Communication (PG-13)

[Sike Saner]

SnoringFrog: Nah, by that time your children will probably be bored of it. Your grandchildren might be old enough to read it by then, though. X3

Thanks for reading and for replying! ^^


Might as well do another progress report while I'm here... Chapter 16, as it currently stands, is just over eleven pages in length, with another two scenes that still need to be sketched out. After that, it's editing time. No solid ETA on the finished version other than that, again, it'll probably be out this year. It's starting to look like this isn't going to be a single-poster after all, though. X3 But it's still going to be shorter than the last one.

[Draco Malfoy]

...I told you I'd get around to reading this. xD

Well, it's really late over here and I have exams to study for, so I have to keep this pithy, please bear with me. >.<;;

Firstly, suspense equals =D

Your plot twists (like in the last chapter) are adroit, in my opinion, and if you'd just post the chapter more often, I might even detail the specific plot developments I like. xD The names are unique and spiffy, without transgressing into corny shait territory (Azvida, Jeneth, Solonn are all very cool)

My only quibble would be your choice to not capitalise Pokemon species names (eg "the chansey" as opposed to "the Chansey"), but that really is a personal thing and not a mistake on your behalf. Hell, by convention, your way probably is the right way of doing it. xP

Continue posting and I'll continue reviewing. >=D

[Sike Saner]

Draco Malfoy: Hi! Glad you're enjoying the suspense and the names and the plot twists. :3

Glad also that you don't mind with regards to the whole pokémon species capitalization thing. ^^ I actually used to capitalize them (along with move names, item names, et cetera), but ultimately came to prefer not doing so. That's just with regards to my own work, though; I don't insist that anybody else not capitalize such things.

Thanks for reading and for replying! ^^

[crazybarkz]

GAAAAH! finally! i just stayed up 48 hours reading this fic! ima go to bed now and review later...... awsome story ur an amazing author, ill write more (and hopefully better) later........

[crazybarkz]

OH SIKEY!!! IM BAAAAACK!!!! *thunder flashes in backround and women scream* OMG AMAZING STORY! I read TOoS three days ago then I just had to read this one. YOU JUST KEEP GETTING BETTER! Damn you and your amazing abilities! I can't really review sixteen or so chapters at once so I'll give it all a quick review and then review every chapter from now on.
To start off, DEATH TO JA'TAL! I don't care how he acted later, that was after he got his way.
Next, your characters seem so real. They're each unique and never stray from their personalities. Kudos to you for that. Alot of authors have trouble in that respect.
Your spelling is amazing, i didn't find any serious errors, i don't think i found ANY errors in grammer.
The story is interesting and keeps people wanting to read. It has alot of twists and keeps getting better.
Now for a word to the fellow fans. CLAYDOLS ARE PONAGE! Any cladol, evil or not, MUST be trusted just because it's awesome.

[Sike Saner]

crazybarkz: Good to “hear” that you feel that I’m managing to keep everyone in character. ^^ Thanks for reading (and for reading both of my stories, no less) and for replying!


So… two chapters within a single year. Sorry to swamp you with my constant updating, folks. :p But seriously, though, I apologize for how infrequently chapters are coming out at this point. Hopefully the fact that this one took roughly seven months as opposed to the roughly thirty-nine months that the previous chapter took is a sign that I’m getting back into the groove, albeit slowly as all heck. X3;

______________________

Chapter 16 – To Return

If the sight before the party hadn’t already stopped them in their figurative tracks, the sound that came with it—a long and incredibly loud roar, the product of six voices calling out in unison—certainly would have. The snorunt and glalie and the single claydol in their midst now stared at its source: a cluster of walrein blocked their path, each of the bulky, blue creatures wearing an expression that told all too clearly that they were uninterested in letting the party pass without giving them a hard time about it.

Solonn eyed the foremost of the walrein warily. The Virc didn’t encounter these beings anywhere near as often as they did the less evolved counterparts thereof and generally left them alone whenever they did stumble upon them, and with good reason. Those who had gotten on the bad side of one had not come away unscathed, and their accounts of those encounters had spread among the public—all Virc glalie, as far as Solonn was aware, knew of the strength, resilience, and dangerous tusks of the walrein.

Taking on just one of them was generally considered risky, and here were six—a potential threat to them even given their own numbers. And with the children still in their charge, not to mention the very real possibility that Oth’s present inability to teleport meant that it was unwell in some way or another, Solonn was not of the mind that they ought to be getting into any fights if they could help it.

