"I think we missed Hilby again," Barry said as he led the other lab trainers and (nickname pending) Cheryl down the road past Lost Tower. The tower of stone dominated the countryside and cast a shadow over them as they walked. Their visit hadn't been terribly long and their emotions hadn't run too high, but there was still too much tension in the air for Barry to tolerate.

Dawn glared at him. "So what? Would you like to have run into him here? This isn't the kind of place where you randomly have a battle."

Barry winced. "Aw, I didn't mean it like that."

"Do you realize how obnoxious he would be, anyway?" Dawn continued, "He'd go on and on about how spirits are real and how none of the people or Pokémon in the Lost Tower are really lost, on and on and on. Seriously annoying."

"I did see some Ghost-types," Lucas muttered. He clammed up and looked away when Dawn turned her glare on him. The Riolu sitting in his backpack slapped him on the back of the head and yipped something that was probably about how he shouldn't show weakness.

Barry looked away as well, his face contorting with second-hand shame. Was he supposed to accept that Lucas had basically won the hidden potential lottery and was still afraid of a girl? Don't get him wrong, Barry knew that girls and Dawn especially could be scary, but a few weeks ago he watched Lucas knock a tree over by headbutting it. Shouldn't that kind of thing affect your priorities? If Barry didn't know better, he'd call Lucas desperate.

Cheryl wiped her eyes again though they had long since dried. "Do you really think he would do something like that?" she asked.

Dawn gave a half snort. "You've met him."

Cheryl's face morphed into a frustrated pout, though Barry still wasn't sure if frustration was even possible for her. "I don't think he would be so rude about it. He was very polite while communing with my great aunt's spirit."

"That was just a Ghost-type Pokémon," Dawn said, flicking her wrist. "He couldn't have changed that much between Jubilife and Eterna."

Cheryl's expression grew more intense but she didn't say anything further.

"I'm sure Hilby's doing fine," Barry said, thinking that he needed to mediate that conversation when it came up again, "but my mom would kill me if he, like, got arrested or he died or something. Someone's got to keep an eye on him."

"You had it right the first time," Dawn said with a scoff. "He'll be fine."

"You were there in Oreburgh," Barry said before shrugging. "Who knows? Maybe he got a girlfriend that'll put up with him." He mimed throwing up. "If the cooties didn't get him first, I mean."

The Lights in the Sky Are Thunderbolts - XXXI - Your House

The Sinnohan countryside, Hilbert decided, was just about what he expected. Fields and forests stretched for miles and miles, and it may have been because Hearthome was closer to the foothills of Mount Coronet that he could see a gray tower over the rolling hills and skyscrapers above the horizon.

As he sat on the bank of the winding river that ran through Route 209, fishing rod in his hands and his fear of water sufficiently suppressed, he thought it was almost idyllic. Sure, he could sometimes hear windmills groaning or the sound of traffic rolling like thunder, but it felt as natural as the outskirts of Nuvema.

The bobber jerked in the water. Hilbert yanked his rod and watched the Magikarp flop around on the line. Its spiritual energy was too scattered to form into type energy, which was actually a good sign. The ability to channel type energy was an indicator of higher sapience in Pokémon.

"Hey," he said, "Are you too smart to eat?"

The Water-type didn't react to his words and continued thrashing on the line.

"Communion," he said, the words well-worn into his vocal cords. He'd been fishing for a good while and as usual, he saw brief flashes of almost-awareness, but not quite. Sensation, but not memory. Instinct, but not thought.

He looked over his shoulder at Yuki. The Ice-type spirit hovered over an earthen box filled with ice cubes. "Another one for dinner."

Yuki huffed a cold wind and crossed her cloth-draped arms. Even so, after Hilbert tossed the still Magikarp into the box, she created and dropped more ice into the box. "I feel that there are much better ways that my second life might be utilized."

"She's gotta eat right," he said, casting the rod back into the water.

"Who's gotta eat right?" Mira said, approaching from their campsite. The tent and the fire was a hundred or so feet away from the water, but Hilbert supposed there wasn't much for a kid out of school to do other than bug him.

