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Brimber City

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The magnetic train ride to Brimber had been strange for Bronze. Jake would hardly speak and kept glancing out the window to the desiccated savanna. The two of them had eaten some breakfast purchased in isolated taverns, behind hedges; they would change trains frequently and sometimes traveled short distances on foot. All the time Bronze felt that he was being watched, not by the three angels, but by foes. He made no complaint, but was becoming weary. It was good to sit and think about the Plan for a while.

Was the Plan that Bronze and his family had devised to be called good? The reader cannot judge, not knowing its contents. There does exist a very respectable theological and political school that does not hate the Plan. I do not belong to it. To me, it is but the stupefied product of a thousand and half years of death and birth. That such an eagle like Bronze Tercano should emerge from such an egg is not unexpected.

The Plan was this. Bronze would win the Pokemon League and become Champion. With the people's support, being of the old Rorian stock, he would institute many reforms and become the Chairman. From this point of high power one can logically proceed: the gradual abolition of democratic processes, a strengthening of ancient ideology, the rebirth of Hisuian-Logarian common law, the reinstituion of the position of Logarian Emperor, with Bronze bearing divine right on his crupper. It was the use of the Championship for virtue. It has no doubt occurred to the reader that Bronze is the heir to the ancient emperorship, the rulers of the South-kingdom descended from glory into the dark wild and now glory again. How he knew of his own station and where that line came from is not yet answered here.

That was all that really matters in the Plan. It was the restoration of antiquity in the brewing. Though it did succeed, it reached its goal strangely. Thus Bronze said after all was done, "So does progress proceed. There is no such thing as a bad tool for that workman."

Forty years ago, a rambler who had ventured into that unknown country of the Plains of Brimber and who had mounted to the dry savannah by the northern way, reached a point where it might be said that civilization disappeared. It was no longer solitude, for there were many Pokemon; it was not the country, for there were few trees and scorched and blackened bushes; it was not the outback, for the fields were so fertile from the volcanic ashes that spread in long streaks like highways, and the grass grew in them; it was not a farmland, the volcano was too perilous. What was it, then? It was an inhabited spot where there was no one; it was a desert place where there was someone; it was a realm of the wilderness of Roria, more wild at night than the forest, more gloomy by day than a cemetery.

The volcano was dormant. From its south-west and south-eastern faces there sprouted two great lines of slag-hills, covered in long sickly grass, mixed with flowers colored the sort of green that reminds a traveler of an absinthe drinker's bile. When Men came to settle in that place they built a city south of the volcano, nested between those two rows of mounds. The magnetic train halted in the waste flats beyond the city limits and Bronze and Jake left for the Gym.

Bronze, if he risked himself outside the four decrepit walls of the city hall, if he consented even to pass beyond the volcano, after leaving on his right a garden protected by high walls; then a field in which tan-bark mills rose like gigantic beaver huts; then an enclosure encumbered with timber, with a heap of stumps, sawdust, and shavings, on which stood a large dog, barking; then a long, low, utterly dilapidated wall, with a little black door in mourning, laden with mosses, which were covered with flowers in the spring; then, in the most deserted spot, a frightful and decrepit building, on which ran the inscription in large letters: POST NO BILLS, this daring boy would have reached little known latitudes at the corner of the city. There, near a small hutment, and between two garden walls, there could be seen, at that epoch, a mean building, which, at the first glance, seemed as small as a thatched hovel, and which was, in reality, as large as a cathedral. It presented its side and gable to the public road; hence its apparent diminutiveness. Nearly the whole of the Gym was hidden. Only the door and one window could be seen.

The door led to a very vast edifice that resembled a shed that had been converted into a house. This edifice had, for its intestinal tube, a long corridor, on which opened to right and left sorts of compartments of varied dimensions which were inhabitable under stress of circumstances, and rather more like stalls than cells. These chambers received their light from the vague waste grounds in the neighborhood.

The place was unpleasant. In addition to the gloomy thoughts that assailed one there, one was conscious of being between the geographical location of Rosecover City, a glimpse of whose green plains could be seen, and Silvent, whose outskirts one was fairly touching; that is to say, between the madness of women and the madness of men. As far as the eye could see, one could perceive nothing but the abattoirs, the city wall, and the fronts of a few factories, resembling barracks or monasteries; everywhere about stood hovels, rubbish, ancient walls blackened like cerecloths, new white walls like winding-sheets; everywhere parallel rows of trees, buildings erected on a line, flat constructions, long, cold rows, and the melancholy sadness of right angles. Not an unevenness of the ground, not a caprice in the architecture, not a fold. The ensemble was glacial, regular, and hideous. Nothing oppresses the heart like symmetry. It is because symmetry is ennui, and ennui is at the very foundation of grief. Despair yawns. Something more terrible than a hell where one suffers may be imagined, and that is a hell where one is bored. If such a hell existed, that bit of Brimber City might have formed the entrance to it.

