YEEhaw my dudes we're back with another update only 1 week later, let's gooooooo

"Why didn't you call me?"

"I didn't know how much time I had."

"You didn't have to blow up the Fuego Ironworks."

I shrugged. "I also could have let the Galactic Bomb and Red Chain slip through our fingers."

Looker sighed and gazed out over the wreckage. The Fuego Ironworks had been reduced to piles of scrap metal, all radiating out from one point on the ground. A team of firefighters and the local police force ("Oh, there's the Sinnoh cops," you're saying. "Look at them trying to be useful in the aftermath of someone actually fighting a major criminal organization. How cute of them.") had gathered to inspect the scene and put out the lingering fires. Luckily, the woods were too charred already to sustain much of that now.

Scattered around the woods like pixie dust were little red grains of sand.

"Honestly, though, you did the right thing," said Looker. "Admittedly it was a little more… messy than would have been ideal, but you found and destroyed what I've been hunting for months. How did you even find it?"

I shook my head. "Completely by accident. Tricia's been doing lab work on the river up here. We came to check out the site."

"What about the ironworks?"

"The river – I mean, the shaymins – the uh, the thing…" I'd lost the vocabulary word I needed.

"Take your time," said Looker.

The word came to me. "Tributary. The tributary that passed the ironworks was weirdly clean. Turns out, the shaymins Galactic caught ages ago have been here, cleaning the waste from Galactic's manufacturing process."

Looker nodded thoughtfully. "Environmental consciousness. I don't know if we can fight Galactic anymore. They have a redeeming factor."

I was at a loss for words. "Did you just make a joke?"

Looker pretended to look scandalized. "I can do that, you know," he said. "I'm not completely humorless."

"Just mostly?"

He shook his head, trying not to smile.

I pulled something out of my bag. "Thanks for the hearing aids, by the way. This is for you."

Looker, stunned, took the small wrapped package from my hands. "Thank you."

"Open it."

He obliged, revealing a deck of Sinnoh-themed playing cards.

"I know you usually don't have enough people to play board games, but there are solitaire card games you can play too," I explained as he opened the card box. "Megan showed me a game called Peanuts that can be either solitaire or multiplayer."

Looker shuffled through the cards. Each one had an illustration of pokemon on it. He stopped at a picture of a shinx.

"I assume it's Sinnoh themed to try and convince me to stay in Sinnoh?"

I blinked. "You're leaving Sinnoh?"

"I was trying to joke again–"

"You're leaving Sinnoh?"

Looked glanced up. "Well, yes. At some point, this mission will be over, and I'll be assigned a new one."

"The mission could still be in Sinnoh, right?"

"Assignments rotate regions so agents can remain anonymous."

"Oh."

I couldn't explain why I was so upset over something so obvious. Looker had no connections, as an IP agent; this was partly because he moved around so much. Of course he'd move on after this mission. Obviously, Evelyn.

Looker put the deck back together. "Can you show me the game you were talking about?"

I nodded and pulled out Def. Looker let out a natu, and we teleported to a Pokemon Center to play cards.

Tricia had to report her results to the lab (even though blowing up the ironworks had definitely changed the data oops), so I couldn't say goodbye to her til late that night. Megan had asked to go with Looker to return the shaymins to their home, so it was just me.

Tricia opened the door, wearing slippers and a light sweater. "Hey," she said.

"Hey. How was lab?"

"It was okay. Maya and I are going back as soon as it's considered safe, to take new data."

I nodded. "Ah."

Tricia shrugged like it didn't matter. "Well, at least we got to learn why the river was so weird," she said. It was her usual optimistic self, or it should have been, but it seemed forced.

I smiled halfheartedly. "Yeah."

We were quiet for a second.

Tricia shifted. "Are we… Are we okay?"

I blinked. "What do you mean?"

"I just… I don't know, I feel like… I feel like you guys… I don't know why, but I feel so much farther away from you guys these days."

My breath caught. "I've felt it too," I confessed. "I don't really know what it is, either."

Tricia nodded slowly, her eyes diverted.

We stood in the cold a moment longer. A breeze bit at my neck. Tricia shivered.

"I should go back inside," she said, still not looking at me.

"Okay," I said, not wanting to keep her in the cold.