If Zdir had expected to run into a gang of walrein en route, he hoped to all gods that she had some idea of how to deal with them peacefully.

<We apologize, sirs,> Oth spoke up; a couple of the walrein’s eyes darted around momentarily, trying to pinpoint the source of the words without sound, but the rest of the walrein seemed to guess where it had come from right away, casting an acknowledging and briefly appraising glance at the claydol only to fix it right back onto the glalie almost immediately. <We did not mean to startle you, and we do not mean any harm. We merely need to pass through—we must return these children to their homes. We will not cause any trouble for you in the process.>

The foremost of the walrein drew a deep breath, his already broad chest expanding greatly. “I don’t know who you are,” he said in a booming voice, still keeping his eyes locked onto those of the glalie in front of him as he spoke, “let alone what, but I reckon that you’re not from around here, and I imagine that you haven’t been given the most complete picture of how things work around here if you’ve chosen to ally yourself with those creatures. At any rate, no, you are not passing through, not any of you.”

He had to raise his voice on those last few words; a great thundering noise had arisen and was growing louder by the second. It shuddered to a stop as its cause came into view: beyond the six walrein, a large crowd of sealeo had amassed, and from what Solonn could see of them, they didn’t look any more hospitable than the walrein had. If anything, they looked even less so.

“I won’t attack children of any kind,” the apparent spokesman of the walrein went on, “and neither will any of my men here, but they…” He gave a quick, backwards jerk of his head toward the crowd behind him. “They may not be so inclined to show that kind of mercy.”

<With all due respect, sir… do you not have any authority over them?> Oth asked.

“We do. But at the same time, we understand that their caution may well have saved their lives or those of their loved ones in the past. Now then, if you’re really interested in getting those children back where they belong safely, you won’t push your luck in here. Go find some other route to take,” the foremost walrein said, and his tone told that he was done discussing the matter.

There was a moment that would have been nearly silent if it weren’t for the audible shuffling about of anxious sealeo—Solonn became concerned that they might decide to just charge at them and try to drive them away or worse. He found himself rather surprised that they hadn’t done so already, in fact.

Then, <We will go. Again, we apologize.> To the rest of the party, <Go quickly, but not too quickly. Zdir does not entirely trust that the sealeo will not charge after us, and neither do I, but we must stay together.>

Not quite in unison, the glalie turned around. The party began making their retreat in nearly the same instant. The sounds of restless sealeo were still audible, and there was a sound that suggested flippers slapping against stone that made Solonn worry for a moment that he and the rest of the party were indeed being pursued, but those sounds grew softer rather than louder as they left the site of that encounter further behind, and Oth was giving no indication that anyone was following them.

Eventually, <Stop,> Oth instructed the party. <We are back where we began. I… regret to inform you that I remain unable to teleport,> it said heavily. <We have no choice but to take the opposite direction from this point this time. Again, if any of you recognize our surroundings at any point, please let us know.>

Zdir made her way to the foremost position once more as the claydol spoke, and Solonn looked at her with uncertainty as she moved past him. Maybe she had simply made a mistake in choosing the route that had led to the walrein and sealeo, and the opposite path was in fact the one that led back to Virc-Dho… but there was also the possibility that she had chosen correctly the first time, that the right way back to the warren—and maybe the only way there—was now impassable, meaning that they were now more lost than ever before. He caught a look on Zdir’s face as she passed that suggested similar concerns, as well as a hint of embarrassment and apology in the way that the light in her eyes fluctuated.

The party moved out, and as they did, Solonn tried to focus on the lingering possibility that Oth would regain the ability to teleport before they could get hopelessly lost or run into any more trouble. Still, the fact that Oth being able to teleport again was only a possibility at this point made it difficult for Solonn to be too optimistic about the situation. Neither he nor apparently anyone else even knew what was wrong with Oth, exactly, though Solonn still harbored dark suspicions about the way that the guard back at the Security Guild’s holding cell had treated it. He had very little understanding of how a claydol’s body worked, alien as they were; for all he knew, too much exposure to hostile elements could damage whatever mechanism allowed them to teleport—and perhaps permanently.

Please, gods… don’t let that be the case. Please let it heal…

At length, the path split. Both of the routes that they were presented with led leftward, with the main route curving out of sight a relatively short distance past the entrance to an offshoot in the left wall. After a few moments’ worth of tight-browed consideration, Zdir guided the party into the farther path.