Bronze noticed as he walked down the entranceway the enormous size of the spiders. He hated spiders but did not fear them. Electabuzz walked beside him, sending little sparks from its fingers that killed the ugly things by the dozen. He would have burnt the place with Charmander if he could risk starting a conflagration. Soon he realized that the grotesque environment was tending to a pleasant transformation. For the next ten yards the hallway became cleaner and more orderly, which led to a door, and beyond that door was a waiting room the same caliber of quality that the Silvent Gym had.

There were several other trainers sitting about. At the reception desk was a superannuated woman of the kind that remains a marvel to medical experts: speaking without halt, writing without tremor, and possessing the faculties of movement belong to a fifty-year-old. There was a holographic sign over her head that said: GYM LEADER ABSENT.

"Ma'am, where has Leader Sebastian gone?" said Bronze. "When will he return?"

"Possibly you have heard a rumor of it?" said the woman. "There were new lodgers who came into the town. They said they obtained permits to build near the volcano. When they left this morning Sebastian went to ask them for their papers. He has not returned and I cannot tell when he might."

"No, I did not hear of it. What were the arrival's names?"

"I don't know, Henry, or some name of that sort."

"And who is this Mr. Henry?"

The old woman gazed at him with her little polecat eyes, and answered: "A gentleman of property, like yourself. His servants were dressed in black."

Perhaps she had no ulterior meaning. Bronze thought he perceived one. "Could you think of any reason why his person could be in danger?"

"He suffers from seizures and fits. It is possible that he has collapsed. If you wish to go and look for him, I will commend you."

"Which way did he go?"

"Down Maud Road. There's a trail that leads to the building site from there."

When Bronze turned to leave he gave the woman a hundred-unit bill that he had rolled up in his pocket. In spite of all the possible dangers of such an operation he deemed that the faster he left the city after quickly defeating Sebastian the safer he could be. He and Jake left and carefully scrutinized all sides of Maud Road. They saw no one. The street appeared to be absolutely deserted. It is true that a person can conceal himself behind trees.

...

It was well into the late portions of the day when Bronze and Jake came to Brimber Volcano. He looked back, and then he looked up, and he was amazed to see how far his effort had brought him. The Mountain standing ominous and alone had looked taller from far away than it was. Bronze saw now that it was less lofty than the high passes of the Frostveil Mountains. The confused and tumbled shoulders of its great base rose for maybe a thousand feet above the plain, and above them was reared half as high again its tall central cone, like a vast oast or chimney capped with a jagged crater. They were standing in a grassy field enclosed by two lines of hills, and before them in the eastern face of the volcano was a black opening arched with graven stone, from which came fumes and shadow. As he looked into the darkness he saw plainly the beginnings of a path that led into the mountain.

The path was not put there for the purposes of Bronze. He did not know it, but he was looking at the Old Logarian Road from Brimber City to the Naryana, the Chambers of Fire. In ancient times there was a great tower where Brimber City had stood, and out from the tower's huge eastern gate it came over a deep abyss by a vast bridge of iron, and then passing into the hills it ran for a league by the same path that Bronze had taken, and so reached a long sloping causeway that led up on to the Mountain's eastern side. The causeway was gone but the tunnel into the heart of the fires remained. The old path had once turned and encircled all the Mountain's wide girth from south to north, climbing at last high in the upper cone, all the way up toward the reeking summit, to a dark entrance that gazed north where the Last Emperor Tar-Castamir would sometimes perceive with the Red and Blue Orbs. Often blocked or destroyed by the tumults of the Mountain's furnaces, always that road was repaired and cleared again by the labors of countless slaves under the lash of the Logathrim. The long years and many fires of the volcano had worn it much, but some spell was upon it, so that it did not vanish or cave-in.

Strewn about the plain were signs of both the works of Old Logaria and the men who had passed into the area in the morning. On one hand, some busts standing on pillars, ash-covered and soot-blackened, stood in rows on the northern and southern borders of the narrow pass. On the other were metal tools and jerry cans, along with other stations and machines that had been abandoned in some unknown haste. Bronze sent out both his Pokemon. "We ought to clasp hands to that we aren't separated," he said. "Hold a flashlight in the other. Jake, see if you can hold the right wall."

They plunged into the dark. It was not as easy a way to take as it had looked at first. By fortune the tunnels inside were not blocked by fires or tumults. Yet in many places the path had crumbled away or was crossed by gaping rents. After delving westwards for some time it bent back upon itself at a sharp angle and went eastward for a space. There at the bend it was cut deep through a crag of old weathered stone once long ago vomited from the Mountain's furnaces. Bronze turned the bend; and even as he did so, out of the corner of his eye, he had a glimpse of something falling from the crag, like a small piece of black stone that had toppled off as he passed.

