Chapter 29 – Chat

It was about three in the afternoon when we finally got home, so we were more than a little surprised to find that the main door was locked. Somehow, it seemed that Mom had gone out despite it being the middle of the day. And of course, I myself didn't have a key since I was officially a runaway.

"Well, shit!" I muttered, as I placed Silas on the porch, next to the shoe rack. "Looks like we'll be stuck out here until she gets back from wherever she's vanished to, Silas."

Silas made a whistling sound. "It's still better than when we got locked out of our room back at Canalave, though."

I grimaced at the memory of the lockout incident. "Don't remind me of that."

We sat there on the porch for a while, watching... well, nothing at all. My family's home was located in a particularly boring part of Jubilife, apparently. Not even five people walked past the house during the one hour we spent sitting on the doorstep, although that woman did look suspiciously like an obese version of that asshole from Canalave port control.

"Trainer..." Silas said, sounding about as whiny as a shellder could, "are you sure that she hasn't hidden a key somewhere? Or left Bruiser at home to guard the house?"

"Nah, she's paranoid about spare keys," I shook my head. "And as for Bruiser letting her leave the house without him? Hah!"

"Nonetheless!" Silas huffed. "If she's as paranoid as you claim, she'd have left Allan home, right?"

"Nope; she leaves Amy home, especially since that incident with Allan and the toilet rolls," I replied, staring at the bushes next to the driveway. "Wait, what?"

Silas squeaked angrily. "You mean to say that your mother's arbok has been home all this while?"

"She slipped my mind!"

"She's a fucking cobra that's nearly thirty feet long! How the fuck could she 'slip your mind'?"

"Be quiet, you little bastard child!"

Before Silas could come up with an undoubtedly profane retort, a flying slipper flew through the air and hit him on the shell. Made of rubber and obscenely pink, it bounced off him and landed at my feet.

All we could do was to stare at it. What else could we do, really? It was a flying slipper, of all things.

And that was when the second slipper hit me in the head.

"What the-"

"Mother of fuck, we're being attacked by footwear!" Silas squeaked, narrowing his eyes. "Trainer, on the ready!"

"Keep your motherfucking voices down!" shrieked one of the neighbours, causing the two of us to very nearly jump out of our skins. "And mind your fucking language, you dastardly hooligans!"

Dumbfounded, we sat there for a while, just staring at the pair of slippers lying on the porch. A bird chirped. Then a little gust of wind blew past. And then, an armoured van drove past the house, startling us out of our little daze.

I got up, and shook my head to clear my thoughts a little. "That was... unexpected."

"Damned right it was," Silas chirped. "That old lady is bonkers! Completely off her fucking rocker both literally and figuratively speaking."

"Didn't need to know that," I replied, looking up at my parents' bedroom window. "Anyway, I'm going to try and get Amy to open a window for us, alright? Just sit there and be quiet for a bit."

Walking onto the driveway, I picked up a few small pebbles, and headed back towards the house. Choosing the smallest pebble, I took aim at the window, and threw the pebble. It hit the window with a sharp sound, and I waited to see if Amy would come to investigate it. After a few minutes without her appearance, I threw the second pebble, with similar results.

"Trainer?" Silas called out from where he sat, at the porch. "Aren't you forgetting something?"

"What?" I asked him, wondering what he was going on about this time.

"Snakes are deaf, aren't they? Or at least, only able to detect vibrations?" he said, looking at me with wide eyes.

For a brief moment, I just looked at him, before letting out a groan of disbelief and smacking myself in the forehead. Most unfortunately, I did that with the hand which was holding the remaining pebbles.

Later, Silas would claim that the outburst of vulgar language and stomping around that followed the smack was probably the most colourful display I'd ever put on in his presence. He also told me to get some anger management, and I did wonder if that suggestion had some merit – just why I flipped out that much puzzled me, really.

That claim of his was probably true to some extent, since the old lady next door did throw two pairs of slippers at me as I raged in the garden for my forgetting that Amy was effectively deaf. And she even threatened to call the local MP's over to detain me, though how she knew I was a military man was beyond me.

Well, at least my little raging spell made enough of a commotion to alert Amy to our presence, anyway. It didn't take long for her to unlock and open one of the living room's windows, and before you could say 'lockout', Silas and I were back in the house.

The old lady's slippers ended up being taken care of, too. I put them away in a safe place, really – for her sake, though, I hoped that the garbage collectors would decide to picket sometime within the next twenty-four hours.

xxx

According to Amy, Dad had been let out of the office early for once, and had decided to take Mom for a movie. Bruiser was out at the park, feeding the birds for some odd reason, and supposedly, Allan was having a little fun harassing the children who were playing there. Amy claimed that he'd taken to preying on the fears of random children since I'd left the house, and that no one had actually managed to track him down as the culprit of the sudden outbreak of nightmares in the neighbourhood, yet.