That path ultimately turned out to be a dead end, opening into a somewhat large, oddly-shaped room. Solonn prepared to turn back around and saw Zereth out of the corner of his eye already doing so, but Zdir stayed put and appeared to be thinking briefly.

Then, <We will stop and rest here for a while,> Oth announced; Zdir began leading the rest of the party well into the room, away from the exit, as it spoke. <I will make further attempts to teleport while we are here.>

Most of the glalie put a little bit more space between themselves and the snorunt and sat down, many of them leaning against the walls. Zdir, however, remained where she was, staying airborne, and she turned to face the children as Oth lowered them to the floor. Some of the snorunt wore confused or worried looks, while a couple of the others looked annoyed to varying degrees by the current situation.

“Now, don’t stray, any of you,” Zdir said in a lowered, gentle tone once Oth had relinquished its hold over them completely. “The ones who took you from home are still out here, and until we get you back home, we’re the only ones who can protect you from them.

“Speaking of the ones who took you…” she went on, “can any of you tell me anything about whoever it was that tampered with your minds, made you believe things that weren’t true?”

All of the snorunt responded in the negative, shaking their heads or saying “no” in one way or another.

“I don’t think we were awake when it happened… were we?” one of the slightly larger, presumably older ones among them asked of the others, which sent another wave of negatory responses through the children. “I was at the snowgrounds just minding my own business—we all were—and then a couple of glalie showed up. They knocked out Jeril right away. Her and Seska. We couldn’t get out of there. Pretty soon, they got all of us.”

“I tried to fight back,” the snorunt at her side said, looking proud for a moment, but wilted just as quickly, looking aside. “…It didn’t work.”

“At least you tried,” said the snorunt who had been speaking previously. She sounded a bit regretful, even ashamed. “But anyway, yeah. Next thing I knew, I woke up somewhere else, and I thought I’d always been there.”

Zdir nodded in acknowledgment, drawing and releasing a deep breath with a look of disappointment. “Is that what all of you remember, more or less?” she asked, at which the snorunt all nodded in near-unison.

“I’m sorry I can’t remember any more about it,” another of them said quietly, earnestly.

Zdir’s features softened a bit. “That’s okay,” she assured her. “It’s not your fault.”

There was a very brief flash of the light in her eyes then, and a small pile of snow appeared just behind her. She moved around to the other side of it, and Oth joined her there a moment later. “Eat,” Zdir told the snorunt. “You’ve certainly earned it.” Four of the snorunt obliged right away, with the rest only hesitating briefly before partaking of the snow. She watched them for a moment, then turned to face the majority of the other glalie.

<Are there any among you who have not successfully hunted in the past couple of days?> Oth asked then.

That question took hold of Solonn’s attention at once. His eyes widening, he looked over the snorunt, not knowing for sure how they might react to such a question… but found them all just sitting there and eating snow, giving no indication that they’d even heard the last thing that Oth had said. It had transmitted the message to the glalie alone, he realized.

With regards to that message… he had to stop and think for a moment, finding the last few relatively mundane hours preceding the hell that had broken loose in Virc-Dho hard to reach. He finally managed to recall having hunted shortly before he’d gone to sleep on the night prior to the attack on the temple and the snowgrounds, and he was fairly certain that that was in the time frame about which Oth had just inquired. He looked back toward Oth and shook his head.

Someone else had apparently done the opposite; <I am afraid that you will have to make do with ice until such time as the children have been returned to Virc-Dho,> Oth said. <Zdir believes that it would not be prudent to expose the children to predation at this time on the chance that it may disturb them too greatly. She wishes for them to remain as calm as possible for the sake of their safety and our own.>

That made sense, as far as Solonn was concerned—no one needed to be losing their heads at a time like this. He just hoped that no one, including himself, would be affected too detrimentally by the lack of proper food for a while. Ice could occupy the stomach, could pacify hunger to a degree, but without meat, the glalie in the party would start to grow weak and ill before terribly much longer.

Solonn decided to conjure up a moderately sized block of ice in front of himself then, the rest of the glalie each doing likewise for themselves. Though he still felt oddly disconnected from the hunger that he was fairly sure he should at least be starting to feel by now, he started in on the ice right away, trying not to eat too slowly, feeling that the party should and probably would be moving on before much longer.

