On the Saturday she'd vowed to leave, Veronica was dropped off outside the school for another study session. Her mother said, "I'll be back to pick you up at five," already turning away. "We'll... We'll get dinner on the way home. Think about what you want, okay?"

"Okay, mom." It was funny that her mom had offered that, funny in one of those ways that just felt mean instead. She was finally listening, just a little, and now it didn't even matter. "Um, I…" She was going to ask for a hug. Her mom wasn't really the hugging kind, barely even the pat-on-the-head kind. The most they touched was holding hands in crowded areas.

The words to ask didn't come. Instead Veronica just went for it, dropping her backpack onto the ground and throwing her arms around her mom. Andromeda took a second too long to react. Then, with a soft sigh, she hugged her daughter back.

"I'll see you soon," she said. "Okay? Study hard."

"Okay, mom." Veronica let go and scooped up her backpack. She fled into the school, towards the library, but stopped after she turned the first corner. She waited there, alone in the hallway, clutching hard onto the straps of her bag, counting seconds.

After five minutes, she turned back around and went out the same way she came in. Her mom was gone, already on the next tram to her office. Veronica caught one going the opposite way, all the way back home.

It was nine AM. She had six hours to get everything together and get out of Candling. It was definitely doable. It could be plenty of time. She ran down the street from the station to her home anyway.

She fumbled with the key to get back inside her house, leaving her school bag in the hallway. She rushed immediately up to the attic, nearly bashing herself with the attic stairs in her haste to yank them down. From the crate against the wall she pulled her mother's old camping supplies out. She hadn't looked over more than the outside of them before, so she took a moment to open every pocket she could find in the backpack, and there were a lot.

There wasn't really anything too interesting in most of them, just old receipts and scrap paper, and an old sock hidden away that Veronica immediately threw across the attic. But in one side pocket was something special: one single pokéball, probably a couple decades old. The metal had gone dim and dusty, but it polished right up when she rubbed it on her shorts.

She'd never held any pokéball before, not even Talia's. It was heavier than she'd expected, even minimized. She tucked it into her pocket to carry with her, and shook out the unzipped backpack just to make sure there was nothing else left in it. All that came out was old dust, dirt, and lint. She tossed it down the attic stairs to get later.

The tent she tried to be more careful with. It was heavier than she expected, and she briefly–only briefly!–struggled to get it out of the crate. Everything seemed to be in order, and the faded tag on the bag it was held in claimed it was a snap-together tent. She'd trust it for now, even if it was a lot older than she was. She left it near the stairs instead of tossing it down. The sleeping bag, though? That went down like the backpack.

She moved to close the crate and paused. Hidden in a corner, right where all the shadows were, was something new. She scooped it up, felt soft, worn cloth: it was a wallet she had never seen before. Her thumb slipped around the edge and then flipped it open.

The front pocket where an ID card should have been was empty. Nearly the entire wallet was, with nothing major she recognized as wallet-y. The only things left inside were a membership card to a sandwich shop she'd never been to, but had seen, and a stamp card for a training supply store with one stamp left to earn.

The sandwich membership card had the name Lucas Sanders scrawled on the back of it. Of course it was her dad's. She probably could have guessed that. She put that in her pocket along with the pokéball. It was… nice to carry with her. It was nice to find a piece of him laying around, like it was waiting for her. It was nice to have something that Leo hadn't managed to find before he left.

Quickly, she knocked that idea out of her head. There had to be a good reason he hadn't come back for her. She'd find it out. She'd forgive him for it. Everything would be okay after that. They could be a tag team and take on gyms together. Everything would work out.

The dust was making her eyes water. She gathered up the tent and carefully walked down the stairs with it. This time, when she folded the attic stairs back up, she didn't bother scrubbing away the dents on the carpet.

She left the sleeping bag and tent in the hallway, but the backpack she took with her to her room. She laid it out on the floor, all its pockets still unzipped, and dug underneath her bed. She'd snuck her notebook home yesterday after school, hiding it in the usual spot the moment she had time alone. She flipped it open to a checklist and marked off two of them: Get home without getting caught. Get the things from the attic.

Now, next on the list, was Pack. Easy. Um, maybe.