She didn't forget to mention that Mom had made some lasagna for us, and that I was to heat it up for dinner. That piece of news was delivered rather gravely, since I was the only person in the house who possessed the manipulatory appendages necessary to operate the oven.

"So, you've been a busy guy, it seems," Amy hissed, as she sat with us on the sofa, watching some television. "Bruiser keeps telling me that you've been promoted."

I pressed the side of my face against the side of her head, and said, "Bruiser's a horrible one with the facts. I turned down the promotion, Amy."

"Trainer, why are you talking to a snake?" Silas asked me, flicking his tongue in her direction. "She's deaf!"

"Bone conduction, Silas. Vibrations from speech or something like that," I replied, as Amy turned her head to get a better look at him. "Ah, I don't think you two have been properly introduced. Silas, meet Amy. Amy, meet Silas."

"Delighted to meet you," she hissed, uncoiling slightly and lowering her head to look Silas in the eyes. "Hello, Silas."

"Seeing you cuddling with my trainer like that is more than just a little creepy, I'll have you know," Silas whistled, though his voice shook a little.

"If he wants to speak to me, he has no choice," Amy replied, flicking her tongue in and out, looking suspiciously like she was going to strike and swallow Silas whole. "I don't have outer ears, alas."

He visibly flinched as she continued to lock gazes with him, and I belatedly remembered the effect of an arbok's glare. "Umm, Amy, please don't do that to him. I am actually somewhat attached to the little bastard."

"Bastard?" he huffed, as he broke out of the spell Amy's gaze had put him under. "Really, Trainer, you wound me."

Amy made a rippling motion with her body that I'd long ago learned was her equivalent of a shrug, before turning her attention back to the television set. "Pardon the glare thing. It happens almost... unconsciously, for me. It was one of your mother's favourite ways to keep Bruiser and Allan under control, it was."

"Amy, Amy. Tormenting others is Allan's job."

She didn't bother with an answer for that one, and very frankly, I wasn't fussed. While Amy and I had never been as chummy as I was with Bruiser, she was still mostly civil with me. When I was growing up, she'd never objected to me having a nap in her coils, though she would later admit that she'd had to fight the urge to poison, crush, and eat me more than just the one time.

Come to think of it, I probably had a pretty unusual childhood.

And for the record, Allan's antics at the park were rather unsettling for me – the bugger seemed to have developed urges to molest children mentally, it seemed.

xxx

Dinner came and went, and before we knew it, it was midnight in Jubilife. In just a matter of hours, I would be making my merry way back to Canalave, where things would undoubtedly be getting considerably interesting, what with the first batch of newly-licensed pokemon trainers coming in for their evaluations.

Silas was contentedly snoozing in a bucket of water by my bedside, but I just couldn't sleep. As much as I'd initially hated to return to Jubilife, the past two days had been oddly... soothing, for lack of a better word. Sort of like confronting my old ghosts, really; and it was quite literally as such in Allan's case.

Out of the corner of my field of vision, a dull red glow materialised next to the closet. Speak or think of the devil, and he would appear, it seemed.

I sighed. "Allan, fuck off."

Sure enough, the ragged mismagius emerged out of the shadows, his eyes looking surprisingly glassy. Briefly, I wondered if he had gotten high by his own means, or perhaps just finished with gorging himself on some hapless soul's nightmares.

"Such manners," he murmured, as he floated up to my bed, eventually settling down right next to my shoulders. "Couldn't sleep?"

"In this house, sleeping's a risk, with things like you lingering about," I replied, sitting up in bed and narrowing my eyes at him. "What do you want, Allan?"

He twirled his ribbon-like body about innocently. "Just to have a little chat, really. You're a bad liar, you are."

"Fuck that."

"Hah!" he sneered, even as the red beads on his neck began to sparkle menacingly. "I might not have disturbed your beauty sleep last night, but really... you've got some interesting thoughts in your mind."

At that point in time, I was really hoping that he'd be fully corporeal. Then, I'd be able to strangle him, the bastard. "You little-"

He cut me off, "What you do in your own time is your own business, idiot. I'm just here for... in representing my trainer's best interests."

That sentence made my head ache, it did. "Allan, what is it now?"

Allan flicked his red eyes towards the window. "I know about what you were planning to do with your commanding officer over at Canalave. And also that Silas is your little accomplice. But, like I said, what you do in your own time is your own business.

"But, on the other hand, I am genuinely fond of my trainer, who happens to also be your mother. So I'm going to have to ask you to stop your shenanigans over at Canalave."