As he fed, he saw Oth and Zdir make their way over to Narzen, who looked up from his ice with a questioning expression. Narzen maintained eye contact with Oth, and he nodded a couple of times over the seconds that followed, his expression turning from one of vague disappointment to one that suggested that he was intrigued by something and then to another that almost looked eager.

Oth and Zdir moved away from Narzen then, leaving Solonn to wonder what the apparent, silent, one-sided conversation that had just taken place there had been about. That question then moved aside in his mind as he saw Oth and Zdir stop before Zilag and start up a similar conversation with him.

Solonn frowned in puzzlement, wondering what they—or rather she, he imagined—could have seen fit to discuss privately with just one of them at a time rather than saying it to at least all of the glalie at once, if not to everyone who was present. He suspected that the subject they were on about with Zilag wasn’t the same as what they had discussed with Narzen, however: he noted that Zdir wore a visibly more serious expression while Oth spoke to Zilag, and noted also that Oth apparently had more to say to Zilag than it’d had to say to Narzen.

It was all too apparent that the topic in question was unsettling Zilag to some degree, but at the same time, Zilag responded affirmatively to every silent question he received, as far as Solonn could tell, and Zdir looked satisfied enough with his answers.

They began to drift away from Zilag then, returning to the spot near the snorunt where they’d been moments ago. The still-troubled look on Zilag’s face left Solonn feeling strongly inclined to go over to him and ask what that had been all about.

Before he could do so, however, <Zdir wishes to know if anyone else among you wishes to be left in Virc-Dho when we return the children,> Oth spoke up.

Solonn was shaking his head before he’d even quite realized that he was doing so. He was a fugitive, and a fairly recognizable one at that. Showing his face in the warren seemed incredibly ill-advised to him, and he got the distinct, unpleasant feeling that doing so would continue to be a bad idea for a long time—possibly forever, much as he hated to consider it.

<Very well, then,> Oth said. <If any of you change your minds later, please let me and Zdir know. Even if we have already returned the children by that point, we will help you get back to the warren.>

Zdir looked pleased enough with the silent answers that the rest of the glalie had given her, partaking of her ice once more and sending no further messages through Oth for the time being.

Solonn, meanwhile, was less at ease with the matter, for something in the way that Oth had inquired about it had struck him and struck him hard: if anyone else among you wishes to be left in Virc-Dho, it had said. Perhaps by “anyone else” it had been referring to Zdir, the thought occurred to him, but he promptly dismissed it; Zdir had the same good reason not to go back that he had, and he was sure that she recognized that fact. What he suspected instead was that Oth was referring to Narzen and Zilag there—that the matter of whether or not they wished to return was what those private conversations had been about (though why they had been singled out in that way, he still couldn’t guess), and that they had both said that they did want to go back to Virc-Dho.

This didn’t come as any real surprise to Solonn, at least not where Zilag was concerned. He knew that Zilag would want to go back home to his family. He just wasn’t sure any longer if it would be well-advised for Zilag—or anyone else in the party—to do so.

Once again he had remembered the lahain having known his name back in the council chamber, and once again he had found himself wondering just what else the Virc authorities saw fit to know. This time, however, it had occurred to him that maybe they already knew whom he associated with, and with Zdir having once been one of the Virc authorities, he suspected that she was well aware of just what they knew.

Solonn reckoned that if they did indeed know such things, then the authorities would likely want to look to those associates for any information that might help them track down the fugitives. And if they decided that those associates weren’t cooperating enough to suit them… Solonn swallowed hard, feeling as though the remainder of the ice that he’d generated for himself had just tried to force itself down his throat all at once.

But then something else crossed his mind. Wait… Whether or not they really would be in that kind of danger if they went back home seems like something Zdir would know, too. If Narzen and Zilag are in any danger from the authorities, then she wouldn’t let them go home, would she?

That, he couldn’t answer. He sort of figured that she wouldn’t, seeing as how she’d not been able to stand the thought of letting him, Grosh, or Oth be unjustly kept in the Security Guild’s custody. Still, the possibility that Zilag and Narzen would be greeted by harsh treatment from the guild upon their return sent new currents of worry through his already uneasy nerves.

There was yet another reason to hope that Oth would be able to teleport again soon, as if they needed any more. If Narzen, Zilag, or anyone else who decided to stay in Virc-Dho got themselves thrown into the Security Guild’s cells, he could see no other feasible way for them to be delivered from them.