"No one," he said. "I misspoke. I like fresh fish." He, in fact, had very few feelings about fish, other than that he figured that it made for a better meal for their growing tagalong than packaged trainer meals.

"Can you really talk to Miss Yuki?" Mira asked, bowing to the spirit before turning back to Hilbert.

"Hm. The brat knows her manners," Yuki said, turning up her nose.

"I'm a spirit medium," Hilbert said.

Mira blinked. "I thought you were a Ground-type specialist."

Damn, the one time he didn't insist on his specialization! "Do you need something?" he asked.

"I'm bored," Mira said. "I did all of my homework for the day." Homeschooling was more limited in Sinnoh than it was in Unova, but the apparatus did exist. Mira would have to upload scans of her work the next time they had access to the internet. "Kazza's sleeping, too," she said, before she looked at the makeshift ice chest. "How do you know how to do all of this stuff, anyway?"

He looked back towards the campsite and saw that Marley was still going over something about stitches with Shuppet's components, the quartet nodding in time as she held up differently sized needles and hooks. As long as she wasn't listening…

"I'll tell you, just don't yap about it," he said.

Mira mimed zipping her lips.

Hilbert recast the line. "Before I came to Sinnoh, I was planning to go on a journey with my childhood friends."

"You had friends?" Mira asked.

"Anyway," Hilbert said, "I had to learn how to fish, cook, and pull my weight. Cheren is a smart guy, but he doesn't have a clue about applying theory. He knows all of the temperatures and techniques you need to cook noodles and stuff, but if you give him a butcher's knife he'll act like it's an artifact from Relic Castle. Same kind of thing with a fishing rod."

"Relic Castle? Is that like Pokélantis?" she asked.

"Uh," Hilbert said eloquently. He'd ask Cheryl to clarify if he ran into her again, but for the time being, "yeah, something like that. Then there's Bianca, and she's really good at talking about her feelings and all that, but she's more scatterbrained than a Pidove. Her and Cheren, it's obvious to everyone else that they would make a good couple, but I don't think they got together while…"

Hilbert blinked.

"Anyway, my other friend, Hilda. She's… well, this one time we went camping as a test run, right? And it was just us for some reason, probably. She dumped a tablespoon of chili powder into my food and called me a," he shifted his grip on the fishing rod, "for not wanting to eat it. Suggested CPR when I started coughing my lungs out." Which was a bad idea for a lot of reasons, he figured.

"Don't you mean a teaspoon?" Mira asked.

"What I'm trying to say is that she never learned that not everything can go the way she wants it to and not everyone thinks the same way as she does. It's not a great attitude for cooking or fishing or anything that requires patience, really."

Hell, if Hilda had been looking for him and his mother had kept her promise to him, she'd probably run off to Galar and Paldea first thing. It wasn't that he learned Paldean and forgot all of the knowledge of Sinjohan-Japanese he was born with, it was just that he forgot everything about verbs, nouns, and word order. But not all of it! The 'kuro' part of Kuroiwa… probably meant something, right?

"So why are you fighting evil here instead of there?" Mira asked.

HIlbert's brow furrowed. "Huh?"

"Kazza told me that you were an angel of vengeance sent by a Legendary Pokémon to fight bad guys," she said. "Aren't there bad guys where you come from?"

Hilbert waved the fishing pole and tugged the bobber in loose circles. "Probably, but the funny voices in my head told me to come to Sinnoh, so here I am."

"You have voices in your head?" she asked.

"Yeah, doesn't everyone?" He recast the line and ignored the look she was giving him.

"No," she said, "I don't. Shouldn't Marley have told me that you were crazy before I came along with you?"

He glanced at her. "You don't have visions or nightmares or anything like that?"

"I mean, Kazza does." She kicked a rock into the river. The shadow that had been lurking beneath the bobber swam off. "I don't."

"Oh." Hilbert stared into the water. "That's a good thing, actually. Uh… tell me if you start seeing things, okay?"

"Why would I-" she blinked, a light flashing in her eyes like a lightbulb- "Oh! This is just like what Marley told me!"

Hilbert glanced back at the campsite, but Marley was still threading a needle through the air to Shuppet's enjoyment. "What?" he said more than asked.

