Aight let's do this

1) YA GIRL BEAT CYNTHIA FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER WOOOOO

2) This chapter is one that I've been looking forward to/dreading for a long time. What I need you to know is that the event in question is based on two things: a) something that happened specifically in high school and b) literally just my own imagination/how I think the situation would go down in this world with these people.

2a) Reread the final scene from the previous chapter for the full effect :)

I went out to lunch Thursday afternoon with Maylene and Candice.

The two of them as a couple were fascinating to watch. Maylene in Veilstone was fiercely independent, able to fight the black belts in her gym both physically and verbally and win. In Candice's presence, however, Maylene was softer and more relaxed.

Candice, meanwhile, was a firecracker.

"So!" She smacked the table between us. "I hear you've got a boy in mind?"

I choked on my waffle. "I–"

"It's the guy she was traveling with," Maylene said for me.

"Oooh, you gonna ask him out?"

"Maybe?" I said, sipping water.

"What's stopping you?" Candice asked me.

"I… uh, I don't know how?"

"You just ask," Candice said.

"Easy enough for you to say," Maylene said. "Some of us need an excuse to work up the courage."

The two of them sat there for a second, scheming silently.

"What's the story between you two? You've been traveling together?" Candice asked.

I told them about the boy who'd rescued me in Jubilife, who'd traveled with me through Eterna Forest, whom I'd run into again in Hearthome. I told them how he and I had helped each other through unrequited feelings. I told them all the ways he'd saved me, big and small. I told them how he asked me to dance at the Trainer Ball, and Candice clutched a hand to her heart.

"My heart," she gasped dramatically. "Makes me miss falling in love."

"Hey." Maylene put a hand on her chest in mock offense.

"You know what I mean," Candice said, draping an arm over Maylene's shoulders. "Butterfrees, excitement. It's different from what we've got."

It was weird in the sense of… I guess, just that Maylene and Candice were two people who could maybe help me figure out whatever was going on with Megan and my sexuality? And here we were talking about a boy instead, and I was hyperaware of how straight I looked, even though I wasn't necessarily not straight(?).

When I mentioned our bonding over Pokemon Center board games, Maylene and Candice shared a glance.

"What if we–" Maylene began.

"Oh, you bet," said Candice.

So after we paid for lunch, they took me to Candice's apartment, which was full of books and dark wood furniture. Candice ran into a room and came out a minute later with an oblong box. I recognized the shape.

"The blocks all have questions written on them," she said, handing me the Jenga box. "When you pull a piece, you ask the other person that question."

"Some of them are blank," Maylene said. "You can ask whatever question you want with those."

It was the game we'd played in Eterna back when we were first becoming friends, repurposed to bridge the gap from one kind of relationship to another. It was perfect.

Thomas still wasn't feeling great, but he was down to play one round that night. My heart thumped wildly through the first several turns.

"If you could be a pokemon, what pokemon would you be?" Thomas read off a pink block.

"Latias," I said immediately.

"I thought you don't like flying?"

"Only because I don't have my own wings." Hence falling being a real danger.

"Hm," Thomas said, seeming unconvinced.

"Why, what do you think I'd be?" I asked him.

He considered it. "An umbreon, maybe? They're edgy but cuddly."

My heart stopped. "You think I'm cuddly?"

"I mean, they're sorta, dark exterior, soft on the inside, you know?" he stammered. "You kinda have a tough front sometimes, but you're also very emotionally motivated and caring."

"Ah," I said, definitely not overthinking the fact that he'd just called me cuddly and then got nervous sldkfjas;dlfk

Thomas frowned at me. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah?"

"Your face is red."

Motherfu–

"Really?" I placed a hand to my cheek and feigned confusion. "Weird."

"You're not getting sick, are you?"

"I hope not."

I pulled the next piece. "What's the last thing you let go of?"

Thomas didn't hesitate. "April."

I blinked. "You… you got over her?"