She opened the door, stepped through, and closed–

"I don't…" I blurted out. Tricia stopped closing the door. "I don't want to lose you. I feel like I'm losing you, and I'm jealous of Maya, and I don't want to lose you even though I don't know how to stop what's going on right now."

There is an alternate world out there where I said nothing and she closed the door. I watched that version of myself stand at the doorstep for a minute, then turn around and go home, a little sadder than before. Her friendship with Tricia would diminish until they were the kind of acquaintances who barely talk and only think of each other sadly, maybe with some consolation remembering the happier times they'd shared.

This version of myself was too stubborn to lose her like that.

Tricia opened the door a little wider. "I wasn't sure you guys minded drifting," she said quietly.

My jaw dropped. "Are you kidding? You're fucking wonderful. We love you, dude."

She smiled softly. "I love you guys too."

She came back outside. I was reaching for a hug even before she got there. I held her tight.

"We'll work on this, okay? Whatever's going wrong. We'll fight it," I said, determined not to lose one of my best friends.

Tricia nodded. "We'll fight it."

I'd received a package that day, postmarked from Johto. It was late, but the lateness was offset by the fact that Arceus these must have been expensive.

Thomas had gotten me wireless earbuds, the kind that connect to poketches. I could only assume it was for the same reason that Looker had gotten me the hearing aids, although that also made Thomas's gift kind of tragic, timingwise.

Still, it's the thought that counts. I still hadn't even figured out what to get him.

Thomas arrived at the Eterna train station the next day. "Ready?" I said the instant he set foot on the platform.

"Ready? I just arrived," he protested.

"Trainer life waits for no one," I said, turning and striding towards Route 211, the route leading to Snowpoint.

It was a joke, of course. He hadn't yet packed for the journey ahead of us. The route up to Snowpoint in the winter is a weeklong snowy trek that serves as an unofficial rite of passage for Sinnoan trainers. I'd actually never made the journey, myself – last time around, my time in Snowpoint had lined up perfectly with Galactic attacking the lakes. After Looker teleported me to Lake Acuity to back Dawn up, I stayed in Snowpoint recovering. Now that I was traveling with a Johtoan who might have made the mistake of, I don't know, taking a boat straight there after winter break – le gasp, c'est scandaleux – it was the perfect time to take the journey I'd missed out on.

Bonus: we'd just made major strides against Galactic. Looker could message me if he needed me, and I could teleport wherever with Def, but most likely Galactic would have to recover from their loss first.

Thomas and I got lunch in the city and stocked up for the trip – he'd brought a heavy coat but saved food packing for the day of – and then we were off. Route 211 – the easy part – took about a day to cross. We entered Mount Coronet and got most of the way through before camping for the night.

"Evelyn, wake up."

I gasped, opening my eyes suddenly. Thomas had illuminated the cave with a flashlight.

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah…?" My dream came back to me slowly. Azelf at Lake Valor, Lucas dying in a cave. "Oh. Uh… Yeah, I think I'm okay."

"We don't have to camp here, if it bothers you," Thomas said.

"I… no, it's okay…"

"You sure?"

"Yeah."

It was not, in fact, okay. I couldn't sleep at all for the rest of the night. We set out at ten in the morning, one of us incredibly exhausted.

"I don't know why caves still do this to me," I grumbled. "I was fine on Iron Island. And I had that dream again, too… I thought things were getting better."

"Recovery isn't linear," Thomas said simply. "We'll avoid caves, going forward."

"All the best camping spots on the snowy routes are caves."

"We'll make it work," he promised.

He stayed true to his word. We left the Coronet caves and entered Route 216 that afternoon, and after hours of hiking through the snow – it wasn't that bad, there was a path – we stopped to camp under a bridge. We built snow walls on either side of us to brace our tent from the wind. The next day, we managed to reach the Snowbound Lodge by nightfall, so we spent the night indoors.

We kept our pokemon inside pokeballs for most of the journey, not wanting any of them to be out in the cold for longer than necessary. Mostly we just let them out so they could play in the snow while Thomas and I took a break from walking. Trust and Cassie were cold resistant and generated their own body heat, so we let them out a little more often than the others.

