Lolwut updating on a Monday what is this madness

I'm at orientation rn, and yesterday I didn't have enough time to update. So, Monday update. Ywvm.

Lol enjoy.

Looker handed my egg bag back to me when I arrived: we were in Veilstone.

"I'll take these." He took the Adamant and Lustrous Orbs in his (gloved) hands and nodded. "Thank you guys. Go ahead and check in. I need to talk to you in the morning, but get some sleep first."

I checked my poketch – it was 1:30 am. Dawn and Lucas and I walked into the Pokemon Center and checked into an empty room. I'd thawed out from Lucas's snorunt attack, but the overnight nurse at the front desk kept glancing at me funny.

It's my hair, I finally realized. I reached up to touch it – it was uneven, rough, brittle at the burnt ends.

"Wild encounter?" the nurse finally asked.

"No, my monferno," I said. "He was confused," I added, so she wouldn't think I had a feral pokemon on my hands.

While they got settled in the room, I went to the floor's bathroom and ran my burned hand under the tap. I knelt there with my hand in lukewarm water, staring into my reflection, still thinking about what happened after Azelf killed Lucas.

Grief hadn't set in yet – not so much as panic and denial had. But Dawn was still fighting Jupiter at Lake Acuity, so Looker teleported me to Snowpoint. It went badly – she had almost lost already, and my pokemon were in bad shape because I hadn't stopped to heal – but it was especially bad because I couldn't think straight.

When we lost, Jupiter caught Dawn off guard and pulled her to the edge of the cliff. Dawn and I both tried fighting her off, but I was unprepared for the cold besides a thin jacket and thus frozen stiff, and Jupiter was stronger than Dawn. Jupiter threw Dawn off the edge and almost dragged me over too. By the hair.

When I woke up, I headed to the bottom of the cliff and found Dawn. I wrapped the open break on her leg in my jacket and called for help. They treated me for hypothermia, Dawn for broken bones. Her leg was the worst. It was messy and kept healing wrong or getting infected and she was still in the hospital a month later, when I climbed Mount Coronet. But she'd have been dead if not for the snow slowing her fall.

My hand wasn't getting any better. I turned off the faucet and went downstairs to research Veilstone hair salon hours.

At half past ten, I walked out of a salon near the Veilstone Gym. It wasn't the earliest open, but they did offer a nice trainer discount.

When I arrived back at the center, Lucas and Dawn were already starting training. Lucas saw me first, and did a sort of double take. He paused to look, the way you do when you're caught off guard by something pretty.

Don't mind me, I'm just happy.

"It's so cute!" Dawn exclaimed.

I instinctively reached up to touch the ends, which hovered a bit above my shoulders. "Thanks."

"Looker's waiting in the lobby," she went on, withdrawing Alan from the battlefield.

We met up with him and moved to the meteorite park to talk. He looked like he hadn't slept a wink. I questioned him about it.

"Hm? No, I suppose I didn't."

"You've got to look out for your health, too," I said, with the affectation of a stern mother. Looker glanced at me, surprised, and chuckled.

"Well, I had to get the orbs to safety. But we've moved on past that. Lyn, you remember the recording you took in Eterna?"

"Of course."

"The man who sold Jupiter information said that most any related legendary pokemon would speed up the formation of the red chain. Dialga and Palkia's orbs were two, but any other could give Galactic the same boost."

"What else is related, then?" Dawn asked.

Looker grimaced. "Directly, Giratina is the only other. But myths have a tendency to be linked, and there's a whole host of legendary pokemon in the Sinnoh region. Stark Mountain is famously home to a heatran. I need to research it more fully, but be prepared to go through something similar to last night in the future."

Dawn looked nervous, but Lucas's face stayed stoic. I already knew what we were in for, so it wasn't news to me.

"That's all. Lyn, stay a sec."

"See you later," I said to them. They got up and left in the same direction. It struck me as odd how often they were together still, despite being on separate journeys.

"What is it?" I asked him. Looker gestured at a park bench nearby us; we sank onto the seat.

"I brought that up because of other things that happened last time around," he said. "There was a whole host of pokemon disappearances. The legendary guardians of locations throughout Sinnoh kept suddenly vanishing."

I frowned. "So… they're all related?"

"It's possible." Looker pulled a little black book out of his trenchcoat. "I have a rough outline of when they were – I write down pokemon thefts for the IP, but I didn't think these were related to Galactic. The timing could change, but…"

"It's great," I said happily. "Arceus. This is great."

I pulled the diary he'd given me out of my bag. Looker took it and started to copy some of the dates over.

"That's not the only reason I wanted to talk to you," he said seriously.

"What else?"

Looker reached for my arm. I held it out – he flipped it palmside up. My hand was still red from where I'd touched the Adamant Orb.

"First degree," he diagnosed, letting go. He rummaged through his pockets. "Not too bad. Where… Here it is."

It was a small tube of green gel. "You carry aloe vera with you?" I giggled. It was useful but random.

"No, I got it this morning. Take it."

I stopped laughing and accepted the offer. "You… Thanks."

"No problem. How are you doing, other than that?"

I unscrewed the cap and squeezed a little bit of the cool gel onto my burnt hand. "Uh… Well, my other hand is getting better. I'll probably take the bandage off soon."

"That's not what I meant, but I was wondering about that. What happened?"

