"See you later," I said as I got up from the table.

"Where are you going?"

I looked blankly at Thomas. "Dude. I'm going to find Liana while you do your business. Remember?"

"Oh, right. See you later."

Shaking my head, I bused my dishes, dropped my egg off at the front desk, and headed out of Jubilife.

I started off the day with Faith. The instant she was out and in the wild, she started… I think the word is frolicking? She was hovering in midair, as a haunter, but her bouncy, carefree manner was so two-year-old-humanesque that frolicking seemed the only appropriate word to describe it.

We explored the route, occasionally running into wild pokemon who were more interested in battling than I was. We battled them anyways, Faith usually taking them out with one or two nightshade attacks. In between, she flitted about the meadows, occasionally stopping at a patch of grass or trees and yelling out something like "Live oak!" or "Creosote!" or various other words that sounded vaguely like plant names, but which I didn't recognize.

It was a terrible place to be training a ghost type. The route between Sandgem and Jubilife is full of normal types, so Faith wasn't getting any pain tolerance training. Which she probably needed. I ought to get them to battle each other more. Battling Thomas was okay, but it was more like target practice because Thomas didn't attack back. I'm off track. Anyway.

Sometime around 11 I heard a pop at my side, and looked down to find Promise outside his pokeball. He looked stunned, but after realizing what had happened, a wide grin split his face.

I swear. You think you've seen everything as a trainer. Then you see your normally stoic buizel doing flips and springing all over the place in celebration.

Promise went back in his pokeball for another hour. In this time, I spotted a group of shinx from a short distance away. Quickly, I searched for Faith – she was exploring a patch of tall grass about fifty feet to my right.

"Faith," I hissed. "Faith, over here."

She didn't seem to hear me.

"Faith, please?"

Faith sank into the ground. Dammit Faith. I reached behind me to pull out another pokeball.

Suddenly there was an explosion of shinx. Something dark came rocketing out of the ground in the middle of them. Several went flying. A little bit of chaos later, Faith sat (okay, hovered) in the middle of the unconscious shinx. She knew what she was doing after all.

"Wow, nice. Check if any of their tails have a five-pointed star."

One had a three-pointed star, actually, but there were no fives. We headed deeper into the grasslands.

At noon I exchanged Faith for Promise. The shinxes weren't anything he couldn't handle, even with the type disadvantage.

Promise stuck by me, occasionally checking something out a little farther away, but always staying within twenty feet of me. We ran into two lone shinxes, both of which had four-pointed stars on their tails. One ran away and the other attacked; I had Promise knock the latter down with a watergun.

We took a lunch break at one. Trust and Promise had a chat while Faith wandered around.

I wondered if I was spending too much time looking for Liana. I still had Quasar and Jirra to hunt down, and Emmy to locate in Hearthome. But at the same time, I wasn't willing to give up on her. She was the pokemon I'd had for the longest, since just a day after Bree.

Anyways.

We kept going. For a long time we didn't run into any pokemon besides a few sentrets, and I was getting discouraged, when suddenly a five-pointed star flashed through the foliage.

Liana. Oh my lord.

"Prom, watergun!"

His water stream cut through the grass. I heard a yowl, and the shinx sprang at Promise. Fast. She always had been.

"Sonic boom!"

He shook her off and knocked her down with sonic boom, and of course then I saw that it was a male shinx. Black hind paws. Flipping hell.

"Just… sonic boom," I said, not really caring but not really wanting the shinx to retaliate. Promise dealt with him easily from there.

This. Was. Bothering. Me. So. Much. Like. You don't even understand. If we hadn't been walking directionally, I'd have been pacing.

There was so little I could do. There wasn't any way I could ensure Liana was there. There wasn't any way to know flat-out where she was. She'd just been out wandering when I caught her the first time. Oh gee, I thought to myself, would you look at that? It's a shinx. Hey, I should catch this shinx. Wow, what a great damn idea Evelyn.

For crying out loud, she hadn't even been near a landmark. She'd been in the middle of the damned grass. She could have been wandering for hours. There was nothing to go by to find her and it was driving me insane. All I could do was walk in circles around this Arceusforsaken route which I was starting to hate, and beat up the pokemon that were arrogant enough to try fighting me, and in the–

*Sonic boom!*

I jumped. Promise was suddenly in a scuffle with a– a zangoose? Those weren't around here often. Promise fought with his fists and tail; the zangoose fought with deadly claws. A yowl from I-couldn't-tell-who. This wasn't the kind of fight a trainer could step into. Too fast for words to direct.

