"Sedati-… -earing… She-… -aking u-… -gain…"

Voices… voices drifting through the grey…

"-eep an e-… -er… Stan-… -ith ano-… -ose…"

Grey… Had she been flying before? Maybe…

(think)

"-ayde? –an you… -ear me… -eetheart?"

No more flying… Floating…

(think of the)

"-ayde?"

She floated.

(of the)

"Jayde? Can you hear me?"

A bright light cut through the grey, and she squinted her eye and withdrew.

"There you are, sweetheart. Can you hear me?"

She tried to say Yes, but all she managed was a groan.

"Yeah? Alright, good," the voice – she thought maybe a young man – said soothingly. A hand forced her other eye open and flashed the light again. "Do you know where you are?"

Other sounds began fading into her awareness – a steady beeping somewhere to her right, muted voices from outside whatever room she was in, the soft whisper of fabric on fabric as the voice's owner leaned over the bed. Jayde swallowed a few times, her dry throat scratchy and sore, before forcing out a weak, slurred response.

"Wil' guess… 'ospital?

"Very good. Yes, you're in Fairview Hospital in Viridian City. Do you remember what happened?"

Jayde grimaced, ignoring the question, and tried to raise her head, but something held her down against the cool cotton sheets. She sensed a flutter of movement near her temple, and suddenly some layer of warmth was lifted off of her forehead. A strap? Her mind tried to make sense of it, but the grey (think of the) still fogged her thoughts.

"Sorry about that, sweetheart. Try to relax and rest. How about some water?"

Jayde tried to open her eyes, but the fluorescent lights blinded her. Instead, she closed her eyes and simply nodded weakly.

After a few moments, she felt a cool surface against her mouth as a hand placed itself on the back of her head. She parted her lips and felt cold trickle down her throat.

By the time a cloth dabbed gently against her lip to catch a stray drop, she had slipped, as one might slip into a warm bath, back into the grey.

The world around her was blurred and hazy as her eyes drifted open, but after a few bleary blinks it slowly came into focus. She had vague memories of waking before this, but she couldn't place anything specific. A beeping was coming from her right, low and monotonous, and when she looked she could see a large screen displaying various lines and numbers. A heart monitor. Yep, this is definitely a hospital. A slim metal stand stood next to the monitor, and hanging from it was a large plastic bag containing a clear fluid – a small tube leading from this drew her eyes to a large needle set into her arm. She flicked them away, grimacing. She had never been fond of needles.

Her eyes meandered around the white, sterile room, picking out details at random. A glass of water sat on a small table to her right, its condensation throwing small sparks of light. A large set of green cloth curtains yawned on the left, revealing a patch of (the blue) clear afternoon sky. Her eyes flickered down to a small remote, the surface of which was dominated by a red button featuring a prominent white cross, lying next to her right hand. Her hand seemed to be leaden as she slowly raised it, but she laid it on the remote and managed three staccato taps before lying back.

She closed her eyes, her nostrils filled with a sharp antiseptic scent, and marked time with the beeps of the monitor – after forty-nine, a faint sigh announced the arrival of the nurse as the door whispered open. Jayde turned her head towards the sound and let her eyes open. Before her stood a smiling auburn-haired man clad in a light green uniform.

Jayde, hopeful for answers to the questions that had drifted through her mind in the forty-nine beeps of quiet, managed to raise her head slightly. He must know something.

This last thought was likely very true, but she quickly realized that his knowledge of what had happened after she began falling towards the blue (her mind used this name without noticing) was irrelevant – the nurse was unable to tell her anything of any importance. The most she managed to glean was in the redhead's response to her inquiries about Syn.

"Oh, yes, your Bulbasaur! He was brought with you from the conference, and at first he refused to leave your side." These last words were said with a tinny laugh. "However, when you began regaining consciousness earlier this morning, we felt it was best to allow him some rest. You seem to be getting some strength back, though, so he can visit you soon. He'll be very pleased to see you!"

Jayde smiled and nodded, but something about this answer made her feel uneasy. For one thing, it proved that this was not the same day as the conference – the fall had been in the early afternoon, and she had apparently woken up in the morning. One day in between, then – she felt her mind try to add at least onto this determination and brutally pushed the thought aside. Next, Syn had been removed for some other reason – the nurse's guilty glance at the floor confirmed this. Something must have gone wrong. Maybe her heart stopped, maybe Syn had acted out (though this she doubted)… "felt it was best to allow him some rest" set off alarm bells.

"Not to sound rude, but when can I meet someone who can actually tell me anything?"

He assured her that the attending physician, Dr. Roth, would arrive shortly. "Shortly" ended up being about ten minutes, through which she vacantly smiled and nodded at the various pleasantries the nurse tried to distract her with. As the ginger walked across the room to open the window ("It's such a beautiful day, and fresh air will do you good!"), the door whispered yet again with the arrival of the doctor, a tall, heavily-built blonde. The nurse greeted her, and the doctor dismissed him with a polite nod.

Jayde, slightly irritated at the lack of information being provided to her, gave a sarcastic smile and snapped, "Are you going to stand there all fucking day, or are you going to tell me what's going on?"

