I stared at the pokeball in my hand as if it, personally, was offending me.

  “I don’t get it,” I whined. “Why doesn’t she let me release her?”

  I had let Mankey out of the ball several times at that point and without fail, she attacked me. Trying to explain I wanted to let her go continued to not work, and I suspected she was actively preventing me from breaking her pokeball. I would have even thought she wanted to come with me if it wasn’t for her constant aggression when she was out of the ball. Strangely enough, she was quiet once inside.

  “I’m telling you, she doesn’t want you to,” said Clair. “It doesn’t matter how it happened, you caught her fair and square. Releasing her would be an insult to her pride. She’s a fighting-type after all.”

  “Then why does she attack me?” I asked, already knowing the answer. Claire shrugged.

  “She’s a Mankey,” she said.

  I shot her a glare. I still hadn’t forgiven her for the stunt she pulled with Watty, but it was becoming easier to think of her as a grievously immature nuisance than a villain. It was hard to hold a grudge against someone I almost died alongside.

  I shivered, and returned to looking at the pokeball. That was the true reason I didn’t want Mankey on my team. They were hard to train, sure, but if I was going to be the champion, that was no excuse. No, the real reason was that I blamed her for the Parasect debacle. We were the ones to intrude on their territory. That was our mistake, and I acknowledged our responsibility, but it was the Mankey’s harrassement that led us to make such a stupid error. I had no idea if they had pushed us in that direction intentionally. Whatever the case, it was easier to be mad at them than the Parasect. I’d been thinking – never a good sign – and everything in relation to the Parasect left a bad taste in my mouth. Nevermind that I had new material for my nightmares, and I was sure the sensation of tiny tarsi crawling over my skin was one I would relive the rest of my life. Almost as bad as all that was the guilt. We were to ones to barge into their home and set the place on fire. Self-defence was a poor excuse for our carelessness. Which was why, while I would be glad if I never saw another Parasect again, it was easier to blame the Mankey. And I had a hunch that the one in my hand had been the ringleader of the little group that chased us. She seemed to be the type, but more concretely, the rest of them left us alone after I caught her.

  “I don’t think I can work with her,” I said.

  In the end, I pocketed the pokeball and decided I’d deal with it later. We kept a steady pace along the river. Sunny and Luca had gone a few paces ahead and were talking in hushed voices leaving me to deal with Claire. I didn’t even have my Pokémon to back me up. When we had left the path, it had gotten too difficult for Flaaffy to navigate the undergrowth quickly, twigs and leaves kept getting stuck in her wool slowing her down considerably. As a result, she spent much of the journey resting in her pokeball. Lucky her. Comfey, on the other hand, had taken quite the shine to Hector after his evolution. He was swimming in the river and she was nestled on his head. I was not jealous.

  To make everything worse, Vivi was giving me the stink eye from Clair’s shoulder. She still hated me even after I’d saved her, the ungrateful brat. It was alright though, I was going to be the bigger person and let bygones be bygones. Well, Sunny seemed to be letting things go. If she was okay with things, I wasn’t going to make a fuss. Maybe.

  In the early evening we slowed down and considered stopping for the day. None of us particularly wanted to, but a shared lack of sleep and the occasional cough and weakness of limb were making a good argument for not pushing ourselves.

  Around the time we were about to make camp, a Ninjask appeared among us, so fast I didn’t even see where it came from. I hardly froze at all, which I figured was good progress. It buzzed around a little and then headed off down the river.

  “Did that look familiar?” asked Sunny.

  “Familiar?” I said. Luca and Claire also shook their heads.

  “Never mind, then,” said Sunny.

  Not a few minutes later, it returned, followed by an unexpected face crashed through the trees.

  “Jade?” exclaimed Sunny as her friend wrapped her in a hug. “What are you doing here?”

  “I ran away from Quentin, well, he caught up after, but anyway, I’ll tell you later. We’re all down by the Tea Bridge. Come on.”

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  Finding out we were so close to the others did wonders for boosting our spirit, and dropping all notions of stopping we forged ahead listening to Jade yap about how she had ditched Quentin to go to the Greenforest hoping to meet up with us. He found her, but by that stage they were already in the forest and she managed to convince him to go all the way. Not that he could have brought her back anyhow.

  “Psst, Calla,” whispered Clair to me. “That’s Jade Silks. Like, the Jade Silks.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” I said. “And?”

  “Why does she have a Dewpider on her head? No, I meant, how does Sunshine know her?”

  “They were childhood friends or something. And I don’t think she likes you calling her Sunshine.”

  “Come on, it’s just a joke.”

  “You’re jokes aren’t funny.”

  “Rebecca and Sarah think I’m funny. Luca too, sometimes.”

  “I bet they do. Aren’t you ever going to apologise to Sunny?”

