I had seen Galactic hurt Lucas before.
They had attacked him with their pokemon and their own hands.
They had turned Azelf into a lethal weapon to lift Lucas into the air–
And I still couldn't think about what happened without triggering a painful flashback, and at the time I lost hope. I panicked and sank into despair.
I was panicking a bit now.
But I had seen shit happen to Lucas, and this time, I was also fucking mad.
Found LT at HQ. Can set diversion at warehouses.
I've got diversion covered. Meet me woods east of HQ.
"What's your diversion?" Looker asked with a frown as I approached. "And where's Dawn?"
"Maylene's doing an 'inspection' of the warehouses," I said. "And Dawn is being a limp noodle while recovering from loss."
"You brought a gym leader into this?"
"She's just doing an inspection. Nothing wrong with that."
"But the coincidence of Lucas disappearing at the same time as…"
"I've got that worked out. Don't worry."
Looker was incredulous. "I know you don't like my diversions, but–"
"Can we cut the crap? I know you have a disguise for me, and I'm not in the mood to waste time."
He hesitated, but he pointed into the forest. I walked in and found the clothes behind a tree.
"What's your plan?" Looker asked after I emerged, fully dressed in a Galactic grunt uniform.
I told him, and exchanged Hope for a natu.
"I really hope I'm right in trusting you on this," Looker said tiredly.
"Yeah, well. The last time you said you trusted me, we wound up in September instead of February, so."
"Lyn."
"There's always gonna be a risk. Optimism. Let's hope for the best."
Looker and I came here a week after the Lake Valor incident. Galactic had vacated the building, which was good because I was in no state to fight them.
"It looks like this one would be their primary HQ," he said as we walked through. "The Eterna building didn't have living facilities like this one. Which means – oh."
We had entered a large room, headed by a raised podium. It looked designed for speeches and accommodating as many grunts as possible.
I saw Cyrus standing at the top of the room, proclaiming, "Once the Lake Trio is under our control, there is nothing we cannot do! We are one step from creating our new world!"
And the hall full of grunts cheered, thinking of their schemes for a grand new world coming to fruition, not of a member of the Lake Trio killing a sixteen-year-old boy, crushing his insides and letting his blood drip onto the cave floor–
"Lyn?"
The room cleared. No one was there but him and me. I'd fallen into a hunched-up ball. Looker knelt beside me.
"Come on," he said, gently but also trying to get us going. "There's something on the other side." He helped me back up.
It was a warp tile, beyond which lay a few other rooms, and then a long walkway bordered on either side by cylindrical glass tanks. Holding cells of sorts. Past there was the room where we found out the Lake Trio had been held before Galactic evacuated, but I didn't bother remembering past this point because I knew where Lucas was.
I teleported in. Looker had sort of stuck the natu through a skylight ahead of time to imprint the location. It worked better than I could've hoped, because I was already on the third floor.
There was a bit of warping back and forth involved (those things are a pain in the ass), but eventually I got to the fourth floor. No grunts crossed paths with me; they must have been at the warehouses.
On the fourth floor was a closed door with a keycard lock. I flipped to the notepad app on my poketch, where I kept the passcodes I'd obtained last time around. I punched one into the keypad below and went through.
The hall was empty again. Or so I thought at first. Then I heard the voices at the top of the chamber, on the dais.
"…can't cause trouble. Just for a few days, to scare them." Saturn, I think? I thought the admins (especially the admins) would've been at the warehouses. That was the point of the diversion.
"He doesn't seem that scared to me." This one was definitely Jupiter. "He was surprised for sure when he woke up, but he's been pretty calm since."
"Jupiter, no."
"What?" she said innocently.
"You can't just torture every prisoner we take."
"I haven't gotten to torture anyone."
"You already killed his friend's pokemon."
"Not the same." Jupiter sighed.
Go die in a hole, I thought, creeping through the chamber underneath the dais.
