A/N: aldybaron, yes, I do base quite a bit off (which I've admitted as I'm a fan of and has driven quite a bit of this fanfic's plot) the Keys to the Kingdom, and Marley was heavily based off of Mister Monday as you could tell. Thomdolt isn't as heavily based off of Grim Tuesday though, and as we go along most of the Gym Leaders will have very little relation to the book counterparts.

Julie Togepi, yeah, we'll see, but mainly after Thomdolt, and perhaps even after Linnea. I'm thinking of bringing in someone a bit late, but it seems like during Wade's arc will be way too long, so perhaps before. Anyway, I'm open to ideas.

As they moved on, Ash was able to use his Badge to detect, avoid, and disable all of the traps they could find. He still felt uncomfortable though, and somewhere in the back of his mind he could still feel something tugging at him, as if his very domain was begging him to come back.

The walls soon changed from being natural jagged rock to being wood which at one time would have been smooth, but had been worn away due to years of misuse and had several holes. Avoiding these, and some other traps, they found that the tunnel opened into a large chamber.

It was here that Ash encountered his first problem. Namely, that there was a large trap laid out for him and he couldn't figure out how to disable it. Like he had done before, he had tried telling the Irresolute Badge what to do with his mind, but instead of something happening, it just vibrated uselessly in his hand. He didn't know what was wrong or why, but his attention fell on a side door.

"We're going to have to go around this place," Ash said. Their Zubat went ahead through the side door and Ash followed.

The place had been made of wood mostly and at some point of time might have looked homely enough, but now it just stank and large parts of it had collapsed. Even worse was the fact that Ash knew just what had happened in there and kept expecting to see a skeleton or something else as a remnant of the massacre that had occurred there long ago.

There weren't many Pokemon hanging around, just the usual Zubats. Ash did catch sight of some ghosts though and captured a Gastly for himself, thinking that the partial Poison type might be useful against Thomdolt.

As Ash wandered around some places, and ended up backtracking occasionally, he started getting the feeling that he was not alone. This could have possibly been due to some other Ghost types that would likely be wandering around the ruins, but as Pikachu pointed something out, Ash squinted his eyes and it took him a few seconds to realize what he was looking at and realized that it was due to another reason.

"Is that… a security camera?" Ash asked. The only thing visible of it was a small light blinking occasionally. Pikachu decided to take it out with a Thunderbolt.

"Golly, those are expensive," Gulliver said. "They only have them 'round the old Marley's Gym back home, but I guess that Thomdolt wouldn't be having any problems purchasing them with what he makes."

Ash however, was not really interested in know the financial details of Thomdolt's domain and more concerned on what it meant: that Thomdolt knew they were there.

As such, he kept expecting for a huge army of guards or a swarm of Pokemon to suddenly swoop down upon them. But it never came. They continued walking, and though there were several traps, Ash was able to disable most of them. Those he couldn't, they walked around.

"Hey! Look, a window!" someone shouted and motioned to a place where sunlight- something that nearly blinded them after hours of being in near-total darkness- came out. "We can get out from here." She made a beeline for it, before Ash called out,

"Wait! This fortress was made at the edge of a cliff! You can't just jump out the window!"

The girl stopped herself in time and took a good look down outside the window. She gulped.

Ash took a look too. It was only a few hours till sundown, and they were overlooking a large plain with the river that Mr. Jennings must have been talking about winding through. In the distance, he could make out a huge dark cloud near the horizon.

There didn't seem to be any people watching them though, and there was a herd of Sawsbuck feeding on some grass.

"Okay, I can use my Fearow to fly us all down there one by one," Ash said.

"Ya sure that's a good idea?" Gulliver asked. "What if there're people waiting to attack us once we get down?"

Ash considered the problem, and said, "That'll still be a problem no matter what we do. At least this way, Fearow can fly us up and down faster than it should pose a problem compared to climbing down."

They got down, with Ash going first since he had the strongest Pokemon and it would've been easy for him to fend off an attack if they were attacked on the ground, though no one bothered them. As each of them disembarked, they thanked Ash's Fearow.

"I think we should make camp," Ash said. "But first, let's explore the area and make sure there aren't any ambushes set up for us."

Their first leg of business was to go to the river and see if there was fresh water, and Pikachu got off Ash's shoulder and ran towards it with full speed, eager to take a nice swim, but stopped short suddenly fifty feet before the river and immediately turned into a feral position and began making hissing noises.

"What happened?" Ash asked. He took a few steps forward before Pikachu began making some more noises at him. "Is there something wrong with the river?"