At the end of that pass they came to a spiral staircase. It was a slave-built Logarian thing that went up to the magma-forges, where the Logathrim tempered their steel and imbued it with runes of power in the heat of the floes of fire. They went up and up. Eventually the staircase halted. Fearfully he took a few uncertain steps in the dark, and then all at once there came a flash of red that leaped upward, and smote the high black roof. Then Bronze saw in the light of the fire and flashlights that they was in a long cave or tunnel that bored into the Mountain's smoking cone. But only a short way ahead its floor and the walls on either side were cloven by a great fissure, out of which the red glare came, now leaping up, now dying down into darkness; and all the while far below there was a rumor and trouble as of great engines throbbing and laboring.

In the light at the brink of the chasm, at the very cracks of doom, several figures stood huddled and black against the glare. They turned and saw the two. Then Bronze felt like something like a huge weight had struck him in the back, and he and Jake were pressed downward as a dark shape reared up behind them.

...

"Ho!" a voice cried, awfully raspy. It was like chains being dragged through muddy gravel. "You two down there, you rats! Stay there and don't squeak, or Aegislash will deal with you. D'you hear?"

They made no answer.

"All right," growled the voice. "But I'll come and have a look at you all the same, and see what you're up to."

But the speaker did not come to them. Rather there was a commotion, and a small shape clambering on the ground beside the standing figures. Then Bronze heard the hideous voice speaking again.

"You lie quiet, or you'll pay for it! You've not got long to live in peace, I guess; but if you don't want the fun to begin right now, keep your trap shut, see? There's a reminder for you! Weston, give him a lesson." There was a sound like iron boots against flesh.

At that rage blazed in Bronze's heart to a sudden fury. Until then he had been impotent to move under the power of Aegislash, but Charmander had struck it from behind, emerging from the shadows of the entrance-portal to deal a crucial blow. Jake scrambled for his flashlight. Bronze sprang up, ran, and drew his dagger. Something was lying on the floor by the chasm under the red glow of the roof, but over it a black shape was straddled. It raised a boot a second time, but the blow never fell.

With a cry Bronze leapt across the floor, blade in hand. The man wheeled round, but before he could make a move Bronze slashed his left hand from its arm. It was an unconscious action. Howling with pain and fear but desperate the huge grunt charged head-down at him. Bronze's next blow went wide, and thrown off his balance he fell backwards, clutching at the man as he stumbled over him. Before he could scramble up he heard a cry and a sound like hissing. The man in his wild haste had tripped on the ground and fallen straight into the flowing magma and was dissolved instantly. The organic material caused the molten stuff to make a sizable plume of lava that drove the others away, giving Bronze an extra second of cover. He gave no more thought to it. The figure huddled and bound on the floor was Sebastian.

"Grab him, damn it!" the leader yelled. Bronze lashed out with his dagger but felt the same unbreakable psychic force again. Charmander had been defeated and Aegislash's will was now wholly bent on restraining the two. He was rendered immobile again. There was a fear that he would be beaten for resisting, but the leader did not order it.

The head went eye to eye with the boy. This was Admin Harry of the Eclipse Alliance, though his cover was Commander Henry of Team Rocket. He and Emrett are allies but opposites. Never did Arceus, who is fond of antitheses, make a more striking contrast, a more extraordinary comparison. On one side, precision, foresight, geometry, prudence, an assured victory, reserves spared, with an obstinate coolness, an imperturbable method, strategy, which takes advantage of the follies of logic, tactics, which preserve the equilibrium of arguments, carnage at the mouth, executed according to rule, words regulated, watch in hand, nothing voluntarily left to chance, the ancient classic calculating lord, absolute regularity; on the other with Harry, intuition, divination, military oddity, superhuman instinct, a flaming glance, an indescribable something which gazes like an eagle, and which strikes like the lightning, a prodigious art in disdainful impetuosity, all the mysteries of a profound soul, associated with destiny. Emrett was the mouthpiece of Team Eclipse, Harry was its grasping hands, and on this occasion, for this particular scheme, speech was vanquished by the need for strength.

He looked like his brother Eric, though his red hair was longer, and some gel had been mixed within to make it jut sharply upward in points. The entirety of his face below the cheek-bones was obscured by a respirator, which was the check on his injuries and agony. Without he could not breathe. Only the threat of its removal suffered to blanch his hair. His original vocal cords were gone, so the Hood had given him synthetic ones, hence the gravel.

