The boat came into Canalave through freezing rain, and neither of them noticed until they got a look at the dock.
Sinnoh. Far enough north that the sea had changed.
Everyone down there was wrapped to the eyes. Hats, scarves, gloves, all of them stamping their feet to keep the blood moving.
"Must be cold," Ren said, in her shirt.
"Must be."
They went into town anyway, because Adam had promised her shops on the way and Ren does not forget a thing like that. She spent most of an afternoon in them and came out of the last one in a coat that went down past her knees.
"You don't need that," Adam said.
"Obviously I don't need it. Look at it." She turned around once so he could get the full effect, then held the front of it open. "Feel the inside. Go on, feel it. That's real fur, or it's a very good fake, and either way it cost a stupid amount of money and I'm keeping it." She let it drop. "The one I had before is a Hoenn coat. They don't really get winter down there, it's basically a jacket. This is a coat."
He felt it. It was, admittedly, a very good coat.
He didn't buy one. He'd been told twice on the walk over that this made him look like a lunatic, and had decided he could live with that.
The Larvitar hated the snow. It made a noise of deep personal offence every time it stepped in a drift, and then walked through the next one anyway instead of going around, because going around would have been admitting something.
They went for the island first.
Canalave was built out over the water on stilts and bridges, and from its docks you could take a boat to a lump of rock and old machinery that had been a mine once and was nothing now. Iron Island. Sage read the name off a rusted sign before Adam could pretend he'd known it.
The man waiting on the dock had a black coat, a flat cap, and a Lucario standing close beside him.
"You'd be the two from the ferry," he said. "Riley. Don't go in the lower tunnels, half the roof came down in the winter and the other half is thinking about it."
"We were going to go in the lower tunnels," Ren said.
"Everyone was." He looked at their team, and stopped looking at it casually about a second in. "That's a Metang."
"It is."
"Hm." He didn't ask. Adam liked him immediately.
The trouble in the mine turned out to be Steel-types. A shelf of the ceiling had come down over a nest of them. The ones that got out were furious. The ones that hadn't were making noise about it, and Riley had been working the problem alone for three days with one Lucario and a lot of patience.
It took the rest of the day with four of them on it.
Adam's Metang moved rock. That was the thing nobody expected, including Adam. It hung in the tunnel, took a beam four men couldn't have shifted, and held it up while the Marowak dug. It did all of that without being asked twice. Two months ago it would not have happened. Riley's Lucario worked the far end. Ren's Weavile went down the narrowest crack after the trapped ones because it was the only thing thin enough, and came back out with a Magnemite balanced on its head and an expression of absolute disgust.
"That's a well-raised Weavile," Riley said, watching it. "Most of them won't go into a gap like that for anybody. She didn't even wait to be asked."
"She never does. I stopped telling her things months ago." Ren said it warmly, watching the Magnemite try to get down off her head. "She's usually already doing the right thing by the time I've thought of it."
"That's not luck, that's years." Riley looked genuinely pleased about it. "Whatever you did with her, you did it properly."
By dark the nest was open and the noise had stopped. Adam had rock dust in every part of him. They sat on the dock afterwards with the black water slapping the pilings and Riley made tea on a little burner, which he apparently carried everywhere.
"Good team coordination young man," he said to Adam.
"They knew what they were doing."
"Most trainers never stop talking. Shouting at their team the whole time like the Pokémon's gone deaf." Riley poured. "You only gave a few orders and it was done." He set the pot down and reached into his coat. He came out with something wrapped in wool and held it out. "Here. Take this."
It was an egg. Pale, dense, and slightly warm.
"Found it back in the spring," Riley said. "Been sat in my pack since, waiting for the right person. I've already got mine." The Lucario's ear flicked. "Look, I'm not being soft about this. Something you raise from an egg comes out closer to you than anything you'll ever catch in a ball. It's just how it works out. You'll see."
Adam sat there holding it. He'd wanted this one since before he'd set foot in the world, and he'd expected to have to earn it in some complicated way, and instead a man in a flat cap had handed it to him over tea because he'd spent a day moving rocks.
"Thank you," he said.
"Keep it warm. Not hot. Against you if you can." Riley picked his tea back up. "And come back through in a few years so I can see what it's become. I'm curious about you."
He's an aura user, Adam thought, walking back to the ferry with the egg inside his coat. He already noticed something off about us, but still he didn't mention it.
Ren got hers four nights later, up past Snowpoint in the deep snow country, and she had to work for it.
The little ice ones only came out after dark. That was the whole problem, but Ren simply moved her entire schedule to nights, which she did happily, because Ren has never once complained about an excuse to be awake at three in the morning doing something stupid.
She found it on the fourth night, on a frozen lakefront under a sky with too many stars in it: a small thing in a rock-coloured shell with two bright eyes, sitting in a snowdrift.
She didn't knock this one flat. She did the usual, sit in front of it and talk all night long. This was her method. If the Pokémon decided to join willingly she caught it just like that, if it needed some persuading she beat it down. After the night it willingly joined her, after all there was a menacing Weavile there looking like it wanted to tear it apart the whole night.
"It's so ugly," she said, delighted, holding up the ball. "It looks like a rock with a face drawn on it."