Promise did end up on top. The zangoose slunk off battered and bruised, but Promise was torn in multiple places.

I looked around for a clue to what happened. "Did he sneak up on us?" I asked Promise.

He nodded. A drop of blood was slithering down his cheek.

I took my backpack off to find potions and bandages. Zangoose could get pretty territorial. I was lucky Promise had responded so fast; unless there was a seviper around, zangoose tended to attack the human first.

I wiped the cut on Prom's face with an antiseptic wipe.

Lucky Prom was there to save the day.

"Promise," I said, a connection forming in my head, "You weren't mad at yourself after the Eterna HQ, were you?"

The look on his face said I was on the right track. Mad probably wasn't the right word, but I was more interested in the root cause.

"Because… I'm sorry if I'm just making assumptions and this is all wrong… was it because you couldn't come out and fight?"

He fidgeted a little, but nodded slowly. Arceus. No wonder he'd stuck by me so much after I landed in the hospital. No wonder he'd been trying so hard to get out of his pokeball lately. When Trust and I were knocked out in the HQ, he was the last one conscious, and he was stuck inside it. The poor fool wanted to protect me.

(Which was half "for crying out loud, I can protect myself," and half really sweet.)

"I named you exactly right, didn't I?" I murmured.

It was mid-afternoon when I gave Promise a break – almost regretfully, although I knew he could get out of his pokeball if he needed to – and brought out Trust. The sun was starting to get low already, and I was starting to panic a little. Just walking faster, that's all.

"How about," I said to Trust, "you just blaze everything to the ground? Pokemon out of hiding, easy picking."

He looked at me funny.

"You got a better idea? We're almost at Sandgem."

We hit Sandgem, stopped for a snack (and to run Promise through the heal machine), and turned around to look around the route a second time. No pokemon stood a chance against Trust in battle. We met a young girl trainer with a cacnea and a gulpin. Two-hit fight.

The sun slowly set and anxiety steadily rose. We found more shinxes during this time, and not a single one was Liana (I know because Trust beat every one up, and we looked at them all. Most of them attacked first. Don't worry about it.).

"Trust?"

He looked up.

"What if we can't find her?" I felt weak. "What are we gonna do?"

He patted my leg but couldn't reassure me past that. Language barrier. I kept voicing my concerns to him anyway, as the sun sank lower and the world grew darker. We should have headed back to Jubilife by now, but I wasn't done looking. I wasn't giving up before we found Liana.

When the last sliver of sun slid over the hills, I flopped over in the grass. I wasn't giving up. But.

"She's not here, is she," I said. Trust sat beside me.

"I mean, it's trainer season. 'Tis the season to catchemall and probably stop after six or so and then train them up so that someday I'll be battling a random-ass trainer and I'll react the way I did with Owen, just freeze up and get dizzy and let whoever's out get beat up by one of my old best friends."

He patted my shoulder. I sat up and pulled him into my arms. He smelled like dust and roses. I breathed deeply so I wouldn't cry.

"Let's… let's keep going a little longer."

His tailflame gave us a little light, although he had to keep dimming it so he wouldn't burn the grassland to the ground (as convenient as it would be). We stopped running into pokemon entirely. They went to sleep or something.

The last straw was when I tripped over my own damned foot and landed hard on my bruised hand.

I took a deep breath and screamed, "FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!"

"I thought you didn't swear in public?"

I looked up, surprised. Then I let my face fall back into the dust. "Go away, I don't need rescuing right now."

"Excellent, then you don't need to be mad at me."

He crouched down and held out a hand to help me up. I pushed myself to my elbows and looked him in the eye.

"I'm not done."

"You're still looking? It's past eight."

"I can't give up."

"Evelyn, you've been at this all day."

"She's out there still."

"Come back in the morning," Thomas said. "You've been out all day. Come back tomorrow."

"I'm not giving up."

"That's not what this is. You need to take care of yourself too. Come on. Let's go back to Jubilife."