It took Ash some time to notice it in the low light, but he noticed there was something odd with the water. It was flowing rather slowly, and had an odd tinge to it. The wind then picked up from the river, and Ash covered his nose as its putrid odor reached him.

"It smells like a sewer!" he exclaimed.

Beside him, Gulliver nodded. "Wait, how do you know what a sewer smells like?"

"I've been in a few," Ash confessed.

"Really?" Gulliver asked, interested. "Why?" He had been of course, used to thinking of Ash as a Gym Leader and couldn't imagine why someone like that would go into a sewer.

"Oh, there were lots of reasons," Ash said. "And lots of times. But why is the river like that?"

Just then, his Pokedex began beeping, and a message came up, simultaneously being read by those same four crackling voices:

The region under control by Thomdolt was once a lush, verdant region before the factories under Lady Falmouth came up. Thomdolt has greatly increased the number of them in order to increase his profits, and these dump their waste into the rivers and skies. Normally, as the river water flows into the sea, so he was bound by a treaty to nullify the waste using the Hemlock Badge. However, this arrangement has ended recently due to Wade's suspected involvement in bringing you over to Galea, and so Thomdolt has relocated currently to the northern part near the border in order to send his goods overland. As such, he is too far from his factories to mitigate the waste that they release into the land.

Ash's first thoughts weren't to process this information. Rather, they were to scream at the thing, "How! And why! How do you know all of that, and just who are you? I've talked to a lot of people on phones, and you don't sound like a live person making those noises at all, so you're using some sort of program. How do you know that Thomdolt is near the border, and why should I believe you? And does that mean that Wade didn't bring me here?"

There was only a single line as a response.

I know what I know is true and I wish for Thomdolt to fall.

Regardless of what Ash did next, the thing did not give off any other information.

Gulliver had been trying to look busy examining the grass to try and remove himself from the rather awkward scene when he noticed that it seemed to be wilting and had turned a nasty shade of yellow, a phenomenon was more and more apparent as his gaze moved towards the river.

"It's like he's poisoning everything," Gulliver muttered.

"Pika pii pii!" Pikachu said. Ash glanced up to where his friend was pointing, at what he had earlier mistaken for a storm cloud but was clearly something else instead.

"It's a giant… collection of smog," Ash muttered.

"I don't think it's comin' this way," Gulliver mused.

"Well, this puts using the Wailmer out of the question," Ash said. "We'll just have to go overland then."

Ash tried to pry his eyes away from a small body that was floating in the river. It looked like it was a Pokemon, probably swimming happily and freely in the water before it had been contaminated. He had seen enough for one day.

They then spent the rest of the evening setting up camp. They sort of patrolled the surrounding area but didn't find anything that looked threatening.

Ash spent some time trying to train his Gastly, but it turned out that it was rather weak and it mainly just hovered around playing pranks with the other questers and Ash's Pokemon instead of any real battling.

For a moment, Ash was reminded very strongly of his friends, and it seemed so easy to forget about all that he had to accomplish, and to just think of this as another journey.

The next day, Ash decided to assume, for now, that whoever was talking to him through the Pokedex had been right (though he made a mental note that it was not a wise idea to blindly trust someone who didn't even trust him enough to tell him who he-or she was) until they came upon a warehouse.

It had apparently been manned by some of Thomdolt's cronies, but they had all fled on their bicycles at the site of Ash and his team, and Ash didn't bother pursuing them. He released his Fearow to keep an eye on the skies for any trouble.

They had entered the warehouse to see that it was mostly empty, except for some bottles of water and some other odd snacks boxes. Before anyone tried any, Gulliver rather (valiantly?) volunteered to taste all of them to make sure that they weren't poisoned somehow.

Ash had mixed feelings about letting everyone take whatever they wanted. It felt like stealing to him, but at the same time, who owned the warehouse? The owners had run off, and it probably belonged to Thomdolt, or whoever held the Hemlock Badge, and if he won it was his and technically he only owed the money to himself but until then-

His thought process was interrupted by his Fearow landing, and it didn't seem like it had seen anything. This was something that everyone found disturbing. There was no army, no soldiers, nothing that seemed to be coming at them, even though it was obvious that Thomdolt knew they were coming for him.

It seemed that Thomdolt was content to wait for them to march all the way up to him.

Or perhaps, like Ash, Thomdolt really didn't have a choice. After all, if Ash decided to walk up to Thomdolt and decide that he didn't want to battle him and started doing the can-can at his front door, well, there was little that Thomdolt could do to stop him.

A/N: So, thanks for reading everyone! And as always, do review if you liked!