"It's like, Marley wears the pants and you're the housewife, right?" Mira asked. "She calls the shots and you just do what she tells you, like taking care of meals, room reservations, and Pokémon."

Hilbert's eyebrow twitched. "I think I'm offended on behalf of housewives everywhere. I don't have to feed you, you know. I just have to keep you alive."

Mira shook her head like he had just told her the sky was green. "Nuh uh, you will."

He leaned back and glared at her. "Says who?" he asked.

"It's like I was saying. Marley said that you pretend to be this rough and tumble cool guy, but deep down, you actually care a lot about other people!"

Hilbert was interrupted before he could voice his doubt. "I said no such thing," Marley said, her voice clear over the small distance, "and as a matter of fact, because you told Hilbert that I told you such an opaque lie, I'm revoking your bedtime story privileges."

Mira gasped. "You wouldn't!"

Marley nodded. "I would. I suggest that you issue a retraction of your previous statement."

Mira gave him and Marley a series of hesitant glances. "I, uh… was joking. Must have hit my head outside that warehouse." She trailed off. "Ha ha…"

Hilbert stared into the water. Golett, when did my life take a turn for the this?

His heart pulsed.

Forget I asked.

Soon enough, the sun set and left them cast in firelight.

Hilbert had his hands clasped over his stomach and his head propped up on his bag. Fuego's spirit had dispersed, though enough of the spirit's warmth clung to the campsite to make it comfortable, much like how Shuppet's quartet clung to Hilbert. The embers in the fire pit were spitting out bursts of light as they crackled and died down. Sinistea sat on a log, idly filtering the firelight into a small rainbow.

Marley emerged from the tent, zipped the nylon canvas shut behind her, and sat to Hilbert's right on a flat stone. She wrapped her arms around her knees and asked, "Are you certain that you wouldn't rather share the tent with us?"

"We're not actually her parents, don't be weird." Even Hilbert could see that she would use the situation to mess with him more than usual. Yuki would likely scold him about his impropriety despite how stupid that would be, though she was sharing the tent. Shaymin would probably try to drug him or something, the damned shrub-shrew.

"I find it hard to believe that sleeping on the ground while using your bag as a pillow is good for your health," she said.

Hilbert tilted his head back. "Yeah, well, believe it."

Marley rested her chin on her knees, staring into the fire. "Perhaps you should pay more attention to your wellbeing."

He snorted. "Like it matters much. Do you know what a normal teenage boy would do if you handed him a death sentence? If you told him to go off and save the world?" Sex, drugs, rock n' roll, that's what.

"I think that he would grow up," Marley said.

Hilbert's smirk flattened.

"I think that maybe at first, he would be terrified of the responsibility that had been placed at his feet. Denial: it's the first of the five stages of grief, you know. He would kick and scream and shout, but the future would drag him forwards. He would try to trick himself out of it, pretend that he was someone he wasn't, pursue a goal that he barely understood, let alone believed in, and then when he fell short, he would sink into despair. That, too, is a sort of death." She cupped her cheek. "But when some flowers wilt and die, others grow and bloom. Maybe he would change for the worse, and maybe for the better, but he wouldn't lose anything, I don't think. I think that he would hold onto the ideals that gave him hope, even in his sorrows. His doubts. His failures. I think that even if he wore the mask of a young man whose bitterness at the world approached that of vengeful spirits, he would still have the little boy inside of him who simply wanted to know every light in the sky."

The coals quietly roared as Fuego's spirit pulled more oxygen into the fire. A log cracked and fell in an explosion of embers.

"Yeah," Hilbert said, "Maybe he would."

She balanced a twig on her finger before tossing it in. "He'll have to stay alive to see them, of course."

Hilbert swallowed. "Probably."

"And, just maybe, he would see that there is someone out there who realizes the path he is traveling is one marked by danger, and that he ought to avoid unnecessary risks. He would see that just by entering someone's life, he has taken on a responsibility for that connection as well." She tossed in another twig.

Had she heard that bit about Hilda earlier?

His mind wandered a bit. He had heard everything from before she sat down but he still asked, "Did you really read Mira a bedtime story?" He hated the dryness he tasted in his mouth. "She's fourteen."