  “For what?” asked Clair, looking genuinely surprised. I withheld the urge to kick her again.

  “I don’t know! Whatever you did when you were in school together!”

  Her face turned pink, though I couldn’t tell if she was angry or embarrassed. I was saved from further conversation by the sight of the Tea Bridge and a collection of tents that looked like home.

  “Guys, look who I found,” shouted Jade. Quentin was the first to notice, and in typical fashion, started giving out to Jade.

  “Jade, you promised you wouldn’t run off on your own.”

  “Yes, but Ena found Sunny and the others,” she said, waving to her Ninjask.

  While Quentin scolded Jade, the rest of the camp was turning into a stifling hugfest. Rebecca and Sarah pulled Clair and Luca together, and Darren enveloped Sunny in a hug so long I thought my watch had stopped. If I had a watch. Even Infernape jumped on top of Baltazaar and wrapped all four limbs around him. He laughed but quickly came over to me and pat my head.

  “I’m glad you’re safe, kid,” he said. For once, I didn’t feel the need to correct him. Darren hugged me too, once he’d finished with Sunny, but somehow, it didn’t feel the same.

  The Tea Bridge was a wooden arch bridge crossing the Greenforest river where it spilled into Dewpider Lake. The lake had the questionable honour of being the smallest in Silín and had Surskit gliding all along the surface. The bridge itself had an interesting history. It was so old, nobody could say for sure when it was built, though it had been reconstructed so many times, there was nothing left of the original. Nothing, except for a stone marker with a message written in an ancient language honouring an unspecified individual, and the name of the bridge. A typo in the translation had renamed the bridge to its now commonly used name, and by the time someone had noticed and said it should actually be the Teal Bridge, it had been to late, and nobody really cared anyway. This I learned from Kurt, who was big into his history which was the reason the Professor had trusted him with this mission in the first place.

  I helped Sunny set up her tent by the shore – she was kind enough to let me sleep with her – and after the brief celebrations of having reunited with everyone, we secluded ourselves inside and zipped the door shut. It was still early, but I was tired, and by the looks of it, Sunny was just as exhausted. Darren had assured us he would call us when dinner was ready. I pulled my sleeping bag up to my chin and let my eyes close.

  I woke up, not much later, to cold sweats, and Sunny trying to keep my thrashing limbs from smashing her in the face.

  “Ssh,” she said repeatedly. “It’s okay, you’re okay,”

  I stilled as tears welled up in my eyes and I started sobbing.

  “I couldn’t move,” I said.

  “I know, I know. It’s okay.”

  Her hand combed through my hair and I let myself be comforted. By the time we were called for dinner I was feeling much better, even if my eyes were still red.

  Nobody mentioned hearing me cry as we gathered around the campfire. I had a bowl of stew in my hands, made from ingredients mostly foraged by Jade and cooked by Kurt. It turned out, Jade knew her plants, and was able to find not just edible, but delicious things out in the forest. She said her Pokémon helped her out. It was uncanny the extent to which she was able to understand them, and all bug-types for that matter. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she was having full on conversations with them. This was also the first time I could get a good look at all her Pokémon. Apart from Ninjask and Forretress, she had a Shedinja which, if it wasn’t floating I would have been convinced was dead, a Shuckle and a Beedrill. She also had a Golispod, but after making a brief appearance, he hid back in his pokeball. She said he was quite shy. I also got a look at Quentin’s Meganium. I prided myself in that I was getting good at judging a Pokémon’s strength, and he was rivalling Baltazar’s team in do-not-mess-with-me energy. He was also a good fit in that his flamboyancy matched his trainer’s love for colourful shirts. At least, I had yet to see him wear something darker than autumn red. Currently, he had on a flashy pink top combined with light blue trousers.

  As we ate, Darren caught us up on his adventures.

  “We also scattered during the Primeape attack,” he said. “Fortunately, we were close enough that when Baltazar and his team succeeded in fighting them off, we were able to find each other pretty fast. We had strayed some distance from the path, but we had Kurt here with us. This guy must have had ranger training or something, because he was able to find all kinds of trails through the trees, as well as what Pokémon were nearby, all by looking at a leaf.”

  Kurt mumbled something about that not being exactly true, and certainly not as impressive as Darren was making it out to be, but the storyteller ploughed on regardless.

  “Obviously we spent a good deal of time looking for the four of you and, even if none of us succeeded, I think it’s fair to say that Sarah and her Cutiefly went above and beyond.”

  “I wasn’t able to do much,” interjected Sarah, a slight flush on her cheeks. “It was all Cutiefly. He kept going deep into the forest long after everyone else had mostly given up. I was only panicking thinking I might never see you again.”

  “Maybe,” continued Darren. “But Cutiefly did find someone. Two someones actually.”