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This is the second part of the Legends of Pokemon trilogy. Please read Pokemon Special: Sword and Shield (the final book) after this. For the first volume, read Pokemon Special: Legends of Arceus. Although the additional reading is not required for an enjoyable experience, I recommend that you at least peruse them both. They give much-needed information and clear up certain parts of the story.
The story takes place twenty years after the events of the Red, Green, and Blue manga arc: the first storyline. Being set in the manga universe, it shares similar characters, new and old. Although some basic knowledge of the manga is recommended, it is not necessary for a fully enjoyable read.
It tells of the rise of Bronze Tercano, the war against the Eclipse Alliance, and the return of the Evil Djinn. Many figures from the manga meet their ends: whether noble or not. It is a time of tragic heroes, corrupted Men, and returning darkness.
May you be blessed. All honor to Arceus Elyon!
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This story is dedicated to C.S. Lewis and all who believe that Men should be free.
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The Tale of the Bronze Brick
The Second War Against the Dark Lord
And the Return of the King
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An Introduction to the Region and People of Roria
by Bronze Tercano, chief scribe in the Kingdom of Beulah
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This book is largely concerned with Rorians and their Pokemon, and from its pages a reader might discover much of their character and a little of their history. Many, however, may wish to know more about these remarkable people and the land they inhabit (Roria) from the outset, while some may not possess the Legends of Arceus. For such readers a few notes on the more important points are here collected from Rorian-lore, and the ancient history is briefly recalled.
The Rorians are a very ancient people, more numerous formerly than they are today; for they love war and songs and glory; a well-tended library or a battlefield was their favorite haunt. Though the love of learning was not a thing shared by all Rorians, there were a few among them who cherished their books. They invented many complex machines in the ancient world, and were very skilled with tools and weapons. Even in ancient days they were, as a rule, strong and powerful. They are quick of hearing and sharp-eyed, and though they are inclined to be doting and do not hurry unnecessarily, they are nonetheless nimble and deft in their movements.
They are a stout people, shorter than Hisuians and the Men of Sinnoh: more swarthy and stocky, that is, even when they are not actually much shorter. They once lived close to a hundred years, but they have dwindled, they say, and in ancient days they were more vigorous. The Rorians are mostly descended from the Logarians, who were a very strong people that dwelt in northern Roria and did many deeds of valor in the War of the Plate, in which the Evil Djinn was destroyed of old. These Logarians are very similar to the Rorians of today, with whom this tale is concerned.
Those days of the Logarians, the Middling Days of Earth, are now long past, and the shape of all lands has been changed; but the regions in which Rorians then lived were doubtless the same as those in which they still linger: the North of Roria, south of the Great Sea and the Equator (named to them the Girdle of Earth). Of their original home the old tales say that they in the distant past sailed from the North, fleeing the Ancient Darkness. Their own records began only after the settlement of Roria, and their most ancient legends hardly looked further back than their Wandering Days. Why they later undertook the hard and perilous crossing of the sea into the Southern World is no longer certain. Their own accounts speak of the multiplying of the Men of Kalos in the land, and of a shadow that fell on the North because of the strength of the Enemy.
The region of Roria is shaped like a sort of horn. It is well over four thousand miles long north to south, lying in the southern hemisphere, though from east to west at its lengthiest point, from the Horn of Roria to the Deserts of Aredia, the width is three thousand miles. Running through the center of the whole mass north to south are the Frostveil Mountains, with only a few breaks and passes. The south of Roria is cold and the sea there is filled with ice. A little north (and west) the land becomes rich and kindly, with many trees and tilled fields. Forty leagues further north the Plains of Brimber surrounding the volcano that is their namesake fill the whole landscape. Then, stretching for a thousand miles, from coastline to mountain foothills, is the Taur-I-Melegyrn, the Great Forest, the greatest in the southern world.
Beyond that, now in the subtropics, the rain-shadow of the Frostveil Mountains resolves into the Deserts of Aredia, through which runs the River Bloodflow. It is very dry, save for the coasts, which are pleasant most of the year. Any league northward of Aredia was once part of the Empire of the Logarians, and as such is filled with ruins, legends, and tales from immemorial days past. The Sea of Summer at the very northernmost point of Roria is clear blue, and a few day's boat ride will bring any journeyman or well-wisher to the Alolans Islands.
I have neglected to mention the geography of the eastern half of Roria, the one beyond the Frostveil Mountains, because it does not come into this tale nor concern anything that does. For those wondering, eastern Roria is covered in forests and plains and is not interesting in any respect. It was filled, and perhaps still is, of wild folk and wicked things. They hardly were civilized by the Logarians and, so Men say, "did not hear Arceus." For most Rorians attributed Arceus of old to their most essential laws, laws that survived even the Downfall of Logaria, and usually kept them out of free will, because they were "The Law" (as they said) and were thought both ancient and just.
Logaria fell swiftly because of the judgment of Arceus. That tale is long and is told better in other places. With the Logarians gone only a few descendants of them remained in Central and Southern Roria, dwindling to a secretive and ancient people. The Aredians that dwelt in the deserts were of old allies of the Logarians, and being spared the wrath of Arceus, preserved much of the history of Roria in story and song. Mostly the Rorians became wild and fierce, a rustic people of hill and vale, going backward in knowledge and power while the rest of the world went forward. A hundred years before this tale takes place emissaries of the Pokemon Association came to Roria and gained the friendship of many tribes there.