"Yes, she is fourteen. She is also a young girl who has had very few positive role models in her life. Much fewer female role models." Marley splayed her fingers. "I suppose that is a consequence of all of this."

"This," Hilbert said with a slight nod. If he could call it the human condition, he would have, but that didn't feel quite right.

"I doubt that she will be harmed by revisiting any potentially missed milestones in her development," she said. "You saw how her grandmother treated her."

There was silence as Hilbert watched the stars pass by and Marley placed her chin on her fist.

"What kind of stories do you read to her?" he asked.

"Oh, nothing special. Mostly the ones I've written about you and that Paul fellow."

Hilbert jerked half-upright, barely getting a hand under himself before he could flop back down. "If you're not joking, I'm calling social services." Or the Sinnohan equivalent.

"I'll tell them you did it."

Hilbert mouthed a curse. They weren't likely to take his side, she had him there. He laid his head back to stare at the stars. He could hear the surface of Sinistea's body shudder as the spirit gently snored.

"Stories like the ones she ought to grow up hearing," Marley said. "Those are what I read to her. Stories where the truth is certain and following your ideals guarantees victory, where heroes do not fight to obtain gratitude but receive it anyway, where boys and girls can be simply that instead of men and women."

"Do you forget that we're eighteen, sometimes?" Hilbert asked, slowly twiddling his thumbs.

She sighed. "With your attitude, no, that fact is quite hard to forget."

Hilbert snorted and closed his eyes. "Nevermind. We're not her parents. Or role models. We're stupid teenagers in over our heads."

"We?"

He coughed in his throat. "Me, whatever. Still, though."

He heard her start to speak again but she stopped herself.

After a minute of silence, he asked, "Could you start reading stories to Sinistea, too?"

The Lost Tower loomed over them. The only kind of traffic around them was foot traffic, with the building being so far away from the roads that Hilbert could only hear three sets of footsteps and the wind blasting the smooth stone walls. The tower's base was at a lower elevation than the surrounding fields and forests, meaning the staircase was as tall as it was long.

Once the tower had come into view, they all dropped into a somber silence. Even if he was raised with the traditional Unovan "dust to dust" mentality, he could see the tenseness in Marley's shoulders and how Mira's gaze turned towards the paved brick.

The lowest floor of the tower was thick with incense but the density of spiritual energy wasn't much greater than it was outside. It seemed that most residue had dispersed, but Hilbert remembered that the more recent a death was, the higher in the tower that the remains were stored. It was superstition, maybe, but it was something worth checking out.

Marley led them up to the fourth floor with due haste. Before then, the timeline of deaths had been fairly spread out. On the fourth, however, it was the same days and months repeated for rows upon rows. From the Conflict, if his assumption was correct.

"Hilbert," Mira suddenly asked, "can you, like, bring back the dead? If you're a medium or a spiritualist, isn't that a power you have?"

Hilbert looked away. Of all of the places to have this conversation? It made sense that it would come up, but seriously?

"I can communicate with spirits," he said evenly. "They can be the spirits of living things or ghosts with a strong connection to our world."

"Yeah, ghosts," Mira said. "Can't you bring them back?"

Hilbert wracked his brain for a good enough answer. He didn't have a prepared explanation for why couldn't perform miracles. "The ghosts of humans and Pokemon… they're not who they were when they were alive. They don't stick around because they were satisfied with things the first time around, y'know. They're twisted, angry, and upset. Even when I've managed to turn them around, like I did with Yuki," his scarf tightened, "it's not an exact thing. They're always missing something. Humans, I mean, we're not built to have a focus like some spirits do. We're more than just our ideals or dreams," or gratitude, he left off, "but ghosts never get back what they lose. Machamp only remembers what made him raise his fists. Fuego only remembers being thrown away over and over." He sighed. "Well, I… Mira, I'm sorry. There's a lot of things I can do, but resurrection isn't one of them." By whatever gods would hear, he wished it was. Mira wasn't too much older than Belle had been, was she?

