XIX
Taunt
Ashton and Shiri crashed at a cheap motel on the northern outskirts of Goldenrod City and woke up at a fairly decent hour the next morning. They both had a series of phone calls they did not want to make: Ashton had to call home and let his parents know he was going to visit. Shiri had to call her boss and officially quit, and she wanted to call her mother as well.
Grimacing to himself, Ashton wasn't sure who was dreading which call the most. Shiri had never been very happy at her job, he knew, and after so many years without a promotion, she really should have quit by now anyway. But he also knew she was stubborn and felt too pressured to make money to find something else.
Her mother Elise was a force of nature, and Ashton really did admire her. But she and Shiri were on opposite ends of the personality spectrum, and they clashed quite often.
The pair sat back-to-back on the small, slightly musty bed, phones in hand. Shiri took a deep breath, sitting upright, her shoulders squared. She was trying to psych herself up; Ashton had seen her do that hundreds of times over the years they had been friends.
Ashton scrolled through his numerous contacts until he came to the farm's landline number. His parents had gotten a cellphone which they shared some years back, but he never bothered to put their cell number in his phone. He tapped the call button and put the phone to his ear, a few of his earrings clinking against the glass screen.
The phone rang three times before it was picked up. "Kayano Farms, Kerry speaking," spoke his sister, which surprised him.
"Kerry?"
"Yeah," she said as if it should be obvious. "Who's speaking?"
"It's Ashton," he said playfully. "You forgot my voice already?"
"Oh," she responded, her tone flat. "You sound different over the phone."
"What are you doing at the farm?" he asked.
"Working," she said. "Maybe you've heard of it."
Ashton's mouth tightened. "Are Mom and Dad okay?"
"They're fine. Business just picked up."
"That's great."
Awkward pause. Ashton could hear Shiri talking to her boss, explaining that she was not going to return to work.
"What do you want, Ash?" Kerry asked at last.
"I'm in Johto right now," he said, "and I was gonna stop by later today. Wanted to give y'all a heads up."
"Why?" Kerry's deep voice hit like a sack of bricks.
"It's been a while," Ashton answered.
"It's always been a while," she responded. "You want something specific."
Sighing, Ashton said, "Yeah, I'm gonna pick up my team."
Another pause. "Fine. I'll leave them with Phil. You can just go to the front office and get them."
"Front office? Who's Phil?"
"Accountant," Kerry answered.
"Damn, business has really picked up if you had to outsource accounting."
"Well, if you called more than never at all, you'd know Kayano Farms got acquired by Silph Co. last spring."
"What?" Ashton got to his feet, surprise driving him to movement. "Why would Silph Co. need a farm?"
Kerry sighed impatiently. "Why don't you go ask their CEO? I have things to do." And she hung up.
Shiri, having finished her own phone call, looked up at him over her shoulder. Her eyes were tinged with red, as if they were just beginning to gather tears. "What happened?"
Ashton momentarily ignored her question, settling back down on the bed and placing a hand on her shoulder. "You good?"
Shiri blinked back her tears, nodding. "Yeah. Mr. Joseph wasn't happy with me, but I figured he wouldn't be." She let out a breath, making herself smile now. "What's going on with your family?"
"Apparently, Silph Co. bought the farm," Ashton said. Shiri's eyebrows rose. "My family's working the farm for them now and it sounds like they're expanding operations even more."
"Whoa," Shiri said, cocking her head to the side. "That sounds like a boon for your family."
"There's more important things than money," Ashton spat. He didn't say it aloud, but he had a deep sense of foreboding at this news. He did want his family to be successful, but considering everything he had learned about Silph Co.–and about their parent company Pokémon Labs, Inc.–he couldn't help but feel that something was off about this.
"I guess we'll find out when we visit," Shiri said. She took a deep breath, squaring her shoulders. "Okay, I need to call my mom."
Ashton grinned. "Good luck, girl. Tell her I said hello."
"She may not want to hear that after she finds out what we're up to," Shiri said. She turned back around, picking up her phone, and Ashton looked back at his own.
On a whim, he opened his contacts and scrolled to Simon's number. He had no plan to what he'd say to him, but that never stopped Ashton before. He dialed the number and held the phone to his ear.
"The number you have dialed has been disconnected. Please check the number and try again."
Ashton's brow furrowed, not expecting to hear that artificially cheerful robot voice. He checked the contact number. His text messages to Simon were listed there, so it wasn't like he had put the number in wrong.
Ashton turned around and reached over Shiri's shoulder to the landline phone on the nightstand beside her. She wasn't speaking, and Ashton could hear her mother's voice quietly through her phone's earpiece, although he couldn't make out the words. She didn't sound very angry, but the expression on Shiri's face told him otherwise. Shiri's dark eyes watched him as Ashton dialed Simon's number on the landline and put the yellowed receiver to his ear.
"The number you have dialed–"
Ashton set the receiver back in its cradle. Shiri raised an eyebrow at him, then answered something her mother had asked.