Roria became a part of the Association, for whatever good or evil came out of it. Now the Pokemon Association was founded in 1676 A.F, or after the fall of the Dark Lord. The After Fall reckoning was the standard year-counting calendar for most of the world, though few could remember what the "Fall" was. The Pokemon Association was the governing body of the whole civilized world. Each region had one Chairman who reported to the World Chairman. The Pokemon League was funded and hosted by the Association, and that is where its importance ends. I dissolved it, so how important could it be?
At the time that this tale betides, the world had seen many disasters, great and small, over the past twenty years. Though none knew it, these troubles were the work of the will of the Dark Lord, the Evil Djinn, which still moved in the world. The Evil Djinn was the first and greatest of the rebels against Arceus, desiring lordship over the whole world. He was defeated by the Hisuians and Logarians in the War of the Plate, which is told of in the Legends of Arceus. So the Dark Lord was bound in the Prison Bottle, and cast into the Earth, never to return while that age lasted.
But the Evil Djinn was not destroyed, only restrained. The Hisuians in the North deemed that evil had been ended forever, yet it was not so. It was diminished, but not wholly ruined. The Prison Bottle was lost, and not held in bond. The power of the Enemy was broken, but the lies that the Dark Lord sowed in the hearts of Men and Pokemon could not be removed, and while the World remains they will endure. The Logarians fell. Because of the Enemy the kindreds of the gods, Men, and Pokemon are estranged. The Hisuians dwindled and decayed, the span of their years lessened, and their reign over Sinnoh passed.
In the long years Men and Pokemon devised great engines, and made new technologies, and because of the ancient teaching of the Hisuians and Logarians they crafted all the devices we have today. So the world had peace without the Evil Djinn, for a time. But in the wearing of swift years the Prison Bottle began to weaken, and a shadow crept back into the world, and the Willpower of the Enemy began to move again. For the Bottle was made partially of the stuff of Earth, and it diminished in strength and the potency of the spells of warding upon it wore away.
For twenty years the Dark Lord had been moving those servants among Men that he ensnared, for some were always ready to his command; and they received the treacherous gifts he gave them. But never could the whole power of the Dark Lord escape the Prison Bottle of its own bidding, and the part of him that lurked in the shadows of the Earth was impotent, reserved to foul furtive plotting in the dark, moving a few psychically sensitive and very evil people to do his bidding: to destroy the world or conquer it.
But Arceus would not suffer the rule of Creation to fall to the Enemy unhindered. Among many children He raised heroes to daunt and defeat the schemes of the Dark Lord. These are the Pokedex Holders, renowned in the race of Men, and they were the bitterest foes of the Enemy, though they did not know the dark architect behind all their troubles. Their deeds earned them the undying hatred of the Evil Djinn when he returned: the Prison Bottle did not remain lost forever.
Now we are ready to begin. The Dark Lord has found what he hopes to be his greatest and last servants in the organization of Team Eclipse, a group gaining power throughout the world, hoping to "recondition" society and Men by creating a new universe. At the Dark Lord's behest, the enigmatic man called only the Hood, Supreme Leader of the Eclipse Alliance, is searching for the Prison Bottle, along with another artifact that holds to key to ultimate power for whatever force that can find it and bend it to their will. The Pokedex Holders and Team Eclipse begin to struggle to a climactic resolution that brings the annals of Brick Bronze, and the world that the Pokedex Holders know, to a magnificent, crashing conclusion.
In the mighty clash that ensues, as old heroes protect the world from the malevolent plans of an organization that seeks to create a new world order, the time also comes for the lost heir to the throne of Logaria to take up the title of his forebears and the crown of his birthright. This is the story of Bronze Tercano, the War Against the Evil Djinn, and the Return of the King.
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Part I
The Hearth and the Tinder
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"The shadow of that hideous strength,
waxes long and more it is of length"
(Sir David Lyndsay: from Ane Dialog, describing the Tower of Babel)
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The sun rose, having no alternative, onto nothing new. The rays broke apart the clouds and drifted into a room on the second floor of a red-painted house. The room was short but broad with a single window facing east. In the bed of that room was a boy of fourteen winters who had been sleeping through the predawn dark. He has dark hair, longer than it would be after a fresh cut. He is not big but his muscles are wiry. All Logarian boys have wiry muscles at that point in their life. The boy's face is curiously hard, the closed eyes oddly angry.
Who is writing this? The boy is, a little god made by greater ones long after, since the others have absconded.
He woke when he hears the loud ungentle clamor of the clock alarm. The boy silenced it and rose, changing into his day-clothes. He wore a pair of tan pants that were so tersely adorned they would have been allowed in the military. He put on a jacket and went downstairs. His mother had just left the kitchen and he knew how tidy it was. The breakfast things were put out or washed up, the tea towels were hanging above the stove, and the floor was mopped. She had gone out on the only real work she needed to do that particular day, and it was only eight.
"Here I am, standing about, starting to waste another morning," said Bronze to himself sharply. "I must do some work before I leave." By work he meant his paper on the Rorian Chairman's new bill on decreasing term limits. Bronze had always intended to pursue a career as a politician or scholar after he married rich: that was one of the reasons why he was to have no close human partner, at any rate for a long time yet. The Pokemon were another matter. He was frustrated because the paper was not very original and continually emphasized the Rorian people's general dislike for the Chairman. He still believed that if he got out all his notebooks and editions and really sat down to the job, he could force herself back into her lost enthusiasm for the subject and finish it before he had to leave at nine. The paper itself was not even very important: he would not need to write many papers after he had his way with the world.
