make it back somehow they had enough supplies to camp out for the night and could find their way in the morning once the sun rose to guide their way.

"Raine," Mirella said, not long after they began and they stopped so he could face her. She had tears in her red stained eyes and deep lines where the salty water had worked its way down her cheeks and neck.

"What's wrong?" Raine asked, wanting to reach out and comfort her, but resisting the urge. "Did something happen?"

"Professor Sakura…" Mirella said, stumbling as she wiped her face with the back of her sleeve. "I don't understand why it happened to him."

"His death?" Raine hesitated before deciding it was okay to close the several metre gap between them and grasp her arm reassuringly.

"Yes. Why did August decide to kill him? They wanted me and yet they traded my life for his and the Pokédex. If my father actually betrayed Team Omni and they wanted retribution they didn't exactly see that through."

"I don't know," Raine conceded, fighting his own tears at the flood of memories and emotions that came with thinking about Professor Sakura and everything he had meant. "Hopefully the others can capture them so that the police can investigate their motives and we can get justice for their crimes."

"I want more than justice!" Mirella said, clenching her fists. "Justice isn't enough. I want to make them pay. I want them to feel what it's like to burn alive. Damn them for mutilating my poor Zangoose and ruining my chances at revenge."

"Let's just focus on finding Gaia," Raine said, feeling all of the same feelings as Mirella, but knowing one of them needed to remain focussed. They couldn't let all of the bad thoughts start to take over or they would get nowhere. "She's out here somewhere and she's going to help us put a stop to Team Omni."

"You think?"

"I wouldn't be here if I didn't believe that this is the right thing to do. Even if it derails some of their plans and helps bring them out of hiding, that's all we could hope for."

"I can't believe we left Miles to fight Team Omni alone back in Sparrow Town," Mirella said, apparently airing all of her concerns even if the conversation didn't flow. "That was our best chance to stop them before they could do any further harm."

"We had no choice," Raine said. "It was either abandon our fight with them or risk all of our Pokémon ending up maimed and killed. How were we to know that by the time we returned to the battlefield all traces of them would have disappeared?"

"Where do you think that they went? Last night Constance said they could find no evidence of them in Robin City. Could they have come west? Will we find them hiding somewhere in the Forest?"

"I'm honestly not sure, but if we do find them we'd do well to have Gaia on our side by then. Let's keep walking and see what we can find."

Mirella gave her silent consent so Raine turned and continued to stalk through the trees. She had raised so many valid concerns and was wearing her grief on her sleeve. Raine wanted to be just as open and honest with his feelings, but he knew that they would take over if he submitted to them. Grief was not something that he had ever dealt well with. He had never truly come to terms with the disappearance of his parents that first year that he had spent in Professor Sakura's lab as a boy. He had just thrown himself into his research and used the feelings to make him more studious. Now with Professor Sakura's death he just had to keep moving forwards. He had to keep focussing on achieving his tasks one by one. First finding Gaia and then stopping Team Omni. Although they seemed impossible they were targets that he could put his mind to.

"Lunch?" Raine asked, stopping and basking in a patch of sunlight filtering through the dense canopy.

"Lunch," Mirella agreed, dumping herself on the hard packed dirt with no qualms.

Raine let his Pokémon out of their Poké Balls and they all sat on the ground around himself and Mirella. Mirella let out Furret and held another Poké Ball tightly in her hands with white knuckles.

"It's okay to let Zangoose come on out." Raine knew that she hadn't interacted with Zangoose since he had been held in the Pokémon Centre after his maiming. "They won't be upset with you. What happened wasn't your fault."

"I know," Mirella said, cringing at her own words, "but I'm her trainer and my job is to protect my Pokémon. I constantly put her in harm's way. And for what? To try and stop a bunch of kids from getting a shiny piece of metal. I know that this was different. That I needed to use her to fight August. But I hate myself for what happened. How can I face her and reassure her that it will never happen again? She's my baby and I let her down."

Once again she was flirting with a conversation that Raine didn't exactly know how to get involved in. Crisis management was not one of his strengths. He knew that silence was not the best response in a lot of situations and especially not this one, but he didn't know what to say to reassure her.

So he opened his bag and took out all of their lunches. He offered her a sandwich and a juice bag which she blindly ignored and he placed at her feet. Then as he moved on to feed his Pokémon Mirella whispered, "Okay."

She let Zangoose out of her Poké Ball and she immediately jumped at Mirella and wrapped her in a one-armed embrace. "I'm sorry, Zangoose," she cried, wrapping her arms around the Pokémon's back. "I promise that I'll protect you better from here on out."

"Eat up," Raine suggested, motioning his eyes at Mirella's food and placing out a tray for Zangoose. They both hungrily got stuck into their meals and Raine felt a smile twinging at the corners of his mouth.

"So," Mirella said after a few quiet moments where everyone was happily devouring their food. "Is this what you expected? Blindly wandering with no idea where or how to find Gaia?"

"Honestly, we should have started at Blackbird Villa," Raine conceded. "If anyone could have given us any knowledge about her it would be the few residents there. If we weren't so afraid of running into Team Omni everywhere we go we could have benefitted from some helpful information."

Mirella stared at Zangoose, eating eagerly with her remaining claw without any concern in the world. "It's not too late," she said.

"And if we stumble into August? What are the two of us supposed to do?"

"He wields a lot of power, but I don't think that he has the control needed to fight in the constraints of a forest. He will not allow his Pokémon to fight and potentially burn everything around us to ash. I think that we can risk a confrontation as long as we're careful."

Raine looked north west through the dense forest. "So, Blackbird Villa."

"After lunch," Mirella said, taking the final bite of her sandwich. "I do need to rest my legs too, no matter how it may seem."