The mask was designed by the Hood, and was not supposed to be comfortable. It pinched horribly and was itchy. It could also never be taken off save by force. What was underneath the mask on Harry's lower face one could only guess: dozens of hideous sores, a somber intermingling of raw facial bones, withered furrows of skin like a raisin.

"I wasn't expecting this," said Harry. "But what! I am glad to see you, boy. You look familiar."

"That's odd," said Bronze. "I don't remember us ever meeting."

"Whatever that may mean," said Harry, "you killed one of my men. We officers of Team Rocket look after our own, so I cannot let you or your companion live. I understand you will feel afraid and angry at what I am saying here. My superiors say that those are chemical reactions. It would be better for you to be completely rational with what I am about to tell you."

"Why do you want to tell me anything?"

"Egad, man! I respect you. You are half my age and killed a man twice your size with only a knife. The hand wasn't much of a loss; he could have gotten a new and better one back at our headquarters. His life, a loyal one, cannot be replaced. You cannot move and your Pokemon are defeated. There is no way you can escape. Why should I not lecture? Can you guess what we are doing?"

He had an idea and hoped it was true. The marvelous cleverness of any scheme these men could make would not avail them in that case. It has not been mentioned that under Brimber Volcano sleeps the god Groudon, Lord of Earth. He came there two years ago.

...

Groudon has might equal to Kyogre and a little less than Celebi. His lordship is over all the substances of which Earth is made. Regigigas is his vassal. In the beginning he wrought much in fellowship with Rayquaza and Kyogre, and the fashioning of all lands was his labor. He is a smith and a master of all crafts, and he delights in works of skill, however small, as much as in the mighty building of old. His are the gems that lie deep in the Earth and the gold that is fair in the hand, no less than the walls of the mountains and the basins of the sea. The Rock and Ground types learned most of him, and he was ever their friend. The Enemy was jealous of him, for Groudon was most like himself in thought and in powers; and there was long strife between them, in which the Enemy ever marred or undid the works of Groudon, and Groudon grew weary in repairing the tumults and disorders of the Dark Lord. Both, also, desired to make things of their own that should be new and unthought of by others, and delighted in the praise of their skill. But Groudon remained faithful to Arceus and submitted all that he did to His will; and he did not envy the works of others, but sought and gave counsel. Whereas the Enemy spent his spirit in envy and hate, until at last he could make nothing save in mockery of the thought of others, and all their works he destroyed if he could.

"We want Groudon," said Harry. "The masters won't tell me why. But we are going to get him."

"Then maybe you should listen to me," said Bronze. "You cannot control Groudon. He is his own master. Even if you had the Red Orb, which has been destroyed, it would not serve you long. The very desire for it would allow Groudon's power to eat away at your very mind. Your masters have sent you here to die."

"Then see this calculation!" said Harry. "The following proportions have been established: Loss of men: fourteen percent; expenditure: three million units."

"What does that mean?" said Sebastian.

"Quiet!" said Harry. "It means nothing you could understand. And boy, you say the Red Orb was lost. That one was. But the Orbs are made from the primal energy that flowed into the Earth from the Ancient East in days long ago. The master of that energy gathers it to him. What if we could extract that?"

There was a machine in that hot and acrid room. It was four feet tall and covered in unstained steel, blinking with odd lights and adorned with little mechanical knobs and levers. It was really only esoteric machinery. Into a hatch Henry reached, after reading several measurements, and behold! In his gloved hands was a Red Orb.

A sort of visionary mist was about the sphere. The inside of it was filled with a molten fire, with many flickering lights revolving. When Bronze saw the faint stirring within he could not look away. The frightful catastrophes of the inner earth danced before his eyes inside that ruby shell; the magma floes shift, lines of igneous rock undulate as they melt, the flare of lava, the tremendous interchange of subterranean bombs, the death rattles of landslides, the vague distant clamor of earthquakes, shadows of underground heats and slimes, which then no longer existed; yet they still all clashed together, and the ravines were shifted, and the lands changed. Desperately Bronze tried to think of the sea, but that thought was pale and cold in his mind and gave no relief in the stifling volcano. The rocks quiver, there was fury in the land, the might of tectonic bellowings, all those terrible boomings, confusedly crowned with whirlwinds of molten rock engaged in exterminating each other. He had come to the heart of the power of Groudon and the forges of his ancient might, greatest on Earth, and all other enemy powers were subdued.

"The Red Orb!" said Harry. "This is what our device, our machine of primal accretion, has accomplished. Our laboratories had this plan long in the making. But I must be quick, before the power of Groudon overthrows my mind!" He laughed long and high. Stepping toward the brink, where the lava churned, he held the Orb between his hands and gave a word of command in Old Logarian, the most ancient of all the Rorian tongues, spoken by the sons of the First Emperor who came out of the northern seas:

...

