05 No Feelings
At the Mahogany Gym one day it was suggested that they all partner up and try something new, like using each other's pokémon. Delilah did not generally have much preference when it came to partnerships, so she usually just waited to see who didn't have a partner at the end—but today, Michael Jacobs came up to her and said, "Delilah! Do you want to be partners?"
She smiled and said, "Yeah, sure!"
"How many badges have you got?"
"Six."
"Hey! You caught up to me. I'm just going to go to the bathroom first..."
She was really quite flattered by his interest, because she had always thought that Michael was cool and funny. He was flamboyantly gay, of the musical theater variety, and he was a very good pokémon trainer; she had never battled him before, because he had always had more badges than she did, and in gyms it was commonly accepted for trainers to battle others with the same number of badges, in the interest of fairness.
When Michael came back from the bathroom he said, "So how are you doing?"
"Fine," she said.
"Really? Are you just saying that?"
"Yeah. I have clinical depression."
He laughed.
Why didn't people believe she was telling the truth when she said she was fine? Did she seem mean? Maybe she did. Maybe she was.
"So, I heard Lance Siegfried is here in Mahogany," said Michael as they sat in the bleachers with Alejandra Cardona and Keanna Sherman.
"Really?" said Alejandra. "Where did you hear that?"
"Pryce told me."
"I wonder if he'll show up at the Gym sometime."
"And then, you know," he added, "Giovanni Harlow is here in Johto, and Adam Harlow."
Alejandra sighed judiciously. "Adam Harlow," she said. "I think he is really hot, and talented, but he is just so gross. I can't imagine what it must be like to see him walking down the street, it must be the scariest thing in the world."
"I saw him at the Wild Animal Park," said Keanna. "It was soooo trippy."
"I wouldn't mind battling one of them," said Alejandra.
Keanna laughed. "If you know what I mean..."
Alejandra laughed too. "I've seen some of both of their matches on YouTube. They're both really good."
"And they're both really good-looking..."
"I've battled Adam Harlow," said Delilah.
"So have I," said Michael. "He's tough."
"Yeah, he's very talented."
Michael looked at her and smirked. "I bet you won anyway," he said.
"Yeah, I did."
He laughed. "You're insane, Delilah," he said. "Delilah has only been collecting badges since last summer, and she already has six. Girl is disgusting."
They laughed.
"Oh, well," he said, standing up. "Do you want to battle?"
"Oh, I don't know," she said. "I might beat you and you wouldn't like it, or you might beat me and I wouldn't like it..."
Birds of a feather flock together, perhaps. But Delilah didn't have a flock, and so in these group situations she usually ended up partnering with whoever was left over—and it was usually a girl, and it was usually a specific kind of girl. Delilah had been in this situation enough times, from training seminars to high school English projects to middle school PE activities, to recognize the type of person she usually ended up paired with.
This kind of girl was too shy to ask somebody to be her partner, and since nobody knew her very well (because she was shy) she never got asked herself. And so Delilah would wait to see who didn't get a partner, and this girl would be hanging around sort of lost, so Delilah would ask her, and she would smile and be very nice.
She was always very nice, and usually smart, but with a strangling shyness that prevented her from making many friends. She was the kind of person who read Jane Austen and always remembered birthdays. So she was a good person, but in truth Delilah always found her a little boring, because she was always quite serious, and if Delilah made a joke, she might laugh in politeness, but she always seemed a little hurt and overwhelmed by any sarcasm, even if Delilah was making fun of herself.
The fact that Delilah had encountered this type of person enough times to be able immediately to identify them spoke of their high numbers; this girl, however, apparently and unfortunately, was too shy to ever approach any of her own kind, despite the fact that Delilah constantly encountered them in PE and English and training classes. Because of the breadth of this group, Delilah knew that many people probably assumed she belonged to it, if only based on the fact that she was quiet.
But that was the difference: Delilah was quiet—not shy. She could talk to people if she wanted to; but she didn't want to, and she never did. She ended up among the partnerless, not because she was too scared to ask, but because she was too detached.