My fingers were itching with the urge to brutally murder him, corporeal or not. "I've got a better idea; why don't you mind your own fucking business, Allan?"

"Not when my trainer's well-being is possibly involved," he scoffed, giving me an angry glare. "Have you ever stopped to think about what might happen to her if you were caught with a plot for the untimely disposal of your superior?"

"I'm not planning to kill him, you idiot!" I snarled, swatting at him with my left hand. As expected, my hand went right through him, feeling unnaturally cold as it did so.

"Disposal doesn't always involve death, you twit! And keep it down, would you?" Allan said icily, as he levitated off my bed. "Wouldn't want to wake the household up now, would we?

"Getting back on to the matter at hand, now... assuming you were caught, don't you think they'd throw you in prison at the very least? Or perhaps even execute you, given that you're actually holding a respectable rank in the navy."

A headache was starting somewhere behind my eyes; I could feel it. "They'd try and punish me for sure, but it's not punishable by death. Believe me, I've checked."

Allan floated out to the middle of the room. "Come with me for a while, would you?"

"Glad to hear that you're willing to drop the subject," I sighed with some relief. "And who in their right mind would follow you anywhere at this time of day?"

"Just come with me to the den, and hopefully I'll be able to get some sense into that brainless head of yours," he said, as he made the door open itself to allow himself out of the room. "Seriously, you damned kids will be the death of me..."

"That'll be a welcome change," I muttered, as I sat there in bed for a while, wondering if I should actually go along with his demands, if only to shut him up. After some thought on the matter, I got up and walked out of the room. Either way, it was probably going to be the last night I ever spent in Jubilife.

The house was dark, of course. And silent, which made it feel almost eerie as I made my way towards the stairs. I took a brief look around me to ensure that Allan was going to attempt to ambush me, and walked down the stairs. As usual, the third stair from the bottom creaked when I stepped on it.

For some reason, that sound, normally so easily ignored, felt harsh and out of place in the darkness just then.

It was just a matter of passing through a doorway to get to the den, and sure enough, Allan was already there. There was a large book on the table, and the doors of the little wooden cabinet next to the television set were open. Clearly, he had taken the book from somewhere within the cabinet, but just what did the book contain? I certainly didn't recall such a book being in the house before.

"Finally, you came," Allan said, sounding oddly downbeat. "Here, take a look at this."

"What is it?" I asked, as I switched on the den's lights. When they came on, I saw the label on the book's front cover, and stopped in my tracks. "Allan, is this some kind of a sick joke?"

"It isn't!" he snapped. "Just read the fucking book, alright? And then I'll leave you to rot or whatever it is that you're so set on doing once you get out of here in the morning."

Sparing a moment to cast a disdainful look in his general direction, I sat down, and opened the photo album. As soon as I saw the first picture, I froze and felt a wave of nostalgia washing over me. It felt as if time had stopped and jumped backwards, back to a time when things were more certain than they were currently. When life was much simpler and all I needed to worry about was getting my work done.

Somehow, my mother had managed to get a copy of the picture showing me with the guys from my barracks, from my training days at the Coronet base camp. Usually, such pictures were limited in circulation to the local military newsletters, where they represented each new batch of recruits.

A pang of guilt made itself known somewhere in my mind as I realised just what Mom had probably been doing to occupy her spare time since I'd run away from home. Flipping the pages of the album merely provided more proof of what seemed to be Mom's latest hobby.

She must have subscribed to the military newsletters, since there were cuttings here and there amidst the photographs. There was the news about my incident with the goldeen, and there was the news about my affinity testing. And then, there was a picture of a group of soldiers standing at the Coronet train station, all ready to depart; one of them was me, and that picture was from the day I'd first set foot in Canalave.

For a moment, I wondered about just how much detail there actually was in the newsletters. I myself rarely read it, but it sure seemed that Mom had been reading them. And she had been doing so quite religiously, at that.

"Do you see now?" Allan asked me quietly, as he came closer to me. "You running away from this place sucked for her, definitely. But if there's one thing she is now, it's proud of her son and what he's achieved on his own.

"Really, you should hear her go on about your little antics out there. How do you think that old cunt next door knew that you were a soldier? Nice move with the slippers, by the way."

All I could do was nod mutely, as I continued to flip back and forth through the album's pages. Nothing much, really, given that my military career was still short-lived as it was. But the fact that Mom had taken the trouble to collect those materials for her album still made me think a little.

"All right, Allan," I spoke up softly, to the point that he jumped slightly upon hearing me raise my voice a little. "I'll stop the schemes back at Canalave."

He gave me an uncharacteristically hopeful look. "Will you, really?"