<We will now resume our journey toward Virc-Dho,> Oth said then, sounding regretful, and telekinetically gathered up the children once more. As the other glalie began to rise and cluster around the snorunt, Solonn hurriedly finished his ice, then quickly rose to join the others. The party and their charges departed the cavern and went back out into the unknown, with Solonn still harboring concern for what might await some of them after reaching their destination in addition to that which he had already held for the trip.

The party backtracked to the fork in the road, taking the other route that it had offered this time. Not long afterward, they were met with another choice of multiple directions to take and subsequently ran into another dead end, but they didn’t stop there, and they only made a very brief stop for necessities at the third dead end that they encountered.

Meanwhile, nothing of their surroundings looked at all familiar to Solonn, and no one else had given any indication that they recognized anything around them since Zdir had mentioned that the place into which they’d unexpectedly teleported looked familiar. Maybe that wasn’t the place she thought it was after all, Solonn considered dismally. It truly seemed that they were traveling blind at this point—and there was the chance, he couldn’t help but consider, that they were headed straight for the Sinaji’s lair.

That thought sent a fresh bolt of fear into him. Before he had long to dwell on it, however, <Solonn! This place… we have been here, have we not?>

Being addressed directly when he’d not been expecting such a thing startled him initially; he threw a gaze about somewhat wildly, but couldn’t seem to connect any of what it showed him to anything that he could remember.

Then his wits congealed once more, and he nodded to Oth in confirmation as he realized that yes, he and the claydol had been here before, and recently, at that. He’d been here alone several times prior to that, furthermore; it was simply his first time looking at it from this angle.

Oth had moved to the front of the party and was now leading them towards an irregularity in the path before them, one that revealed itself to be a large, deep hole in the floor as they drew nearer to it. The party had managed to stumble upon Grosh’s home.

Oth came to a stop at the edge of the pit, and it once again relinquished its hold over the children. <Be careful not to fall in,> it warned them.

It leaned forward, peering down into the hole in silence. Next to it, Zdir was looking into its depths similarly, wearing a look of contemplation. She nodded at something that had been spoken silently.

<Solonn… do you suppose that your father would mind if we were to take shelter in his home while he is away?> Oth then asked.

The question took Solonn slightly by surprise, but then it occurred to him just why Oth might be asking such. When he and Oth had been on their way to visit Grosh, he had told it of how Grosh had managed to remain undisturbed in that hole for so many years. It might have occurred to the claydol that if such a creature had stayed successfully hidden there for so long, then the party could perhaps avoid being noticed likewise there.

Solonn figured that Grosh would have no problem at all with their using his home to keep themselves safe—if anything, he imagined, the steelix would be elated to know that he could be of some help to them, even if it was in some distant, indirect way.

Gods… he’d be happy just to know we’re alive, he recognized, which made him rather heartsick. Solonn nodded to Oth in response to its question, silently praying as he did so that the steelix on whose behalf he answered would be reunited with his home and what remained of his family before much longer.

<All right, then,> the claydol said. <I have proposed that we stop here to rest for a while, longer than any of our previous stops,> it then announced, which elicited a groan from one of the snorunt. <This—> It gestured toward the hole with one of its turret-hands, the other still clutching the herbs that it had gathered to its chest. <—has been the home of one of our allies for many years. He is elsewhere at this time, but I have assurances that he would not mind our staying here in his absence.

<Given a bit more time to rest, I may be able at last to teleport us to the warren. I sincerely hope that I will be. If not, that tunnel,> Oth said, pointing toward a passageway off to the left, <ultimately leads back to Virc-Dho, but fear not—it is a scarcely-traveled route. People virtually never come here. Our hope is that we may be able to avoid notice here, or at least more able to do so than we might be anywhere else that we can presently reach.>

That was, in truth, all it was: a hope. Still, it was better than nothing, Solonn supposed, and he furthermore reckoned that an extended period of rest might very well help the claydol succeed in finally reconnecting to its presently unavailable ability, which would make the final phase of their rescue of the children much easier to pull off without any further trouble. And spending that period of rest out of sight in that pit was certainly preferable to doing so out in the open.

A familiar scraping noise arose then; looking down into the hole, Solonn eventually saw a platform made of ice rising up toward the surface. It wasn’t of his making; he looked to Zdir, saw the brightened light in her eyes, and figured that either Oth had told her how to gain entry to the chambers below or else she had simply figured it out on her own.

She moved out onto the platform once it was level with the floor, and Ronal followed her, but she shook her head when Solonn and Zereth tried to do likewise.

