Chapter 16: Flame of Viridian
"Hey, how're you feeling today?"
Risa groaned, opening her eyes to see Johanna staring down at her yet again. She rubbed her eyes, letting Johanna help her sit up. "Okay, I guess...better than yesterday."
She and Johanna hadn't left their campsite during the previous day - when Risa woke up that morning, she felt too nauseous to stand. Johanna and her team had offered to stay with her until she got better, and she gladly accepted, grateful for Johanna's help.
Or, rather, she was grateful for Johanna's cooking. Apparently, Kanto schools taught their students how to cook outdoors, whereas Johto schools just sort of said, "you'll need food. Don't run out. Okay, have fun, bye!"
But Johanna as a non-cooking entity was pretty cool, too. She was seventeen, placed pretty well in the Kanto Pokemon League, and worked part-time back in Viridian City for her mother's software company. Her pokemon were pretty nice, too, especially her hypno, who would tell Risa funny stories to take her mind off the nausea.
She also knew a few things about raising tricky pokemon, and since Risa firmly believed Nanimo was one of these "tricky pokemon", she tried to hang onto Johanna's every word in regards to that.
Johanna smiled and held out a packaged pastry. "I bought a few of these when I was in Violet City. You look like you could use the blood sugar."
"Thanks," Risa said as she took the pastry and unwrapped it. When she bit into it, it tasted heavenly, sugary and light and with a hint of...of...
What was that?
A hint of something...
Risa frowned.
It seemed...familiar somehow. But not familiar in a sense that she'd tasted it before - it tasted normal, like some kind of berry or fruit, and she probably did taste it before.
But that wasn't why it felt familiar.
She swallowed and suddenly felt everything around her go cold. Shivering, she looked up at the sky.
Cloudless.
It was a brilliant blue, cloudless sky.
But when she squinted, Risa was sure she could see...something.
Clouds - but not clouds.
"Beatrice..." she whispered, and the clouds (or whatever they were) disappeared.
"What?" Johanna asked, leaning in and looking a little concerned. "Are you okay?"
Risa blinked a few times, her mind feeling unusually blank. "Y-yeah, why wouldn't I be?"
"Um, maybe because you just started looking up at the sky all weirdly? Like - super spacey," Johanna explained, doing her best slack-jawed staring impression. "And you said something about some girl named 'Beatrice'."
"Beatrice?"
"Yeah. You know, what you just said?"
Risa frowned. "Who's Beatrice?"
Groaning, Johanna stood up. "I don't know! You're the one who said it!"
"But..." Risa shivered again, though she didn't feel cold. She put the pastry down - she didn't want to eat it anymore. "I didn't say anything about 'Beatrice'..."
---
Later that day, Johanna and Risa were walking along the path south, flanked by Johanna's new smeargle, Picasso, and Heat. Nanimo hadn't wanted to come out of her pokeball, and the rest of Johanna's pokemon weren't good for endurance hiking, were resting, or both.
Picasso, Risa noticed begrudgingly, seemed perfectly normal and easy to get along with. Of course, Johanna had more experience with newly-caught pokemon, but still...why did Risa have to get stuck with either already-owned pokemon or ones that kept telling her that she was going to die?
"So," Johanna said finally, breaking the uncomfortable silence. "You're gonna go back to middle school in a couple weeks?"
"Yup," Risa replied, looking over at Heat to see if he'd heard. He just glared back up at her. "Um, I'm planning on it."
"Cool," the older trainer said, flipping her red hair out of her eyes. "Are you gonna do more training next summer, or something? That's what you kids do in Johto, right - you train a lot during the summers?"
Risa shrugged. "I mean - yeah, a lot of people do that, but I dunno if I'm -"
"YES, YOU ARE."
"Well, I guess I might, but -"
"YES, YOU ARE."
"I think I'll just stay in school -"
"YES, YOU ARE - wait..." Heat growled. "You tricked me!"