There was something different about Delilah, but she could not figure out just what it was. There was something that kept her apart from other people. There was something going on that she didn't quite understand. She just didn't fit in with the other people who didn't fit in. In fact, she fit in better with the people who did fit in, but she just couldn't be bothered, probably because she was a bitch. She had never met a bigger bitch than herself, except for Adam Harlow, but he was a boy and apparently that was okay.
Later, Delilah and Michael decided to visit a little shop a block or so from the gym, and stood outside looking at the racks of postcards and things.
On the glass front of the shop were stuck a lot of funny signs and decals. Michael pointed to one that said, "Jedi Trained Here".
"Watch me levitate this chair with the Force," he said, waving his hand over a plastic lawn chair, which he jiggled with his foot.
Delilah burst out laughing. "I like this one," she said, pointing to one that said, "Just a Souvenir Shop, Nothing Suspicious about It, No Need to Be Alarmed".
He laughed. "That's cute," he said.
Inside, they wandered around for a while and ended up in the aisle with gift items like picture frames and scented candles.
"Ohmygod, Delilah," Michael whispered behind his hand. "Look, it's Lance Siegfried, he is in Mahogany..."
Lance Siegfried was standing inconspicuously in the middle of the aisle. "Pretty cool," said Delilah, not sure what she was supposed to say.
Michael sniffed various candles, and eventually Lance ended up next to them.
Then Delilah noticed something extraordinary.
"Oh my God, what is THIS!" she said, picking up a ceramic figurine.
It was a green elf or troll or something, and quite possibly the ugliest thing she had ever seen.
Michael fell into a fit of helpless laughter. Delilah caught Lance's eye and noticed he was trying not to laugh.
"Too good for the usual insincere Valentine's gift," he advised her seriously. "It wouldn't be properly appreciated."
"You're probably right," Delilah sighed sadly.
"Ohmygod I'm so excited to meet you," Michael blurted out.
Lance smiled. "It's nice to meet you too," he said. "What are your names?"
"Michael."
"Delilah."
"So can I assume you're pokémon trainers?" At their nods, he asked, "Will you be entering the Silver Conference this year? How many badges do you have?"
"We both have six, but Delilah got hers a lot faster, she's only been collecting badges since the summer!" Michael babbled, his face quite red.
"I'm impressed," said Lance. "Will you be entering the Silver Conference?"
"Oh, um, maybe," she said, trying to ignore the fact that she was a little pink herself. "Oh, but I only have five pokémon, though," she added, remembering with embarrassment how she had gotten lost with Adam in the California shrubland but still not caught any pokémon.
Lance looked behind himself. "Hey, do you feel a breeze?" he asked casually.
Delilah and Michael stood still. "Yeah, I do," said Michael.
"Maybe a little..."
"The door's closed," said Lance.
"Maybe there's a fan on," Michael suggested.
They chatted for a short while longer, and then Delilah and Michael made their purchases. Michael asked the man behind the counter about Jedi training, but he just looked at him blankly.
Delilah went back to the pokémon center and sat in the cafeteria, listening to Gabrielle Varnham unpack her woes about her breakup with Art Christiansen, whom she had dated while they were in Violet at the same time.
"It was so awkward and stupid," she said. "We were walking and then we stopped in front of the pokémon center. And he was looking around, not looking at me, and he said, 'I don't think we should see each other, romantically, anymore.' And I just, like...laughed. I was like, 'Hah! Okay, I can deal with that.' And then he basically ran away. Ugh! I can't believe he dumped me! And then later I texted him just, 'why?' And he said, 'Actually there were a few things. I didn't want to talk about it and make you sad.' And then like a smiley face. Whatever, he was extremely boring anyway."
Delilah scoffed, feeling validated in her judgment of him. "How immature," she said. "Yeah, no offense, but I never got why you wanted to go out with him."
"Well, I didn't, really..."
"Then why did you?"
"Well, I don't know, I just...I don't know..."
"Anyway, I think that's an extremely offensive thing for him to say to you," she said.