"He hasn't done enough to warrant such a response." The irony of the admin responsible for Lucas's death now defending him was not lost on me.
"Those joltiks ate all the energy we stole from the Windworks!"
"Jupiter, we're an electric company. We only need to stage a few power outages to power the bomb ourselves."
"Then why the hell–"
"It would've been nice to have half as many blackouts. Less suspicious."
I made it to the warp tile at this point.
"Shh. Is someone in here?"
I warped quickly.
So sabotaging their Windworks collection hadn't done much… Unfortunate. At least I knew Lucas was okay now.
Moving faster, I reached the hall I remembered within minutes. The glass cylinders were dimly lit in crystal green light. All were empty.
I frowned. That wasn't right. He definitely should have been here. Unless…
I took off down the corridor. They didn't put him in the Lake Trio room, did they?
They did.
The Lake Trio room is the one set aside for when Galactic eventually (theoretically) captures the Trio. The contraptions for imprisoning them are detachable from the room (I'd seen one at Lake Valor) and designed to pin them down physically and with energy.
Lucas was in the corner. His hands and feet were tied and strung to the machine behind him. Duct tape covered his mouth. Someone had removed his jacket and scarf and dumped them on the ground beside him. He was awake and looked unhurt, except for a bruise on his eyebrow where the grunt had hit him.
He seemed so small.
"Hey," I said softly. He nodded a greeting.
I prioritized his hands, because I was too embarrassed to touch his face. The instant his hands were free, he shifted to work the knots at his ankles, and then the tape. Bracelets of violet skin circled his wrists. My heart ached with empathy, relief, and still-throbbing anger, which was subsiding now.
"Okay," I said with a sigh of relief. "We need to get to the landing pad."
The idea was to stage a transport, so that Maylene's inspection would look unrelated. A grunt moving Lucas from Veilstone to wherever, and on the way there something would destroy the helicopter. After we'd teleported out, of course. It would have looked more realistic if we'd had another grunt (say, a limp noodle) around.
I draped Lucas's jacket over his shoulders so that his hands were hidden somewhere behind his back. I held one arm – loosely, but with a tense hand to make it look tight – and we set a brisk pace out of there.
It took a great deal of self-control not to simply burst into a smile. I'd done it. I'd literally rescued Lucas from the bad guys. I hadn't been this relieved since the day I found out Lucas was alive again.
I checked his face to see how he was doing. His expression had remained consistently stony and emotionless.
"So… You're okay, then?"
"Yeah."
Emotionless, but in a dark way. I had no idea why.
"You don't… seem it," I said. He didn't answer.
We made it through the hall and the next room before almost literally running into Saturn and Jupiter. For crying out loud.
"Whoa!" Jupiter did a double take. "Where are you going with the prisoner?"
My stomach twisted when she called him that. First of all, he has a name. Second of all, you'll be seeing a lot of us, so you better get to know his name.
Out loud, I said, "Transporting him to Eterna, sir! Commander Cyrus's orders."
Jupiter walked up with slow steps, her boots clicking on the tiled floor. She gazed into Lucas's face – which remained emotionless – and when she didn't get a response, she reached up to backhand him. I clenched my teeth and told myself to let it happen.
I didn't have to worry. She didn't smack him.
She smacked me.
Unprepared, I recoiled hard. In a second my wig fell too far askew to work as a disguise.
"Nice try. Evelyn. I remember your face." Jupiter picked a pokeball and threw it; her skuntank.
"Funny," I said, "I'd expected you to block out your memories of getting trashed in battle that badly."
I nudged a pokeball into Lucas's hands, beneath his coat.
"If I remember correctly, the last time we saw each other, you had to flee the scene," Jupiter retorted.
"Had to, chose to–" I pushed three fingertips into Lucas's back. "–they're different things." I pulled a finger away, leaving two. "What matters is we're here now, and this time–" One finger remaining. "–we don't have to argue about who goes first." Zero.
"Wha–"
Lucas's kadabra and the IP's natu materialized.