The woman, wearing a clean white coat that reflected the light and hurt Jayde's eyes, raised a hand. "Please calm down. I realize this situation is extremely upsetting, but if you'll wait a few minutes I promise that everything will be explained. Now, what would you like to know first?"

Jayde took a deep breath. "Well, let's start with how long I've been here. That's a nice, simple place to start."

She could see from the doctor's expression, though, that it was anything but.

Dr. Roth hesitated for a moment before responding. "I'm afraid that it's not as simple as it might seem. You see, you survived the fall – for reasons I'll expound on in a few moments – but you still suffered severe head trauma. We were able to treat it quite readily, but you didn't awaken. You slipped into a comatose state, in which you remained for more than three days. We began detecting more responsive behavior late last evening, and by the early morning you awoke." The doctor paused somewhat uncomfortably before she continued. "You… lost consciousness again, woke up at around one o'clock this afternoon and drank some water, lost consciousness for roughly four hours, and then woke again some fifteen minutes ago."

Jayde looked blankly at her for a few moments and then looked at her hands in silence. Three days. But something else nagged her, and her eyebrows furrowed as she met the doctor's eye.

"The nurse told me that Syn was taken away in the morning, but I only remember the afternoon one. What happened this morning?"

She repeated the question more insistently after she was met with silence.

"I'm afraid you had an… episode. You woke, but you were unaware of your surroundings and appeared to be hallucinating – screaming incoherently."

Another detail sent a flare up in her memory. "You strapped me down."

"You were thrashing in the bed and ripped the IV out of your arm. We were forced to sedate you."

Jayde absorbed this. She remembered the (think) grey, but she had the impression of something before that… something (children) frightening. She pushed it aside. It doesn't matter.

She began to question the doctor, who was much more accommodating than the nurse, further, and she slowly began to piece together the events of her unconsciousness.

Had she simply free-fallen, the impact on the lake would have killed her almost instantly – in her incapacitated state, she was falling headfirst. However, there were several Psychic-type Pokémon present at the conference, and they managed to slow her descent enough that she suffered only a dislocated shoulder which was caused more by the angle than the force. She couldn't help but laugh. Both tortured and rescued by Psychics in the span of… what? Fifteen minutes? God, it seemed so much longer.

After she hit the lake, the Water-types stepped up to the plate. By the time the police and paramedics arrived, she was already onshore, unconscious but breathing. She saved the Pokémon… and they saved her.

The paramedics bundled her into the ambulance – Syn managed a spot in a police car after refusing to leave her side – and her wounds were treated at the hospital. Multiple lacerations and contusions, some "minor" skull fractures, three broken fingers, and the dislocated shoulder. All were easily healed – her fingers were still stiff, but the fractures had been closed – and she was cleared for discharge after she woke… except that she didn't wake for three days, and by this point (the doctor said with a sympathetic grimace) they wanted to monitor her for a few days to make sure she was stable. After listening to the preceding information, this didn't surprise her, though she still tasted bitterness on her tongue.

The nurse reunited her with her backpack, which she had thankfully left on the ground before making the near-suicidal leap, and she happily retrieved her cell phone to make some video calls – she contacted first her parents (worried and upset, but overjoyed that she was recovering) and then the lab, where Gary answered ("You have been on your journey for a week, and you have spent four of those days in a hospital in a fucking coma! What the hell is wrong with you?"). When the nurse returned bring her some dinner (a steaming bowl of tomato soup and some fruit juice), she brought with her a special visitor. Jayde laughed as Syn's stubby legs clambered clumsily but enthusiastically up the cotton sheets, being careful not to disturb her IV, to curl up on her stomach.

It was like this, with Syn snuggling against her, the dinner dishes empty, and her hand tracing lazy circles on his leathery skin, that she fell asleep instead of falling unconscious, and for the first time in four days her slumber was not bound in a single color but many.

The hospital kept her for another three days after that, during which time she tended to wander outside with Syn and occasionally battle other patients. Dr. Roth tried valiantly to safeguard her from the inevitable police inquiries (they had been badgering the staff for the ability to question Jayde since she woke up that first morning), but, once it was clear that Jayde could walk and carry on conversations without difficulty, it quickly became impossible to deny them. She sat in a plush upholstered chair in the security office for most of the early afternoon of her second conscious day, answering questions and then repeating those answers about five times after that, until the interrogating officers were satisfied. The younger of the two, a mild-mannered boy who couldn't be long out of training, regarded her with something like awe and left most of the talking to his elder. They simply required a description of the event from her perspective (since she had broken free of the Psychic influence before anyone else) as well as what vague descriptions of the pair in the helicopter she could provide, but they constantly made her rehash the story. Finally, though, they allowed her to go, reminding her that, should arrests and positive identifications be made on the two criminals she had seen, she would be notified and called on to testify.