Last time she'd done laundry and folded it, she had chosen clothing she wanted to take with her and preemptively stored it in one specific drawer of her dresser. Now she took it out and stored it in the biggest pocket of her backpack. Then she went into the kitchen, to rob it of some canned goods–not many, really, not many, just enough to get started, like the crunchy peanut butter neither of them really liked but they bought anyway. It only had one scoop out of it and they'd bought it a month ago.

She took her own after-school snacks, like the granola bars and the weird puff balls that she didn't really like but her mom got anyway. She even took her bottle of one-a-day multivitamins that her mother always made her take in the morning, and they weren't even the gummy kind! She was being so responsible while she robbed her own house.

All of that went into the backpack. She crossed Pack off her checklist. The next one stared at her, like it had since the moment she wrote it: Money?

Because money was important. She needed it to buy food, because even though she could eat for free at pokémon centers, she wouldn't always be near one. Then there was buying pokéballs and medicine and everything else, and Veronica had been saving for years, but it wasn't much. It wasn't much! She'd gathered it up last night, right before bed, and had counted it. It was shoved into this silly little coin purse she'd gotten as a kid, shaped like a sock but with a clasp on the ankle end. She had, all told, maybe a thousand dollars.

And that wasn't a lot! A single pokéball cost two hundred, which meant she could buy five balls, but food could get really expensive, and she knew that because the last time she and her mom went grocery shopping she had actually paid attention to the end total. And that was just for a week's food! Just for two people! And that didn't include free meals at pokémon centers, sure, but it also didn't include feeding a potential team of six pokémon while wandering through the region!

She could have dealt with it, tried her hardest to be so self-sufficient she didn't even need money, which she had no idea how to do, and even Zander had looked at her like she had two heads when she'd proposed that.

So, instead she swallowed down a thick clog of guilt and opened the door to her mother's room. It was dark; she hadn't seen the inside since she was young enough to need comfort after a nightmare. Even then she'd been more inclined to go to Leo's room. It wasn't like she had been banned from it; her mother had just never been the comforting type.

She fumbled for the light switch and flipped it upwards. It was nearly the same as she remembered. Don't dawdle, and don't snoop, she told herself firmly, fearfully. She wasn't a bad girl. She had never been a bad girl. She had always done her best, never talked back, and had kept her head down.

Until lately. Now she was verging on criminal, not just with the paperwork, but with stealing from her own mother. Wasn't it right? Hadn't she earned it? Hadn't she gotten As and the occasional B, even if she'd had to study every week for them? Hadn't she always done everything she was told, ate all her vegetables, taken the gross chalky vitamin just like she was told? She had never gotten an allowance, though she knew for a fact Zander and other friends did regularly. She rarely even got money from her mother, more rarely than when distant relatives sent a hundred dollars to her when they remembered her birthday.

Did that make it right?

She didn't think there was anything right about this situation. Even if she had a thousand reasons to do what she was doing, she would still feel guilty over it.

She'd just have to deal with the guilt. And she'd pay it back. She'd write down the exact amount she owed her mother and send it right back to her as soon as she was able to. That made it better. It had to make it better.

She found her mother's money in the first place she checked, a handful of bills placed in a rarely-used jewelry box. It was possible Andromeda had even forgotten it was there, and she wouldn't even notice it missing. Not for a while.

Veronica almost closed the jewelry box then and there. Instead, she snagged the money and yanked it out like the box would bite her. She counted it: three thousand. That brought her up to four thousand. She didn't need any more than that. She was done.

She shoved the bills in her borrowed wallet and kept the change in her coin sock. She crossed Money? off of her list. Now she had Register to go through. That one wasn't just running around her house. That one was lying and faking and dealing with people.

Register could wait just a moment. She went to the kitchen first, to the pad her mother kept on the fridge to write grocery lists on. Her handwriting was more shaky than normal when she scribbled a goodbye note.

Momma, she wrote, I'm leaving on my pokémon journey. I wish I could have told you in person. Please don't try to bring me back. I love you. Ronnie.

Leo hadn't even bothered to leave a note when he'd left. It'd been up to her to tell their mother. This time, at least, she wouldn't need to see her mother's face go all steely and cold again.