But before he did so, perhaps in order to put off the moment of beginning, he turned over a newspaper which was lying on the table and glanced at a picture on the back page. The moment he saw the picture, he remembered his dream. He remembered not only the dream but the measureless time after he had awoken in the middle of the night and kept very still. He was an excellent sleeper. Only a few things ever seemed able to keep him awake after he had gone to bed, and even that did not keep him awake for long.
The terror of this dream, like the terror of most dreams, evaporates in the telling, but it must be set down for the sake of what came afterwards.
He had begun by dreaming simply of a face. It was a feminine-looking face, clean-shaven and rather pale, with a sharp nose. The face had very black straight and black hair that flowed over its back and shoulders like little dark waterfalls. Its expression was frightening because it was cruel. The mouth sagged open and the eyes stared as he had seen other men's eyes stare for a second or two when some sudden shock had occurred. But this face seemed to be meeting a shock that lasted for hours. Then gradually Bronze became aware of more. The face belonged to a man who was sitting ramrod straight in one corner of a little square room with white-washed walls; waiting, Bronze thought, for those under his power, so that he could do something horrible to them. At last the door was opened and a rather good-looking man with a cloak on came in. The first man seemed to recognize him as an old acquaintance and they sat down together, smiling, and began to talk.
In all the dreams which Bronze had hitherto dreamed, one either understood what the dream-people were saying or else one did not hear it. But in this dream, and that helped to make its extraordinary realism, the conversation was in Old Logarian, a dead language, and Bronze understood bits of it, but by no means all, just as he would have done in real life. The visitor was telling the man something which he apparently intended him to regard as good news. And the cruel man at first looked up with a gleam of hope in his eye and said something unintelligible, but then he wavered and changed his mind. The visitor continued in a low, fluent voice to press his point. He was a good-looking man in his rather cold way, but he wore a strange hood and these kept on going over his eyebrows so as to make his eyes and parts of his face invisible. This, combined with the almost unnatural perfection of his teeth, somehow gave Bronze a disagreeable impression.
And this was increased by the growing distress, and finally anger, of the first man. Bronze could not make out what it was that the visitor was proposing to him, but he soon figured out that the bid agreed on before the new scheme was the hijacking of some vehicle. Whatever the visitor was offering him was something that angered him more than that. At this point the dream abandoned all pretence to realism and became an ordinary nightmare. The visitor, adjusting his hood and still smiling his cold smile, seized the other man's head between his two hands. He gave it a sharp turn; just as Bronze had last summer seen Rowlet turn its head all the way around. The visitor unscrewed the first man's head and took it away. Then all became confused.
A strange man was still the center of the dream but it was quite a different head now: a handsome face all covered with earth. It belonged to a young man whom some people were digging up in a kind of churchyard. Bronze recognized it as an ancient Hisuian-looking man, with Hisuian clothes and a dagger in a sheath tied to his side. Bronze didn't mind this much at first because he thought it was a corpse. Then suddenly he noticed that this ancient thing was coming to life. "Look out!" he cried in his dream. "He's alive. Stop! Stop! You're waking him." But they did not stop. The young man sat up and began talking in something that sounded vaguely like Old Hisuian. He locked eyes with Bronze and pointed at him, now shouting louder and louder. "Hide the Brick, you fool!" the undead man cried. "Hide the Brick! The Enemy wants it, but he must not get it! Hide the Brick!", And this for some reason frightened Bronze so badly that he woke up.
That was the dream, no worse, if also no better, than many another nightmare. But it was not the mere memory of a nightmare that made the kitchen seem suddenly grim to Bronze's eyes. The trouble was elsewhere. There, on the back page of the newspaper, was the man he had seen in the nightmare: the first man (if there had been three of them), the head of the one with the long black hair. He took up the paper. Rally at Silvent City in Five Days! was the headline, under which was Eclipse Spokesman Announces Visit to Southern Roria. Bronze remembered vaguely at having followed the proceedings. The man was named Emrett, of Hisuian descent, and he was a wonder-worker of sorts, going about and getting people to join his organization. Bronze had never heard him speak and was curious about what he had to say. So that was the origin of his dream. He must have looked at this photo in the paper (the man certainly had a very sharp and fierce face) before going to bed.
Five minutes later Bronze was done. He swept up his coat, wallet, put on some old boots, and went out to find his friend Jake Albans.
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Bronze was walking down to Jake's house, and thinking of many different matters. He did not notice at all the morning beauty of the little street that led him from the woody hillside suburb where he lived down into the central and lightly populated part of Mitis Town.
Though my present conditions as I write this far surpass it, and Jubilife City is also splendid, I think Mitis Town where I was reared is the most beautiful place on Earth. For one thing it is so small. No maker of cars or Poke Balls or marmalades has yet come to industrialize the country town which is the setting of the Professor's laboratory, and the laboratory is also tiny. It was founded by a fellowship of Rorians to research things like the sociology of Pokemon and to pray for the soul of the town. Now it was the official laboratory of Jonathan Rowell Cypress, the Rorian Professor of Pokemon, and he had perhaps forty attendants, few of which, if any, prayed anymore.
