21.

Mr. CɅrrington's Proper Introduction


After the jacket came… nothing.

Cyllene sucked in a long, sharp breath, shivering at the way her heart had quickened. Her fingertips dragged against grit scattered in the bottom of the pack. She gripped and tugged at the ratty linen lining. It was stitched and stapled down fast. Nothing hiding beneath. Nothing stowed in a secret pocket.

She tore open the side pouches. Empty. Empty. But that stuffed-looking one on the left side!? Absolutely empty! Cyllene turned the whole pack upside down and shook it, pleading that something arcane and miraculous would come tumbling out into the sand. A glowing potion. A magic dagger or a book of spells. Something that could save Ginter's life. Something that could grant him strength and put that sparkle back into his eyes.

But nothing came. It was just a jacket. The sea was cold and the sky was gray and in three days Kamado was torching Jubilife and the experiment would be erased from history like a galaxy whose stars had all flickered out into oblivion. With a cry of anger, Cyllene picked up the pack full of nothing and tossed it into the nearest bristling white crest of the sea. It washed in again almost immediately after, punching her ankles with its wet, lifeless straps.

She seized the blue jacket in her right hand, rushing over to the dying man and shoving it right under his nose.

"What. The. Hell."

"Hell is what?" Ginter bit.

"This!" she bit back. Her blood seethed. Her throat closed hard and fast around her fear. "This is what you've been hiding! This is your big, world-ending secret! This is what you risked us getting stabbed and burned alive for!"

"Well, you wouldn't… be angry… if-if you hadn't… opened my pack… now would… you?" Ginter wheezed, looking more morose than anything.

"Don't make those your last words, you… you accursed, you terrible shifty old man!"

"Cyllene—"

"Don't say my name, either! Don't even look at me!"

She wanted to turn away, but she couldn't. Ginter's expression was as broken as her own. His whole body slumped at the sight of the jacket. He took it in his shaking hands, then cradled it to his chest, curling up like it had some charm affixed she'd failed to see.

It was an eccentric sort of jacket. Almost like the wind-breaking cardigan of a sea captain, but closer-fitting and far too simple, without buttons to keep it cinched shut. The material was smooth, but carrying the sheen and bulk of leather. What was once a rich, bright ocean blue was now sun-bleached and grayed with age. Three ovoid brass knobs were affixed to each sleeve above the elbow. They'd long tarnished to a dark, muddy green and sagged as they slipped between Ginter's fingers.

Torn gray cuffs. A peaked yet wrinkled gray collar. Thin, faded streaks and blurry smudges everywhere. Bloodstains. Old ones, too, by their dry brown color.

"Cyllene," Ginter croaked again. "I… need you to… get me water. Freshwater. The seawater made me… sick."

"I told you not to drink seawater."

"Help me," he forced, every breath coming out stunted like there was a storm brewing up in his chest.

Ginter's face twisted in pain. He shifted until his back came away from the tree and he could lie down, jacket still pressed over his chest like an uncertain balm. Wherever the old thing came from, he cherished it. Cyllene hauled him up again, scolding about keeping his head upright to breathe. She then took Abra's Poké Ball from the string on her gi and summoned it with a click of the latch.

"Abra, I need water for a shifty old man's last drink. The cleanest and freshest you know of. Quickly, please. And don't be seen."

"You're going… to… to stay with me?"

"You don't talk. Just breathe. Try not to exert yourself."

Ginter nodded, understanding that instruction all too well. He fiddled with the jacket, slipping one pale hand into the left pocket down near the hem, and withdrew something truly mysterious.

It was an orange-colored vial of translucent glass, sealed with a flat white cap and labeled with something Cyllene couldn't read as he gripped it. A single pop of his thumb and the cap came off. He tipped the vial, and into his palm rattled a single pinkish diamond-shaped tablet about the size of his pinky nail.

"You really do have special medicine," Cyllene remarked.

Ginter scowled, covering up the vial and the pill under the jacket.

"Well, I've already seen it. Don't think it's a secret any longer."

"You've seen nothing."

"Quiet."

Abra returned shortly after. It gripped one of Cyllene's tea bowls between the claws of its feet, full to the brim and quivering with water from somewhere.

"Perfect. Thank you, Abra," Cyllene said. Resigned and still shaking, Ginter put the little pill in his mouth and closed his eyes as Cyllene helped him drink. He slurped down the whole first bowl, and then another and another, Abra popping in and out with two or three in its claws each time. When he was satisfied he let out a tiny hiccup and then massaged his temples.

