"You know," Gabe said, reading the map, "we probably should've gone to this musical thing in Nimbasa. Sounds fun."
"I don't think I would have liked it," Ray said, kicking a rock down the road.
"Well, there's also, like, sports things."
"You know I don't like sports that much, either. Unless there's Pokémon."
"Oh well. We're already like halfway to the next town." Gabe reached down and rubbed his Growlithe, laughing. "Growlithe probably wants to watch a battle. But the last few ones have been indoors, right?"
"Why don't you battle, Gabe?" Ray said. "That's probably what Growlithe's dying to do."
"I dunno. Maybe."
"Remember what Elesa said? Don't be afraid of losing—"
"Yeah, I know." Gabe was silent for a moment. Then he said, "So the next Gym guy—he's like a cowboy! And it says here he likes ground-types."
"You know, sometimes types don't matter."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, Spolt took out another electric-type with an electric move."
"Yeah, I guess you're right." Gabe put away the map and stroked his Growlithe again. "But you know they can help."
Ray could see an angular, red bridge up ahead—the drawbridge leading to Driftveil City. Boats would come and go beneath it like the occasional car on a back-country road. Ray reached down to pet Spolt, who leaned into Ray's legs affectionately. Dax responded by slumping on Ray's other side.
"Oh come on, guys," Ray said. "Gabe, do you—"
"Help! Stop him!" yelled a voice from behind. A policewoman from Nimbasa City was chasing a guy in a leather jacket, who ran by Ray and continued sprinting ahead.
"Hold this," Ray said, handing Gabe his bag before running after the suspicious guy. Spolt and Dax followed, but Growlithe stayed with Gabe.
"I just chased him through half of Nimbasa," the policewoman panted, bent over to catch her breath. She looked up at Gabe. "Can your friend run?"
"I dunno, but I'm pretty sure his Pokémon can," Gabe said, bemused, gazing at the four sprinting figures in the distance. "Where are yours?"
The policewoman blushed. "That man stole them, along with another poor girl's."
Ray didn't really know why he was chasing this man. He should've left it to the police or something. But only one person had been chasing this guy, and she had looked exhausted. He couldn't just let him get away, if he was the only person left to stop him.
Ray let his mind clear, and soon he was focused on running down the fugitive. They were almost at the drawbridge. Wait—the bridge was rising!
"Hey! Stop!" yelled the man in the bridge's little control room as the shady character leaped over the barrier. "You can't cross now, the bridge's rising!"
Ray jumped the barrier, too, saying, "Lower it!"
"I can't!" was the reply. Ray didn't stop running.
The bridge was getting steeper—and the gap in the middle wider—as the seconds ticked by. The fugitive made it over the gap, but it was way too wide once Ray made it there.
Adrenaline was running the show. Ray told Spolt and Dax to go back, and then let out Terral. Before he knew it, he was riding Terral and still in pursuit of the criminal. Once he was past the bridge, he quickly dismounted and started running again.
"Cut him off!" Ray yelled, almost out of breath. He meant his command to be for any bystanders—there were a few of them watching—but Terral flew ahead, too. Once it was blocking the way, the guy on the run was forced to turn around—but he slipped and fell. When Ray caught up, the guy was already apprehended by Driftveil police.
"Mind tellin' us what's this guy's problem?" an officer said to Ray.
"I don't know. A cop from Nimbasa and my friend are catching up," Ray said. He hoped they were, anyway.
"Well, don't leave town without stopping by the police station," the officer said, turning away with the suspect in tow. "We're gonna need a few statements for this guy."
In the police station, the policewoman from Nimbasa was giving the story in hushed tones to the other cops. Ray strained to overhear what they were saying, but the TV Gabe was watching drowned it out. It was turned to a news channel that was playing recycled material. A couple other people were sitting at chairs in the station's waiting room, too, but the place didn't look busy at all.
A Driftveil policeman walked up to them, saying, "The guy wants to talk to you." He pointed at Ray.
Ray got up, not sure what to expect. "Okay," he said. He gave Gabe a confused look before being led out of the room.
"Hello, kid," said the guy Ray had chased into Driftveil. He was sitting on the other side of a wall of bars. "The name's Chuck. Sorry to have made you run so far, for a pointless reason."