Bronze himself knew Cypress. The new professor was just beginning to find his feet in the town, though he never got out much. He was a forty-year-old fellow who looked half his age. Men whispered of life-extension treatments or sorcery. Bronze did not believe that either was the cause for Cypress's seemingly perpetual youth, though he was beginning to wonder. The man's raven locks and cold face had not changed in over two decades, if pictures were anything to go by. He and Bronze had become acquaintances over the past several months; not friends, certainly, though they sometimes came close to kinship in their talks. Cypress treated Bronze with all the respect the boy thought he deserved, and so they enjoyed each other's company whenever they talked about whatever was on their minds.
Cypress had caused a minor stir in the scientific world when he was appointed Rorian Professor. He had been a sub-warden of some nameless college in Kanto before catching the eye of Samuel Oak. The Rorian Chairman favored Cypress as well, the blighter. They were both part of the "progressive element" in Rorian politics. Yanase Berlitz and one Professor Rowan of Sinnoh had protested, but Oak had stood by his decision. "He'll be a hell of an administrator," Oak told the Chairman. "He works all day long, even during dinner. We shall have all the obstructionists wasting time as hard as they can. But luckily that's the worst they can do."
Bronze was going down his favorite walk, or he took it often so he must have favored it. The official start, official for him, was a short and for some reason permanently muddy lane leading down from the back of a sweet-store, passing through a gateway and straggling off to a small stand of oaks and beyond that to the unfettered countryside. The five-barred gate itself, worn by wind and rain to a delicate filigree, the rust seeming of a dusting of roughly ground cinnamon. It does open, but he preferred to climb it, enjoying the way it wobbled under him in panic, clanging and chattering. The action of throwing his leg over the topmost bar caused him to rotate a smart half-turn. Perched there, he imagined himself a dauntless sailor breezily aloft in the swaying crow's nest of a square-rigged carrack out on the bounding main. A boy will be a boy, you see, even this one. But try to see a snot-nose scallywag in Bronze. You cannot.
Immediately beyond the gate was a slanted field traversed by a broad, flat grassy bank, man-made but to no known purpose. On it stood three noble beeches, beeches, set in a line and spaced an equal distance from each other, evidence again of human agency, and not the random plantings of some Phantump forest spirit. Perhaps it was the site of some rustic ritual of yore, recalled from years long ago in the darkness before the Association came, featuring bards and music, and maidens and blossoms, and bearded moot-chieftains with their weed hats capering the clumsy steps of an old-time dance and shaking aloft his long wooden stick that bristled with talismans. Or, less fancifully, they may have been planted there by some long-forgotten tribe to establish a boundary or to honor some woodland-Pokemon.
He reached Jake's house by nine. There were two means of ingress. The main gate opened onto a short drive that ran between two rows of full-grown lime trees straight up to the house. This he avoided, and instead turned and drove on along the road that follows the curve of an old demesne wall. After a distance of a couple of leagues or so came to a right-hand bend, in the angle of which, to the left, was a leafy nook where stood a narrow grey-stone arch enclosing something like lychgate, hidden from the road in a tangle of brambles and overlapped by a gnarled hawthorn bush. Here he walked up. A breeze drowsily tousled the spiked and shinily dark leaves of the hawthorn. The sunlight here seemed vaguer, hazier. No bird sang.
How, he wondered, did the prodigal son feel when the feast was over, the fatted calf picked clean and the guests gone home, the tears his fond old dad had shed on the shoulder of his long-lost boy all dried and life started up again? Did everything seem much like before and every bit as dreary, or was it all lit along the edges with a cold, mercurial flame, the brightness of the new, the re-newed?
He found himself meeting Jake just outside the lychgate. It seemed natural to Bronze that they should walk together and discuss the agenda for the meeting later that day. Jake was the same age as Bronze, a little shorter and broader, and, some might say, less tanned. That was because Jake was also less Logarian, had less of the blood of Southernesse in his veins. There was an innocence in his face that Bronze did not have nor ever really possessed. Bronze was of a time that had long outstayed itself, and Jake was not.
Bronze was as Logarian as could be in those later days. That meant his family was fortuitous in enduring hardships and sorrows, slow to weep and swift to laugh. They were enduring in cold and in distances, quick in body, noble and generous, ready in thought and quick to anger; they were availing in counsel and fierce in battle. Now this odd boy is, perhaps, more special on one ground or another than he would seem. More special, at least, on the merits that Arceus accounts for.
"You still think we'll go through with it?" Jake said as they went further east on the road that led that way from the main gate. They were heading toward a place where they could fetch Bronze's parents. It had been arranged, or silently agreed upon, that only Bronze need come to the laboratory sometime at noon. "Or at least, they'll go through with it? But it's the only way, right?"
"Sure it is," said Bronze. "And sure they will. It's always been needed. Once I have the Pokedex I've got the Professor, the bursar of the laboratory, and all the chemical and bio-chemical people on my side for a start. I've tackled your parents and mine and they're sound on the big picture. I've made Nefud believe that he sees the point in my plan and that he's in favor of it; your grandfather will probably do something pretty devastating but he's bound to side with us if it comes to a vote on anything. Besides, I haven't yet told you. We're going to be getting some new Pokemon. Cypress came down to get something at the post office after lunch yesterday, brought some Poke Balls to the laboratory, and got busy at once."
