Evelina
"Another one," Josh said, gazing at something in the sky, shading his eyes against the glare.
"A drifblim? Where?"
"There," he said, pointing. "Probably too high to capture."
Wherever it was supposed to be, Eve couldn't see it. But at this point, with the romance of Summer wearing thin, it was moot anyway. It was well past dinnertime, and the day was still swelteringly hot. At the end of an afternoon of trying to chase drifblim she'd just stopped caring. Down from the very summits of the Beacon Hills the breeze had mostly died away. Following the canal as it descended, lock by lock, had brought them halfway to the downland. It had brought fewer drifblim, too. In theory the prevailing winds would be blowing the drifblim onto the downland – Josh insisted they were, but she'd hardly glimpsed one all day.
Well, the next village wasn't far. Apriwell was hidden somewhere beyond a wooded ridge line. She was pretty sure she could see the village henge peeping above the hills. It was a little out of the way, but Olivine Gym's second field was just south of the village. Second field, second chance.
A rare gust ruffled the grass, long acres of green meadow, whistling around the tower. The air turned chilly.
"Eevee? You ok?"
"Yeah, fine," she blurted automatically. Eve realised she was holding several strands of her own hair. She blinked hard, trying to convince herself she was in fact standing on the slopes of the Beacon Hills in Olivineshire.
"Do you think there'll be a hot spring in Apriwell?"
"Don't know. There'll be a pub, though."
"I like hot springs," Eve said vaguely. "Want to get pissed?"
"We shouldn't. Not if you want to catch anything tomorrow morning. The sun hardly sets at this time of year."
"Doesn' anybody bwoody work in this bl- this place?" Eve slurred, trying to count the empty glasses. She settled on nine.
"My lady can clear her own damn glasses. Four o' them am yours."
"They're not," Eve re-counted them. Eight. They were – what was the opposite of multiplying?
A concerning thought occurred to her through the haze of gin. "Where's that meowth?"
Phone alarm, complaining at her. Hateful damn noise. Hangover pain squeezing her brain. The gritty-skin sensation from sleeping through a Summer night. She fumbled for her complaining phone, managing to cancel it on the third try. Eve slid herself upright, reflecting that falling asleep next to someone wasn't entirely clever, either. He had a lot of body heat for a cold-hearted devil. And Meowth was nowhere to be seen.
Even so, Eve thought muzzily, I did sleep ok … hangover aside.
Better, actually.
Josh mumbled something in his sleep – something midway between a mewl and a song.
That was odd.
Eve flopped back down heavily, feeling that it was altogether too early to puzzle that one out.
"Squid never bloody tastes right when you wake up," Josh grumbled, and rolled over.
"… what?"
"What?"
"We didn't eat squid. And we've missed dawn."
"That's your fault."
"Fuck you."
"We might as well find a bloody laundromat. I dow much fancy walking in noon heat."
He was right, damn it. The morning was basically wasted. She wasn't exactly covering herself in glory as a trainer this morning. Or any other morning.
Tigerlily Champion who can't even – not today!
But no, that wasn't right. She should just let the thought be.
Or doesn't even know what's real.
Eve sighed. It would be nice to be able to take a day off from her own brain.
As it turned out, there wasn't a hot spring in Apriwell. There was a holy well, gushing from the conduit opposite the primary school. And rows of blossoming apricorn trees shading the lanes. The flowers were such a deep blue they were almost literally black.
Apriwell perched like a gogoat on the hill's shoulders, its twin half-mile long high streets looping more or less East-West around the slope. Trying to go North or South called for hiking thirty degree slopes – half of those were stairways. Such a precipitous village. Stalls were set out beneath the black apricorns for market day. Pidgey were cooing and muttering on the roofs. There was the smell of frying chips in the air.
Eve pulled her necklace from inside her shirt, cupping it in her hand against anybody who might be looking. The Silver Wing looked an oddly dull matte grey in the sunlight. Even now her hands shook, just a little, from the excitement of it. She read the inscription again: MONNANA KNOWS I AM FREELY GIVEN.
