Teams:

Pierce Lawson:

- Narcissa, Beedrill

- Orion, Onix

- Cygnus, Kadabra

- Bellatrix, Gyarados (Shiny)

- Andromeda, Vaporeon

- Regulus, Meowth

Lillian Dale:

- Root, Ivysaur

- Talon, Spearow

- Gem, Geodude

- Star, Cleffa

- Cinder, Vulpix

Vermillion City III

[Robert Surge]

Things weren't going well, but that was hardly surprising.

They'd done a great job starting things off with the right foot. Their power was great and the wave of pokemon hadn't been quite as bad as they'd feared, or as he'd feared, at least. Furthermore, the Lawson guy had really made a difference, despite how skeptical he'd been when he learned how that had come to be. Not that he'd have turned him down, because any back up was better than no back up, at least so long as they didn't get in the way, which he didn't.

However, Robert had been surprised by how effective the man had been. Sure, his gyarados swarm had nothing on the Sisters', nevermind Lance's, but they were still gyarados. Weak and untrained as most of those were, they were still sea serpents that'd terrorize most other people and even pokemon. Their greatest strength, however, was their coordination, because those gyarados worked better together than some high level trainers' pokemon Robert had seen.

They worked like pack pokemon, which was surprising because Robert knew most of those creatures hadn't even known each other before they got rescued from the Rockets and they'd proceeded to be separated again through several rehabilitation sites. So, how was it that Lawson could just… wave his arms and the gyarados flowed as smoothly as a goddamn river? He didn't know the answer to that, but at that very moment? He didn't care. Much more pressing was the fact that they were starting to lose ground, or water, as it were the case at that moment.

Much as Lance's impressive dragons and dragon-adjacent pokemon were a force of nature and much as the rest of them were too – if less so –, they couldn't quite hold against the unending wave of pokemon. Whatever had happened at the SS Anne, it had been bad for this to happen, but then again, it couldn't have been normal. Incidents in the ocean weren't this bad or concentrated. It felt like an attack directed at Vermillion, but what in the world could make that many pokemon do that? A Legend? Probably, but why would one do that? Generally, if a Legend felt like being a piece of shit, one would know which because it'd be them making it everyone's problem, not directing pokemon like this.

At most – and worst –, it'd be both things happening at the same time.

"Support is needed on the left side," he heard Sabrina whisper in his mind and he grimaced.

'Who'd have thought?' he thought cynically. Because of course support was needed on the left side. Support was needed everywhere. Still, he refocused, barking more orders for his pokemon to adjust to their apparent weak point on the left side. However, he knew that'd leave other places, so they'd have to be wary about that. He knew Sabrina wouldn't tell him that just because, but for all that her brain was impressive in ways he couldn't quite fully understand, she wasn't infallible.

"Pierce is covering a little more for the right and the middle," the human Psychic informed him and Robert chanced a glance over his shoulder to check on Lawson. He scanned the school of water types literally under the man's feet and then turned to keep his eyes on what he should be doing. That glance had been enough to get a picture of things though and boy was it a picture to consider.

Because before, Pierce Lawson was only a name that he'd heard from the Sister's lips and a word or two from Brock and Sabrina. Some mentions here and there and a few videos that he'd been told he should watch was all that he had to work with. A guy that had a gift connecting with pokemon, soothing them, helping them. Helper-Voice was his Mark and that was not something to ignore. However, he'd also been relatively low in the radar. After all, Helpers weren't rare, Speakers were, but not that much. Voices? Voices raised eyebrows and drew eyes, but Robert wasn't one to care all that much for Marks. He wasn't a pokemon. Until he saw with his own eyes that they deserved the attention, Marks would just be a fancy title, which was why he tended to keep a wait and see approach.

Boy, was he seeing things now though.

If the man didn't get an update on his Mark after that day, then he'd question the Mark system that pokemon had more than ever.

Because the school Lawson had was growing. It was evident in the presence of tentacruel and other water types that were most decidedly not the gyarados he'd started off with. Besides, he'd bet a good amount of money that there were more gyarados than before. Robert wasn't certain what was going on there, but he didn't need the details. All he needed to know was what was happening. If it became relevant, Sabrina would tell him or someone else would tell Sabrina and she'd tell him. They didn't have time to get distracted that much.

Because the wave was unrelenting and the tide was still ongoing. No matter how much they attacked, how much power they threw at the pokemon, they still kept going. Their pokemon also couldn't keep going forever, they were being hit, after all, and while they were strong, the damage piled up. They were also getting tired, because one could shoot powerful attacks so much before the toll became too much.

"It's not as bad as it looks," Sabrina reassured, as if he needed that. Maybe he did. She usually got a better understanding of things than others, so it was difficult to question her judgement. Then again, she wasn't a soldier or anything like that, so she could be wrong in this instance. Robert didn't think it was worth pointing out anyway.