"Why did you want to talk to me?" Ray said. He would rather not be in the same room with this guy.
"Just to apologize," Chuck said, smirking. "You know, this cell is so tiny. Look how they treat people based on hunches and guesses—"
"We have witnesses," interrupted a police officer as she entered the room. "Theft is pretty serious, especially when you steal from my fellow police officers. So don't get all indignant." She turned to Ray. "He's wasting your time. Let's go. I'll get someone to take a statement in a few."
She led Ray back to the main room, as another officer led a girl in—it was the girl from the desert! She gave a fleeting look of recognition, before entering Chuck's room.
"So what's up?" Gabe said as Ray took a seat next to him. The waiting room had a ton of empty chairs, lined up in rows and around the walls.
"No idea. That guy's crazy."
As if to prove Ray right, Chuck's voice rang out from the hallway: "It won't matter soon, anyway! Everything will be different! Everything!"
The girl came back with an officer, who said, "He'll probably plead insanity."
The girl sat down with an empty seat between her and Ray. "Hi," she said quietly, keeping her eyes on the TV. "Thanks for stopping that guy."
"No problem. It was nothing," Ray said, turning to the TV.
"Hello?" said Stanley as he came through the door. He murmured a question to a police officer, and frowned at the response he got. He turned to leave, and—wait.
Stanley?
"Stanley?" Gabe blurted out.
"What? Oh crap, it's you guys!" Stanley flew over and took the seat between Ray and the girl from the desert. "Hello," he said to her.
"Hi," she said.
Ray had no idea what Stanley was doing in Driftveil. "What—"
"My ship couldn't get into Hoenn! It's, like, closed down or something! This was the ship's next place to go, so it just took us here—"
"This is getting ridiculous!" Gabe whined. "First the bridge's closed, then the subway thing, right? And now Hoenn?"
"It might not be related," Ray said.
"You think something's up over there?" Gabe murmured. "Like remember a few years ago, that thing with the epidemic?"
"No, not that," dismissed Stanley. "No way they would get caught by that kinda thing again."
"I-I heard that it has to do with the blue shockwave thing," the girl added.
They traded ideas for a few minutes. Ray tapped his feet on the floor impatiently—nobody was coming to "take statements." He figured it had to do with the yelling coming from Chuck's holding cell.
When the recycled section of news material ended, a bulletin came on the TV instead of another hour of old news.
"The blue wave seen around the world—is it what the mysterious Horizon group says it is?" the news anchor asked. "Or is it another hoax like the fake auroras of '09? We're going to play the video Horizon broadcasted yesterday, and then update with startling news from overseas."
"That's probably Hoenn they're talking about!" Stanley said before being hushed.
The screen changed from the anchor at his desk to a sharply-dressed man in front of a concrete wall. It looked like he had been talking before, so the news channel probably started the video in the middle.
"The blue wave is a demonstration of the machine's capabilities," the man said, staring right at the camera. "We are on the verge of a whole new world! A world where everyone has unique abilities and talents to contribute to society. A world without pollution, or any of those such problems we have created for ourselves and are too sluggish to overcome! I talk of a world of all Pokémon. No humans. This world is very real, mind you. It may not be coming in the physical sense we're all familiar with—no, it's all very complicated quantum physics and multidimensional space. Not even I understand it fully!" He paused to give a hearty laugh. Nobody in the room so much as smiled with him. "When the two worlds collide—we call it convergence—we will be moved from this world to the other. The other world has no humans in it, and for reasons we don't yet know, any humans going there are turned into Pokémon."
"What a load of crap!" burst out a police officer. "Whackjobs can just go on the news whenever they want now, huh?"
The man on the TV went on. "I don't wish to talk for much longer. I would like to say that you won't need to prepare, besides emotionally, for convergence. Only our minds will be transferred. Our current date for this event is July the twelfth. That's a week or so from the time of this recording. Because nobody will believe us as of right now, Horizon will be having a demonstration in the next day or so, to prove to you this world exists. We can't say where. But I'm sure it'll make the news." He winked and waved at the camera before the screen faded to black.