"I need to go," she said to herself, furiously trying for bravery. Notepad back on the fridge. Canteen washed and filled with fresh water. House walked through one last time because leaving was scary. "Come on, come on! I'm going!"

The backpack had straps that attached to the tent's case on the bottom. She tightened them as far as they'd go, then did the same for the sleeping bag on the top. She clawed her application forms with their forged signatures out from the very back of her language arts folder and rolled them up to carry more easily.

"Let's go," she said to the front door, her backpack heavy but manageable. The door didn't respond, so she just opened it and locked it behind her.

The pokémon center was near the front entrance of the town, near the underground train station and the exit into the wilderness. The trams stopped just outside of it. All she had to do was hunker down in her seat and pretend she wasn't doing anything suspicious at all. It was a Saturday! She was a kid the age of a trainer! Sure, there wasn't a gym in Candling, but there were plenty of other reasons someone might come here.

She scolded herself for overthinking. As far as she knew, their mother had done nothing when Leo had left. She'd just gone cold and frosty and avoided looking at Veronica. The door to Leo's room had been closed and hadn't opened since, except, sometimes, when Veronica missed him so much she had to curl up in the middle of his bed.

But she hadn't done that in years. She hadn't even looked inside before she left. It felt bad to do that, worse even than going into her mother's room, like seeing it empty one last time would confirm something she didn't want to think about.

The tram clanged to a stop near the pokémon center. Veronica rocketed up, jumping past the last step to beat the other people getting up. The center wasn't full, like she'd expected, but there were a couple of people lounging around. Her trot slowed down to a bouncy walk and she made it to the counter where the two nurses were, one human and one audino, who had her own version of the counter right under the human nurse's.

"Hi, um, I'm a new trainer, and, I'm here to register." She fought to keep her tone even. "Um, here, I have my paperwork." She let the papers unfurl as she shoved them towards the nurse.

"Hi, sweetheart," the human nurse said. The audino chirped something similar. "And congratulations. Here, let me see that you filled this all out. My name's Lacey, and this is my partner, Heather."

"Hi," Veronica parroted, bouncing on the balls of her feet. "Sorry, I, um."

"Oh, no need to apologize. You're excited! I know how it is." There was a moment's silence as the nurse scanned the papers, then fed them into a machine next to her computer. Veronica's heart seized in the time between the machine whirring and the nurse saying, "Everything looks good!" She flashed a pretty smile, and Veronica would have gone red if she wasn't so nervous and pale.

"Good," she stammered, and tried for a smile she didn't have to force all that much. One step closer. She was almost there.

"What are you doing for your starter? If you're up to waiting a couple of days I can have a lab representative come with a few to choose from. Unless you have one already?"

Quickly, hopefully not too quickly, Veronica said, "I'm going to catch a wild one! Out in the forest! Um, if that's allowed?"

"Oh, of course it is! That's pretty old school, actually." Lacey was typing away at her computer terminal. Veronica shifted her weight to her other leg. "Alright, let's take a quick photo for your ID. Heather, will you do it?"

Veronica shuffled over to put herself against the wall, and smiled as Heather the audino came out from behind the counter to aim a digital camera at her. "One, two, three," Lacey counted, and Heather clicked. "There we go. Just another second."

Veronica wished she could see what was happening on the screen. All she could do was stand there, waiting. Finally, the nurse turned the monitor around, where she'd brought up a mock-up of Veronica's trainer ID. "Is everything correct here?"

Right spelling of her name, right date of birth, right everything. Veronica jerked a nod. "Yes, ma'am."

"Then let me print it." Lacey turned the monitor back around and clicked for another few seconds. A machine behind her started up and whirred for a second. Heather retrieved the card and handed it over with a chipper chatter.

"Thank you so much," Veronica told them both.

"Okay, just a few things left!" Lacey said. "Then you can get going. It's still early! You might even be able to get to Bastic by this afternoon if we hurry."