A nightmare, a death I didn't want to see, Thomas patching me up in more ways than one. "I hit a nightstand while trying to escape a nightmare," I said.

Looker frowned. "That dream again?"

"Yeah. It's not every night anymore."

"You've talked to… Megan, didn't you?"

"A little. Not that much about the incident itself. Everything all together is a lot to tell."

"Mm." He clicked his pen and started double checking the dates he'd written. "I recommend you do. It'll help."

"But it's going away."

"Is it?" He gestured at my still-bandaged hand.

"That's not fair…"

"All's fair in love and war, and this is a little of both."

"A lot of both," I said, glancing in the direction Lucas had gone. "Anyways, enough about my health. Go to sleep."

"What's with the sudden concern about my sleep habits?"

"You look exhausted."

"I'm fine. I'll take a nap after this." Looker finished writing and handed the book to me. It was open to November's page, which I skimmed.

"The Regis?"

"Reportedly disappeared from their respective locations, mid-November, Regigigas a week after the others."

"How are they related?"

"They might not be. My guess is Galactic was grasping at straws. But as long as we know they're going to be stolen, we may as well stop it from happening."

I nodded and flipped back. October was four more thefts. "If they can catch all these legendary pokemon, why would they need the Red Chain?" I wondered.

"Catching and controlling are two different things," Looker explained. "The Red Chain does both, but if the legendaries' presence was all that's needed, then a master ball would work just as well."

"And for the Lake Trio to summon Dialga and Palkia, Galactic needs to control them," I added.

"Exactly."

My eyes fell on a date labeled "Heat Stone, Stark Mountain." October 19th.

"Oh, no," I groaned.

"What is it?"

"October 19th is my birthday."

Looker looked puzzled. "Wasn't it in April?"

"My new birthday. I figured it out with Megan." Speaking of which.

"Have you actually talked to anyone about this?" I asked him.

"About…?"

"Time travel. You keep making sure I'm talking to people, but have you?"

"There's no one I'd contact."

"At all? Anyone back home?"

"IP agents cut off relations," Looker said.

"To prevent personal leverage?"

"Yes indeed."

I leaned back. I wasn't sure how I felt about that. From what I remembered of cutting off everyone but Looker, it kind of sucked. And if there wasn't something like fear motivating you on a personal level to keep your distance… well, I guess there was fear here.

"What relations did you have?" I asked him.

He inhaled and looked at the sky. "Parents," he said. "A younger brother. A few friends. No one particularly close."

"You'll never see them again?"

"Once I retire."

"That's ages away…"

Looker caught my eye, a laugh sparkling in his. "Thanks for the compliment, but we retire before sixty-five in the IP. Maybe forty, mid-forties. If we want we can stay for HQ work, but there's already enough of them."

"Still! What if… Hell, you're in a dangerous position. What if… what if you didn't… not that you… but if…"

He noticed. "What?"

I exhaled. "I keep thinking about the Adamant Orb. The time orb attacked a girl who went against the natural flow of time. We might be screwed."

"Time travel's been done before," Looker said. "Celebi-related events, et cetera. They end up fine. I wouldn't worry too much about it."

"I guess…"

Looker reached out and, in a gesture unlike him, awkwardly patted my shoulder. "Worst case scenario, we're in this together."

I wanted to laugh at his sudden move. Instead, I smiled and said, "Okay. Thanks. It's nothing, probably. But thanks."

Looker and I chatted a little more, but I was determined to make him go to sleep. So eventually he left. I won. Hah.

I called Megan again. A lot had happened in the last two days (day and night, really, but it felt like two days), so I figured I'd bring her up to speed. The last she knew was that I was going to go find Liana, in Jubilife, so I told her about not finding my shinx, and about last night's Celestic adventure.

"That… all happened very quickly," she commented in surprise.

I laughed. "Sounds about right. Sometimes being a trainer is slow, other times five things happen in a day. But it's never boring."

My mood dropped quickly as I remembered how quickly other things had happened. "Can I… sorry, this is just me talking about my problems a lot… can I tell you what happened that day?"

"What day?"

"The day Lucas died."

"Sure."

You're welcome, Looker, I thought.

It wasn't practiced, like the last story I'd told her. I still knew it fairly well because I'd relived it at night so many times. It went from the bomb while we were in Canalave, to Lake Verity, to Lucas at Lake Valor, to Dawn at Lake Acuity. I mentioned my hair.

"So that's why you got a haircut."

"Yup. Unfortunately."

"It's cute though. I like it."

I did a light hair flip. "Thanks."

"Do you get nightmares still?"

"Not so much. This happened last time I did," I said, raising my now unbandaged but still slightly yellow-purple hand.

"Are you… Are you okay with things right now?"

"Like…?" I kind of did get what she meant.

"…like the aftermath of it all."

"Yeah. I cut everyone off and spent almost a month in Celestic. Things have been better since Lucas came back to life."

"So," she said after a short pause, "your old pokemon… are you giving up on them entirely? Or…"

"I'm not going back to look for Liana," I said almost easily. "If I find her somehow that's great… Unlikely though. I might find my starly at Lake Valor, eevee in Hearthome, or sneasel somewhere in Mount Coronet. But I'm not looking for them so actively anymore."

"I hope you find them, still," Megan said.

Exhale. "Yeah," I said. "Me too."

Leave a review if you're reading :) I want to get something out of this too lol