"I think so? Right now I definitely think I'm over her."

"That's great!" I said, delighted. "Congratulations!"

Thomas laughed. "Thanks."

I stacked the block on top. He pulled another out and frowned. "This one's blank," he said, flipping it over.

"Wild card." I said. "Free space." The one I was supposed to pull.

"What?"

"Make up a question."

Thomas gave it some thought. "So… You really just got over Lucas?"

"Yeah?"

"How?"

"I dunno. I just did," I said, feeling my face turn warm again.

"Surely there was a reason, though?" Thomas insisted. "Even indirectly."

"I mean, he wasn't exactly talking to me," I said.

"He hasn't been talking to you," said Thomas. "And now he is, for some reason. And yet you're over him now. What changed?"

I shrugged. "That's more than one question."

"But–"

"Ask more next time," I said, pulling another piece.

He relented. By the time the tower toppled, neither of us had pulled another blank piece.

Thomas was feeling much better the next morning, so he decided to give the Snowpoint Gym a shot. Dawn and I spent some time half-training, half-playing in the snow. Lucas walked up right as Faith popped out of the ground in front of Dawn, who shrieked in surprise and fell backwards through a snowbank.

Lucas burst out laughing, and suddenly my heart was mush, and even as I tried to will it solid again, the open expression on his face transported me back to a time when I was in love and happy.

"You good?" I heard Coeur ask.

I looked away from Lucas, taking a deep breath. "Yeah. I think I'm okay."

The mushy feeling mostly went away, but the fear behind it lingered. I'd just managed to get over him. I didn't want to immediately fall for him again.

Dawn and Lucas and I got lunch. At some point while Lucas was in the bathroom, Dawn said suddenly, "I think we're… I think we're getting close."

"To?" I said, feigning obliviousness.

"To…" Dawn threaded her fingers through one another. To being together.

"Cool. How are… you feeling about it?" I asked, not sure what else to say.

"Excited. A little nervous? Mostly excited, though," she said.

There was a spark of joy in her eyes that she was barely trying to hide. And I was happy for her, and I was jealous, and maybe part of that jealousy was about the good things happening in her love life in a very general sense, but there was another side of that jealousy that saw the whole situation as an opportunity lost, and even if I didn't have feelings for Lucas anymore (I didn't, right?), it still felt like a missed chance, a story that didn't play out, a timeline abandoned.

I also… The way I felt about Thomas and the way I used to feel about Lucas were not the same. I didn't know why. I didn't know if either was necessarily stronger; I just knew they were different, and I didn't know what that meant.

I definitely didn't tell Thomas any of this. I was about to ask that boy out; I didn't need him to think I wasn't all in.

Also, Thomas had lost to Candice pretty badly. As it turns out, not training for a week and then jumping right into a seventh-badge gym match is generally not a good idea. He was too upset to play Jenga that night, which was fine by me. I didn't want to do something big when he'd already had a stressful day.

On Saturday morning, Dawn wanted to meet up again to discuss the Lakes. It seemed like overkill to me – didn't we already have a solid plan? – but there was a specific reason for it.

"Lucas and I might be heading to Canalave pretty soon," she said. "It's my seventh gym."

"Okay. Do we need to reshuffle who's going where, for teleportation's sake?" Looker asked.

"That's what I'm thinking, but I'm also pretty attached to the idea of going to Lake Acuity," Dawn said, seeming embarrassed.

"It may be difficult to get you there – already Thomas needs to borrow my natu to get to Lake Valor, and she doesn't have the power to teleport cross-region multiple times."

I eyed Thomas. He'd been oddly quiet all day. I guess he was pretty upset about losing that gym battle.

"Depending on who goes where, I could possibly also teleport with Lucas's alakazam?" Dawn said, looking at Lucas.

"That's fine by me."

"Maybe we shouldn't rework who's going where yet?" I said. "We can just figure it out on the spot, based on where we all are at the time. There's no telling how long it'll take for them to remake the Red Chain or the Galactic Bomb."