Eve wondered whether Josh realised quite what he'd given away.
"… I can't believe you trusted anyone with a Silver Wing."
"He wor gonna pinch it," Josh insisted tetchily.
"How do you know?"
"We shook hands on it."
"You can break a handshake agreement."
"No you cor."
"You can't break an agreement you kiss on."
"So I hear. Don't shake unless you mean it."
"Don't kiss unless you mean it."
There was the sound of approaching music from uphill – warbling pipes, drumming, sudden singing in chorus. A column of huscarls turned onto the high street, striding in time with the beat. When they held the street's attention they broke into ritual dance; all wild, flying hair, stantler-like leaps and whirling swords, bare chests and shoulders glistening in the heat.
"It's the most wonderful time of the year," Eve said, rather enjoying the sight.
"Hm."
The sight of the practising huscarls prodded a thought to the fore. "You should have gone to the Midsummer celebrations!"
"Woss that got to do with me?"
"You're a man, aren't you? You're supposed to get wild and primal and manly on Midsummer Night. You know, dance around fires, get rat-arsed, smell like a zoroark's armpit."
"Really?" Josh snapped. "Tell me, do any of those men look like me?"
Eve would have argued – as much for the sake of it – if she hadn't been paying close, interested attention. There was a … preference for a certain body type, tall, broad-shouldered body types, tending to command attention. Even small town shrines tried to fill their roster with young men like that. Then there was Josh – short, elfin, with a tendency to fade into the background. Handmaidens were different. You saw all kinds of girls as handmaidens, even if they were invariably under thirty. Which was as it ought to be. Women weren't all one type.
She'd never noticed that contradiction before.
Eve remembered being fourteen or fifteen, making a right nuisance of herself because she wasn't allowed to go to the Midsummer Night celebrations with her dad and cousins. When she was younger she just wanted to join in. By that point it was really about watching young men with their shirts off. Anyway, her dad would usually come home around 1am, rat-arsed and giggling.
"… you really feel that way?" Eve said quietly.
"I'm not in the mood."
" … I wasn't going to make fun."
Eve decided not to say very much on the bus ride. And it was a quiet bus – a few locals who got off at the next village, and a few teenagers hoping to watch an imminent Gym challenge. Josh ignored them, scowling out of the window with his chin on his hand.
The next stop didn't look special - a stony bridleway overgrown with poppies and oxeye daisies, marked by just one rusted iron signpost pointing down the lane. The text was just about legible:
OLIVINE GYM
HEXDENE PITS SATELLITE FIELD
The bridleway led uphill through a meadow of yellow grass. The path, baked hard and dusty by the Summer. Little dusky-brown butterflies fluttered shyly through the grass. It would have been peaceful, but they had a chattering tail of would-be spectators following.
A deep roar split the afternoon air. The crunch of crushed rock, the crackle of a Fire-type attack. The meadow abruptly dropped into the hillside. Tiers of black rock, like an amphitheatre, descending to a battlefield twice the usual size. It was big, and it needed to be. There was a reason the Olivine Gym operated a secondary field in an old coal mine. Jasmine's steelix hunched over the field, glowering, grey with coal dust, blackened by flame, dwarfing both her trainer and the opposing typhlosion.
Steelix roared again. She reared eighteen, twenty feet high, apparently oblivious to the Lava Plumes spurting from typhlosion's back, and slammed her head down.
Typhlosion didn't quite dodge fast enough.
"Fuck …" Eve said. She hadn't meant to. She'd automatically meant to say something engaging and supportive. She wanted to say that a steelix indifferent to a typhlosion would not be beaten by an ivysaur. Distantly from the battlefield Jasmine's referee called her victory. Josh didn't seem to have noticed. Oh gods … he was giving Steelix the same searching look he gave every pokémon he intended to battle.
Zane was guarding the head of the path, probably baking in his leather, eyes hidden behind sunglasses.
"Who dares challenge the Gym?" he demanded.
"Joshua Cook, of Mulberry Town," Josh said. "I challenge Jasmine."