"What, the text message?"
"Yeah. 'Cuz it's like, he's acknowledging that his reasons would upset you, but he's still not going to tell you? That's pointless, it defeats the purpose of not telling you."
"I guess," she said, but she didn't seem to be following, and she left soon after that.
Delilah wasn't sure if she would ever understand the preoccupation with the dating institution that seemed to leave no age bracket untainted. She truly did not see the appeal of it, and the fact that Adam Harlow was the only person to agree with her had her fearing slightly for her personal condition.
As Delilah finished eating, Lance Siegfried entered the emptying cafeteria; when he saw her, she smiled, and he approached her. "Delilah, right?"
"Yeah, Delilah."
"So you're the one who won six badges in about as many months?"
"Um, I guess," she said dumbly.
"Are you busy? I wonder if you'd like to help me out with something," he said, sitting down, apparently prepared to convince her.
"Umm...like what?"
"Have you heard the rumors about Team Rocket?" he asked, his voice lowering.
"About them coming back?"
He nodded. "They're not rumors," he said.
She already knew that, but she didn't say so.
"Do you want to help me out?"
"Um...I don't really understand what you want me to do," she said, having horrible flashbacks to her annoying Slowpoke Well adventure.
"There seems to be a kind of radio signal here in Mahogany that's affecting the pokémon that live at the Lake of Rage," he said. "What I want you to do is going to depend on what Team Rocket's doing, isn't it?"
"I guess," she said, still unsure if this was really a proper explanation.
She agreed to go with him, despite the possibility that he could secretly be a psychotic killer luring her into a bad part of town with his smooth voice and nice clothes so he could cut out her tongue or something. But worse things could happen, right?
He got his pokémon from the nurse and they walked down the street to the shop with the Jedi sign. He told her to wait outside for a minute, so she did. She thought maybe he needed to pick something up, although she didn't know why he wouldn't have just gotten it when he was there earlier.
She stood outside with Snoops, who was in a cuddly mood, leaning up against Delilah's legs and looking winsome until she picked her up and gave her some attention.
Eventually she got tired of waiting so she went into the store; inside she heard Lance say "Hyper Beam", and then the sounds of a scuffle and some swearing, and hushed, intense conversation. When she made it to the back of the store she saw Lance standing next to a shelf and a dragonite, and two men standing at a respectful distance, one of whom was the cashier that Michael had tried to joke with.
Lance turned to face her, and she saw next to the shelf a hole in the floor, presumably a trap door that the shelf had covered.
"Oh, Delilah," he said. He walked up to her and spoke to her in a low voice: "That radio signal is coming from here. The stairs are there. We should split up; I'll go first."
She watched as he went down the stairs with his dragonite. She wasn't sure if it were his instructions that were bad or if it was her comprehension that was bad, because she had no idea what she was supposed to be doing. Should her objective have been clearer to her? What had she missed?
She looked at the two men, who were looking at her, and smiled awkwardly at them. They did not respond in any way. She went down the stairs, and they said nothing.
Underneath the shop, the foot of the stairs grew out of the floor of a pristine, brightly lit hallway, empty except for a couple of statues of persians along the wall. It was so quiet her ears started to ring.
It was flattering, or something, that Lance had asked her to do something like this, maybe. After all, he was sort of a big deal when it came to pokémon, being World Champion. Delilah didn't think pokémon training was too terribly difficult, really. Everybody seemed to think she was very good at it, and maybe she was, but she didn't see how it was such an accomplishment. The hardest part of pokémon training was finding out if other people wanted to battle.
Then again, she supposed she did have more time to devote to caring for her pokémon than most other people did, because she didn't have a "day job". But then, the reason she didn't was because she was good enough at pokémon battling that she didn't have to.
For a long time she wandered aimlessly through endless winding corridors over tasteful checkered linoleum as if she were in a horrible symbolic nightmare about anxiety and feelings of restriction that could probably have gotten her a robust prescription. There did seem to be something going on with a radio signal, because Snoops seemed to hear something that Delilah couldn't. She was worried that it might cause her physical discomfort, so she gave her a walnut and then recalled her.