Heather the audino disappeared from Veronica's view, coming back up with a package and something red on the top. Lacey the nurse said, "Here's your starting kit. You have two potions, an antidote, and five pokéballs to start you off with." She gave a conspiratorial little wink and said, "Heather put in a little box of berries, just to try to bribe some of the wild ones with." Veronica took the offered package from Heather, struggling just for a second. "Careful! And that's your pokédex. It's definitely not the newest model, but it is free." She beamed, and Heather laughed.

Veronica shifted the starter kit to one arm to hold the pokédex. It was shiny, no scratches on it. She knew so much about it, having watched several documentaries on them while doing research with Zander. It held information on every known species of pokémon, and would keep track of her own team specifically, providing helpful tips like lists of moves they might know.

"Go ahead and pop it open," Lacey prompted. Veronica dropped the starting kit at her feet and pressed her thumb against the pokédex's side to pop open the lid. "Alright, turn it on, and then you can press your ID to the screen."

It took just a few moments for the pokédex to power on. When it did, a pulsing green diamond waited in the middle. Veronica did as she was told and touched her ID card to that diamond.

"Registering," the pokédex warbled in an electronic tone. "Registered! Owner confirmed."

"All set! Now you're totally ready," Lacey said, and Heather cheered along. "Congratulations! Now all you have to do is catch a pokémon, and you'll officially be a trainer."

Veronica fought back tears. She probably wouldn't be the first to cry, but she didn't want to be one of them. "Thank you," she said, choked up despite her best efforts.

Heather reached over her counter to pat Veronica's hand, beaming. She said, "Awko," which Veronica took to be encouraging.

"Thank you," Veronica said. Heather chirped again.

Lacey held out a couple of brochures. "Here's some useful reading," she said, and Veronica scanned their titles. She'd read scans of these exact brochures, ones about what to do if your team didn't get along, and how to promote team synergy, and things like that.

But they could be useful to review. "Thank you," she said. "Thank you! Um, I'm going to go now. Thank you so much."

"Good luck!" Lacey called, Heather's voice joining hers. "Have fun!"

Fun! She could have fun! She would have fun! She'd have so much fun! She quickly repacked her backpack with the new supplies, leaving the pokéballs in her pockets and keeping the little box of berries out, then hefted the pack up and left the pokémon center, veering towards the exit, out into the route away from Candling.

A lot of routes in most regions were numbered, but the ones in Isnalt only had titles. This one was Wick Walk, which she'd known but was double confirmed by the sign just outside Candling.

A shinx. She had to find a shinx. They weren't the most common pokémon around Candling, but not the most rare, either. They ventured deeper into the forests during winter, coming out closer to the town during the warmer months. This was the best time to find one.

It had taken an hour to get from school, to home, to the pokémon center. It wasn't even noon. She still had so much time to find a shinx, even if it took an hour or two. She definitely hoped it wouldn't, but if it did, she was prepared.

The city sounds faded out behind her, no more sounds of clattering trams and chattering people. She'd rarely been without them before, and even the normal whirring of electricity was gone, leaving just the sounds of wind and bird pokémon. It wasn't silence, but it was a kind of quiet, anyway.

When she couldn't see the entrance to Candling anymore, Veronica turned in a circle, taking in all of the greenery and the sky. She'd had no idea what she was missing, never having seen more than a glimpse of the forest before.

But she knew better than to just rush in. She had to keep the path within sight at all times, or at least have an extremely good idea of which way it was. If she didn't, she'd probably get lost. She had no reason to trust her sense of direction yet.

So she wandered into the forest just a little ways and started walking parallel to the road. Wild pokémon looked at her from every corner, some of them wary, others just curious. Some of them, like sentret and skwovet, followed her at a distance to see what she might do. Plenty of birds flitted above her in the trees, even landing ahead like they were daring her to challenge them to a battle.

A rookidee in particular perched on a branch right about eye-level with her, wings spread out to flash its yellow breast. "Hi," she said. "Um, I'm sorry, I've only just started, I can't battle yet." She opened the little cardboard box of berries and offered one to the bird. "Would you mind showing me where any shinx are?"

The rookidee tipped its head at her in genuine consideration. Her oran berry was subject to intense scrutiny, until the little bird finally flitted over to snag a pecha directly from the box instead. Veronica couldn't help her grin as it devoured the berry in multiple little pecks. She tucked the oran berry back in its box and followed the rookidee as it led her deeper into the forest.