Zane stood aside to let them pass. I ought to say something supportive. The thought was nagging at her as she followed Josh down the path. Something to make him feel six feet tall and undefeatable. That's what she should do. That's what her mother would have done, or her aunts, or her cousins, or anyone, along with the rest of the damn Johto rose, domestic goddess thing they all did. Or maybe she should not say anything, for exactly the same reason. Maybe.
Halfway down the path Eve couldn't stand it any more. She caught hold of Josh's hand. "Are you sure about this?"
Josh stared at her. "What's got into you?"
"I. Um. I want you to win," she blurted.
"Eevee, it's a Steel-type Gym. There's only so many species Jasmine can use."
… that wasn't supportive. There was another Gym trainer guarding the approach to the battlefield. Only challengers were permitted past that point. Eve had to join the spectators while Josh descended the final twenty feet to the pit face. She pushed her way to the front, treading strategically on someone's foot to get there. The field itself was in a terrible state, smashed and gouged by the battle, scattered with drifts of spoil and rock. Patches of exposed coal were on fire.
Jasmine looked like a wilting lily underneath her sunhat. She was standing on a round dais, a concrete steelix coiled around it in an ouroboros. She sure as hell didn't look ready to battle. You'd doubt she was a Gym Leader, if you hadn't just seen that steelix.
Josh's appearance was met with a chorus of demoralising catcalls from the peanut gallery. More followed as the referee roared out the rules. Josh ignored the commotion, looking critically at the field and glancing at the sky.
"- a Mineral Badge is at stake! Begin!"
"Hey Townie!" someone yelled. "Get ready to get gone!"
"Loooser!" the girl next to Eve hollered, still drunk on the adrenaline of the last battle.
"Twenty dollars says he wins," Eve retorted, instead of yanking her ponytail.
"Huh! Get your purse ready."
"Ivysaur!" Josh called. "Battle's on!"
There was a ripple of general confusion through the crowd. Eve couldn't help but agree this time. It was a strange choice. True, the sun was altogether too bright for Fionn, but Screwball could obviously resist almost anything Jasmine could throw at it.
He's always up to something.
Jasmine cleared her throat demurely. "Magneton!"
One magneton looked pretty much like any other. Jasmine's was a little bluer, perhaps, but it was still as emotional and expressive as a stone. There was a moment of dead quiet. Ivysaur calmly sat down and watched Magneton slowly revolving around its axis.
Jasmine wasn't falling for it.
"Growth," Josh said.
Jasmine still wasn't falling for it.
"Vine Whip," Josh tried.
Only then did Jasmine react. "Iron Defence, Flash Cannon."
Flash Cannon flashed into the field, almost too bright to see in the afternoon sun. Ivysaur seemed to dodge it almost before it was fired; a cluster of Leech Seeds pinged off Magneton's defensive Magic Coat; Ivysaur hopped out of the way of a Thunderbolt. The minutes ticked by in much the same indecisive fashion, move and counter-move.
Magneton finally landed a hit with Thunderbolt when Ivysaur tried to dodge some smouldering coal. Its Thunderbolt couldn't have been that powerful – Ivysaur immediately grabbed Magneton and pounded it into the rock.
Stalemate.
"This is boring!" someone complained.
It was a slow-paced battle, Eve thought. Both trainers were trying to bait the other into doing something stupid, and neither were giving in. It was unusual to see Josh's favourite strategy reversed against him. Laura Winters had been as calculating, but she also had a thoroughly ruthless streak. Jasmine was trying to simply outlast him, and now Josh was trying to win a battle of attrition against one of the toughest type-combinations there was. This was the Steel-type as a strategy manifest, Eve realised. It didn't give an inch and it let you batter yourself to pieces.
"... left," Josh said.
"Flash Cannon right!" Jasmine shrieked. Ivysaur flattened against the ground just in time – Flash Cannon streaked over his head and burned a neat hole through his flower.
"Leech Seed."
"Magic Coat."
"Ten o'clock! Nature Power!"
"Deflect forty! Flash Cannon!"
