Aaaand we're back with part 3 of Chance Being Published Regularly, Somehow.

Thomas wanted to get to his battle forty minutes early. "Just in case," he said.

"That's nearly an hour. You aren't even the one who randomly skips around in time."

"It's only two matches. It won't be that long, I just gotta be ready."

Which left me wandering the festival on my own again. I meandered past a ring toss and a stand selling tteokbokki (which is definitely not a hand-held food and thus kind of confused me with its presence) before finding myself in front of a small tent, purple and sprinkled with stars. A sign planted in the soil next to the entrance read "Future Sight."

"Wanna get a reading?"

I turned – it was the girl I'd just battled. "I… uh, I just got here."

Renée smiled. "I was just gonna get mine done. Come in with me."

She beckoned, and I hesitantly followed her between the flaps of the tent.

When my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I found myself in front of a round table and a smiling woman in dangly gold earrings and a hooded cloak.

"Welcome," she said in a serene voice, gesturing at the bench in front of the table. "Have a seat."

Renée and I sat ourselves down. "Who's first?" the woman asked.

Renée and I looked at each other. "You go first," Renée said.

"Uh, sure."

The fortune teller nodded and pulled out a deck of cards. She shuffled them normally, then spun them in small piles between her hands, cartwheeling them between her fingers with lithe ease. Somehow they all collected in a stack on the table. She flipped the top three onto the deep violet tablecloth, turning them around so they all faced me. I couldn't quite read them in the dark.

"Ah, very good," she said. "Have you done a tarot reading before?"

"No?"

"All right. In front of me I have a three-card spread, which tells your past, present, and future."

I nodded. Sure. Okay.

"In your past, we have the Cresselia card, which represents the moon and joyous dreams. Her presence on this table means that in the past, you lived a life of hope, to a point of dreaminess. I assume correctly in stating you were once happily in love?"

"Uh– I guess so?"

"Indeed," she said, nodding sagely. "As in a dream. And then–" She snapped her fingers. "You woke up. Shaken awake, it seems, given that your present is embodied by Giratina, a being of chaos and shadows."

In her imagery of shadows, I saw a pair of glowing red eyes and a dead body. I shivered slightly.

"Giratina exists in two forms, depending on the world he occupies, suggesting your lover betrayed you for another, taking on a different persona in a different space."

I blinked. I mean… I could see how that might be true? Lucas was a different person now than the first time around, but if the implication was that he'd cheated on me…

"Which brings me to the future." While the other cards were hard to see, the illustration on this one was easier to make out: a solitary human, dark against a snowstorm, with a draconic figure standing next to them.

"The Champion." She looked at me seriously. "You will find a battle awaiting you at the end of your road to victory. In order to succeed in love, there is something you will need to triumph over."

I exhaled. I had to get over my feelings for Lucas. I'd heard it from Thomas and from the thoughts I'd repressed in my own head, but hearing it from a fortune teller hit differently.

"…there will be a point of conflict between yourself and his other lover."

My jaw dropped. "What?"

"Surely you've felt the tension already? There are only two ways this can go."

I looked back down at the card. I'd have to fight Dawn for Lucas? How would that even work?

"Not to worry, though. You'll triumph in the end." The fortune teller smiled. "Any questions?"

So many questions, I thought.

"No, I think we're good," Renée cut in, standing up. "Thank you."

"Would you also–"

"No, she just wanted her future read. I'm good. Thanks again."

She pulled me to my feet, and I stumbled out of the tent with her. "So that happened," Renée said when we were outside.

"Does she really want me to confront her?" I wondered, squinting against the sudden sunlight.

"I dunno, it was a pretty bullshit reading. She didn't even ask what you wanted a reading for."

"I… what?"

"Like she went straight for love life, but… I mean, what were you thinking about, going into the reading? Career, family, academics?"

"Uh… I didn't know there were categories, I thought it was just about my future generally."

"Okay, so like your life overall?"

"Yeah."

Renée thought about it. "Okay. So first of all, Cresselia came out inverted and she shouldn't have flipped that. The inversion means you're coming out of a dark place, not a place of hope. Giratina could be about duality, but more likely it's about chaos, meaning you're probably going through a time of instability or confusion in the present. And then the Champion isn't a catch-all for victory any more than Yveltal means you're gonna die. I dunno if you saw the illustration on that card?"

"Yeah, the trainer in the snow."

"Right. You gotta consider the variations in the cards themselves in tarot. This one's got the Champion… sorta becoming one with nature, you could say. You might overcome the figurative Giratina, but you also might join it, or it joins you. The Champion card wants you to consider the instability the way you'd consider a powerful foe."

I frowned. "Okay. Interesting."

Renée grinned. "Am I more wrong than her?"

"No, you're… that's… I mean, I don't know if the future card is right, but the first two are dead on." I also couldn't figure out how to apply the Champion card to the future, given how many things felt unstable in my life at that moment.

