Chapter 5: Burning Cold

"Risa!"

Silence.

"Risa!"

More silence.

"…HEY! HEY, RISA!" Silence for only a moment, and then: "WAKE UP, YOU IDIOOOOOOT!"

Risa shrieked as her tent came crashing down around her as a somewhat heavy small object slammed into one of the sides. The girl panicked, kicking the object through the tent, and then trying to throw the tent off of her rather diminutive body.

It took her over a minute, as the tent became tangled around her body and one of the poles hit her on the head, but she managed to get out of it in one piece.

Her bleary eyes fell on the cyndaquil in front of her. He glared up at her. "Y'know, you didn't have to kick me," he muttered, rubbing his sore (and unlit) backside. "That hurt."

"Zorry," Risa muttered, wiping her nose.

Heat stared at her through squinty eyes. "What whazzat?"

"I zaid I'b zorry," Risa snapped before sneezing. She wiped her nose again. "I hab a code."

"…What?"

"I hab a code."

"…I don't know what you're –"

"I hab a code! A code!"

Heat frowned for a bit, scratched something in the ground, and then paced back and forth. "A code? Like a secret code? What sort of –" He stopped, looking up excitedly. "Oh, I know what you mean! You have a cold!" He paused, his excitement fading. "You have a WHAT?"

Risa sniffled weakly. "Zorry. I tink I caught da code cuz of da rain ye-terday."

Her cyndaquil roared in anger. "Do you know how long you stupid human kids take to get healthy from those things? Argh, I hate colds! You're going to make us take FOREVER to get to Violet City and beat the birdy-guy and get the birdy-badge and do you know what that means?"

"I go hobe later?" Risa asked, thinking of her mother's promise that she could go home after two badges. She hoped that meant in about two weeks, if all went well.

"No idea what 'hobe' is, but it means WE BEAT THE CHAMPION LATER!"

Risa opened her mouth to protest, to say that the reason they got stuck in the rain was because of her and Heat's little argument over her plan to quit after the Hive Badge (or after twenty-eight days, whichever came first).

Heat kicked a pebble, crossing his arms and squatting down on his two hind legs like a frustrated human toddler. "I was going to tell you that I beat up a whole bunch of caterpies and weedles – partly because of this tree falling down and crushing them, but I still got the experience so it doesn't matter – but I guess now we gotta figure out how to get rid of your stupid cold."

"Uh…"

The pokemon got an idea, tried to snap his fingers (or, rather, his paw), failed, and then gave up. "I got it! Okay, so you know that Mister Pokemon guy? The weirdo who lives around here and keeps to himself and is really smart or something?"

Risa thought for a moment. "I dunno…I tink zo…"

"He probably knows how to make colds go away like that!" He tried to snap his "fingers" to make a point, but ended up almost hurting himself. "Let's go find him! Then we can get back to training!"

"Ugh," Risa whimpered as Heat began to order her to pack up, obviously oblivious to the amount of energy she lost due to her sickness. "I wanna go hobe."

It took Heat and Risa a little over a day to find Mister Pokemon's house, and the campout hadn't done much to alleviate Risa's cold. Heat didn't seem to understand the concept of "rest and relaxation", which Risa kept whining to him about, and instead dragged her through areas of tall grass and shrubs so she could watch him battle all the caterpies and weedles he could find.

He figured that watching him improve his bug-fighting skills would make her feel happier and more excited about one day being the champion, and that would magically make her cold go away.

Risa, on the other hand, just wanted to go home and take some painkillers for her throbbing headache. That, and she desperately wanted Heat to stop being in denial about her plan to quit after the Hive Badge (or twenty-seven days of training, whichever came first).

But at least, she thought to herself as Heat pounded on Mister Pokemon's door, she might get something for her headache inside.

A balding man opened the door, squinting through his glasses at the young girl and her cyndaquil. "Hmm? And just who are you?"

"Hey! Old man!" Heat yelled from his spot on the ground. "You're Mister Pokemon, right?"

