Adam woke before the sun and went through his forms in the cold, the way he had most mornings of his life, in a lot of different worlds.
The Primeape joined him a few minutes in. It always did now. It had watched him do this for weeks before it decided the movements were worth stealing, and then it had started copying them, badly, and Adam had started correcting it, and somewhere in there the two of them had ended up with a thing they did together at dawn. The ape had good hands and no patience. He kept it slow. Slow was the whole lesson.
What was new was the third member.
Marshadow had come out of his shadow a week ago, the morning after Rustboro, and started training. Not lazing in the dark the way it had all through Kanto, surfacing only when something needed hitting. Actually training. It stood off to the side in the grey light and ran its own forms. Older than anything Adam knew, fast and hard to follow. It did not stop when the sun came up.
Nobody had said a word about the loss. Adam wasn't going to be the one to start.
He finished, breathing hard, sweat going cold on him. The Primeape flopped down looking pleased with itself. Marshadow kept going.
"You're up early," Ren said, from inside her blanket, not opening her eyes.
"I'm always up early."
"I know. You wake me every time."
They ate on the move. Ren had strong opinions about breakfast so she complained about it, which was its own small tradition.
"When we hit that hot-spring town," she said, around a mouthful of something she disapproved of, "I'm going to eat six eggs. They cook them in the spring water. Somebody told me that on the boat. You put them in a net and drop them in. After a while they come out grey and the taste is nothing like the usual."
"That sounds terrible."
"It sounds amazing and you're a coward." She kicked a stone off the path. "Ahh, cant wait. My muscles are stiff from all the walking around. The hot springs are just the thing we need. You are joining me."
"In what way will I be joining you?" Adam said, sounding conspiratorial, moving closer and slipping a hand around her waist.
"We'll figure that out when we get there. Let's keep our options open," she said, with a mischievous look.
Adam was already imagining the hot springs, lost in his fantasies.
"Did you see his suit?" Ren said, after a while.
"Whose?" Adam snapped out of his dream.
"Steven's. The guy was in a business suit out in the caves." She sounded genuinely offended by it. "Who does that?"
I'm starting to see more of Mirelle in Ren every day, he thought, and knew better than to say so.
"A rich person."
"A lunatic." But she said it fondly. She'd liked him, Adam could tell. Ren liked anyone who was a good person and a better fighter. "I hope he gets his stupid stone. By the way, you think he'll wear the same suit when he challenges the champion?"
"He will."
"I know he will. Imagine how many pairs he has."
The first trainer came at them on the ash road near noon, a young man with a walking staff and a Numel. He had the specific confidence of someone who had beaten everyone in his home town. He wanted a battle. He wanted money, really, but the polite way to ask for money was to want a battle.
Adam took it, because he needed to improve his coordination with his Pokémon.
He sent the Beedrill.
He was working through the team one at a time, these days. A different one every fight, on purpose. Not because the matchup called for it, most of the time the matchup didn't matter, but because he'd finally understood his faults in the fight against Steven. He simply needed to sync better with each of them. He also didn't know his own Pokémon. Not really. He knew what they could do. He didn't know how they thought, one by one, when it was just the two of them and a battle ahead. So he was learning with them, a battle at a time, and he was starting at the front of the belt and going down.
Today was the Beedrill. It had turned protective fast, and it fought like it had something to prove. He spent the whole short fight not trying to win, which the Beedrill could have done in about four seconds, but talking to it. Watching where it wanted to go before it went there. Learning that it hated being told to wait and loved being told to rush or finish something off.
The Numel never landed a hit. The young man paid up, bewildered, the way they all did.
"You didn't even try," Ren said.
"I tried at the part I care about."
"Take it easy there is time, if anyone can do it, its you." She'd won her own money off the young man's friend in about the same time and hadn't bothered making a lesson of it. Ren already knew her team down to the marrow. She didn't rub it in. She didn't have to.
In the afternoon he walked with the Larvitar and let it eat all over the mountain.