The rookidee was chirping and singing loudly as it flew ahead of her, landing on branches to let her catch up, then flying right back off again. The sounds had the cadence of talking, like the way the kids on the playground would call for each other as they ran across the blacktop. There was a distant reply, a kind of crackling, low roar, and the rookidee banked towards it. Veronica had to run after it, dodging under low branches and the occasional bush.

The rookidee flared and landed on a branch way above Veronica's head, going from rushed escort to preening bird in just a couple of seconds. Veronica took the hint and passed the tree the rookidee was on. Just past it was a kind of clearing, one with a large, ancient tree downed in the middle. A luxray, huge and brilliantly pink and yellow, was disappearing into the forest on the other side, a few tiny shinx darting around its paws.

She didn't have to run after them, though. Sitting on top of the log, ears perking, looking right at her, was a lone shinx, left behind. When their eyes met, its tail whapped excitedly. It made a kind of meowing chirp as she crept into the clearing.

"Hi," she said, suddenly shy. It was so cute, quite fluffy around the face, colored pastel yellow and pink, half-lidded eyes like it was perpetually sleepy.

"Sha-cha," it replied, paws working in front of it hard enough to dislodge moss and bark. As she approached, it rose to all four feet. On the log, it was taller than she was, but willing to bend down so they were nearly close enough to touch noses.

"My name's Veronica. I just started training today," she said, flushing almost as pink as it was. "I don't have a pokémon yet. I, um, I really like fairy types, and I thought maybe, would you want to be my partner?"

Maybe she thought it would take the time to think it over, but instead the shinx immediately launched itself off the log into her chest. Her arms came up just in time to grab it, and she cackled out a laugh to match its jittering cries. It made itself right at home in her grasp, tail hitting her as it wagged.

"Cheechirp," it said, or the best approximation she had.

"I think that's a yes," she said, a touch of giddy wonder in her voice. "Okay! Okay, great!"

She'd put her mother's old pokéball in a separate pocket than the ones the nurse had given her. That was the one she pulled out now. "I'll let you out right after," she said. "Um. if you're okay with it?" She held it up to his face, not too close, but she didn't even need to say anything else before he was touching his nose to the ball. It popped open to let him in immediately, leaving her arms suddenly light and free of his soft, fluffy weight.

Her backpack had a special, pokédex-specific pocket on it, which was quite useful, and further proved that this was a backpack specifically designed for the average trainer. She clicked the button of the pokéball into a node on the pokédex, where it immediately downloaded the data of the shinx. It was pretty young, really just a cub, and male. The pokédex gave her the option to enter a name for him immediately, or wait until later. She chose later and detached the ball from the node.

The shinx came back out of the ball in a beam of red light. It was so weird how that happened, and maybe someday she'd look up the science of it. Pokémon were strange creatures.

"Achee," the shinx chirped, bounding around her feet. "Zi-zi-zirp!"

Veronica crouched to be on his level. He set his paws on her knee, sniffing at her, looking up into her face. Zander knew what Talia was saying every time she spoke, despite the obvious language barrier, but they'd been together for years. She wondered how long it would take before she knew what hers were saying.

"Can I give you a name?" She reached out a hand to stroke his head. Petting him was like the teenest, tiniest static shocks constantly. But he was so soft and fluffy that it didn't bother her as much as it might have. "I know you probably have one of your own, but, um, I don't know it and you can't tell me properly."

He was purring, rubbing his cheek against her scritching fingers. He cheeped, "Zeep," and nodded.

"Okay! Okay. I'll think of a really good one, I promise. Maybe while we walk back to town." She realized, quite suddenly, that she had been led far from the path, and now had no idea where she was. "...Do you know the way to the road?"

The shinx made a sound like a laugh and trotted away from her, nose in the air, like he knew exactly where to go. They made it back to the road proper quicker than she thought they would, though it was definitely further down than where she'd gone into the forest at; she didn't recognize it at all. "Uh, I think Candling is that way," she guessed, and started off. The shinx didn't correct her, so she'd probably guessed right.