"Will it work?" Cyllene asked. "Will it… keep you alive?"

"Well, it's supposed to dislodge the feeling of a dagger in my chest," Ginter grumbled. "Will you give me one good second to breathe before you start asking a million questions? I swear, these headaches…"

"You shouldn't have beguiled the Captain of the Survey Corps. I intend to find out about everything."

"Why did you open my pack?"

"To get your medicine out."

"Then you… gah… You've opened it before!?"

"No. Just now. You told me your medicine was in there a long time ago. What you didn't tell me was how there's nothing else."

"There used to be more. I destroyed the less important things. Or lost them. My map is gone to the wind."

"It's a jacket, Ginter. With blood all over it! Who cares!?"

He looked at her bitterly. "Everyone in the whole world. And quite a lot, I should add."

"Well, no one told me, and I don't care."

"You should care," Ginter said, smoothing the sleeves and folding it neatly into a square in his lap. "You would care a whole lot more if you knew who this jacket used to belong to."

"That doesn't make any sense."

"Well, I wasn't supposed to have to explain anything. Your confusion is your own fault."

"I shouldn't have to be confused. I deserve to know what could threaten me. And I don't feel threatened looking at that thing."

Ginter scratched his beard, pensive. Cyllene kicked off her sandals and sighed. For a long while, she sat on the sand and dragged her heels through the gravel for agates. Abra floated by her side, both waiting for the old man's body to stop shaking so much and his expression to suggest he was no longer on the brink of death. Wingull circled above, faintly screeching. The spray came up higher, freezing her feet again. Kamado would be wondering where she was. Why she wasn't immediately trying to turn the tides and foil his ultimatum, or at least cooperating with the other officers.

Cold winds didn't care about ultimatums. Nor sand, nor the ocean, nor the soggy, empty pack bouncing up and down in the foam — a pack that was seriously starting to annoy her.

"It's okay," she said, half to the coot and half to herself, if there was any reassurance left in the world. "I'll be okay. If it's come to this… then I'll burn that old jacket for you. I'll make sure no one else sees it. It'll be safe in ashes, and you can pass on peacefully."

"You really want me to die and get it over with, don't you, Captain Survey Spitfire?"

She could feel his smirk burning into the back of her neck. It was like he was relishing her continued ignorance. Holding onto his twisted secrets now more than ever in the wake of discovery. Teasing her. Endlessly beguiling her, just as Beni had warned. Demon of a Ginkgo. Not even wearing his true face.

Or… was he?

"Ginter… if you wanted to go to the Cobalt Coastlands, why didn't you just ask me to teleport you there? Abra and I have been everywhere in Hisui, and we can be there in a blink if needed."

Ginter didn't speak. Just hummed in his throat. She could hear his boots scraping the sand as he tried inching down to try lying on his back again.

"You didn't need to be embarrassed. It was my mission to make you agreeable, remember? An agreeable Guildmaster would be a boon to both of us. Especially if it grants the Ginkgo Guild a better reputation overall. And… you and I are good friends, aren't we? We owe too many favors by now with how many times we've had to save each other's lives. If you were too ill to make the journey back and forth from Ginkgo Landing to restock I would've lent you my help without question."

A shuddering breath. Then a long, hacking cough, punctuated with a groan. Cyllene went back over and sat Ginter up against the tree a third time, wrapping the old jacket around his shoulders and setting his cap back into place.

"There's only one reason why you'd do something so stupid as to try rowing that boat to the Coastlands yourself."

There it was. The twinge at the corner of his lips. The wrinkles in his forehead creased just a little tighter.

Caught. Caught. Caught and guilty.

"It's because you don't know where Ginkgo Landing is at all. Because you're not the Guildmaster. You're not even a merchant."

Ginter scoffed at that. "What are you talking about, woman? I said, 'At your service,' the moment I met you."

"I'm talking about your secret. Your real secret. That you want to tell me. I know you do. It's killing you inside. That's why you'd try to run away from your own deathbed to the Coastlands, where there's nothing but Ghost Pokémon and high, steep cliffs. Come up with all the excuses you want. You're cursed. You're tired. You used to be a very dangerous man, and you're still dangerous, even when the pack is open now and Hisui's doom is a bloodied old jacket, whatever such a jacket is worth."