But when it was just us, we just… talked. He told me about his winter break and how he'd been afraid of running into April every time he stepped outside his house. I told him about the Ironworks and Tricia and the things my mom had said about me needing to not have feelings for Lucas. I'd told Megan about a fair few of these things – including about Tricia, before I left – but it was comforting and cathartic to tell him, too.

(I didn't tell him about Megan. If telling Megan about Thomas felt like closing a door, the reverse felt like slamming one shut. Again, I did not feel good about any of this.)

We'd just hit Route 217 on our fourth day of travel when the snow began. It was mild at first, but by nightfall it was a blinding, blistering blizzard. We were suddenly not walking on a path but trudging through deep snow, led by signposts that stuck out of the tops of the snowdrifts.

That first two nights on 217, we managed to find sufficient shelter in dense patches of trees, although we had to dig our way out of the snow that had built up around us overnight. On the third day, we saw someone through the snow. We yelled to them and waved them over, and when we reached each other a small eternity later, it turned out we knew each other.

"How've you been?!" I shouted over the wind.

"Good!" Maylene yelled back. "You going to Snowpoint?!"

"Yeah! You?!"

"Yeah!"

We didn't actually talk that much (because we had to hOLLER) until we reached a cave in the evening. Thomas was wary, but I was fine just chilling out in one for a bit (haha get it chilling because it was still freezing in there).

"Wait, so, why are you walking there?" She could have taken a boat, or flown, or teleported.

Maylene shrugged her massive backpack off – it was weirdly tall, but also kind of empty? – and said, "I always do. Test of endurance."

I frowned. She obviously wasn't wearing enough snow gear – snow boots, yes, and a beanie and a down jacket, but certainly not enough for a blizzard.

Maylene saw the look I was giving her. "I grew up in Snowpoint. I'm used to the cold."

Neither me nor Thomas particularly trusted her sense of cold, though, especially when night fell and she insisted on sleeping outside in the snow.

"Stay in the cave with us," I said.

Thomas frowned at me. "What? No, we've got a tent."

"I'll be fine," I insisted. "Besides, it's gonna be stupid cold out there."

"If you take the tent, we can convince Maylene to join you," he said.

"What about you?"

"I'll stay in the cave."

"It's really okay, I can sleep outside. I have a sleeping bag," Maylene cut in.

"That's not enough–"

"You can't just–"

We argued a little longer, but eventually we agreed that Maylene and I would take the tent and Thomas would stay in the cave. I was worried about him staying warm, but he at least had a sleeping bag and a few thermal blankets. I also gave him Trust's pokeball, so that Trust and Cassie could help keep him warm.

When I woke up in the morning, I realized the blizzard had stopped. Sitting up, I felt too many thermal blankets fall off of me.

It took me a second.

"What the fuck did you do?" I said, bursting into the cave.

Thomas was huddled with his face in his sleeping bag, no thermal blankets or fire pokemon in sight. He shifted so his head showed. "What?" he said groggily.

"Where are the pokemon? And why did I wake up with your blankets?"

He sat up slowly. "Didn't want them to get cold," he said, still waking up. "Or you."

I stared at him in dismay for the needless sacrifices he'd made, and also for the swell in my heart that came with Thomas thinking of everyone else first. "You idiot," I whispered.

The snow was markedly easier to navigate when it was on the ground, rather than in our faces. We quickly found the end of Route 217 and reached the Acuity Lakefront (which has always been confusing to me; Acuity's at the top of the hill, but the Lakefront is at the bottom? There's no lake down here).

This was the first time I'd been to the lakefront since fighting Jupiter at the lake. Now that I was getting to walk through it slowly, rather than dash through while also trying to suppress what else had just happened, it was rather lovely. Snow coated the trees and bushes, some plant life squeezing through the whiteness. A few snowmen stood to the side of the packed-down path, along with a smaller unidentifiable snow creature.

"We're almost there," I said, pointing to the first signs of civilization we'd seen in ages.

Thomas sneezed.

We reached Snowpoint City by late afternoon. Maylene headed to the Snowpoint Gym immediately; Thomas and I hit the showers to warm up.

Thomas woke up the next morning with a massive fever.

"Kind of tragic, timingwise" is my new tagline.

Anyways have y'all seen Porter Robinson's Second Sky set? The Nurture Tour FOMO is real ugh.

K see you next time when Thomas is sick lmao bye