"Gru-lue, a-na-ku mku-ra-as, sar kis-s at sarru rabu, sarru dan-nu s ar babili; sar mat Lugeri u Hikkadi, sar kib-ra-a-ti ir-bit-tim! Mar mka-Kyurbi, sarruri rabu sar alu, an-s a-an mar mari, mku-ra-as ARCS, kir-s Sarrurui Rabu; sar alu an-s a-an ARCS ELYON, m-s i-is Exx-ia, sarru rabu; sarru, alu anshan!"

...

Which is reckoned:

...

"Groudon, the king of the world, the great king, the powerful king, king of Logaria and Hisui, king of the four quarters of the world! Brother of Kyogre, the lesser king of water, you king of the realm of the ground, son of Arceus, who is the True King; by the grace of Arceus Elyon, awaken lord of Earth, you great king; king, awaken now!"

...

The next shaking hurled Bronze to the ground. Harry sank into a gloom as noisome vapors rose around him. The lava ran faster and bubbled like broth, rising a moment in a wide place amid the lake of fire as it crested over a horned head. The heat that emitted from that emergent body was too strong for endurance; it would have killed them all had its fury not risen to the roof and begun to work away at the solid stone. For the lord of Earth himself, the Earthshaker, the Blacksmith of Heaven, the god of fire was with them: the angel that dwells nearest to the Earth's core. Groudon, whom men call Vulcan and Hephaestus.

Groudon sharply reared up. Only its head and the top of a long scaly neck could be seen rising from the igneous broth, which cast an angular cavern that danced of the wall of the cavern roof. That its red hide was wrought of the stuff of earth none doubted, for the torrents of magma broke upon it, but from what stock was not known. His two eyes were like scourges of fire, but in the middle of them was a black pupil, triple-lidded with membrane. Bronze saw that there was still a thin covering over Groudon's eyes. He was not yet entirely awake. It was held in the old days that only when the third eyelid opened could Groudon rage unhindered by body or mind, quite unlike even the largest of Pokemon-kind, whom Groudon far surpassed in size and power.

Never had Groudon been wholly filled with the evil will and power of the Dark Lord, but he had been often deceived; in modern days he had descended from the angelic to the earthly, a fell beast, strong, agile, fierce, and cunning, but harder than stone. Unlike Kyogre, unless all the other's will and wrath was bent toward it, he could endure the heats of the earth. Harry stood with the Red Orb held high, speaking words given to him from the Hood.

"Mighty Groudon, the Great Djinn has returned. Great gifts will be given to whosoever deigns to join him, rewards beyond imagining. What you never did in the old days might be done now. Swear fealty, for the power of the Mbelekoro, the Elder King, the Lord of the Earth, and the Red Orb compels thee."

Then Groudon spoke. Never had he done so in living memory, save through the bodies of those his Willpower had enslaved. Not once during his long battle with Kyogre in Sootpolis City during the glory days of Ruby and Sapphire had he uttered one word. Were the gods-in-exile more sentient than science had given account for? These misgivings would grow among the Pokedex Holders. Perhaps there was nothing to be understood.

"There are reputations that are deceptive," said Groudon, and the noise of that voice went through the stone and shook the mountain. "Follow the Evil Djinn? Bah! That rascal feeds on marauding, pecking at Arceus's periphery but always getting beaten. I do not know why he, far great in other directions besides combat, has always been so popular. Don't go on! His messengers have always caused trouble. I've been awakened too many times for my own good in the past twenty years: yes, I do count the passing of the centuries. You've tried to wake me up again. Go away now, before the power of the land decides to engulf you."

"But war is at hand, and you must pick the side that is winning," said Harry. He strained to use the Red Orb but found it growing dull. The internal lightnings stopped.

"There has always been war between Arceus and the Evil Djinn," yawned Groudon. "I have taken little part in it. Never will I ally with the Dark Lord, but I am not yet at open war with him. Go back to your huts!"

"Attack!" cried Harry. "Spare nothing!" His Aegislash went flying through the air and dealt Groudon a blow on the head, which served only to chip its blade. No strength of Man or Pokemon could have dealt lasting damage to that hide. It was no more useful than if Harry's men had shot at Groudon little stones from slings with handles of yew and strings of twine.

For that Groudon roared such a blast of hot air that the host of grunts flew over the ground. They and their Pokemon were swept up in the god's glory. The Red Orb was forced from Harry and rolled along the floor to where it fell into the lava. An instant it remained coherent: no more. The Orb cracked and then its disparate shards dissolved. That was the end of the Orb for Groudon crafted by the art of Team Eclipse, and never again would there be any Red Orb on Earth till the End of Days.

...