'But it's not good either, is it?' he asked back with a wry smile as he continued overseeing the "battlefield", if it could be called that. He was more partial to disaster zone himself, but oh well.

Sabrina's silence was more of an answer than any telepathic message could have been.

[}-o-{]

[Pierce Lawson]

He felt like a different person, standing there, in the middle of crashing waves and chaotic pokemon.

He wasn't even sure he felt like a person at all, really.

Maybe he was in a trance, not unlike the state he was constantly pursuing with Sabrina, with the Psychic Arts. It could also be something else related to the talent the woman seemed to think he had. Either way, the fact was that Pierce felt eerily calm in the middle of all that madness. He wasn't worried, nor afraid, but neither was he feeling brave or excited. He just… was.

His arms moved and the pokemon followed.

The tide hit them and they hit back.

Everything felt… right. Not good, but right. He felt in control and that was not something he expected. Yet, he didn't feel concerned or confused by this. It just was and he accepted that. His mind processed that and the only thing he wondered was "what does this mean for me and the school of pokemon?", because that was all there was. Vermillion, the elites, the teams, the crisis, SS Anne. None of that mattered insofar as they affected him and the school. It was, as far as he was concerned, just him, the Water types that followed him and the problem right in front of his face.

So, he commanded them and they listened, even if he didn't open his mouth and they couldn't hear. They saw him, or they saw the others, and they moved like they were one. He wasn't a person at that moment, Pierce supposed, he was just the spearhead, the brain of something larger than himself. He was fine with that, so long as the pokemon were safe, or safer.

"Join or leave," he repeated for the hundredth's time when a pokemon from the tide seemed to regain a semblance of calm. Most of them left, but some of them joined and that was good enough for him. More than that, because if it weren't for those additions, he was sure his school would have fallen apart, exhausted and hurt.

Their numbers grew though and that meant they had some fresh energy injected into them, even if it wasn't that much. It meant there was another body taking hits, spreading the damage and making the battle more bearable. It wasn't ideal, but then again, nothing in their situation was. Pierce would take what he could get and things were going surprisingly well, all things considered.

Although "well" might be a bit of an overstatement.

They were being pushed, he knew and could tell. He saw it in the way the elites ahead of him were slowly moving back. Whenever he chanced a look behind him – mostly to check on pokemon that had floated by them –, he'd see the beach that little bit closer than before. It was worrying, of course, but his mind was too focused to let that emotion take root in him.

Still, things were going better than Pierce had expected, so he'd take that small win for all it was worth.

Speaking of being pushed back though…

'Is there anything we can do?' he asked as loudly as he could in his own mind.

He didn't know if Sabrina heard him, but he had to hope she had. She'd delivered him a message here and there, after all. Mostly to ask him if he could move the school of Water types here or there to cover a hole in the elite's formation as best he could and he'd done as he was told. They couldn't replace one of the elites, of course, that'd be stupid and insane to even try, but he could help patch a small hole here and there while they tried to adjust against the tide's chaotic approach.

"We're being pushed," Sabrina replied, and yeah, he'd already known that. She wasn't done though. "Our formation is slowly crumbling, so we might need you to patch more holes. I know it's a lot but-"

'We can do that,' he interrupted, waving his hand forward and watching the many attacks that were his school's response to that movement. 'Anything else?'

Silence met his question for a long moment, but he just continued doing what he had to do. No use in just getting too much into his head. He needed to keep his focus, keep the school active, keep the holes patched and push the tide back. He glanced towards a seaking that was waking up, but he didn't even have to ask the question himself that time. Instead, another seaking that had already joined seemed to take the initiative and the new one joined.

That was great. If the pokemon could help with the recruitment, their school would develop a lot better. It might even make the whole thing more effective, since they might be more likely to hear someone from their own species than a human. So, Pierce barked out the order for them to do just that if they could.

"Can you buy us time?" a voice asked in his head and Pierce realized immediately that it wasn't Sabrina. It sounded familiar, admittedly, but he couldn't quite place where he'd heard it. All the same, he considered the question and then replied.

'How much time?'

"Even a single second would be great," the voice answered and he considered that for a long moment.

That was insane. What was he going to do to buy the elites time? His school was great, but they couldn't match the power of a single one of them, not even the weakest of the Gym Leaders. They were nothing in the grand scheme of what was going on at the moment.

And all the same, Pierce thought it over, he looked at his school of pokemon, he looked at the tide.

'Get everyone ready,' he thought, taking a deep breath in, running his fingers through his hair to push the now wet locks away from his face and steeling his nerves even more than they already were. Then he barked orders for his school, because this wasn't something he could signal. 'I don't know how much we can do.'