"If the Sunyshore blackout is Galactic's fault, they're doing pretty well on that front," Dawn pointed out (because yes, the blackout was still going strong, several days later). "And I thought the Red Chain was made from the Lake Trio's crystals?"

"It can be. Galactic makes theirs artificially."

"But if they're both…" Dawn frowned. "So do they need the Red Chain and the Lake Trio, or just the Lake Trio?"

Looker and I said, "In theory, just the Lake Trio" and "Both of them" at the same time.

"The Red Chain is needed to actually control Dialga and Palkia, yeah?" I pointed out. "So, both."

"The Red Chain and Lake Trio are one and the same," said Looker. "Either one would suffice."

"But it's Lake Trio to summon, Red Chain to control?"

"No, just one to…" Looker frowned. "Actually, I don't know that for certain…"

"Side note, what are the orbs for?" Dawn asked. "Do they just influence who's summoned, or are they needed to actually summon them? Because if not, it wouldn't even matter if Galactic possesses them or not, right?"

We stewed in our confusion for a second.

"Let's… let's ask the local expert," I said.

The local expert in question sat us down in the gym's lecture hall and whipped out a slideshow. Her girlfriend sat herself on the table next to me and handed me some popcorn.

"Where did you–"

"Don't worry about it."

"All right!" Candice smacked her yardstick against the whiteboard, which displayed darkness and an egg. "Mythology 101! Sinnoh cosmogony more or less agrees that in the beginning, there was only chaos. Then suddenly there was an egg, and then Arceus hatched from it, and then Arceus made some more guys." She poked her desktop keyboard with the yardstick to make the slide switch to an image of the mural in Celestic Town.

"From there," Candice said, "It gets hazy. Most people who subscribe to the mainstream Arcaean faith say Arceus made Dialga and Palkia, then the Lake Trio. Some people think Giratina should be in there with the creation duo, but others don't think Giratina fits in properly. There's also theories that Heatran or Regigigas should be involved. Snowpoint Temple was originally home to a religion that thought the latter.

"'But Candice!' you're saying. 'This is creationism stuff, not How To Summon Dialga and Palkia stuff.' I hear you, but fundamentally they're one and the same. Galactic is looking to create a new world using myths, yeah? So the myths dictate what they need. They need to summon the pokemon that mythologically have the power to create a new world, and they need a way to control them once they're here.

"Which is also where the Lake Trio comes in!" Candice jabbed the keyboard again, swapping to a slide with a drawing of the Lake Trio on it. "The theory is that they can control Dialga and Palkia, since the mythos says spirit dominates matter. An artificial crystal proxy could maybe-probably control Dialga and Palkia, but the Trio might also be needed for these crystals to be anything more than rocks. And they also might be needed to summon Dialga and Palkia in the first place."

"But… But which one is it?" Looker asked.

Candice paused. She walked over to her computer and pressed a button to stop presenter mode. She scrolled down to the works cited.

"These are the citations for this part," she said, highlighting eight links. "Each one is a full-on academic research paper about the relation between the Lake Trio and Dialga and Palkia. Each one disagrees. And there's similar papers regarding the Adamant and Lustrous Orbs and what they do, exactly. Even the Spear Key's relation to Spear Pillar is contested – does it activate the place? Does it just open the door? If you don't have the Spear Key, will a battering ram do? Are Dialga and Palkia sufficient to create a new world, or do you need Arceus himself?

"The short answer to all this is, we don't know. We have theories for days, and no real idea which one's right. Maybe the Lake Trio and their gems and the Orbs are all needed, and maybe there are layers of redundancies and Galactic can just waltz up to Spear Pillar and go, 'Heyyyy! Arceus! Gimme a new world!' We truly don't know. Mythologies are by nature varied and inconsistent depending on who's telling the story, so even if at some point someone knew exactly how it all worked, it's been confounded over the millenia."