An expanding dome of overpressure threw a cloud of coarse sand over the battle. A near miss. There was something odd about that exchange. Five minutes ago Magneton could hardly land a hit. Magneton were clever enough in their own way, but they weren't what you'd call creative learners. Another Flash Cannon bulldozed Ivysaur off his feet and sent him skidding across the field. It wasn't so much targeting Ivysaur as the ground – and Jasmine was really directing its aim -
- because the sand would allow Ivysaur to use Earth Power.
"Just give me the twenty now so I can get out of here," ponytail girl huffed. "Townie boy there'll have to quit anyway."
He might do just that, Eve thought. Nature Power wasn't a surprise any more and she couldn't see Vine Whips defeating Magneton.
Lyra's Thunderpunches sent out bright streamers of electricity, fizzing and crackling angrily. Scizor fought back just as ferociously, but Eve didn't care. The only way to win was to take back control of the battle. Lyra had beaten a scyther as a ledyba; she'd beat this scizor as a ledian.
"Counter."
The memory brought a hotter blush to her cheeks. Gods, she'd even announced to the whole Gym she was Tigerlily Champion. Tigerlily Champion who can't even battle. Eve wished he hadn't decided to battle in front of a crowd. Not here at the Steel Gym. She clutched her necklace hidden beneath her shirt. MONANNA KNOWS I AM FREELY GIVEN.
"Growth!"
"Iron -" Jasmine started, before realising there was no point.
Eve sighed, quietly, so no-one would notice. Jasmine had finally got him to panic. She wanted to race down there and talk some sense into him before it was too late. He was doubling down on a losing strategy.
The battle had come to another halt. Ivysaur seemed to be croaking something – so far as she could tell he was arguing with his trainer – Ivysaur who was usually quiet to the point of grave.
"No."
"Challenger!" the referee roared. "Time warning!"
" … do it," Josh said reluctantly.
Ivysaur grunted and dashed across the field, aiming again for a drift of sandy ground. Unprompted, Magneton fired off a blindingly bright Flash Cannon. When the glare faded Ivysaur had already swerved under its guard. There was a green flicker as a cluster of Leech Seeds uncoiled their tendrils.
"Mirror Coat!" Jasmine called too late.
"Reel it in."
"Resist."
Ivysaur locked all four vines around Magneton. It hauled back fruitlessly, droning with the effort. It tried shocking him repeatedly to no apparent effect. Ivysaur was edging step-by-step towards the sandy ground. Jasmine said and did nothing despite the crowd indiscriminately egging her on – Eve realised she was growling "Come on, come on!"
"Flash Cannon!"
The direct hit abruptly finished the tug-of-war. Ivysaur gained his feet and blasted a cloud of Sleep Powder in Magneton's direction. He made a run for it, Magneton tracking him patiently, not for sand or rock but right for blazing coal! Disbelieving laughter, outright mockery at the sight. Magneton did nothing – Jasmine did nothing – and everyone could see why.
"What the fuck are they doing?!" she breathed, and this time ponytail girl noticed.
"Failing," she said.
Half a dozen Gym Trainers all watching her and wondering how a Tigerlily Champion could be so obviously incompetent.
She plucked out the hair and winced. Why not just forfeit with some dignity? Since when did Josh fight to the bitter bloody end!
Ivysaur leapt into the flames. There was a red flash. The ground exploded, liquid flame burning fierce and hot erupting from beneath the field. The Lava Plume engulfed Magneton for just an instant – Jasmine clasped her hands to her mouth in shock – but that one instant was critical.
Ivysaur stumbled from the fire, scorched but terribly proud of himself. Magneton drifted listlessly. There was a complete, stunned, ringing silence. Nobody seemed to know what had just happened. The giggle fizzed up from her belly before Eve could stop it. The giggle turned into a full-throated laugh, that, for a brief minute, was all anyone could hear across the Gym. Rhia bless him, he'd found a way to pull it back.
"Victory to the challenger! He is Josh and he is steel!"
To Eve's annoyance, all around her people were starting to walk off. They might at least have the decency to witness him get his Badge.
Ponytail girl pushed past her.
"Hey, hey!" Eve barked at her. "Pay me my twenty!"