Eventually she found another human, in a Team Rocket uniform. "Ummm, excuse me," she said, "have you seen Lance Siegfried anywhere?"
"Lance Siegfried?" he repeated, raising his eyebrows. "What would he be doing here?"
"You know, I really have no idea, but, I mean, I'm pretty sure he's here..." She started to look around a corner, and he grabbed her arm.
"Hey, watch it!" he said, pulling her back. "Sorry," he added when she rubbed her arm. "Just watch out, for the koffings. Just—why don't you just not go that way."
She had no idea what he was talking about, but she let him point her in a different direction.
"Well, good luck with whatever you're doing," he said.
She shrugged enormously to show that she had no idea what she was doing, and he laughed. "Yeah, you too, I guess," she said, and walked in the direction he had pointed her in.
She felt extremely suspicious, but maybe she didn't look that threatening. Maybe she looked so conspicuous that no one would ever suspect her. Maybe he thought she had been wearing a lab coat, or maybe he thought her "I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing" attitude was typical work-a-day cynicism.
She walked down some stairs, because that seemed to be all there was, and found Lance at the bottom of them, in front of a closed electric door.
"Are you all right?" he asked her. "Are your pokémon hurt, or tired?"
"No..."
"Okay. Keep it up," he said, and vanished up some stairs.
Why did he have to be so weird. It must be fame, she thought. It did strange things to people.
She glanced at the electric door. There was a big sign on it that said "The Radio Transmitter".
Well, that was helpful? She wondered if the person who had written that sign was also responsible for the unsuspicious one on the front of the shop. How postmodern, she thought, that whoever put it up knew that everyone would interpret it as a joke.
She continued wandering around and eventually found Lance and his dragonite again, standing next to a man in a Team Rocket uniform.
"Delilah, in order to unlock the door to the radio transmitter, you need the voice of a certain person: Petrel. I have found out he is hiding in their leader's office. Unfortunately though, that room is also protected with a password..."
"Huh?" asked Delilah to convey to him that he had made no efforts to let her know what was going on.
"Delilah, we need the password to their leader's office first," he said, and again disappeared.
Delilah looked at the man on whom Lance had presumably exerted forceful negotiation and threw her hands in the air to show that she had no idea what was going on. He gave her a tiny sympathetic smile, and she continued wandering around.
She hadn't even been thinking about what might happen if her life were a sitcom—that came up all by itself when Adam appeared.
She asked him, "Do you often frequent criminal hideouts?"
He looked at her weirdly. "Do you?"
She sighed and shrugged extravagantly. "Recently I seem to be doing it quite a bit! It's a thing."
"Oh, shut up. I don't have time for you. What do you want?"
She thought this was quite rude, considering she had helped him with his hair and had thought they had been getting along okay before. "Do you know the password for the leader's room?" she asked.
"Why are you asking?"
She sighed heavily. "I don't even know."
He looked through her like cellophane. "It's 'slowpokeraticate'," he said. "All one word."
"Oh. Thanks," she said, not having expected him to tell her. "How do you know?"
"Are you here with Lance Siegfried?" he asked her abruptly.
"Um, yeah."
He pressed his lips together, frowning in reflection. "My pokémon were no match at all," he reflected bitterly.
"Oh. Well, I mean...he is Lance Siegfried, he is Pokémon League World Champion..."
He sighed, leaning his head back, which accentuated the angle of his throat, and she felt a peculiar temperature change at its delicately masculine appeal. "I don't care that I lost," he said. "It's what he said that bothers me...he told me that I don't trust my pokémon enough."
His perfect Roman nose wrinkled in disgust.
"...Humph!" he humphed. "I don't have time for you!"
"Whatever," she said, and watched him walk away, because she liked the way he walked.
She wandered around until she found a door with the name Petrel on it. She looked around, as if waiting to see somebody to encourage her. There was a keypad on the door. She entered 'slowpokeraticate', which she thought was an extremely long password, and it unlocked.