"Well, congrats Ren, it's a blue Snorunt. Give it time. A Snorunt turns into a Froslass, if you do it right. Ice and ghost, a good Pokémon." Adam nodded at the ball. "Gorgeous and horrible, both at once."
"Oh, I like that. I like that a lot."
She put it on her belt, then took it off again, and looked at her belt with the expression of a woman doing arithmetic she resented. "Adam."
"What do I do with the extra now? I've got seven."
"You send one to storage. The professor keeps them. They're fine, they're better than fine, apparently there's a whole field."
"Hmmm, what do I send." Ren made the thinking pose.
"The bird." Adam said jokingly.
"Never. It's my first Pokémon and it stays." She thought about it, standing in the snow, taking it far more seriously than the situation strictly required. In the end she sent the Butterfree, with a whole speech to it first about how this was a holiday and not a demotion, and the Butterfree drifted off looking about as concerned as a Butterfree ever looks. Ren watched the transfer light go out and didn't say anything for a bit.
"It will have a nice field to roam," Adam said. "With a pond."
"Shut up."
They went south and east after that, a long way over more water, into Unova. A country of enormous forests, and one more thing on Adam's list.
The locals called the stretch they ended up in Lostlorn. Nobody could tell them why.
They spent five days looking for it and found nothing, which was the point of the thing they were looking for.
On the sixth day Ren ate something at a roadside stall that disagreed with her for about thirty hours. She spent most of the next day flat on her back in camp with a bucket nearby, in a mood that Adam described as regional.
The Haunter picked that afternoon to try a prank on her. Adam didn't see what it was. He came back from the stream and the Haunter was up a tree with its arms wrapped around the trunk, and it stayed up there for the rest of the day, and it did not go near her again.
The Zorua picked the same afternoon.
Adam had gone out to find something she could actually keep down. He was gone for maybe forty minutes. When he walked back into camp there was a small black-and-red fox tied to a stake next to the fire, wrapped up like a parcel, with both ears flat and its eyes going straight to him. He had never been looked at like that by anything. It was the look of a creature that has met God and found her extremely disappointing.
Ren was sitting across from it with her chin on her knees, staring at it and not blinking.
"What," Adam said, "is happening."
"I'm deciding whether to roast it."
"Ren."
"It came into camp as you." She pointed at it without looking away from it. "It walked in wearing your face, and your walk. It sat down right there, and I said something to it, and it just sat there looking smug. I got up to hug you because I felt like shit and I wanted some warmth, and about halfway there something felt off about you. Once I worked out it wasn't actually you, I beat the absolute shit out of it."
Adam put the food down. He was trying very hard to keep his face still.
"So how did you notice?"
"You don't smell like that. And you'd have said something back." She finally looked up at him. "It's been a bad two days. I've thrown up four times. I am not in the mood to be pranked by a Pokémon."
"I can see that."
"The ghost already found this out."
"I saw the ghost. It's in a tree."
"It can stay in the tree."
Adam crouched down in front of the fox. It looked at him, then at the stake, then back at him, and made a small sound that in any language would have been please.
"I've been trying to catch you for six days," Adam told it. "You had one job, which was to not walk up to her. Genuinely, of everyone in this forest, her." He looked over his shoulder. "Thank you, by the way. You've saved me about a week."
"Don't thank me. I want it on record that I did that with a stomach bug."
"It's on the record."
He held out the ball, and the fox went into it without any argument at all, because it had spent the last hour thinking hard about its options.
That evening it stole a strip of dried meat out of his coat pocket while looking him directly in the eye, so it clearly hadn't learned anything. But it gave Ren a wide berth for a week, which Adam thought showed a basic grasp of the situation.
The egg hatched on the boat back to Kanto.
Adam was asleep when it started and woke up as soon as he heard the cracking. What came out of it was small, blue and black, with a red-brown face and no idea what its legs were for. It sat in the wool it had just broken out of, in a bunk on a ship in the middle of the sea, and looked up at the first thing it saw.
"Hey," Adam said.
It made a noise.
Ren came down the ladder at a run, hair everywhere, and stopped dead. "Oh," she said. "Cuteee." Then, immediately: "It's mine. I've decided. Look at its ears."
"Absolutely not."
"Look at its ears, Adam."
The little thing tried to stand up, fell over, and got very angry about it in complete silence. The Primeape, who had come to see what the noise was, watched this happen with an expression Adam could only describe as recognition.
"Such a shame, you got such a cutie this time," Ren said.
Adam decided that it was time to send some of his team off.
I can't have everyone with me all the time.
He explained this to the team over breakfast. The Primeape understood perfectly and was visibly preparing an outrage in case it was the one being sent. The Metang had clearly worked it out three days before he had and was waiting to see how long he'd take.
They took turns holding the Riolu all the way to Kanto. Somewhere on the third day it worked out its legs. By the fourth it had learned to climb Adam's coat and sit on his shoulder. It fell off constantly. It never once let that discourage it.
Five badges to go out of the eight he needed, and a tournament to win. A hundred and some days left on the clock.
Plenty of time, Adam thought, catching a falling Riolu off his shoulder for the ninth time that morning, and went to find breakfast.
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