<Zdir and Ronal wish to make certain that no one else is down there before the children are allowed to descend, just in case,> Oth explained.

As Solonn watched the platform slowly carrying Zdir and Ronal downward, the light from the two glalie’s eyes dwindling as they went deeper into the chasm, he found a thread of concern for them uncurling in his mind in spite of the fact that, for the most part, he still doubted that they’d find anyone down there. He didn’t question Zdir’s choice on this matter; he understood that no one else here—not even Oth, really—had as much reason as he had to believe that this place was left almost entirely alone. Now given cause to think about it, it occurred to him that maybe he was taking the safety of the pit before him at least a little bit for granted.

Before long, though, <They confirm that it is empty,> Oth said, and the platform could be heard rising again as the claydol spoke. There was no one on it as it ascended, Zdir and Ronal presumably having gone into the chamber adjacent to the one into which the chasm opened.

With the platform not being large enough to accommodate everyone who still waited outside at once, Oth directed Narzen and Zilag to go and sit down on the flat expanse of ice next, then moved to hover over their heads, assuring the glalie that it would attend to the snorunt on this descent and assuring the snorunt that it would not drop any of them in the process. All but a couple of the snorunt looked less than successfully comforted by its words as it brought the fuchsia aura to surround them once more, and one of them failed to bite back a whimper as he, along with the rest of the snorunt, were made to drift downward through the air after the sinking platform. Not long after, the platform returned to bring the remaining members of the party into the pit.

Grosh’s home seemed to lack some of its sense of familiarity as Solonn now beheld it. With so many more people gathered together in the chamber further inside than he had ever seen occupying that space before, it seemed much smaller than he remembered it being. It was much brighter than usual as well, with the light from so many eyes illuminating it.

“When can we leave?” one of the snorunt asked.

<We will leave once we have all had a chance to rest properly,> Oth answered.

The snorunt who had just spoken frowned. “But I don’t like this. I don’t like hiding in a hole when we could be going home. You said you knew where home is, right?”

“We do,” Zdir said. “But Oth might not be feeling well. It might be hurt. We want to give it a chance to recover before we continue.”

The snorunt narrowed his eyes slightly, holding Zdir’s gaze, looking as though he were trying to decide whether he liked her response well enough or not. Finally, shooting a glance at Oth, “You’d better hurry up and get better,” he said, then stalked off to sit against the wall. Several of the other snorunt seated themselves as well, as did most of the glalie.

<In the event that I… do not recover during our time here or at any point prior to our arrival at Virc-Dho,> Oth then began, another of those psychic transmissions that seemed to exclude the children, <we have decided on an alternate course of action for returning the children to Virc-Dho. For their safety, Narzen has agreed to escort them into the warren. He has also agreed to having a link established with me prior to doing so that will allow him to keep us informed of happenings within the warren.>

Out of the corner of his eye, Solonn saw Zereth shudder slightly. A bit to the right, he saw Narzen with that odd, eager look on his face again—it seemed that Zdir had certainly approached the right person about being the party’s eyes and ears back in Virc-Dho.

At any rate, Solonn found himself rather liking the thought of them having one of their own in such a position almost at once. They could know if Narzen were in trouble, be it through his transmissions via Oth or a conspicuous lack thereof, and Narzen could also inform them if anyone else among them who chose to stay in the warren were in any trouble.

He’ll have other things to keep an eye on, Solonn had to tell himself. He can’t spend the entire time guarding Zilag and his family.

<For now, we should try to rest as soon as we can,> Oth went on; the children apparently heard it this time, all of them turning to face it. <One of us will keep watch at all times, and we will take shifts. Who wishes to go first?>

“I’ll do it,” Ronal said simply, rising, and he moved over to sit in the imperfect archway separating the two chambers.

<The moment you feel too tired to focus on your surroundings correctly, wake someone else,> Oth told him. Zdir shot it a glance. <Someone other than me,> it added.

Oth set about trying to fall asleep right away then, and the blue light filling the room gradually dimmed as all but Ronal eventually followed suit. Solonn lay there, eyes closed, but remained awake as the time passed. Concerns about what might lie ahead for those who were gathered there with him, wondering about what might be happening at the moment to certain people who were presently elsewhere, and even the knowledge that he probably wouldn’t have long to sleep before someone prodded him awake so that he could take his shift all kept his mind too preoccupied to allow it to drift away with any ease. Above him, unbeknownst to him, ice crept over the ceiling, and the thoughts that attended him marred its surface with aimless, crooked lines that kept changing direction abruptly as if twitching.