I glanced at Looker, whose face was rather gray. "So… so we're working with nothing," he said weakly.

"Incorrect!" Candice said cheerfully, going back to presenter mode. The previous slides had shown illustrations and drawings; this one was suddenly packed with semi-organized words ranging from "hoverscooters" to "shaymins." "Compared to Galactic, we have it easy. After all, we're not the ones trying to summon gods; we're just trying to stop the people who are. Galactic has to account for all the uncertainties – they have to say, 'What if the Lake Trio does need to activate the Red Chain?' and have a backup for that, and a backup for that in case their backup is wrong, repeat ad infinitum. We just have to know enough to stop them at the key points."

Candice stabbed the keyboard with her yardstick, revealing the same slide as before with several words highlighted – Red Chain/Lake Trio and Spear Key in red, Galactic Bomb and Adamant/Lustrous Orbs in yellow. "There's layers to it. They need need the things in red; they probably need the things in yellow; everything else will help but is ultimately not central to their goals."

"So yeah," Candice said, switching to a slide with "In Conclusion" written across it. "We're operating under a lot of uncertainty. But the good news is, so is Galactic. Accepting this uncertainty will let us work better with what we've got. Any questions?"

Looker looked like he was gonna be sick. "Is it… Is there any way of knowing the true answers?"

Candice shrugged sympathetically. "Short of seeing it happen in an experimental setting, not really."

Looker was silent for a moment. "We don't have a margin of error in this," he said quietly. "Galactic will be taking control of three pokemon with the strength of deities, followed by two pokemon with the strength of gods. There is no room for uncertainty."

Candice set her yardstick down on the bottom ledge of the whiteboard. "I know an international agent may have trouble accepting anything less than certainty," she said seriously, "but I truly think it isn't a bad thing. Keats recommended inhabiting uncertainty without trying too hard to find a singular truth. It's a new way of looking at the big picture, but it will help."

"This isn't poetry, though," Looker pointed out. "This is real life. We're not writing an epic poem, we're trying to fight a criminal organization without losing anyone in the process."

Candice nodded. "I'm not saying we're trying to operate entirely without a base of knowledge. It seems you've got some good intel going, and that's going to be useful no matter what. What I'm saying is that we're fighting something inherently undefinable, so a lot of what we do will necessarily be on-the-spot."

Looker, who looked exhausted, deflated almost imperceptibly.

"Hey, in the defense of who you're working with–" Candice gestured at the rest of us. "Good trainers know that flexibility is a critical aspect of pokemon battles, and these are four strong-ass trainers. They're used to dealing with the uncertainty of pokemon battles and fighting the baddies. They know what they're doing."

Looker nodded. "I know they do."

Our strength wasn't really the problem, though. We were plenty strong, and Dawn still could have died within the past week. And Looker's resolution to support us with Pokemon League help was riskier than ever, with him on probation, and meant he had to limit as much as possible to just the four of us. So Candice and Maylene and the rest of the Sinnoh League couldn't jump in to help us with an event that could (and had) cost us dearly.

In other words, he was worrying about information for our sakes.

Even though she lacked a lot of the context, Candice seemed to catch on to some of this. "I know you don't want Maylene and me involved, but once news outlets start reporting on the lakes, we'll have every reason to jump in independently of you," she said. "Same goes for the rest of the League. If it gets bad, tell us, and we'll be there. We'll be your last resort."

Looker still seemed wary, but he nodded. "All right."

Candice smiled at the rest of us. "Cool! Eight-page essay on negative capability and its subversions in modern-day Sinnoan lit will be due on Friday. Class dismissed."

The next few days sort of blended together.

Each of us trained out in the snow daily. I asked Thomas if he wanted a training partner, but he declined, so instead I asked Candice if she and her froslass could help me teach Faith new evasion strategies ("FUCK yeah we can."). Dawn and Lucas hadn't gone off to Canalave yet, although I don't know what they were waiting for.