There had been talks between the Professors considering the possible Pokedex Holder of Roria, among other things, and Bronze was Cypress's choice. The Chairman had been looking hither and thither for some way to increase his poll ratings, and found a safe, concealable way of doing so. Bronze's Pokedex was made in some obscure manufactury in the northern country, and it happened that this was the day he was to go and receive it. The whole ceremony would be between Bronze's family and Cypress, hush-hush, no cameras or mention of it on the nightly news, though it certainly would be known among the Association brass, the other Pokedex Holders, and a few prominent Rorian politicians and their aficionados.
The "plan", as has been whispered, is glorious. It is remarkable that all of it turned out the way that Bronze intended for it, and a little more. It needed blood to breed blood, it rendered life and youth: catspaw of prophecy, the Doom of Arceus, and terribly and inexorably necessary.
"I should like to see it very much," said Jake quite truly. And then, after a pause, "By the way, I suppose Cypress's own position is secure?"
"What do you mean?" said Bronze.
"Well, there was some talk, if you remember, as to whether someone who was of such disrepute in all the circles he entered formally could go holding the title of Rorian Pokemon professor very long."
"Nothing will come of that. Cypress is too handy for the higher-ups to get sacked this early."
"As between ourselves, yes," said Jake. "But I confess if I were put up to explain in public exactly why a man who is nearly always away from his laboratory, going on some errand who-knows-where, should go on being a Professor of Pokemon, I shouldn't find it altogether easy. The real reasons are the sort that you would call imponderables."
"I don't agree. I shouldn't have the least objection to explaining the real reasons in public. Isn't it important for a man like him to have influential connections with the outer world?"
"Yes. Of course, that's the real point. It would be a little difficult to put in that form at an Association meeting, though!"
"Yes," said Bronze. "I owe Cypress for this opportunity. Some boy named Gladion was actually my chief rival in the selection, my father tells me. Between ourselves, a good many people liked his attributes better than mine. It was Cypress who insisted all through that I was the sort of boy they really wanted. He went around to my parents and ferreted out all about me and you. He took the line that the one thing to consider is the type of boy we need, and be damned to paper qualifications. And I must say he turned out to be right." He made a mock little bow.
Jake was so accustomed to the position that Bronze was the obvious choice for virtually any venture by now that this thought gave him the same curious sensation that a man has when he discovers that his father once very nearly married a different woman.
Then followed some minutes of conversation which was strictly masculine in the old-fashioned sense. Bronze, while preserving a certain sense of superiority, found it indefinably comforting; and though Jake had really the wrong point of view about such things, whatever they talked about, he thought; there was no denying that the one small alteration that he suggested did go to the root of the matter ever so often.
Soon they emerged from the shadow of the line of trees that were around them and stepped into a remembered narrow lane overhung on both sides by jostling hedges of hawthorn, and wild woodbine, trembling fuchsia, and many other bushes and shrubs and so on. Jake felt that he should know the names of them but didn't, all in blossom and bursting to be. This rear entrance to the archeological digs was known as Lady's Way, no one at this place could remember why. As a boy coming home from his studies at the library Bronze would sometimes take this route to see his father, if he was working late, daring himself to it, in spite or because of the fact of never feeling quite at ease here, nervous as he was of the straitness of the way and the menacing look of the foliage that crowded above him.
In a spirit of irresponsibility resurgent from the old days Bronze climbed up an old palisade that blocked the road, beyond which was a single hill, squat like a barrow but wider. The gate was locked, but what did he care? The workers knew him. He saw machines ahead on the muddy space of land before the dark mouth of a cave. One was a hoverdrlll-model, resting still and deactivated beside a deep borehole. It was named, in garish paint on the driver's door, the Burmy. Bronze saw that it was unlocked. What did the operator care? He didn't own the thing, Bronze thought. Maybe, when let alone, it would live up to its name and trip away into the woods and by some rude mechanical magic transform itself into a very real Burmy, a leaf-bodied dryad, and be happy there, haunting the vernal oaks.
To the mouth of the cave they accordingly went. It was surprisingly a very pleasant place for a dark hole. So far the profession of Bronze's mother and father, and the important things that came out of it, have been mostly unmentioned. They were archeologists of the old kind, the earthen type that dug up with their own hands the preserved curiosities that earth and water were kind enough to give them, not wandering in dusty colleges and lurking in cheap eateries, traits of indolence that the scientific class seems presently to be slipping toward. This was a family trade that went back three generations and the dig site was the reason, it is believed, for the original habitation of Mitis Town by civilized Man. A few rough ancestors of Jake had found gold covered in arcane carvings there, and that caught the Association's eye. It produced many notable discoveries in those days, including two very notable discoveries, around which much of the tales of this age of the world are wrapped.
The most controversial business about the whole dig was whether it would run out of profit for such an expense. The purchaser was the Association; they wanted a site for the cavern which would worthily house many remarkable discoveries. The dig was the first-fruit, of that constructive fusion between the state and the laboratory on which so many thoughtful people base their hopes of a better world. It was to be free from almost all the tiresome restraints; "red tape" was the word its supporters used, which has hitherto hampered research in this world. It was also largely free from the restraints of economy, for, as it was argued, a nation which can spend so many millions a day on a war can surely afford a few millions a month on productive research in peacetime. The depths of the cavern proposed for the dig were one which would make a quite noticeable addition to the skyline of Castelia City, if it was inverted. The staff was to be enormous, and their salaries princely. Persistent pressure and endless diplomacy on the part of the Chairman had lured the new dig site away from the attention of Samuel Oak, Professor Rowan, and others. And once it was full-built, then, as everyone felt, things would at last begin to move. Bronze's father had even expressed a doubt whether, eventually, any other dig site could survive as "major" at all.