In the room there was a desk and a table covered in boxes of manila folders; along the wall were shelves of books and poké balls, and a birdcage with a murkrow in it. When she opened the door, a man looked up from a computer.
"Oh," she said. "Excuse me..."
She was going to leave awkwardly but he said, "I've been waiting for you."
She looked at him blankly, hoping she hadn't met him before and created an awkward moment by not remembering him.
"It's me, Giovanni," he said, gesturing to himself.
"...Oh...okay...?"
"What, I don't sound like him? I don't even look like him, what? I worked hard on this!"
He looked like Bing Crosby and sounded like Tom Waits. She didn't say so.
"You must be trying to sneak into the radio-transmitter room," he said casually, standing up and taking off his coat to reveal a Team Rocket uniform underneath. It was a little different from most of the others she had seen, so she assumed he was of a higher rank. "Well, that's not going to happen," he said, walking up to her, stopping only when he was directly in front of her.
She leaned back, only very slightly, but he noticed, and leaned forward.
"That room is protected with a special password," he told her in a gravelly whisper, tapping her chin with his finger. Then he leaned back and raised his voice back to normal to say, "Giovanni."
He smiled in a sort of knowing, cocky way, and laughed.
"The password is 'Giovanni'," he said, removing a poké ball from his belt. "Surprised to hear it from me? Just knowing the password won't help you. It only reacts to my voice."
He expanded the poké ball and released a zubat. She looked at it, not realizing he wanted to battle until he made an encouraging hand gesture and she felt sort of embarrassed.
She won anyway.
He was very complimentary upon his defeat, exclaiming about her strength and skill.
"I couldn't do a thing," he said, and smiled. "I hope Giovanni could forgive me..."
"Um...if you don't mind my asking," she said, figuring she might as well get some real information, "what about him...?"
"Since disbanding Team Rocket three years ago, he's been missing," he said. "I'm sure he's been waiting for the right time for our revival."
Suddenly he pinched her cheek and laughed.
"Losing to you won't change the fact that you can't get to the transmitter!" he said, and practically skipped out of the room.
"Whatever," she said to the empty air.
She was feeling sort of tired and bored, and her face stung where he hadn't been able to resist pinching her, and she peered into one of the boxes on the table, but the papers in the folders were full of words and figures that didn't mean anything to her. Probably they were something dull and utilitarian like payroll or something.
She sighed, and sat down, wondering what she should do now. Looking for Lance seemed to make the most sense, but she didn't know where exactly to look; maybe he would find his way there on his own?
"Hello!"
She jumped, and looked around, scrambling to her feet. "Hello?" she said.
Silence for several seconds. Then, "Hello!"
It was the murkrow. She walked over to the cage and looked at it. "Hello," she said.
It hopped on its perch and looked at her, its head cocked to one side.
"Hello," she said again.
It opened its wings slightly and said, "Hello!"
She smiled, and went to her handbag for the Ziploc bag of walnuts she was using as reinforcers for Snoops. She dropped one into the cage, and the murkrow hopped down and ate it.
"Hello!"
"Hello," she said back. She couldn't help but smile. Honchkrows got a bad rap sometimes in popular mythology, but she thought they were very smart.
It vocalized indistinctly and then said, "What's up!"
"Oh, you say more than one thing!" she said, getting out another walnut. "What's up?"
It looked at her.
She tried again: "What's up?"
Again it opened its wings slightly and said, "What's up! What's up!"
She dropped the walnut in, and it ate it. "Can you say anything else?" she asked. "How about...nevermore? Can you say 'nevermore'?"
It made a little noise and said, "Hello!"
"Hello," she said.
"Hello!"
"Good! What's up?"
"What's up!" it said. "What's up!"
"Nevermore!"
"Giovanni!"
She actually gasped. It sounded just like Petrel.
It looked at her, its nictitating membrane closing and opening like a camera shutter.
"Giovanni," she said. "Giovanni."