"Anything at all will do, Lawson," the voice told him and he felt no small amount of hope and relief bleeding through the telepathic connection. "We'll all owe you one if you can manage this."

'Yes, you will,' he replied, and he really hoped this would work. This was, after all, the second most insane idea he'd ever had. The first being pulling the school of gyarados to help in that crisis, which didn't help matters at all.

He really, really hoped it'd work.

[}-o-{]

[Blaine August]

'Is this my fault?' he wondered, not for the first time.

It was irrational, unlikely, but not impossible, and that thought tortured him like the guilt of his own actions did every single day.

For someone as smart as him, he was a damned fool and he knew it. Hubris was the bane of a brilliant mind, the curse of most scientists. He had known that, but then again, so did most others and that hadn't stopped them from falling. Neither had that stopped Blaine and now he'd have to carry the weight with him, maybe forever.

'Is this my fault?' he thought, and the fact that he was especially weak against this particular disaster just twisted the blade in his conscience. Water types, because of course it had to be Water types. If he really had caused this with his past actions, then it was somewhat ironic, he supposed.

More pokemon came and Blaine's team continued fighting alongside the other elites, elites that didn't know he might have started the domino chain that caused this. This wasn't natural and he knew it more than anyone. So, either the Rockets were behind this in some way for some reason…

Or the Rockets were behind this in some way for some reason.

Blaine hoped that last one wasn't the case, but couldn't help but wonder all the same.

"Do you need a moment?" Sabrina said in his mind and he twitched. There was always that doubt that the woman could just see into his mind, but Blaine had to believe in her morals and his own means of protecting his thoughts. Still, maybe she was asking because she could feel his distress, or a measure of it, but it was unlikely that she knew much else. Maybe she hadn't even picked up on anything and the question was unrelated to his thoughts.

'Why?'

"Because we might get one," Sabrina answered bluntly and he blinked.

In all that chaos? A moment? They were losing, slowly, very slowly, but they were losing. Blaine knew it. It was a matter of time before they all had to teleport away. A single moment for any of them was next to impossible. They might be able to earn them that much, but they'd do so at the expense of someone's entire team, probably. They needed to keep going, keep their guards up as much as possible. Upsetting the slightly skewed balance they had struck could only end badly for them.

"Everyone, be ready," Blaine heard in his mind and his back straightened, because that was Lance. Was a miracle really going to happen or was the situation dire enough for one of them to take the toll of pushing back to let them regroup? Who though? And how were they going to account for that kind of loss? "We're getting a moment to put ourselves together. We don't know how much it'll be, but we better make the most of it," the Champion himself said and Blaine immediately saw everyone's pokemon shift as they gave their orders, himself included.

They prepared, pulled back the smallest bit, readied to adjust their positions and their aims. That was as much as they could do without this "moment" that they were supposedly getting. Because they couldn't really do all that much, pressed and pushed as they were with the tide of pokemon. Their initial formation had cracked, after all, with every little shift, every adjustment they'd had to do with the chaotic nature of that pokemon disaster, they had to give up their stability little by little.

Now though, if they weren't being lied to, that could give them some more time… But Blaine doubted it. Even if they could regroup and put themselves back together again, what good would that be if they lost their numbers? Even one of the weakest elites going down would mean that they would lose a lot quicker. If it had come to that though, he guessed they were more desperate than he'd first thought.

"Just a bit more. Here's what we're going to do," Lance whispered in their minds, addressing each of them separately so that they'd know exactly what they needed to do during this moment they were going to be given. It was a lot, surely, but even if they only got a few steps into that plan, it'd mean a lot. It could be the difference between Vermillion being half destroyed and only a quarter being lost. If they managed to do everything…

No, that was next to impossible.

They'd get a few seconds at best, Blaine knew.

Still it'd be nice-

"Now," Lance barked and everyone gave their commands immediately. It was at that moment that Blaine noticed something odd. Everyone gave their commands, everyone, the Leaders, the Elites, the Champion. So…

Who was buying them time?

The answer came with a chorus of roars. In between the spaces between his pokemon and the pokemon of his colleagues, many Water types rushed. Gyarados, for the most part, but there were plenty others too. 'The Sisters?' he wondered, but no, he'd heard them calling their orders. They were within sight too and they were not doing this. 'But then who…? No way,' he started thinking before trailing off incredulously as the man riding a gyarados moved past Koga a few elites away from Blaine.

And then all of those water types shot moves off towards the tide.

And then they kept shooting, and shooting.

They didn't stop, they wouldn't stop.

And the seconds passed.

One, and they got every pokemon gathered together into a solid group.

Two, three and four, and they started getting back in place, where they'd started.

Five and six, they got to breathe, their pokemon earning some well deserved respite.

Seven… and they got back to work.

[}-o-{]

[Daisy Waterflower]

Pierce was a man of miracles, she decided.