I suppose the mere fact of being walled in gave the cavern part of its peculiar quality, for when a thing is enclosed, the mind does not willingly regard it as common. As Bronze went forward over the quiet turf he had the sense of being received. Where he was looking was surrounded by a world of shadows, while he walked in mild sunshine. There were no living things out on the plain, except the Mareep that kept the grass around the high flat short with their nibbling and who sometimes raised their blue foolish faces to stare at Bronze. He was quite alone; and it felt more like the loneliness of a very large room in a deserted house, than like any ordinary solitude out of doors.
Right away the two ran into Robert and Lily Tercano. Lily's clothes were rather severe and in colors that were really good on serious aesthetic grounds, clothes that would make it plain to everyone that she was an intelligent adult and not a woman of the chocolate-box variety. Or at least that was an impression that some felt, though really they were old raggedy purchases that did well in cave dust. Because of this preference for practicality, Lily did not know that she was interested in clothes at all.
She was more Logarian than anything else, but there was a strangeness to her. She was tall and fair and flint-eyed, and was said to have descent from the Hisuians of the North, sad and proud, of which rumors have been told in Roria. Indeed of the old blood she was, the modern sire of those Logarian warriors with Hisuian wives that they took, fathering children with them along the coasts as they campaigned in galleries and battlefields and campaigns long ago, driving, driving, driving, with bright swords forged by skilled smiths that dwelt in the mountains, across the sea and forest, thrusting before them the ancient dwellers of the lands. Those days were long forgot, but a few knew some measure of their tales.
Bronze was more like Robert in body but more like Lily in heart. The physical resemblance between father and son is noticeable, and genetics in its merciless way has caught something essential of Robert in Bronze, in the menacing set of the chin, in the stolid expression of the eyes. It should be known that we are speaking here of an inner essence, for the outer man of Robert was handsome still, in a brawny, blue-jawed sort of way, though he was coarsened noticeably by now, in the springtime of his fifth decade.
"Grand day, Bronze," said Robert, and he and his son clasped hand in hand. "You're looking ready for Cypress. He's one of the villains of this whole piece, I'm afraid. At least you've gotten on good terms with him."
"You'll have to take a good look at that man sooner or later, Robert," said Lily. "Here I've been imagining that you would use all your influence with him to try and make the Plan work, getting Bronze his Pokedex, whereas in reality it was Cypress moving the chessboard all along. I wonder what he wants, from the dig site no less. Sometimes he comes over to have a look around."
"Bronze hardly talks to me about archeological business," said Jake abruptly.
"Most good friends never should," said Bronze. "At least, only about the business of this one." He remembered that in his haste he had eaten no breakfast. "We ought to get going. Perhaps Cypress will have some lunch."
"Bread and water," said Robert with a smile. "That's all I've seen him eat, and some foul green mixture. You'll have to wait for your mother to make something. For you, Bronze, we were going to give you a gift of sorts. It'll come after the meeting, of course, but I would have you know now."
...
They walked over the path to the north of the dig site and then south along the bank of the Windy River, past some cottages, then left and eastward at the Arcean church and down the straight road with poplars on one side and the wall of a tangled wood on the other, and so finally down to the gravel drive that led to Cypress's laboratory.
During the whole walk Mr. Tercano talked about the old Hisuian and Logarian legends to Jake. "It's really wonderful," he said, "how the whole thing hangs together, even in a late version like the one we have now. You've noticed how there are two sets of characters in the old myths? There's Rei Berlitz and Adaman the Great and all those people in the center: all very courtly and nothing particularly rough-and-tumble, well, Rorian about them. But then in the background, on the other side of the Hisuians, so to speak, there are all those Logarian people like Berothrim and Targon, who are very Rorian indeed and usually more or less hostile at all time to some creature or person. Mixed up with magic. You remember that odd moment, how Emperor Adunakor set his mind ablaze with visions from the Red and Blue Orbs? It feels all very ancient but mixed."
"What do you mean, sir?" Jake asked.
"Well, wouldn't there have been one section of society that was almost purely Hisuian? People wearing old robes and talking a sort of Hisuian, buried wearing daggers at their sides, something that would sound to us rather like Sinnoian: and fully Arceus-worshipping. But further down country, in the out-of-the-way places, cut off by the forests, there would have been little courts ruled by real old primitive Rorian under-kings, talking something like what we have now, and practicing a certain amount of Pokemon-worshipping religion, removed from the beneficial influence of the Logarians."
"Then I wonder what we are," said Bronze. It was shameful to him that his heart should have missed a beat at the words "buried wearing daggers at their sides."
"That's funny," said Lily. "Remember when I woke you up last night, Robert? I had some odd dreams. There was some Hisuian man that I thought I had seen before, in a painting or picture. He was wearing a dagger, like you said. This young man was very insistent. He kept pointing at me, saying that I had to hide it, or—" She looked at Bronze. "He said that I should give it to you."