Mira blinked and averted her gaze. "No, I, uh, shouldn't have asked. I didn't get my hopes up or anything, for real. I knew it was a long shot." She looked around the room. "I've been here before, my parents are this way." Mira glanced back at them before her eyes returned to the tile-patterned floor. "Can you guys hang back for a few minutes?"

Hilbert leaned back and nodded. "Do what you need to."

Mira sort of jogged, sort of speed-walked down the corridor, moving like someone who was cautiously superstitious but still had an appointment in five minutes just across the yard.

He waited until she had ducked through an archway before he said, "There's a lot of spiritual energy in this building."

"Mhm," Marley hummed.

"It's been getting denser as we've gone up so I'm going to check out the rest of the tower. This is the highest up I think all of us need to go," Hilbert said. "When Mira comes back, can you head down with her?"

"Do you not have anyone to pray for?" Marley asked.

Before he could shoot the question right back at her, he caught himself. He wasn't the most knowledgeable on Sinnohan customs, but he had a pretty good guess of what shoes left on the ocean shore implied.

"They didn't find my dad's body." He scratched his cheek and frowned. "Me and my mom don't really talk about it. He was in Bad Company. That's, um-"

"A nickname." She caught his surprised blink. "I've heard the stories."

"Yeah. He was at Coumarine when the Kalosians woke up Lugia." He heard that getting clean drinking water was still a struggle in some parts of the region, even more than a decade after the flooding subsided.

"Ah."

He let the silence lie for a few else was there to talk about other than both of them missing out on the usual military brat childhood? "Like I was saying, I'll go to the top floor by myself and check for any disturbances. Shouldn't take too long."

"Very well. Do what you must."

Not long after that, Mira came jogging back. She didn't seem too emotional, though Hilbert was aware that he hadn't been around her enough to pick up on any tells. That aside, he still poked Mira in the forehead. "Alright, squirt, you head down with Marley. I have some business to take care of so I'm going to keep going up. It shouldn't take too long so you can get started on lunch and your schoolwork."

"Business?" Mira's eyes lit up. "Is it ghosts? Me and Kazza can help! I want to fight ghosts!"

"No, you don't," Hilbert said, before hunching over, "and keep your voice down." There weren't any people around them and the fog was screwing up his second sight, but even so he felt self-conscious.

"Yuh huh, I do," Mira whispered.

Hilbert furrowed his brow. "I know how The Pyroar, the Mismagius, and the Mantle ends."

Mira gaped at him. "You wouldn't."

"I would," he said. "Go get some food or you'll get spoilers instead."

Marley coughed into her fist. It sounded suspiciously like she was covering a snicker.

Before he could think too hard about that tidbit, Mira pouted and kicked at the tile. "Fine, I'll go," she said. "But I'm eating your lunch portions."

"Whatever," Hilbert said..

Joke's on you, I was going to trick you into eating a proper meal anyway!

From the look that Marley was giving him, he must have let his intentions show on his face, though Mira didn't seem to and she ran back the way they came.

"You're really quite the open book," she said.

Hilbert crossed his arms and turned his head to the side, a technique he'd learned from Hilda for when you were trying to deny that you cared more than you did, that you did it for them or anything, stupid, or that you were, as everyone else could clearly see, in some kind of relationship. She was usually lying out of her teeth when she used it, but surely it wasn't that obvious.

An uncomfortable spark jumped inside of Hilbert's brain. Wait a minute.

He forced his focus away from those distressing thoughts and grumbled. "We're still not her parents."

Hilbert sat with his ankles touching his thighs and had Golett keep him in place even if his muscles ached at the strain. He was dealing with Sinnohan ghosts, so he figured that he ought to make an effort to show what they would consider respect.

Smoke and incense swirled around him. It buffeted him in waves, ebbing and flowing like a heartbeat. Silhouettes faded in and out the edges of his vision. He could no longer see the walls, feel the flow of Sinnoh's energy through them. It was a place entirely separate from earth, like a heaven in itself.

There had been children frozen in fear at the foot of the staircase which he ascended, though he was unsure if that was because they were spiritually sensitive or the victims of some schoolyard dare. Was the bitterness in the air so tangible that even normal people could feel it?