"The future card is just advice," Renée admitted. "Things might not end up that way. It's all up to you still."

"And I don't have to fight Dawn?"

"Kyurem, no. Do what you want."

Thomas's battle with Andrew Nguyen was a two-on-two double battle. I sat by his family in the front row.

"So how do you know Tom?" Naveed asked.

"Oh, we just… We ran into each other a few times, a few months ago. He helped me out in Jubilife, I helped him navigate Eterna Forest… at some point we started traveling together," I said cautiously, hoping he wouldn't jump on that fact.

He did, but only briefly. "Oh?" Then, dropping the teasing tone, "So you're responsible for his massively increased badge rate?"

"I mean, I'm not responsible how easily he beat them all," I disclaimed, "but yeah, I pushed him to take on the gyms faster."

Naveed nodded, looking back at the battlefield. Thomas and his opponent were walking on from opposite ends of the arena. "He's doing a lot better than the last time I saw him. He was really torn up about April for a long time, but something in these last few months has helped him out a lot."

"It might just be the new environment," I suggested.

Naveed shrugged. "I don't think it's that," he said simply.

The surface of the battlefield retreated, revealing an aquatic arena with floating platforms. Thomas took one look at the pool and smiled, pulling two pokeballs from his pocket.

"I don't know how you did it, but I'm glad you did," Naveed said. "We were pretty worried about him. So, thanks."

"It wasn't just me," I protested, thinking of Mesprit, the literal deity of emotion.

"I didn't say it was," he said with a grin. "I'm just thanking you for your part in it."

Thomas threw Oliver and Esther onto the field. As soon as the battle began, Thomas called for Esther to use discharge right into the water. Oliver was completely fine (ground dual-type) but Andrew's sharpedo and dewgong didn't stand a chance. I skipped backward at one point, which meant I watched him easily win twice. Naveed and I and the rest of Thomas's family cheered him on as he officially moved on to Round 3.

We spent the rest of the day alternately wandering the festival and watching other trainers' battles. Dawn and Lucas breezed through round two. I went and watched Etana Bing, my original matchup, absolutely destroy her opponent in battle. I wasn't sure what this meant about how my battle with her would've gone, or what it meant that time and chance had undone our matchup.

I kept thinking about the tarot reading – not the fortune teller's so much as Renée's interpretation. Instability could've meant my relationships with other people, which all felt precariously balanced at the moment, through disagreement or ambiguous feelings or jealousy or whatever the fuck was going on with me and Lucas, or else it could have meant just the whole situation with Team Galactic and the fate of the world generally.

But the obvious answer was my spotty relationship with time, which was instability itself. I wasn't sure what the Champion card was trying to say about "joining" time, aside from probably just me needing to find an anchor again. Right now, though, fortune-telling in the midst of time jumps that kept some timelines and rewrote others was making me wonder if the Champion was something I could achieve in any timeline or just one.

As far as instability went, I didn't face any more of it that afternoon or evening, although there's a chance I missed some of Dawn's battle (she was suddenly facing a dragonite instead of a charizard, though I might have just zoned out and missed the transition from one winged orange creature to another).

I hung out with Thomas and his family for the most part, but also spent some time with Ashley de Leon and her friends. We watched the main arena's last battles of the day, none of which were the same lineups I remembered, culminating in Tim Raines, the guy who'd beaten me in the quarterfinals in Celestic, versus Sean Obi, who'd lost to me in round one of the same tournament. Sean won, his mamoswine taking out Tim's flareon with a well-timed earthquake in a great moment of all my expectations for the tournament flying out the window.

The crowd filtered out of the stadium, leaving the trainers behind. Round three matchups would be released at 8:30, giving us ten minutes to wait. Heroic interim music played above.

Thomas found us. "Hey," he said, taking the empty seat next to me. I did my best to ignore overanalyzing the fuzzy feeling that settled in my chest.

"Hey," I said, "so I've been thinking."

"Yeah?"

"Can you like… help me keep track of my battle details?"

Something in his face softened – he knew I was asking in case of time jumps, specifically. "Of course."

His response – two words with a world of "I was already planning to" and "Yes of course I care enough to help you, you didn't even need to ask" behind them – melted my insides in an all-too-familiar way.

"Cool, thanks," I said mildly.

Trainers filtered in from the other three stadiums, filling out the stands. In a few minutes, the music faded as Marian walked on and began talking into a microphone, congratulating us on our previous rounds and hyping us up for the next – or, I assume she did, because I missed most of it. When I landed back in time, the lineups were already on the back wall screens. I squinted, hunting for mine. Thomas was up against a trainer named Ethan Tsai in the 10 am block, Platinum Arena. I poked fun of him for it, and he laughed but seemed tense. Confused, I kept looking. I found Lucas next, up against Evelyn Meyers.

Oh.

Fuck.

I fckin love tteokbokki

that is all