(In the evenings, when the three of us got dinner together, I hoped it was because they just wanted to spend time with friends.)

Thomas came back late each day and just kinda went to sleep immediately. He was definitely too tired for board games. It was silly, but he'd thrown himself so thoroughly into training for the Snowpoint Gym that I was starting to miss him.

The Sunyshore blackout reached day seven and kept going. We had kind of just hit a point where we understood that if it really was Galactic's blackout, we were fucked.

A storm warning hit – I remembered there being a full-on blizzard around now, last time around, and the first traces of it started showing up as early as Saturday. We trained as much as we could in the inclement weather, then stayed indoors starting on Tuesday.

Wednesday, the 20th, I woke up kind of on-edge. It was the day that Galactic had dropped the bomb, last time. Even more alarmingly, Coeur informed me that Marcassin was anxious. Whatever sixth sense I possessed was nothing compared to that of an absol.

The blizzard had picked up enough that all that was visible through the window was blinding white. Confined to the Pokemon Center for the day, Thomas and I finally returned to Jenga.

We'd been playing for long enough that the tower was top heavy and precarious. Thomas was still acting strangely quiet, so I was worrying whether it was really a good time to ask him.

Thomas was first to draw a blank piece. "Make up a question, right?" he said.

"Yeah."

He was quiet for a moment. He placed the piece on top. I braced for the renewal of his questioning how I'd gotten over Lucas.

"Do you…" he began slowly. "Do you like me?"

Time stopped.

(Time stopped in the figurative sense, the way it does for people who are normally tethered to time. Time continued, in the serene music in my ear and the acceleration of my heart rate and the too-long pause lingering in the air. Time continued, and I wished it wouldn't.)

"I, yeah, of course, you're my friend," I said lightly, reaching for a block.

"Evelyn."

My hand was shaking too much; the block I pulled out took the rest of the tower down with it. I cringed at the cacophony of bricks hitting the table.

"What makes you think so?" I asked, starting to rebuild the tower. Thomas didn't make a move to help me. I couldn't read his expression.

"When I battled Candice… She and Maylene were acting oddly. Like they knew something about me that I didn't. Maylene asked how you were doing even though she'd just seen you. Candice asked if we'd played Jenga yet, like she was expecting something to happen? And the Jenga set they loaned you… it's the kind of thing you play when you're trying to get closer to someone, and the blank ones… Plus, you finally got over Lucas and won't say why. And I remembered the conversation we had way back when about new feelings being like stepping stones, and… yeah."

My hands slowed and stopped rebuilding. Arceus. I'd been so obvious.

"So… do you?" Thomas said.

I fidgeted with the block in my hands.

"I don't know," I said too loudly. "Maybe."

Thomas nodded slowly.

"Do you…" My throat was dry. "How does, um, how does that make you feel?"

Thomas was quiet for a moment. I still couldn't parse the look on his face – it was too carefully, intentionally blank.

"I don't know," he said softly.

We sat there in the horrifying silence of two people who no longer knew what they were. And in a sense, we were saved by what happened next.

A massive rumble approached, starting small and hitting the Snowpoint City Pokemon Center in a sudden swell of thunder. It was followed by a shudder in the ground, less like an earthquake and more like a wave of sound traveling through the soil.

"Was that…?" Thomas whispered.

I nodded. It hadn't been like this last time – we only found out through a breaking news report in Canalave, and then through Looker. We couldn't hear or feel the explosion when it happened. But the Sunyshore blackout had been going on for too long, and of course this meant the bomb was stronger than ever before, and it was the same day as last time, and we'd been planning for this for too long for it to be a surprise.

Besides, I thought distantly, it's fitting.

Everything falling apart, all at once.

Lakes time next chapter :)

Weird time to ask this, considering I just punched you all in the stomach, but if I made a ko-fi, would ppl want to use it? Comment if you'd contribute to my hypothetical ko-fi.