The old man shuddered and sighed. For a moment, Cyllene wanted to stoke a fire right there on the beach and let him warm his hands. For another moment, she thought he might object to her accusations. But at long last, he raised a hand to the brim of his cap and took it off again, pressing it gently into her cold, wet hands.

"All right," he said. "You're too smart for me, Cyllene. We both know the answer, so we'll both say it on the count of three. Ready?"

She nodded.

"One… two… three."

"You're a pirate."

"I'm a time-traveler."

Silence, then, except for the waves and the Wingull and the sloshing of the pack as it slumped upon loosening sand.

"What is a time-traveler?"

"You think I'm a pirate?"

This Ginter said with the first smile he'd given all morning. His face looked more flushed, closer to its usual puckered cream. She hoped to whatever god ruled the waste that his medicine was working.

"You're a retired pirate," she said. "You're trying to lie low, with that miraculous medicine you stole and whatever evidence of the important man you slew in the land where no one dies of—"

"God, I wish! That would be so much fun! Especially if my ship ran into one of those terrible storms you always read about. I'd love to go sailing and watch my mast catch a stray lightning bolt once in my life."

"Do you have a deathwish, Ginter?"

"Only the same as you, Cyllene."

"You're… still not answering," she told him, crawling over to lean up against the same tree, staring out at the wide gray ocean.

"I am a time-traveler," he said again, slower, watching her contemplate everything and nothing at once. "I traveled through time, from the far future, when Hisui is just a legend we read about in old dusty books at the library. And when I got here… the wake of all that time twisted my body, and I became what you see now. I'm not really this old, and the reason I'm always sick is because my body still thinks I should be twenty-seven, even when my mind has become convinced I'm in my seventies."

Cyllene bristled. She appraised him up and down with those piercing eyes. He knew he sounded crazy. He'd sounded crazy when he tried to pick adamaN's brain, and Laventon's. "Time only flows in one direction," the professor had said.

But it didn't. That wasn't true. Time could flow backwards. It could flow inside itself and under itself and faster and slower and make some things change while other things stayed the same. And even then, Time and Space only existed if one with intelligence was observing them directly.

He knew that somehow.

It was important.

He just couldn't remember why.

"Why did you come here from the future?" Cyllene asked, then.

Ginter blinked.

"You… believe me?"

"Of course I believe you," she said, sounding almost relieved. "You wouldn't lie to my face. I know you stole the dead merchant's clothes to disguise yourself."

"I didn't kill him," Ginter quickly put in.

"Who are you really? Can I know? How did you travel through time? Is it magic? Are you magic? What was that amp-amp-bay spell? How did it work?"

Too many questions at once, and he still felt waterlogged and sick. Ginter pushed a quivering wrinkled finger to her lips.

"I shouldn't be telling you anything," he grumbled. "I won't even be born for another seven hundred years. You're not supposed to know anything about the world I live in. It could change history drastically, and then I might not even exist the way I'm supposed to, if at all. That's why I've been so afraid, and why my own bloodied jacket is so dangerous. Ginter isn't even my real name. I just made it up when I learned this was the uniform of the Ginkgo Guild."

He took the little vial and dropped it into the cap she was holding.

"But, for what it's worth… Captain Cyllene… I want to tell you my real name."

She turned the cap in her hands. The few pills left tinkled in the bottom of the vial.

"Are you sure?"

Ginter (Not-Ginter?) tried to smooth down his hair and beard the best he could, watching her intently as she reached in and picked up the vial. Cyllene pursed her lips. The orange glass was so… light. And shiny and soft, so when she squeezed it in her fingers, there was give.

"It's right there on the vial. The medicine was prescribed specifically for me and my condition… Well, my condition when I was younger… I don't think it's been as effective now that I've turned old. My blood pressure just hates me."

"Well, if there's really an Almighty Sinnoh of Time that doesn't want you saying anything about—"

"Almighty Sinnoh is nonsense. The place I'm from, it means something entirely different."

"The place you're from… Hm…"

Cyllene put the cap on her head and gripped the vial in one hand.

"Abra?"

Her partner popped into existence right over their heads, tail wiggling eagerly.

"The Point, please," she said, and then to Ginter, "It helps if you clench your stomach and watch your head."

Ginter started shying away, but in seconds, there came the cold, alien claws on his forehead and the rushing of breath — air knocked straight out of his lungs as the sand slipped right out from under his legs and whirled off into a faraway void. He blinked rapidly as the light changed angles and the wind flushed heavily against his back. Cyllene had to catch his hands before he fell right into a very different ocean.