Bronze had fallen to a faint when he was startled by Sebastian's voice. This person was dressed in a rusty cassock and carried in his hand a wide-brimmed black hat such as priests wear in many parts of the continent. He was a very big man and the cassock perhaps made him look bigger. He was clean-shaven, revealing a large face with heavy and complicated folds in it, and he walked with his head a little bowed. Bronze decided that he was a simple soul, probably an obscure member of some religious order who happened to be an authority on some even more obscure theology. And it was to Bronze rather odious to see him standing in the glance of those two preying eyes of Groudon.

"Who are you, boy?" said Sebastian. "Where are you from? Would you be from the south? You don't look like a northerner. No, more likely a Middleman from Rosecove. Brave of you to try and fight."

"Where did the others go?" Bronze stood and looked at Groudon. He noticed that the lava plumes had quieted and the heat lessened greatly enough for the cave to be comfortable warm. "What did you do to them, sir?"

"Don't squeak!" said Groudon. "You need not be frightened like a rabbit, though to me you rather look like one. Their machine is destroyed and their servants are scattered or dead. The leader has fled. Some were crushed by fallen rocks. What might you be needing, Adamson?"

What occurred next was a dialogue between mortals and a god. Groudon's speech was actually filled with more curious references and odd aphorisms than I have bothered to transcribe, being at a loss during the time I first heard them. Even though I understand some of them better now, it would take too long to explain; if I did, this chapter would stretch over twenty thousand words. The speeches between the gods, which are strange and not strange, and Men, which are very strange to each other but not to the gods, have an odd quality of their own, and considering the violence which was told of above the peaceful tone of the debate between the four is, admittedly, an alien transition but not an irrational one if it is defended and given justice in the context of angelic psychology.

"Needing?" said Jake. "A warm bath and a good dinner. Can you provide that?"

"Not unless you can eat stone," said Groudon, "or bath in fire. But in my experience the secondborn Children of Arceus cannot do those things."

"No, we can't," said Bronze.

"Yes," said Groudon. "Let me think about how I might provide some food. Boy, what are you called?"

"The animal I am is called Man," said Bronze, in the proper mode for speaking with gods, "and therefore we are called Humans. But my own name is Bronze."

"Bronze?" said Groudon. "Would you be Bronze Tercano? If so, come and eat! I have heard of you. Perhaps all of you are hungry."

Bronze was. Groudon rose a little higher from the lava with strange bulky movements and began going to and fro about the cave, attended by its huge ogre shadow. He brought them, somehow, the usual vegetable foods of Earth, and strong drink, with the very welcome addition of a smooth brown substance which revealed itself to nose, eye and palate, in defiance of all probability, as cheese. Groudon's claws were now marvelously cool, though only minutes before they had been dipped in melted stone, so that the food did not melt. Bronze asked what it was and how it got here.

Groudon began to explain painfully how the female of some animals secreted a fluid for the nourishment of its young, and would have gone on to describe the whole process of milking and cheese-making, if Bronze had not interrupted him. "Yes, yes," he said. "We do the same outside. What is the creature you use?"

"It is a black beast with a long white snout. It feeds on the roots that grow in the upper soils. The young ones of their people who are not yet fit for much else drive smaller Pokemon down there in the mornings and follow them while they feed; then before night they dig them back under the earth and put them in the caves."

"Drilbur?" said Sebastian.

"Yes, that is what the Arceus-children call them," said Groudon.

"Then this cheese is from Drilbur milk?" asked Sebastian.

"No, I do not think so," said Groudon. "That would be a forbidden thing, a violation of the Laws. Pardon me, but did not our Fair Lord Arceus make a prohibition on the Men eating the Pokemon's bodies, and only rarely would it be permitted, and in certain situations? They took the cheese from some milker's storehouse and gave it me."

"So Drilbur brought all that to you!" said Jake. "We must not have seen them when your large self covered our view."

"I have seen them at that very work," said Sebastian. "Even as I came to see what these ruffians were doing here the Drilbur were moving smaller creatures about, under the soil. They tear up the grass."

"Why should they not?" Groudon said.

"Do you rule the Drilbur?"

"Yes," said Groudon. "But Arceus also rules them."

"And who rules you?"

"Arceus. I said that I had not sided with Him because I wanted to deceive the wicked men."

"But you know more than the Drilbur, so why should you not rule them?"

"The Drilbur know nothing except for singing and digging and making things come out of the ground. You know already that Arceus rules all Pokemon and everything in Imbar." Imbar was the word he used for Earth.

"I don't understand," said Jake. "I've heard that angels and gods can't be touched. But if you're one of them, and not just a Pokemon, then whya re you here, I mean, here physically?"