"I will," I nodded, as memories of that night at the milotic's lagoon flashed through my mind. "Believe me when I say that I've got bigger things to worry about now than Zachary Harding being a corrupt bastard."

"Like him trying to kill you in an isolated lagoon?" Allan offered, sounding mildly amused.

"Damn it, Allan! Just how much do you know?" I narrowed my eyes at him. "That was private and confidential!"

He telekinetically took the album from me, and snapped it shut, before sending it flying back into the cabinet. "I know more than you, for sure. Bet you didn't know that Benedict the gardevoir's got a psychic trace on you, did you?"

Upon hearing those words, my mind was all but petrified for a moment, before it went into hyperdrive. "Wait, a psychic trace? How would he have registered... damn it, was it the hug when I first went to Sootopolis?"

Allan seemed to be lost in thought for a moment. "No, it was his farewell handshake. He sealed the trace then."

I frowned. "So now General Harding's got a way to constantly monitor my whereabouts. But given that Ben's in Sootopolis, I doubt he'll be checking on me that frequently."

"He's a strong psychic," Allan said, sounding a tad miffed. "Trust me when I tell you that that's one gardevoir you wouldn't want to mess with. Their whole species is fucked up enough with all that human fetish stuff going on – gallade even more so, given that only male kirlia can evolve into them - but he's a distinctly scary one, somehow."

Really, right at that moment I didn't know if I wanted to laugh, cry, or just end up stoned out of sheer disbelief. Here I was, talking to the sadistic ghost who'd haunted me in my childhood, talking about the sexual preferences of gardevoir and gallade, of all things. Granted, he'd been doing most of the talking for that part, but still!

"I just don't want my trainer to get heartbroken, is all," he said, as he landed on the den's table. "You... you can appreciate that much, can't you? As a boy... no, as a young man, could you promise me that you won't do anything of that nature?"

I leaned back and sank into the sofa, feeling a strange sense of hollowness in my chest. It almost felt as if I was a deflating drifblim, or something like that. "Alright, Allan - no more of the great anti-Harding plot."

We sat there in silence for a while, just listening to the distant sounds from Jubilife's city center. Truly, Jubilife was a city that never slept, despite the curfew imposed after the terrorist attacks. People went on working at night, and slept in the day; the terrorist attacks merely sealed their fate as creatures of the night. At least they knew what they wanted to do, or were supposed to do.

"Coffee, Allan?" I asked the mismagius, who looked as if he was starting to doze off on the table.

"Umm... what did you say?"

"I can't sleep, Allan," I said, even as a yawn made its way out of me – where it came from, I have no idea. "So... I thought of making a cup of coffee for the two of us?"

"Why not?" he replied, lifting off the table and shaking his cloth-like body about. "Nothing like some man-to-man talk in the dead of the night, eh?"

I left the den and headed to the kitchen, nearly tripping over my feet as Allan called out after me.

"Hey, kid!"

"What now?" I asked him, turning around and straightening the den cabinet, which I had bumped a little out of alignment when I was trying to not fall flat on my face.

"Thanks."

xxx

Morning came, and not long after that, I left Jubilife for Canalave. I managed to sit down for a small farewell breakfast at home with the family – well, it was a Sunday morning, after all – and even Amy turned up to say goodbye to me. Bruiser nearly removed my lungs non-surgically by clapping me on the back, while Allan gave me a knowing look as I left through the front door. Briefly, I felt a faint tingle running over me as I crossed the threshold; perhaps it was him engaging a psychic trace, or maybe I was just feeling sentimental again.

All we had to do was to walk to the city center, where General Harding would pick me up. Apparently, he had spent Saturday night at the Jubilife military quarters, to allow whichever pokemon he was using for transport to rest a little. Once he picked me up, we'd board the train and head back to Canalave. If all went according to plan, we'd be back at Canalave by three in the afternoon, as far as the train tickets went.

"Goodbye, Bruiser! Keep in touch, yes?" Silas chirped cheerfully from the top of my unzipped backpack, as we walked down the driveway. "You too, Allan – give those little bastards hell!"

"Silas, you twat! Don't encourage him to terrorise children, would you?" I said, appalled at the fact that my starter was supporting Allan's sadistic little trips into peoples' subconscious. "Would you want more people turning out like me?"

He shuddered a little. "That... is a genuinely terrifying thought. Anyway, we need to go."

Nodding, I turned about and waved. "Keep in touch, Mom!"

"Bye!" she called out, waving at me from the doorway, with my father and her three pokemon standing behind her.

As I turned to look, I realised just how small she looked in the doorway. Everything else looked blurry, much like the background characters and scenery in a low-budget movie. And the expression on her face looked like she was holding back a tear or several.

Right then, she just looked so sad.

With a final wave to my folks, I turned around, and walked away.