They were standing on a cliff — a tall, rocky promontory jutting into a shimmering blue bay, hugged close by two vast, unbroken peninsulas that framed it like a sharp, curving beak.

Far below was a white beach that stretched out for miles, settling between pockmarks of ancient sediment rising out of sand and spray. Trees were much more dense here — greening up islands and rocky ledges like fur. Fir and cypress, littering the earth with their needles. Scattered oaks that twinkled and whispered in the sunlight. Scores of cedar congregating further inland beyond the glacial cuts, where the faint chittering and chirping of Aipom and Starly drifted up over the rhythmic lull of the tide.

Cyllene could tell by the way Ginter trembled now that her theory was correct.

"The hole in the sky doesn't kill everyone," she said. "Jubilife Village survives. The expedition is successful. Hisui is settled, and in the future, people like you understand Pokémon so well you can command their most dangerous powers in battle for fun."

"I… can't confirm anything," the old man stuttered, shivering with cold yet nonetheless letting a smile slip free. "I'm sorry. I wish I could. But I don't know how or why I time-traveled in the first place, and I'm terrified I'm going to mess something up. I'm surprised I've been able to keep up the act this long. Must be my newfound shitty old man instincts… or all that community theater last summer. I was an audience-favorite Prospero."

"But you're a very important person in the future."

He nodded slowly. The sea air tousled his gray hair back into disarray, and the scents of cedar and salt and sand were turning him wistful.

"You live down there in the Coastlands. In a great city. Where you're friends with kings."

"A small but nice city. With one king," Ginter corrected. "Not really a king like you would think of it, but still revered like one. He's sometimes called the False King, or the King of Burning Sand, and he's my best friend in the whole world."

Almost tearfully, he sat down on the edge of the cliff, dangling his hands between his knees, and looked down at the empty Coastlands in spite.

"I don't want to die here. I want to go home. I want to sleep in my own bed, with Luxray licking my feet and about seventeen mini vanilla éclairs stuffed in my gut."

Cyllene wrapped her hands around his chest from behind, gently tugging him backwards until he willingly crawled away from the edge, instead lying down on his side and picking at the grass, another rasping cough growing in his throat.

She looked down at the vial, one by one uncurling her fingers around the paper label stuck to it.

Ginter was not from the future. "Time-travel" wasn't possible. That was ridiculous.

But of course he was a time-traveler. He needed to be. Cyllene wanted someone to slap her. Zisu said she was waiting for a crisis. iridA said she was waiting for adventure. And what was her life now? Three days to save her own future. Three days to free herself from her own mistakes — actually be the Captain she was only pretending to be before.

"It's not about being fearless, you know. You're still allowed to wake up in the morning and say 'What the hell.'"

So what the hell.

Cyllene stooped down and swiped the old, bloodied blue jacket out from underneath Ginter. She pushed her arms through the sleeves, marveling at the sky-blue lining — soft as silk — and let it drape over her, a few sizes too large for either her or the aged hero it supposedly used to belong to. The tarnished green buttons on the sleeves glinted faintly in the sunlight. How bright did they flicker when the brass was new? Sunlit yellow? Catching lightning?

She took in a deep breath, then tore to the very edge of the cliff, belting the name printed on the vial to the wind and the waves.

"VOLKNER!"

She felt him jolt behind her. Whirled around and watched him climb to his knees, all horrified and giddy at once.

Thrilled.

"Volkner?" she asked. "Am I saying it right?"

The stupid grin he gave her then proved every ridiculous thing was true. Forced to keep even his real name a secret from everyone he met. How long had it been since he last heard it spoken aloud?

"Pleased to meet you," he said, then. "I'm Volkner J. Carrington. The Shining, Shocking Star of Sunyshore."

She tossed him his cap, and he caught it in his left hand, just to tip it politely.

"At your service."


i must be dreaming...


~N~

If you've read my other Volkner fic, (so excited I can say that now,) you'll notice his last name is different. This is both because this is not the same universe as in Thunder God and because I've come to know Volkner so much better through writing him as Ginter, and I feel his personality is rich enough here for him to be entirely distinct from that madlad Marcell. (He's just moody in that fic. Good lord. XD)

Published by Syntax-N on FanFiction . Net and by scrivenernoodz on Ao3 September 19th, 2023. Please don't repost. Please do review!