"Sad that the largest clips on the news nowadays are the bullshittiest," mumbled the police officer from before.
"Watch your mouth," warned someone else.
The TV returned to the news anchor. "As the date draws nearer, speculation grows about what this Horizon group is going to demonstrate, exactly. The authorities are concerned that it may be a criminal act."
"What was the blue thing, then?" Ray asked to no one in particular. "Wasn't that the demonstration?"
"If you ask me, it was an accident," Stanley said. "They're probably covering it up."
"And now for some news just received from overseas," called the anchor. More people were standing around to watch the TV.
"News 'just' received—that's a lie," someone said. More than one person shushed him.
"Hoenn seems to be in a state of emergency, as of sometime last night," the anchor continued. He shuffled some papers around. "We're not getting any reports about what's happening, other than that ships and planes going to Hoenn are being turned back. It's only adding to the mystery behind the 'convergence apocalypse,' as some critics call it. Whether it's related or not, we'll find out in due time. Stay tuned for updates."
"What do you think?" Stanley said as the news segment ended.
"How are they going to demonstrate something like that?" Ray said.
"You think it's gonna happen?" Stanley asked.
"Who knows?" Ray said. "Some pretty crazy things happened to me with that blue wave thing, that's for sure."
"Yeah, I heard. You're not a Pokémon, though."
That much was true. Ray was trying to thing of ways to possibly prove the existence of another world in "multidimensional space," but a sudden headache was getting in the way.
"What's the matter?" Stanley said as Ray rubbed his head.
"Nothing. How would—"
"Excuse me, son. If you would just fill out this form," a gruff officer said, handing Ray a sheet of paper. "Most of it's done for you already. Just describe what happened."
Ray wrote that he saw the guy running from the Nimbasa policewoman, then chased him until he was caught in Driftveil. There was nothing much else to say, except that Chuck seemed unusually apologetic about the whole thing.
"Thanks," said the cop. "Feel free to leave, unless you want to watch more 'news.'"
"I think I've had enough news today," Gabe said, apparently missing the sarcasm. "Let's get outta here."
"Might as well hit the Gym," Gabe continued, outside the police station.
"Oh. I'm going there, too," said the girl, who had followed them out.
"I guess I'm hanging with you guys, then," Stanley said, flinging his arms around. "What a crazy mess we're in."
"Ray's right. How are they going to demonstrate something like that?" Gabe pondered, as the four of them walked through Driftveil City. "I think they said they have a machine or something?"
Ray wondered, too. They would have to do something big and drastic if anyone was going to believe in their convergence thing. How did they get on the news? Are they a powerful corporation or something? Ray had never heard of Horizon, though the name sounded familiar. The guy on the taped message looked like the rich and fancy type to Ray.
In any case, he was glad to catch the news while it was still new. If he hadn't chased Chuck down, he wouldn't have found Stanley or watched the news.
Wait a minute. The video was old.
"Hold on!" Ray said. "The guy said the demonstration was going to be in like a day."
"And?" Stanley said, shrugging. "We'll just have to wait—"
"And the video was recorded at least yesterday, probably earlier!"
"So you think it's happened already?" Gabe said. "We haven't seen anything happening—"
"Hoenn," interrupted Stanley. "Oh, crap."
"Let's not worry too much, yet," the girl piped in. "Or jump to conclusions."
"Yeah," agreed Stanley. "Let's worry once we're all Magikarp." He laughed, alone. The shy girl blushed, and Stanley looked like he regretted saying anything. "Sorry, I didn't mean to tease you, uh—"
"Kristy—"
"Kristy! Yeah, feel free to smack me if I get too crazy. I won't mind."
They walked onwards, towards the center of Driftveil City. Ray put aside any thoughts about Hoenn and "convergence," but idly wondered what it would be like in a world with only Pokémon. So many things would be different.
"Ray, weren't you about to ask me something?" Gabe said. "Before the whole chase thing happened?"
"Huh? Oh, yeah. I was gonna ask if you had any cough drops."
"Yeah, I have some—"
"I don't need any now," Ray said, shrugging. And the headache had disappeared, too.
"Oh, by the way," Stanley said, grinning, "can I borrow someone's phone?"