While they walked, Veronica tried out names. "Sean?" That one got a crackling, sneeze-like sound she took as a no. Jason, Lee, Derek, and Fluffy got similar rejections, which was fine because that last one had been a joke.

"How about, um…" She hesitated. "Okay. I've got a good one now. Alec."

The shinx tipped his head up at her, one starburst eye pinned on her. He said, almost like he was trying to say it too, "Alc. Erk."

"Alec!"

"Erk! Erk! Alc!"

That was a much better response than any of the rest of them had gotten. Alec it was. She registered it in the pokédex just as they passed the sign back into Candling and out of Wick Walk.

She definitely should have been heading to Bastic as soon as she could. She had her starter, she had her supplies, she should be on her way out of Candling right then. And that would have been what she did, if she didn't have Zander. She wanted him to know she'd succeeded and was getting out. She still had a good three hours before her mother got off work.

"We're going to go see my best friend," she told Alec. "Then we'll be going to the next town. I just want to say goodbye."

He mumbled an acknowledgment, but his eyes were wide as he looked around the city. Despite being maybe a mile out, he'd obviously never been within city limits. He looked nearly overwhelmed, and stumbled. Fretfully, Veronica asked, "Should I pick you up? I can!" and he willingly let her scoop him.

He was quiet and wide-eyed as they got on the tram to Zander's street. The mechanized whirring and whatever ambient electricity was in the air fascinated him; his ears were constantly adjusting, fur fluffing out with static, paws kneading at her arm so that he gently pricked at her skin. It was more adorable than she'd expected, seeing him filled with so much wonderment.

When they were off the tram, he informed her, solemnly, "Chirr-zeep," and she nodded in agreement.

Zander was normally out on Saturdays, busy with family things, but this was one of the rare ones where he stayed home with his mom. He was in the backyard, like he'd said he'd be if she managed to come say goodbye, and all she had to do was knock on the gate and whisper, "Zan! Zander!" until Talia unlocked it.

"Ronnie!" Zander squealed, arms thrown out. Veronica trotted towards him, holding up her shinx to show him off. "You found one! Hi! Hello!"

"Agreep," Talia trilled, and Alec chirped, "Zeep!" right back at her.

Alec sniffed Zander's hand and let him scritch behind his ears. Veronica said, "I named him Alec."

"That's a great name," Zander said, right before he realized what she'd named him for. His full name wasn't Alexander, but the relation couldn't be denied. "Oh! Aw, Ronnie," and it was terrible to see tears had sprung into his eyes. "Ronnie, I'm gonna miss you."

Alec wiggled out of her arms, landing on the springy grass, and chased Talia around the yard, having a spirited conversation. Veronica scrubbed at her eye, then grabbed Zander in a hug. "I'm going to miss you, too," she whispered, and he squeezed her tighter.

"I won't tell anyone where you went," he promised, "even if they ground me."

"You're the best friend ever. I'll call you whenever I can. I'll email you, too, I swear."

"You better! I don't want to call Keoni and make him track you down. And he will! He'll track you down and beat you in a pokémon battle."

"It won't come to that! Geez! I'll call you as often as I can." She'd have to stick to the pokémon centers' phones until she had earned enough money for a cellphone.

"Good." Despite the tears still swimming in his eyes, Zander was beaming. "You gotta get going, though. You still have to walk to Bastic, and Keoni said that the first walk is the worst of 'em."

"Just walking through the woods was hard," Veronica complained. "I bet it is going to suck. Alec? Are you ready to go?"

He stopped chasing Talia around and bounded over to her, yipping, "Alc!"

"He says his name!" Zander was delighted. "I try to get Talia to mimic human words and she throws blocks at me."

"Alc," Alec repeated smugly. Talia trilled a screech and leaped at Zander, bashing ineffectually against his leg.

He ignored her best efforts to eviscerate him. "See you soon, Ronnie," he said, and he took her hand and squeezed it.

"I love you, Zander," she told him, squeezing his hand back. "See you soon."

"I love you," he echoed. The gate closed behind her and latched again.

Alec trotted happily at her side. Whatever tears Veronica might have had dried up as they boarded the tram again, her shinx on her lap, both of them observing the city. They had hours ahead of them on the road to get to Bastic.