"We Elohim, we spirits, do not die," said Groudon, "and we do not breed. We are the ones of the kind who were put into Earth to rule it when Earth was made, before the Men and Pokemon. Not all our bodies are the same. The ones you are thinking of, Son of Earth, are the military caste. Their bodies are not like mine, nor yours; it is hard to see and the light goes through it."

"So they can choose if they are physical or not?"

"No, only if they are among the greatest spirits that ever came to Earth. The ones without flesh still have bodies. They have a great many kinds of bodies that you cannot see. Every animal's eyes see some things but not others. Do you not know of many kinds of states, like solid, liquid, and gas? That is not the way to say it. Body is movement. If it is at one speed, you smell something; if at another, you hear a sound; if at another, you see a sight; if at another, you neither see nor hear nor smell nor know the body in any way. But mark this, Small One, that the two ends meet."

"What do you mean?"

"If movement is faster, then that which moves is more, nearly in two places at once."

"True," said Bronze.

"But if the movement were faster still (it is difficult, for you do not know many words of Deep Heaven) you see that if you made it faster and faster, in the end the moving thing would be in all places at once, Small One."

"I think I see that."

"Well, then, that is the thing at the top of all bodies: so fast that it is at rest, so truly body that it has ceased being body at all. But we will not talk of that. Start from where you are, Small One. The swiftest thing that touches your senses is light. You do not truly see light, you only see slower things lit by it, so that for you light is on the edge, the last thing you know before things become too swift for you. But the body of a god is a movement swift as light; you may say our bodies are made of light, but not of that which is light for the gods. Our 'light' is a swifter movement which for you is nothing at all; and what you call light is for us a thing like water, a visible thing, a thing we can touch and bathe in, even a dark thing when not illumined by the swifter. And what you call firm things, flesh and earth, seems to us thinner, and harder to see, than our light, and more like clouds, and nearly nothing. To us the light is a thin, half-real body that can go through walls and rocks; to ourselves we go through them because we are solid and firm and they are like a cloud. That is how angels move through walls in the Unseen World. And what is true light to us and fills the heaven, so that we will plunge into the rays of the sun to refresh ourselves from it, is to you the black nothing in the sky at night. These things are not strange, Small One, though they are beyond your senses."

"Well, that was fruitful," said Sebastian. "But I must be going, sir. I feel tremblings in my body. How shall I take my medicine?"

"My servants will carry you," said Groudon. "You are too small a one to make the journey yourself and I will gladly go to lengths to get you to safety. The others in your life should not have let you be sent this way. They do not seem to know from looking at an animal what sort of lungs or nerves it has and what it can do. It is just like a Drilbur. If you died on the field before the mountain would have made a poem about the gallant man and how the sky grew black and the cold stars shone and he journeyed on and journeyed on, and they would have put in a fine speech for you to say as you were dying from seizures, and all this would seem to them just as good as if they had used a little forethought and saved your life by stealing some medicine for you. They are Pokemon, what else could you expect?

"As a religious man, I quite like the way you are speaking about death," said Sebastian stiffly.

"They are right not to fear it, Small One, but they do not seem to look at it reasonably as part of the very nature of mortal bodies, and therefore often avoidable at times when they would never see how to avoid it. For example, this has saved the life of many a man, but a Drilbur would never have thought to use it."

Groudon showed Sebastian a flask with a tube attached to it, and, at the end of the tube, a cup, obviously an apparatus for administering oxygen to oneself. It was filled with special herbs of virtue that the Drilbur had harvested. "Use it on your return journey as you have need, Small One," said Groudon. "And close it up when you do not."

Sebastian judged that the journey back would be endurable with this extra oxygen. "I remember when you came to this little land two years ago, Groudon, and how we were amazed at the lights and fires from the mountain. But I have never spoken with you."

"It is not to honor you that I speak," said Groudon, "but it is for the Southstar, the Heir to Southernesse, the Emperor of Logaria. He is among us. I told you that I had been expecting Bronze Tercano. The earth speaks of him, the sky tells his coming, and the waters carry the rumor of his journey far off to the lands of the gods, wherever they still dwell. From what Arceus has told me, I begin to see that there are gods who go down into your air, Bronze, and into the very stronghold of the Dark Lord, He-who-has-returned, to protect you from his eyes; your person is not so fast shut against the angels as you might think."

"Arceus is doing things?" said Jake. "Then why could Arceus have not prevented any of the bad things that have happened? Where is He?"

"Where He always is," said Groudon. "You Men have rejected Arceus, and have made yourselves into little Arceuses. You cannot help it, not right now. There must be rule, yet how can creatures rule themselves? Beasts must be ruled by the Children and the Children of Arceus by gods and gods by Arceus. You have no gods. You call the gods Pokemon and the Pokemon gods, worshipping the created things instead of the Creator and the sub-creators. You are like one trying to lift himself by his own hair, or one trying to see over a whole country when he is on a level with it, like a female trying to beget young on herself."