This was less a training exercise than a fact of life. The Larvitar had to eat, constantly, and it had opinions, and the opinions were about rocks. Adam had learned some of them by now. It liked the dark heavy stones with metal in them and turned its nose up at the pale crumbly ones. It would walk an extra hundred metres for a particular red-brown mineral that grew in the cracks up here. When it found a good seam it made a low sound Adam had come to understand as happiness.
He pried a chunk of the red-brown stuff loose with his knife and handed it over. The Larvitar took it out of his palm almost gently.
"Don't tell the others I carry snacks for you," he said. "They'll all want in."
The Larvitar ate its rock and leaned against his leg, heavy as a bag of cement. The two of them stood on the mountain for a while, just enjoying their time.
The chess started as a joke and stopped being one fast.
While on the road he carved out a board and pieces, initially wanting to play with Ren, but she hated the game with a passion. One evening in camp he set it out on a flat rock, more from habit than hope, and he became aware after a minute that the Metang was watching the board.
Not him. The board.
He'd been trying to reach the Metang for two weeks and getting nowhere. It wasn't cruel about him. It was worse than cruel: it was uninterested. It took his orders in battle like a professor grading undergraduate work, a half-second late, occasionally not at all when the order was beneath it, and the rest of the time it hung by his shoulder and thought its own thoughts and let him feel exactly how much smaller they were.
But it was looking at the board.
"You want the white pieces?" Adam said. "They move first."
The Metang did not answer, because it was a Metang. Adam turned the board so the white pieces faced it, and moved a pawn, waiting, feeling faintly ridiculous.
The Metang studied the board for a long moment. Then a thread of psychic force, thin and precise as a needle, lifted a black pawn two squares and set it down without a sound.
Adam kept his face very still.
They played the whole game. It took a while, because the Metang thought about every move like it was being paid by the hour, and it beat him. Not narrowly. It beat him the way an adult beats a child, seeing four moves to his one, and when it took his king it did the smallest thing, a little settling of its weight in the air, that Adam chose to read as satisfaction.
"Again?" he said.
They played again. He lost again. It was, he thought, the most attention the Metang had paid him since the day it let itself be caught.
Ren watched over his shoulder for the second game, eating an apple. "It's toying with you."
"I know."
"You could let one of the others play. Maybe the Haunter would be interested."
"The Haunter would flip the board and blame the Weavile." He moved a knight into what he already suspected was a trap. It was a trap. "This one likes a real opponent. I'm the only real opponent it's got. That's something."
"That's a whole personality, is what that is." Ren looked at the Metang with new respect, one collector to another. "You caught a snob."
"I caught a genius. The snob's just included."
The Metang took his knight. Adam had the distinct sense of being told, without a word, to concentrate.
The Haunter got them both that night, because the Haunter always got somebody.
Adam woke to Ren swearing and the sound of the tent trying to eat her. The Haunter had reached through the wall and rearranged the inside of it in the dark, tied two corners together, moved her boots somewhere unforgivable, and was now hanging above the whole scene grinning like the moon.
"Your ghost," Ren said, with feeling, upside down, "is a menace."
"I know." Adam did not get up. "Go back to sleep."
"It moved my boots."
"It always moves your boots. Don't reward it with a reaction."
The Haunter, denied a reaction, drifted over and moved Adam's boots instead, and Adam let it. A camp needed a menace. In the morning they'd both find their boots eventually. That was the tax for keeping something around that still thought life was funny.
They came down toward the hot-spring town over the next two days. They were close to their true destination now. Adam's idea was to get the Mega Stone for his future Tyranitar. It was the closest one to them, so he'd decided it would be their next target.
Meanwhile, in front of him, Ren was practically skipping toward the hot springs, which were in sight by now.
The town was a small place in a valley in the mountains. You could see steam pouring out of the cracks all around it. Adam also noticed a lot of Fire-type Pokémon in the area.
Maybe getting one or two would be wise. If an opportunity arises. Sage, keep an eye out.
[ Already on it. ]
AN: If we get to 300 power stones, I will release an extra chapter on 500, another one. If you wish to support the story and read ahead, visit [email protected]/skeri123