Beyond that, her sojourn was largely uneventful and, at times, incredibly boring. She did, however, try to take what little advantage of the time she could and train Syn in preparation for their upcoming battle against Erebos in the Viridian Gym. Her attempts were quite often interrupted, though, by visitors (mostly other trainers from the conference wanting to thank her), and she rapidly memorized the faces of all the news reporters that tried to approach her – within three hours of being outside, she had already found four different places to hide when such media personnel came calling.

Some company, though, was a bit more welcome.

"Hey, there's my favorite rookie! That live entertainment at the conference was something, huh?" Victor said with a sarcastic smirk, with Mira, Sarah, and David grinning and waving not far behind.

Jayde laughed and walked over, trying not to trip over Syn as he enthusiastically followed. "You guys weren't weeping at my bedside – I'm heartbroken."

"Yeah, well, we didn't want to interrupt your beauty sleep."

"Oh, how kind of you."

"We like pride ourselves on our compassion." Seeing her raised eyebrow at his pronoun choice, he laughed and added teasingly, "I'm sticking with them for a bit, even if they are almost as amateur as you."

David looked at him in mock offense and made a high-pitched noise in the back of his throat. "Amateur? Excuse me, but who got the Nyx Badge and who lost spectacularly?"

Victor looked at him, playfully irritated. "Hey, the dude had type-advantages over almost all my team! Plus, he gave you an easier battle than he gave me because you had – what? One puny badge? If I'd had your battle, we would have swept the floor with him."

David grinned. "Sure."

Behind him, Sarah and Mira giggled and shook their heads at Jayde, mouthing "No."

Victor scoffed. "I should let Nat set your sleeping bags on fire." He turned back to Jayde. "So what's your plan? Calling it quits and running home to your mommy?"

Jayde smiled and cocked her head. "Not a chance. Sorry, pal, you're not getting rid of me that easily. I'm about to start catching up to you. As soon as they let me go, I'm heading over to the Gym."

Sarah winced. "Oh, good luck with that. You're not going to get a foot out the door."

"What are you talking about?"

She gestured to the hospital. "The media's on a leash for now since they don't want to risk getting banned from hospital property – but the second they hear you're being discharged? They're going to swarm you. What you did at that conference wasn't a tiny thing. You didn't just rescue a Rattata from a tree or something – you broke free of a Psychic attack and took down a fucking mass criminal operation. As a teenager. With no Pokémon. They nearly pissed themselves when you woke up. They ran out of ways to say that you have, though, so now they're just running recaps of the conference and your daily activities every five minutes. If they hear you're going to challenge a Gym, you're not gonna be able to see the ground in front of you – there are going to be a million reporters."

Jayde scoffed in disgust. "It's just a Gym battle! And I'm just a trainer! All that happened was that I noticed the thing first. Anyone else would have done the exact same thing. It wasn't anything 'special'. It wasn't" – here she put on a ridiculous falsetto and gave a dramatic swoon – "'bravery in the face of mortal danger' – it was just acting without thinking anything through. It was a miracle that it worked and a bigger miracle that I didn't die. Why are they freaking out?"

This time, Mira answered. "Because it was a miracle. And don't undersell yourself. It's not like anyone could have done that. And even if they could have, that argument isn't going to sway the press. They'll just start flipping out over how modest you are. Your best bet is to lay low for a bit."

Victor now piped up helpfully. "Or get plastic surgery and change your name to Francesca Vanilloupe. That'll throw 'em off the trail."

Jayde rolled her eyes and shot him a middle finger, and they all laughed. From there the conversation turned to more casual topics with the occasional random trivia thrown in – Jayde exclaimed loudly when she saw that Lyn, who used to be just a fuzzy little purple ball with adorably tiny feet, had evolved before the playpen had been opened, and she offered the squeaking Venomoth a handful of Oran berries as thanks for rescuing Syn.

After nearly an hour of talking, joking, and laughing, the five trainers exchanged numbers and farewells. The others offered Jayde a spot in their group ("The more, the merrier," Victor said only slightly sarcastically), but she reluctantly refused.

"I think Syn and I kinda need to figure out where we're going first. Plus, me being with you is just going to make you targets for the media, and I'm pretty sure that would just end with some scorched reporters and assault charges."

After they had left, promising to keep in touch, Jayde knelt down in the manicured grass beside Syn and scratched him behind one ear, feeling the greenery prick her knees through the denim. She again considered Mira's advice, not for the last time that day. By the time the nurse (whose name was Will) delivered dinner to her room that night she had made a decision. She asked to speak to Dr. Roth about her discharge date.

The next night, while televisions across Kanto enthusiastically announced her release date as set for the following day, Jayde shifted her backpack on her shoulder as her eyes readjusted to the pall of tangible darkness that overlaid the forest. She pictured her goal in her mind – she saw the city of stone rising up in her vision, heard the distant blasts of dynamite in the quarries, smelled the sulphur and the smoke. Her fingers lit on the ball at the front-right slot of her belt. Well, Syn, here we go.

She left the fluorescent lights behind and pressed forward into the pitch.

Bye, Viridian City - see you later!

As I said last chapter, the next update will be a week from now - new chapters will be up once a week until the end of the month, but after that it can go back to being twice a week.

As always, thanks for reading! Stay gold.