The man stared at him for a moment. "Are you the second cyndaquil from Elm's laboratory?"

Heat glared up at him. "Yeah, of course I am! And I'm also gonna be the future champion's prize-winning typhlosion one day! Now let us in!"

Mister Pokemon chuckled and held the door wide open for the cyndaquil and his trainer. "It's good to see you, Cyndaquil," he said as Heat waddled inside on his back two feet. Then he looked at Risa. "My, you're shivering! Do you have a fever?"

Risa shrugged. "I dunno. I hab a code."

"Well, now, come inside and let's get you some tea, at least. Don't worry about a thing – I'm a colleague of Professor Elm's, and my daughter's inside. She's probably only a few years older than you."

Risa stumbled inside where she internally cheered at the sight of a couch and a warm blanket next to a section of the building filled with computers and strange devices. Heat already had made his way over to some of the machines, throwing courtesy to the wind.

A young woman came out of one of the rooms in the "home" part of the building followed by a flaafy. "Oh!" she exclaimed at the sight of Risa. "You look awful!"

"Nana," Mister Pokemon asked as he ushered Risa over to the couch and pulled the blanket around her shoulders. "Can you get," he looked down at Risa.

"Risa," Heat yelled from behind one of the machines. "Her name's Risa."

Risa nodded feebly, not really in the mood to say anything.

The man looked back at his daughter. "Can you get Risa some green tea?"

"Yeah, sure, one sec," his daughter, Nana, replied, disappearing back into the room she'd begun to come out of.

A few minutes later, Risa was very contentedly sipping on a hot cup of tea, already feeling a bit better to be inside with the blanket and the hot drink. Mister Pokemon and his daughter were seated in chairs across from her, with the flaafy in Nana's lap.

They had started to chat about some of the recent research done in the field of breeding and pokemon birth (the specialty of both Professor Elm and Mister Pokemon – or rather, as Risa learned, Doctor Pokemon), and Risa actually had begun to enjoy herself despite her ailment. Unlike her pokemon partner, she actually liked science and learning, and while most texts were too scholarly for her, she really did like hearing the man and his daughter talk about their research in words she could understand.

She enjoyed it, however, only while their conversation was uninterrupted.

It only took a few additional minutes for Heat's curiosity to get the better of him, and the chatting humans (and the flaafy) were interrupted by the sudden explosion of one of the machines in the laboratory.

That, and shortly after the machine exploded, part of the wall caught fire.

Everyone jumped up and ran over, Nana releasing a pokeball containing a rather irate tentacruel, annoyed to be let out without a body of water to swim in but willing enough to put out the fire with a water pulse attack.

The fire went out soon enough, and Mister-Doctor Pokemon assured Risa that it was easily replaced, but Heat took a few moments to emerge.

He all but hurled himself out of the rubble, slamming into the tentacruel's soft body and bouncing off into the "house" part of the building. (Nana's tentacruel, angry at the sudden appearance of the cyndaquil, had to be returned immediately before he attacked Heat.)

"Risa! Guess what, guess what!"

"…Wha…?"

"I learned EMBER!"

Risa stared at him dully. "You 'sploded da machine. Dat's expensive."

Heat ignored that last bit. "Yeah, but I did it with EMBER!"

Risa sighed. Her cyndaquil was a lost cause, and her headache just came back. She would have shaken her head to express her disgust, but the throbbing inside her skull kept her from doing it.

Twenty-seven days left…

Disclaimer: I don't own Pokemon. I do, however, own this story and all the original characters in it.

Author's note: I've decided to not capitalize most of the "Pokemon nouns" anymore, since doing so kind of annoys me. Annoyances defeat continuity in my world, at least. Oh, and I'm not abandoning this to work on Poltergeist's, although that's sort of taking priority over this. I'm going to try to make progress in Summer Heat, though, since I feel like it's kind of important that I do. That, and a lot of people seem to enjoy it! I'm glad people enjoy reading it, even though Risa doesn't save the world or anything. (And thanks to all the reviewers!)