He held his hand out again. I took it.

He took better care of me than he should have. I took a shower, and when I got back, he'd brought soup and bread up from downstairs. He helped me rewrap my hand. He'd put my pokemon through the heal machine, had them wash up and fed them too. He'd retrieved my egg from being babysat; the nurse recognized him as my friend. Maybe this counted as rescuing me again, but I didn't think of that until later. There was something else bothering me too much.

"I'm going back tomorrow morning," I said, exhausted.

"Evelyn."

I ate some soup. Drank? Ate, I think. Does it depend on how thick the soup is?

"Have you considered… it's a pokemon you met once and liked. That happens sometimes. It's okay to move on."

I shook my head. "Met once and liked" wasn't accurate at all.

"No, really. And it wasn't for nothing. You must have learned something about pokemon, if your life was impacted enough by this shinx for–"

"Luxray."

"Hm?"

I realized what I'd just said. "Luxray. Liana was my luxray,"

"I know you're still focused on building your team, but–"

"No." I shook my head vigorously. "I'm not… I mean, I am, but that's not what I mean. Liana was my luxray, back when… Back when I was a trainer the first time."

Thomas was silent. "I started out as a trainer in September, with a piplup. Bree. I caught a shinx on my second day out. Liana. The growlithe in Eterna Forest was Owen. Plus an eevee and starly and sneasel. Thomas, I time traveled, from next February to early September. That's why I keep slipping up and saying weird things, that's why I hate not being a strong trainer anymore, that's why six random pokemon across the region mean so much to me."

"You – how?"

"Looker. IP agent. They made an app."

"Why?"

"We didn't beat Team Galactic. I couldn't take them alone."

"What about Lucas and Dawn? Weren't they involved?"

"Both incapacitated by Galactic. Dawn was in the hospital. Lucas was dead."

He ran a hand through his hair, looking baffled. "It's just… What on earth. I've heard of time travel happening before, so that doesn't surprise me so much. Just, that Galactic got so far. And you were at the center of the fight against them."

I stirred my soup and took a sip – a bite – fuck it.

"But there's a difference between perseverance and pigheadedness."

"Hm?"

"What does your head say?"

"About what."

"Do you think, logically, that you're going to find the shinx again?"

"Yeah."

He raised an eyebrow.

"…well, no, but I have to."

"You could also take the pokemon you have now and befriend them like you did the old ones. It's a new era in your life. It's between that and spending too much time searching for all those needles in haystacks."

Debatably, there were only four needles, max, that I could find and train anymore. And only two spots on my team, unless I rotated them out. Today as a whole didn't make the hunting look good.

Thomas's voice softened. "I know it's hard letting go."

I tensed. "Really?" I said stonily.

"I'm still doing so myself."

I remembered April and loosened up. "Right. Sorry."

"But in the long run, it's for the best."

I nodded contemplatively. Thomas stood. "I'm off to shower now."

"Okay."

He put together a bundle of clothes and walked to the door.

"Thomas?" I said when he was halfway out.

He looked back in. "Yeah?"

"Thanks." I gestured at the soup.

"Sure." The way he said it made it sound like an "of course."

He closed the door.

Come back in the morning, he'd said. You've been out all day. Come back tomorrow.

"Tomorrow," I whispered, "and tomorrow, and tomorrow."

I didn't want to leave my friends behind, but there was a lot of circumstance involved. It wasn't a distance thing, like with me and Megan and Tricia. Them, I could talk to often. My pokemon were worlds away, lives away. Bree and Owen were under training as Kenna and Alan; everyone else was with another trainer or off in the wild living their life. None of them remembered me.

We'd meant a lot to each other in the time I had with them. They'd had an impact on my life… perhaps that had to be enough.

I was still making up my mind to definitely head towards Veilstone when a knock on the door made the decision for me.

"It's unlocked."

It wasn't Thomas, like I'd thought. Looker came in, looking frazzled.

"What's going on?" I said, standing up.

"We got it wrong," he said, walking up to me. "The orbs in Hearthome were decoys. Celestic Town has the real ones, and it's crawling with grunts. We need you."

Mm how's that for a melodramatic ending.

At least you don't have to worry about next chapter being a lot of rambling like the last two lmao