It blinked again, and then opened its wings and said, "Giovanni!"
"Good!" she said, giving it a walnut.
Lance would be pleased with that, wouldn't he? Well, she couldn't carry the entire cage upstairs to the transmitter room; she began picking up poké balls from the shelves, weighing them in her hand until she found one that was empty.
On her way back to the transmitter she was keeping an eye out for Lance when somebody said, "Excuse me!"
Delilah turned and saw a woman with red hair hurrying up to her with a man in a Rocket uniform.
"We can't—"
Delilah's handbag buzzed disruptively. "Oh, sorry," she said, taking out her Pokégear. She was surprised to even get a signal, and she looked at it to see Irwin's name.
The woman drew a poké ball and made some sentences with her mouth, but they washed over her meaninglessly as she said, "Hello?"
Suddenly Lance appeared, also making sentences, and he and the woman interfaced intensely.
"Hello?" she repeated. "Irwin?"
There was a lot of fumbling on the other end and then Irwin said, "Hi, Delilah? Sorry! I had my phone in my pocket, and I just sat on it wrong, I guess, haha!"
"Ahah," she said, suddenly very irritated as Lance expanded a poké ball.
"Well, since I've got you here, are you watching TV?"
"No, I'm talking to you on the phone."
He laughed, misinterpreting her bitchiness as a joke. "I mean, do you have the TV on?"
"No, I have a dress on."
"Well, you should turn on a TV, and watch the news."
"The news?" she asked, wondering how he could be so obliviously good-natured when she was so obviously aggravated. "Why would I want to watch the news? I just saw it last week."
"Delilah, you're impossible," he said, and she could just tell he was smiling, that...ninny.
"Irwin, I have to say, this is really not that great of a time..."
"Oh? What are you doing?" he asked conversationally.
"It's hard to explain but I'll call you back okay," she said, and hung up just in time to get involved in a double battle. Delilah didn't really like double battles, but of course they won, because after all Lance Siegfried was LANCE SIEGFRIED.
"You really are strong," said the woman when they were done. "But that's fine. It doesn't matter what happens to this place now..."
Lance told them off like the hero of a romance novel and they vanished mysteriously.
"Now, about this room," he said. "We still have to find Petrel..."
"Oh, I found him," said Delilah. She told him what had happened and released the murkrow from the poké ball.
"How convenient," he said.
"I know, right? It's like a puzzle in a LucasArts adventure game or something." She let the murkrow perch on her arm and she said, "Look, watch. Hello!"
It opened its wings and said, "Hello! Hello!"
"Good job!" she said, giving it a walnut. "What's up?"
"What's up!"
Lance smiled and said, "That's cute, but..."
"Yeah, I know, I'll get on with it. Giovanni!"
"Giovanni! Hello!"
There was a clicking sound, and she and Lance looked at the door.
"I think it unlocked," he said.
As soon as he opened the door, the murkrow leapt off of Delilah's arm and flew away back down the hallway. "Ouch!" she said, touching her arm where it had scratched her.
"You better clean that," said Lance. "Who knows what's on its feet." He told her potions were okay for humans, and he sprayed one once on the scratch. It stung a little, and she inhaled sharply, and put a Band-Aid on it.
They went inside the transmitter room and Delilah immediately got a weird, unsettled feeling in her digestive system or something. There was a big machine of some kind, with three electrodes on each side hooked up to it.
"We can't hear it," said Lance. "But do you feel that?"
"Yeah."
"Imagine how much worse it is for, like, a snake, or something."
"Well, just look at the electrodes...no wonder they're going insane..."
He examined the machine for a few minutes. "I don't know if there's a switch," he said. "If there is, it's hidden or something." He bit his lip and looked around. "If we battle the electrodes," he said, "they should get tired enough to stop...no, you know, I'm going to make some calls. That's too dangerous, with the electricity. We can get specialists in here..."
So that was an extremely anticlimactic way for this adventure to end. Lance told her he would pay her back for her "help", but at that point she had stopped caring. She went back to the pokémon center and collapsed into bed.