His trainer grinned. "It's not like it was that hard."
"Stupidhead."
"Um, you're the stupidhead," Risa grinned, "you're the one who fell for it."
Heat just growled and started muttering to himself, hanging behind and walking next to Picasso. Picasso patted him on the back, but Heat just shrugged him off.
"Anyway...so you're gonna try and go for the Hive Badge, right?" Johanna asked, trying to avoid any serious arguments between Risa and Heat.
"Uh-huh."
"Me too," replied the girl, pointing over her shoulder at Picasso. "I'm doing the Second's League, so I think I'll be using Picasso, too."
Risa frowned. "Second's?"
"Yeah, you know," Johanna prompted, making "prompting" motions with her hands. "The league for people who come from Kanto - Kanto has the same thing, kinda. I fight either two-on-two, four-on-four, or six-on-six single battles using half pokemon that I trained before and half that I caught in Johto. So it's like...half of the pokemon are freshly caught, and the other half are seasoned."
"Oh," Risa said, vaguely remembering a couple people talk about it when they set up the league a few years ago. Living away from the gym action didn't really create a gym-centric community, and people in New Bark Town only ever really watched the league finals on TV. "So, uh, is that what you did against Faulkner?"
Johanna nodded. "Yep. I used my rhydon from Kanto and a geodude I caught here. I'm probably gonna use my nidoqueen against Bugsy, since she's immune to poison-type attacks."
"Wait - Bugsy uses poison-types?" Risa said, suddenly panicking a bit. "I thought he used bugs!"
"Uh, yeah, but some of them use poison-type attacks." Johanna shrugged. "Like his beedril - or, I guess, you'll be seeing his kakuna..."
Risa bit her lip. Poison-types were tricky - she hadn't gone up against many of them, but some of the weedles' poison stings back on Route 30 were hard to defend against, especially when they poisoned Heat. Now she had to go up against the evolved form of one?
Johanna seemed to sense Risa's panic. "You have two pokemon, right?"
"Yeah."
"You'll be going up against three pokemon when you fight Bugsy, most likely. That means you're allowed to use up to three pokemon to beat him."
"...Yeah?"
"So," Johanna said, flipping open a PDA and tapping the touchscreen a few times. "You might wanna catch one of these - they're wild in this area."
She held up the screen, showing a picture of a medium-sized purple snake. "An ekans?" Risa asked, recognizing the picture from her pokemon training classes at school. "You think I should catch an ekans?"
"Why not? Your cyndaquil is great offensively, but for Bugsy's kakuna, you might want a better defensive pokemon to handle Kakuna's poison-type. If your cyndaquil gets poisoned, it might be harder to fight off his other two pokemon, like his scyther. But if you catch an ekans, then it can't get poisoned at all; you just use the ekans to take care of Bugsy's poisonous bugs, and then use your cyndaquil or your unown - you said it had an ice-type hidden power, right? - for the rest."
Risa nodded. That did make a lot of sense, and an ekans might be a good pokemon to have later on. After all, if Bugsy could take advantage of poisoned opponents, so could she - or, at least, she could as long as she wasn't going up against a poison-type opponent. Or a steel-type. But any other...
"Sounds good," Risa said, turning back to face Heat. "If you see an ekans, tell me, so we can catch it." Maybe she'd catch one, and it would turn out to be normal.
Heat rolled his eyes. "I can beat up a bunch of bugs by myself."
"I don't care. Just tell me if you see an ekans."
"...Fine."
---
By the end of the day, they had not seen a single ekans. Johanna, on the other hand, managed to capture an aipom that she found in a tree her nidoqueen shook down. She also showed off Picasso's two sketched attacks: earthquake and air cutter.
Just as they were about to set up camp, though, Johanna got a phone call.
Risa listened to Johanna's half of the conversation as she played tic-tac-toe on a game board drawn in the dirt with Johanna's hypno, Zen.