Settling back to his side of the bed, Ashton stared at Simon's contact page on his phone screen. His phone line was disconnected. Their only point of contact with him was totally severed. Ashton could bet if they returned to Saffron that moment, they would never find him. Not only was it a city of hundreds of thousands of people, with hundreds of neighborhoods and thousands of alleyways and mysterious little places to hide, but he could have left Saffron altogether.
Simon was gone. That was all Ashton could think. Did that make sense? Did anything that man did make sense? Ashton had no explanation, no way of understanding Simon's actions and movements. He stayed silent, mulling this over, until Shiri hung up her own phone.
She was emotional again, but she rubbed at her eyes and sniffled, pushing it down. She looked at Ashton. "What is it?"
"How's your mom?" Ashton asked.
"Ashton," Shiri said, her tone a warning.
He sighed, held her hand, and told her his discovery. Shiri was stone silent for several moments, then burst forth with all the same thoughts he had been considering: Shiri still had Houndoom, Simon had insisted he wanted to know what they found, Simon wouldn't just abandon his pokémon.
"Something might have happened to him," Shiri said, pacing the small room now.
"There's no way to know now," Ashton insisted. "How can we find him?"
"There has to be a way," Shiri said. She was shaking. Ashton stood up and pulled her into a hug.
She went still against him, her long, skinny arms gripping against his back. She pressed her face into his chest, and he felt a sob rip its way through her body. He gently rubbed her back. "It's okay, Shir," he said quietly as she finally let loose the torrent of emotion she had been fighting for the last half-hour. He rested his chin on the top of her head.
His phone chimed, and, somehow hoping that it could be Simon, Ashton gazed at the screen. It wasn't Simon, but it was the next best thing: an email from one of Ashton's usual contacts, with the subject line Weird video.
Ashton released Shiri and sat back on the bed, clicking the link in the email. It took him to a video hosted on a small forum, the footage low quality, as if it had been recorded from a livestream. Shiri sat beside him and looked over his shoulder as he played the video.
It was a battle in a street–Saffron City, judging by the businesses in the background–and a little sylveon was facing off against a particularly large rhyperior. The trainers weren't in the shot. The audio was a mess, picking up the murmurings of the crowd more than the trainers in the battle, but even through the din, Ashton could make out a familiar Galarian-accented voice that called out, "Shadow Rush."
Shiri gasped but said nothing as the battle unfolded in the video. The sylveon's body tensed up, its eyes went glassy, and then it charged at the rhyperior with a shocking recklessness. Its small, lithe body crumpled against the rhyperior's armored belly, like a car smashing into a brick wall at high speed. Somehow, despite the sylveon being so tiny, the rhyperior completely collapsed, falling back with force which could not have been produced by what appeared to be a simple tackling move.
The sylveon did not look good after that attack. It staggered on the ground, shaking its head over and over. Its movements were erratic, uncertain, and Ashton was certain it must have been horribly injured in the attack. The crowd collectively gasped, with some people cheering or hollering like you find in street battles, but not everyone was lost in the reverie. "What was that?" a feminine voice close to the camera holder asked. "Didn't look right," replied the camera holder. They panned the camera up, and Ashton saw the footage of Simon. He was speaking to a young woman, mostly likely the rhyperior's trainer, and there was a very pretty young man standing with him. Then the video ended abruptly.
Ashton and Shiri were silent for a beat as they processed what they had watched. Ashton saw the timestamp of the post–the previous day, posted in the evening–as well as a caption which read, Saw weird battle live streamed this morning. Anyone heard of an attack like this?
"That had to be a shadow pokemon, right?" Shiri asked.
"Did you see an aura?"
"No," Shiri said, "but maybe that can't be captured on a camera. But the way it was acting…"
Ashton nodded as he scrolled through the responses to the forum post. Most people were baffled by the footage, had never heard of Shadow Rush. Some responses accused the footage of being faked, but one comment stood out: I once saw a pokemon use a move like that when I lived in Orre. That was during the Shadow Pokemon Crisis of 2005.
"Shit," Ashton said, pointing out the comment to Shiri. "This is all connected. Pokemon Labs started in Orre, they came out here, and they're doing this shit. They're making shadow pokemon." He looked at Shiri whose face was ashen, but her eyes were focused, her mind working in double-time. "Girl, this is the major league."
"But Pokemon Labs opposed the group that started the crisis, right?" Shiri asked. "Why are they now the ones creating shadow pokemon?"
"That's the big money question," Ashton said. He sent a quick thanks and request for any additional information to his contact, then put his phone back in his pocket. "I'll start putting feelers out about Pokemon Labs. See what things have passed by without the public eye's notice."
Shiri let out a long exhale and sunk down on the bed. She gazed at her feet, chewing her lip. "Simon made that sylveon do that attack," she murmured after a moment. "It doesn't make any sense. I thought he wanted to help us. Does he not care what's happening to these pokemon?"
"You really can't know what's going on in a man's mind," Ashton said. Shiri scoffed but nodded. "Either way, we can't contact him. Let's not worry about him for now." He held Shiri's hands. "You and I, we got this, girl. Let's go get my team and get started."