There was no other way to call him, after what she'd witnessed. Bellatrix's thing back at Cerulean had been amazing and it paired really well with the history that the man had left behind him. Daisy had read up on the onix and the Mt. Moon incidents, after all. It paid to know people you were working with and she'd learned to check on people almost out of instinct after a life of being part of a Gym.

However, what he'd done then and there, in Vermillion?

That wasn't a whole new level, it was a whole new league.

Watching Pierce command his own school of Water types to halt the wave of pokemon was unbelievable, or it would have been if Daisy weren't seeing it with her very own eyes. He had numbers where they had power, for sure, but still, that was a feat that only elite trainers were able to accomplish. The elite of the elite even, because she very much doubted high ranked Ace Trainers and Rangers would be able to pull it off, nevermind high ranked trainers in the conferences.

Witnessing that left her heart beating faster in a whole new way, but she didn't have the time to entertain those thoughts, sadly.

Because those seven seconds had to count. Daisy and the rest of the elites rushed right back when they saw Pierce's school faltering, their energies running low and their moves fizzling out. Beams, cannons and so on started thinning as the toll of the onslaught made itself known. That's why it was risky for one of them to try and pull that off. They'd leave their teams exhausted trying to hold up the whole thing on their own.

The same happened to Pierce's school, letting up as the elite moved to cover for their retreat. They sagged back with the sea's waves, and Daisy could almost see the whole thing give, like a man deflating after holding a weight up for too long. There were some half-hearted moves shot here and there, but that was about it. The school of Water types was done, or almost done. They didn't leave though, even though Daisy imagined they could have. They remained there, exhausted but present, just in case.

She'd admit that she found that slightly reassuring, and not just because it'd be nice to have some back up. Pierce was there and she would, at least in the privacy of her own mind, admit that she cared about him. Even as more than a friend, she'd started to realize. It wasn't the time to think about that, she knew, but she couldn't help the fleeting thought as she continued commanding her team.

That was as much as she could do though, because much as those seven seconds had helped, the tide was still coming and they were still being pushed back. It'd helped, but the situation was still precarious. However, maybe, just maybe, they would be able to save most of Vermillion. All of it was a possibility too, by then, if very unlikely.

The seconds continued trickling by as the two sides of the battlefield – if it could even be called that – clashed. The tide never let up, no matter how many pokemon they knocked out, and they didn't either, much as they were being pushed back and around. Her eyes widened though, when she noticed more and more attacks moving past her from behind. Not rare, but she knew when an attack came from her pokemon, her sisters' or Erika's, who were the closest to her.

No, those were from Pierce's school.

Looking behind her for a split second, her eyes widened right before she turned back around. She couldn't afford to split her attention that much, but the one glimpse she'd gotten was enough. The numbers on that school were still growing, Pierce was still recruiting the very pokemon they were fighting against and that was… that was crazy.

If anything, it was growing faster than before.

She couldn't make heads or tails of that, but she was certainly not complaining.

She'd been wary when he offered to help them, especially when that help was accepted. Now though, she felt like she'd severely underestimated what he could do. She'd thought of his talents as more… non-combatant, before. She'd thought him a healer first, physically and mentally, for pokemon. Now though, the picture she had of Pierce in her mind was changing to something else entirely.

"Daisy, Giovanni and Bruno could use some support on his side," Sabrina pointed out and she shifted her orders to back those two up immediately. The Psychic was their communications center, after all. If she was relaying that, then it was absolute. Maybe they had called for help, maybe one of the others had noticed something. It didn't matter, they just needed to-

"Pierce!" she heard Lily scream and Daisy felt the panic in her voice cut into her chest like a blade made of ice. Immediately, her head snapped back to see and she did see. She wished she hadn't, however, because that was not an image she'd soon forget.

It was Pierce's body, barely visible in the chaos but distinctively not on top of the biggest gyarados.

No, instead it was moving through the air, as if in slow motion, before disappearing somewhere in the mass of bodies of the pokemon school.

[} Chapter End {]

Hey guys! How's it going?

Well, that's it, guys. This is the end of Searching Far and Wide. Next chapter we start with the epilogue. That should be a few more chapters and then we're wrapping things up. I still don't know what will replace this story in the schedule but…

What?

Why are you looking at me like that?

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the chapter.

As always, if you can't wait until next week for next chapter, or if you just feel like supporting my writing, there's up to three new chapters in my Pa tre on:

P a treon . com (slash) AdrianKing

Discord Link: discord .gg/UTDransjJZ

Random Question: I don't think I've asked this before. Who's your favorite Gym Leader in Kanto? Mine would be… None of them, I guess. I mean, there's a few I kind of like, but none of them that I'd call my favorite. If someone puts a gun to my head though, I guess I'd pick Sabrina.

See you.