"Magic indeed!" said Bronze involuntarily. "I had a similar dream. Hide the Brick, he said. I wonder what this all means. Have you two found some old piece of sacred mortar?" He was speaking with a little relish. "Are the patron spirits of construction materials up in arms because your bulky equipment has disturbed their ancient fane?"
Robert looked in amazement at Bronze's face. "It's not right for mother and son to go around sharing dreams. I hate to shoulder this aside, but we are nearly there. We can psychoanalyze this later."
Cypress managed his business really very well in the space that was given to him. Most of his assistants did not know when they came into the laboratory that there was any question of Cypress's sacking when they saw his output. They saw, of course, from their agenda paper that item Fifteen was "Employer/Employeee Compentey Overview" but as that appeared at almost every Association meeting, they were not very interested. On the other hand, they did see that item One was, "Questions about the Professor." These were not concerned with the proposed sacking and rather Cypress's beliefs.
It is good enough evidence that the clergy uncovered most of Cypress's occult murmurings, putting out a paper that said, closely enough, that the Professor should be sacked and the laboratory redone, "for the taking away of all profane and heathenish superstitions and the deterring of the vulgar sort from all wakes, may games, dancings, mummings, and thoughts of Pokemon-worship, heretofore used about the man called Jonathan Rowell Cypress, and utterly to be renounced and abominated as a gallimaufry of shamanism, gentilism, lewdness and paganistic folly." Not that the Association had by this action renounced its own interest in the place. They hardly heeded the Arcean church, putting down their protests to destroy "progressive and occultist" thoughts among the "the groves and the high places." Bronze remembered that they even sent a few troopers with power to impress the country people and protect Cypress's stately work from the mobs of religious.
The scheme among the church leaders came to nothing in the end; but there had been a bicker between the Rorians and the troops in the very heart of Mitis Town a month ago, and the fabulously learned and saintly Mr. Crow had been escorted away by armed forces, and another Jacobson had been scraped by a Skarmory's steel feather. Bronze knew it would take a brave man who could accuse Cypress either of shamanism or "gentilism" (though he understood the man's fascination with spiritual mysticism); yet the story is that Crow's last words before being shackled and spending a night in jail were "Good sirs, if Cypress who is the Evil Djinn's son is verily a true Chairman's man as ever ate bread, is it not a shame that you, being but the brutes of the government, should be far worse?"
Very few people were allowed into the laboratory. The gate was by and large the only entry: a high wall enclosed the place, the property of which was perhaps a quarter of a mile broad and a mile from east to west. If you came in from the street and went through the town to reach it, the sense of gradual penetration into a holy of holies was very strong. First you went through the road which is dry and gravelly; the forest, florid, but beautiful; Logarian buildings look down on it. Next you must enter a cool tunnel-like passage under the trees, nearly dark at midday.
When you emerged from this tunnel you would find yourself in the property proper: in the midst of the much larger rectangle of the Association-owned land. The grass here looks very green after the aridity of the tunnel and the very white stone of the laboratory's exterior baseboards that rise from the part of it that borders the ground gives the impression of being soft and alive. The Arcean church is not far off: the hoarse, heavy noise of the works of a great and old clock comes to you from somewhere overhead in the south. You went along this path from the gate to the sliding doors, past slabs and urns and busts that Cypress had put installed in the front yard to commemorate dead scientists, and then up shallow steps into the full air-conditioned paradise called the laboratory.
The consoles to your front and right were last-century work: humble, almost domestic in character, with plastiglass windows, almost mossy and grey-covered. You were in a sweet, scientific, sterile world. You found yourself, perhaps, thinking of nanotech or bots. There were no windows straight ahead on the far side of the laboratory; only a row of elms and a blue-painted wall: and here first one became aware of the sound of running water and the cooing of Spearow from some other conservatory entered by a door from the left wall. The street was so far off by now that there were no other noises. As I have said, in the left wall there was a door. It led you into a covered gallery pierced with wide plasteel windows on either side. Looking out through these, you discovered that you were crossing a wide bridge and that a dark brown, dimpled, artificial, and wholly indoor river was flowing under you. Now you were very near your goal of reaching Cypress's office. A wicket at the far end of the bridge brought you out into the archival room, and across from you saw through a few windows the glimpse of green leaves and dark shadows.
Behind a single door with a camera hidden where the peep-hole should have been Cypress was busy following up on articles and writing some nameless treatise on the potential dangers of commercial life-force extraction or the groundbreaking aetheric evolutionary energy or other pseudoscientific humdrum. The whole office was oddly sparse. It had one oak desk, a leather swivel chair, a lamp and some chairs beside the desk, and spruce-paneled walls. Whenever Cypress needed to fetch some paper he yelled for a beleaguered receptionist or stood to find it himself if the woman was being especially touchy. As the four walked in Cypress looked up from his labors with an expressionless face. He was wearing glasses, though Bronze had seen him read just fine without them. Cypress would have looked dandy in pince-nez, if he had any stored away.
The outer office was full of what Bronze had already learned to call Waips, the girls working on Cypress's research team. The men of the force, though very much more numerous, were not so often met with indoors, but Waips were constantly seen flitting to and from wherever Cypress appeared. Far from sharing the masculine characteristics of their chief they were (as Bronze once said) "feminine to the point of imbecility"; small and slight and fluffy and full of giggles. Lily behaved to them as if she were a man, and Cypress addressed them in tones of half-breezy, half-ferocious, gallantry. "Cocktails, Dolly," he would bawl as they entered the outer archives. Bronze knew that Cypress had an oddly copious appetite for women, though the professor never seemed to care for them much outside of the pleasure they could give him. This was at time a hot point of resentment between Robert and Cypress: with what indignities the professor treated his subordinates. Bronze sat down with Jake, but Cypress remained aloof. Robert was grumbling some grievance.