He searched his mind for what the spirits might desire, what their troubles must have been. Violent deaths? No, Sinnoh's crime rate was a fraction of Unova's and the rare fatal feral Pokémon attack didn't leave much to be buried. Illness? Shaymin had bragged about their ability to purify poisons through Marley, so that wasn't likely. If the spirits that remained had died natural deaths, then why had they been so resentful?

Ah. He could see it now. There was the older generation that had their children taken away to fight in a war, then deprived of possible grandchildren by the consequences. There was the generation that left behind grandchildren who were always a little bit broken, deep down, kids who were missing pieces like he- like the others he had seen, maybe. These were the recently deceased elders, those that had come before but had been unable to see what followed.

"All of you," he called, "Please listen to me."

Dust scratched his skin as he was struck by another blast of wind.

He bowed his head further. "I can't apologize for the people and Pokémon that took your children from you. I can't apologize for how the world is going to treat your grandchildren. I'll apologize for the living, since that's all I can do."

The fog swirled around him as if he were placed at the eye of a storm.

"The future isn't as bright as we wish it was," Hilbert said. "I've seen it. The end of days is coming. I'm sorry, but there's one more battle left, and I need to make sure that we win."

At that, specks of ash cut into his skin, scoring thin lines in his fists and neck though not deeply enough to draw blood.

He bit back a swear. "I know how much fighting has taken from you!" he shouted. "I know that war isn't just fun and games, but if you want your grandkids to have a future, you need to listen to me!"

The wind stilled and became staler than the air in a mortuary.

"I want to save as many people as I can," Hilbert said, raising his head. "If you're going to stay in this world… Please, help me. Come to me, lend me your spirits. Let me give your children a miracle."

There was a moment where Hilbert was unsure whether they had heard him or even listened, but soon the spirits began to stir. The fog and lingering incense swirled together, coming closer and closer to Hilbert until he was totally immersed in spiritual energy.

Hilbert felt the buffeting winds on the edge of his soul and how they were blunted by the cloud cover. He took the willing spirits in, and while holding the connection open, turned his attention elsewhere.

All you, Golett.

Blank gravestones crumbled and their remnants rolled over to meet Hilbert. Gray rubble poured over itself as it grew into the form of a golem.

As he had many times before, he carved the four symbols into its forehead and a spiral in its chest. He thought of what the spirits of Sinnoh had to fight for, not just what he did. As he created that spiritual nucleus, the concept around which the spirits would reform, his finger began to glow. As he pressed it to the heart of the empty vessel, he spoke with a small smile.

"Singularity."

Within and without the rolling hills of eastern Sinnoh, between dream and reality, there was a forest in which the trees reached beyond the sun. The canopy was only known to exist because it blocked a bright blue sky and replaced it with a dull lime hue. Sunlight beamed down between the massie trees and pollen drifted in a gentle wind.

At the center of the forest, there was a giant tree stump grown in the shape of a throne. A clearing surrounded it, large enough to allow the endless regiments of fae that resided there to pass through. Far above the throne, colorful lights danced around each other, disappearing and reappearing on a whim like the fickle creatures that they were.

The Wild Hunt was the most honored and most organized regiments among the fairy legions, consisting of four-legged beasts of all sorts, equally bound in service to the Queen. There were Rapidash with flowing, rainbow-like manes, Ninetales which left frosted dew behind them with each step, and at the head of the galloping Hunt there was the leader. Though shrouded in a spiritual miasma rather than the mystic essence of its peers, the Spectrier still bore the reins of their master. It, along with the rest of the Hunt, came to a stop and kneeled before the living throne.

Atop a carved tree stump, the queen rested. Her legs were tucked under her, though she held her head high as she looked upon her subjects. Her blue fur waved like the primordial waters which gave way to life on Earth, and embedded within her golden antlers, a thousand crystals glittered like eyes opening in the sunlight.

"I have heard the call of those that would place themselves above Life and Death," Xerneas said. The words came with no movement on the living throne, and the voice pierced through the forest like the notes of a reed flute. "The night of your next ride draws near. Bring them to me."

Spectrier lowered its head in deference. The rest of the Wild Hunt followed suit.

AN:

Schedule slip. Oops. I swear that this story is actually about Pokémon, pinky promise.