"Skuntank, night slash!"
She targeted the natu first, then Lucas's kadabra; the latter and his trainer made it out faster. The natu squeaked and fell, gashes across his face.
"Again! Target her!"
Promise rocketed out of his pokeball so fast, he had barely materialized when he reached Skuntank. Neither of them were ready for the collision, but after they crashed headlong into each other, Skuntank raked his claws up Promise's back.
"Bui!"
"Faith, assist him! Confuse ray! Prom, watergun!"
"Toxicroak, poison jab!" Saturn said, adding his pokemon to the fray.
Faith immersed herself in shadows, Prom shot himself out of Skuntank's range, Toxicroak jabbed at where Faith was and missed. A flashing light came out of the ground and smacked Skuntank.
"Ugh. Skuntank, toxic!"
Wait, poison! Shit!
"Prom, dodge!"
He evaded the sludge but not Toxicroak's pursuit. Skuntank staggered around confused and shot more poison in a random direction. Saturn dodged it. Faith popped up to use nightshade and disappeared again.
Then Lucas returned.
"Dude! Get out of here!" What the actual fuck?
"Here," he said, shoving a pokeball into my hands. "Backup teleporter."
"Okay, great, thanks. Go. Prom, return." I withdrew my battered buizel from the fray. "Faith, return." Her pokeball didn't respond. She was still in the shadows.
"Shoot. Kadabra, shadow ball!"
Lucas's pokemon drew the attention away from us. "What are you doing?! Get out of here!"
"Get your pokemon first!"
"I'm working on it! Lucas!"
I shoved him out of the way of a stream of poison sludge. "Faith! I need you!"
She popped up out of the ground, finally. I got the pokemon – natu – out of the pokeball. "Return! Lucas, let's go!"
"Not so fast! Poison jab–"
"Psybeam!"
"Lucas!"
His kadabra teleported to him, and we both teleported out of there.
The instant we rematerialized, I was shouting. "What were you doing?! Jumping in the battle when we were trying to leave?!"
"You were unprotected–"
"So you figured you'd just swoop in? The whole point of that was to get you out of there–"
"You're making a big deal of this–"
"This is a big deal!"
"Guys, whoa, calm down!" Looker had found us, and now stood between us, holding Hope. "What happened?"
"Lucas thought the battle looked fun, so he joined in–"
"I keep saying you weren't protected–"
"The whole reason I was there was to rescue you–"
"I didn't need rescuing. They were going to release me."
"Great, so you trust frigging Team Galactic–"
EARSPLITTING PRRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIIIII!
"Aaaaaarghhhhh!"
Never make a togepi cry. Ever.
"She has a point," Looker said once Hope stopped destroying our eardrums, "I wouldn't take Galactic's word for anything."
"Thank you," I said exhaustedly, rubbing my ears. Lucas shut up.
"All right. Well. You guys both made it out. If I was you, I'd stay together for the rest of your time in Veilstone. The three of you."
I traded my Galactic uniform and natu for Hope. Lucas was already walking off.
"We literally just went over this," I called after him.
"I'm right here," he said. "I'm fine."
Somehow we managed to get from the southern woods – our teleportation destination – back to the Pokemon Center and drop off our pokemon at the front desk without fighting again. Lucas was sullen and didn't even look at me. I was fine with that. I was mad. How hard could he possibly have made it to save him? I just wanted to save the flipping boy I loved from his flipping killers. "Making a big deal of this"– yeah, making a big deal of highly possible death.
"Hey guys," Dawn greeted us as we walked in. She looked like she had just gotten dressed. "How was…"
She saw our faces. Lucas threw his jacket and scarf roughly onto his bed and walked back out again. I kicked off my shoes and climbed into my bunk, throwing the blanket over me. Fuck this day.
"…oh. Okay," Dawn said nervously.
Three for three weeks in a row woot woot
If you caught the reference to the major Pokemon game plot hole, dw, I'll address it next time. See you later~