"Really? ... Only in Cherrygrove? You can't come - oh, yeah, huh. ... You're going to take the test tomorrow? Then why - awww, that's so sweet! Yeah, sure, but - no, no, I taught it to a skarmory I caught a couple weeks ago. ... Yeah, I'll come. ... Don't worry! I can take a day or two off! ... I love you, too!"
"Who's she talking to?" Risa whispered to Zen.
"Probably her boyfriend," the hypno replied through telepathy, drawing an "X" in one of the side squares and winning the game. "He's back in Viridian City. They've been together for two years now, but have known each other for much longer. He's very nice, but kind of..."
"Kind of what?"
Zen grinned. "Nerdy. He loves fossils and science and weird things like that. He's really bad at fashion, too - he tried to give Johanna a dress for her birthday, and he got her this weird orange-and-dark-blue tent. Even I knew it wouldn't look good on anyone."
Risa sniggered, trying to imagine such an ugly dress on Johanna, who probably didn't look good in orange at all. The only thing Johanna had going for her in terms of a shapeless orange-and-dark blue monstrosity was that she was pretty thin, meaning she could pull off a lot of things by that alone.
But orange-and-dark-blue?
Nope.
"She returned it, right?"
"Oh yeah. Managed to get a nice black dress instead. You know - something classy. Not clownish."
Risa laughed again, suddenly seeing an image of Johanna with a bright red clown nose walking around in orange and dark blue.
"What's so funny over here?" Johanna asked as she walked over. Risa shut up immediately, though the funny image in her head didn't go away. "You gonna let me in on the joke?"
"Um, no..."
"Nope. Sorry."
Johanna rolled her eyes. "Whatever. Listen - Zen. Gio's taking the test tomorrow."
"Tomorrow?" Zen asked, frowning. "I thought he was scheduled to take it in two weeks."
"Yeah, well, the committee said they'd rather have him test sooner," Johanna replied with a shrug. "But he's going to be in Cherrygrove tonight, since he was at the bookstore there - you know, the really big one? - and he wanted us to swing by." She looked down at Risa with an apologetic smile. "I'm sorry, but we're gonna have to leave you for one night."
Risa sighed. No tasty dinner for her. "That's okay."
"Thanks," Johanna said, taking out two pokeballs. "I figure I'd just use Moro to get there, so Zen?"
"Alright," the hypno said, taking the hint. "Bye, Risa - it was nice beating you in tic-tac-toe." And with that, he disappeared into his pokeball in a bright red flash.
He was replaced seconds later by a skarmory. Johanna swung her leg over the bird's side, sitting down on his metal back between his wings. "Maybe we can meet up in Azalea," she said as her skarmory began to flap his wings.
"Yeah," Risa said glumly, waving goodbye. "Oh - what test is your boyfriend taking?"
"He's taking the gym leader test," Johanna yelled over the metallic screeching of her flapping skarmory. "The one for the Viridian City Gym. He wants to make it a ground-type gym."
"What's his name?"
Johanna grinned, the setting sun reflecting for a moment against her light green ring. "Giovanni!"
With that, Johanna's skarmory shot off into the night sky, heading west.
Risa frowned. "Giovanni?" she asked, her head beginning to hurt. "But - I thought...didn't he?"
She doubled over, holding her throbbing head.
Once the pain began to subside, she reached into her backpack and took out the grimoire, opening it and looking at the incomprehensible writing on each page.
When she looked up, she saw a flash of purple shoot through the evening.
"An ekans?"
But when she squinted, she didn't see a snake.
She saw a small, four-legged mammal with a split tail.
"Espeon..."
The espeon's eyes glittered coldly, and it bore its teeth, growling a bit.
Then it bounded away into the brush, leaving Risa alone in the evening with a headache and the vague sense that something was not right in the world...
Twelve days left.
---
Disclaimer: I don't own Pokemon.
Author's Note: Sorry this is so late! I got hit by major writer's block. Bleh...