"I see that you came along to have a talk with me," said Cypress. "And Robert, I've told you that you need not worry about all those little nymphs I have on this floor. But I won't go on with you here if you keep complaining."
"That might be very good advice, Jonathan," said Robert, "if I were committed to staying here at all. But I'm not. And from what I've seen I don't like how you run this place, and you know that. I've very nearly made up my mind to go home after the whole ceremony is over. Only I thought I'd just have a talk with Bronze first, to make everything clear."
"Making things clear is the one thing the Association can't stand," replied Cypress. "That's not how they want to run the place. And mind you, the Chairman knows what he's about. It works. You've no idea yet how well it works. As for leaving, you're not superstitious, are you? I am. I don't think it's lucky to leave your son while he's getting his Pokedex. You needn't bother your head about all the women and the duties I perform here. That's not part of your job. You're being put through it at the moment, yes, but if you hold on you'll come out above them, once I've packed up and left in a year or two. All you've got to do is to sit tight. Not one of them is going to be left when we get going, and you'll be spared the annoyance."
"That's just the same line you told me when I asked about your tastes," said Bronze. "But it never seems to do me much good when coming to the point."
"Do you know, Tercano," said Cypress, "I've taken a fancy to you. And it's just as well I have. Because if I hadn't, I'd be disposed to resent that last remark. Perhaps you will find some difficulties on your trip if I get any more cross."
"But what for?"
"There you go again, Bronze!" said Cypress. "You've grumbled about being given nothing to do, and as soon as I suggest a bit of real work in this Pokedex Holding assignment you expect to have the whole plan of campaign told to you before you do it. It doesn't make sense. That's not the way to get on here. The great thing is to do what you're told. If you turn out to be any good you'll soon understand what's going on. But you've got to begin by doing the work of catching the damn Pokemon. You don't seem to realize what we are. We're an army. The sooner you drop all that talk about what you came here to do, the better you'll get on. I'm speaking for your own good, boy. You can write. That's one of the things you're wanted for."
"I've no notion of spending my life writing newspaper articles or Pokemon studies," Bronze said. "And if I had, I'd want to know a good deal more about the politics of the research branch of the Association before I went in for that sort of thing. I've only focused on the electoral."
"Well, my work is strictly non-political," said Cypress, "and so will yours. Don't you understand anything? Isn't it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That's how we get things done. Any opposition to the Science Program is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it's properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us: to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we're non-political. The real power always is."
"I don't believe you can do that," said Jake. "Not with the papers that are read by educated people."
"That shows you're still in the nursery," said Cypress. "Haven't you yet realized that it's the other way round? Why you fool, it's the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believed the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Pokemon farms to be used as fertilizer. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything. Of course, there's a minority of educated like Bronze that actually look a little deeper. You usually don't get them from the public schools. That's what he has going for him."
"As one of the class you mention," said Lily with a smile, "I just don't believe it."
"Good Lord!" said Cypress, "where are your eyes? Look at what the weeklies have got away with! Look at the Weekly Herald. There's a paper for you. They report on everything the way the wind swings. Remember that for ten years the old Arcean tradition was an anti-progress institution? Now since the Arceus-worshippers got control of the publishing company, they went all conservative in about a fortnight. Did they lose a single reader? Don't you see that the educated reader can't stop reading the high-brow weeklies whatever they do? He can't. He's been conditioned."
"Well, all that does is help ruin the region, and the whole human race," said Lily. "And I'm Arcean myself, which is unfortunate when I agree with a bit of what you're saying. But talking about the Association's own propaganda will tank your career."
"No, it won't," said Cypress. "I am not talking in much degree about the Association. I am speaking of other power groups. You could say that I'm even being a proper citizen, and honest citizen, and a public servant, by spreading the word about these dangerous psychological tactics. They are remarkably effective." He smiled, and Bronze had a good feeling that Cypress had used them himself from time to time. Then the confidential tone in which he had been speaking up till now had disappeared and there was a threatening whisper in his voice. Cypress was speaking indistinctly, as if not to the four standing and sitting before him. Bronze heard him growl "Used by you? Did the Lord use Cyrus of Persia?" Bronze wondered what he meant.
Breaking off from his whisperings Cypress reached into a desk cabinet for a chromium box, about the size of a human hand. "Get up, Bronze! We've got to get going. I have lines to say, the tired old guarantees of responsibility and chivalry and cooperation with your Pokemon partner and all that grade-school garbage."
Robert made an attempt to prolong the interview but the professor did not permit this and in a few seconds he was outside the door. "It's about time," said Bronze. "I've never really owned a Pokemon before. Is it any different than rentals?"
"A bit," said Robert. "I cannot, could not explain it to you until the time comes. I could try. But if I was wise, then how should I expect you to know the feeling, until the time comes?"
"Take as long as you need," said Lily, giving Robert a chaste kiss. "We'll be waiting by the lawn green with that 'brick.' You better run along now. Have a nice talk with Cypress. Be careful not to annoy the man. He does so love giving speeches and hates interruptions."