"That wisdom is welcome, sir," said Bronze politely. "Is there anything else Arceus wants us to know?"

"You may wonder at this, Little Emperor," said Groudon, "for you will have never heard anything like it. Arceus has several things. You are adjudged to take the Gym Badge from Sebastian."

"Yes, that was why we came to Brimber," said Bronze. "Sebastian, we came here to look for you. Your receptionist was worried you had suffered a fit. We had intended to challenge you after all was over."

"Have the badge now!" cried Sebastian. "You have done enough to warrant it." He gave Bronze a badge with a heart of ruby and a black obsidian body like a teardrop. The genetic verification was done and Bronze now possessed another one of the eight badges. "I will give it to you out of love for Arceus," Sebastian continued. "But what is this Emperor?"

"That remains to be seen," said Bronze. "Thank you, though. I will make those men rue the day they wounded you."

"The other news from Arceus is to go to Rosecove," said Groudon. "I see in your heart that you planned to do this. But here is the strangeness in the voice of the Original One. It is commanded there that you will add to your company of two the first girl your age that calls upon the name of Arceus, and your two will become a three, and she will travel and do battle with you. But you are commanded, Bronze Southstar, not to have sexual relations with her. I am a god and have never experienced the sweet humiliation of biology, yet I think this command might become difficult. Because of the Enemy's great victory in the Garden the path of abstinence has ever since been very hard to follow."

"I don't think I need to worry very much," said Bronze, and he felt a little offended. As if the only suitable purpose for a girl was sex! Groudon would surely have no difficulty understanding that. Was not the earth god's wife Zygarde, after all? He should be able to understand the goodness of women's counsel. Bronze had to concede that even against his own wisdom, Arceus was very right. They did not some woman. The impulsive clashes between him and Jake and others, all hormonally fueled, were not balanced by his counsel alone. He was making very rash choices. A wiser man would not have rushed headlong into the volcano path without first thinking a bit longer. There was a common feminine sense that Bronze and Jake did not have. He could not just go around asking for pretty girls to join their band; no, it would be too dangerous. But the first that called upon Arceus? Such was the portent they had been given.

"The Enemy will make it difficult," added Groudon ominously. "I am sure you have many more questions, but that is all that I am allowed to tell you. It is also all that I know. You will encounter more danger in Rosecove. I also have one last gift to give to Jake. I see that he has no Pokemon and is not very useful."

"No, I don't," said Jake. "I've tried to make it a business to catch one but we never seem to have much time."

"Then I will give you a Pokemon of fire," said Groudon. "It rejoices my heart to have to cleaved to you. You are likely to meet more mighty foes on the path: give battle to them."

At this Groudon clacked his huge, shiny teeth. Coming as it seemed from nowhere a small firey ball tumbled from a hollow in the ceiling and landed before Jake. It unfurled itself and it was shown that the creature was a Monferno. It looked doubtfully for a moment at Jake, but then Groudon spoke some words to it in the tongue of Deep Heaven. Instantly the shadow of the wild animal was gone. The Pokemon's tail relaxed, its body slouched, though until Jake put it into a Poke Ball it kept making a chittering noise: a faint, continual agitation of shrill sound, hardly a sound at all, if you attended to it, yet impossible to ignore.

"May the warmth of your cloak bear you where the sun sails and the moon walks," said Bronze to Groudon. That is the polite thing to say in Roria when leaving an honored person.

"But not too much farther," said Groudon, and he sank beneath the lava again. Bronze would never see him again in the flesh in that world.

...

Sebastian returned safely to the Gym and was able to live out the remainder of the Great War there. Immediately Bronze and Jake boarded the train outbound for Rosecove, leaving the dry fields behind. Neither would ever visit it again nor have much inclination to. Groudon would not like to be woken up again for tea and chat.

"The land is full of the Alliance's plots," said Bronze in a hushed voice. "But why Groudon? They had a good thing going with their ongoing takeover. Why risk the danger of capturing that god? It doesn't line up."

"The Alliance?" said Jake. "They looked like Team Rocket to me."

"The signs were all there," said Bronze. "Did you hear him say that his masters regard emotions as solely chemical reactions, negative byproducts of an evolutionary past best controlled? The references to the Great Djinn, patron demon of all things esoteric? We were lucky enough that those ones did not recognize us; once it becomes clear to the High Command that they missed a chance to capture me, grunts will be swarming like ants over Brimber, only to find that we have already gone. They are disguised but not to the discerning eye. If we are to expect more trouble in Rosecove, then it will be because of their punitive plans."

"I still had more questions for Groudon," said Jake gloomily. "It's not every day you get to talk to a god." He would have many more chances.