At some point, he gave up trying to sleep for the time being. No sooner had he sat back up and opened his eyes than Zereth entered his field of vision.

“You want to go next?” Zereth asked in a whisper.

Solonn cast a glance to the archway and saw that it was unoccupied. He found Ronal lying nearby, seemingly asleep, and realized that it was Zereth who was just finishing his shift. Solonn hadn’t noticed when he’d relieved Ronal of watch duties; he wondered if any others’ shifts had come and gone without him noticing.

Hoping that he’d be more attentive in the task that was being offered to him, Solonn nodded and rose, taking his position in the archway. He tried to stay focused on the presently unoccupied chamber in case anything unwelcome descended into it, but only partially succeeded.

It did help somewhat that the possibility of someone finding them there had already had a stake in his mind. It also helped that every so often, as he gazed out into the as-yet undisturbed emptiness of the room before him, he thought he heard a scraping, rustling, or other noise that compelled him to investigate it. Every furtive look that he stole up the chasm showed him nothing, however, leaving him to chalk each of those sounds up to his mind playing tricks on him. Nonetheless, no matter how many times it happened, the first thing that crossed his mind whenever he heard something was the chance that it might mean that the party had company.

“Hey. Been on watch for very long?”

The utterance was only whispered, but it sent a jolt through Solonn almost as if it had been screeched right in his ear. He bit back a hiss and turned to identify the speaker—it was Zilag—then turned back to stare into the empty chamber once more.

“I don’t know,” Solonn admitted just as voicelessly. He heard Zilag set himself down beside him. “I don’t feel at all like sleeping, though. I think I can stay here a while longer. Go ahead and get some more sleep for now, if you want.”

“Hm. Don’t really feel much like sleeping right now myself, to be honest,” Zilag said. “Besides which… I don’t know. I guess I just kind of feel like you could use as much of a break as you can get after… well, you know. Especially considering what the folks back home decided to do to you and Oth and your dad afterward.”

Solonn turned a brief, surprised glance toward Zilag, but that surprise faded quickly as he realized when and how Zilag must have learned about the lahain’s decision to have him imprisoned. “Zdir and Oth told you about that, didn’t they?” he asked, at which Zilag nodded. “And you believe what they said, right?” Solonn asked, unable to help himself, hearkening back to the seemingly incomplete readiness to trust Oth that Zilag had shown back in his home.

Zilag sighed. “I’ll be honest with you: if your dad were anyone, anything else, I’d be a bit more skeptical. But I know how they feel about him, how… how deep it is, you know? Hell, I even felt a little bit of it myself the first time you took me to see him,” he admitted, looking away guiltily.

“Mm,” Solonn responded dismissively to that. “Don’t worry about that; I used to feel that, too. But anyway… since you do know what happened… what had to be done,” he said carefully, “you know they’ll surely want information at the very least, and they’re likely to see you as a good source. And if they don’t like your answers, they might…” He swallowed, suddenly especially concerned that his next words would make him sound paranoid, less credible. “They might just decide against taking chances and just put you out of commission, same as they did with me.”

“Yeah, she told me that, too. She says she doesn’t think they’re too likely to do that, but she wanted me to know that they might, said she couldn’t in good conscience let me go without me knowing what I’m possibly getting myself into.

“And I won’t lie: she had me pretty worried there for a moment, and there’s part of me that still is,” Zilag said. “But… well, I gave it thought; don’t think for a moment I didn’t. It’s been in and out of my head this whole time since, in fact. And what occurred to me is that yes, going back’s a risk, but so’s staying out here. Who’s to say that someone—maybe even the folks back home—won’t find us somewhere out here? If anything, honestly, it would probably look worse for me if I were found along with all of you than if I were approached alone.”

Solonn’s eyes widened slightly; that angle hadn’t occurred to him. “Gods, it might…” he agreed.

“And besides which…” Zilag went on, “besides which, Hledas and the kids are still back there. I know that Hledas at the very least is worrying herself sick about me, and Kavir might be starting to get worried by now, too. Even Ryneika might be starting to sense that things are off. I can’t let them go on worrying about me for much longer, Solonn. I just can’t.”

Solonn nodded in solemn understanding. His own thoughts drifted out toward Mordial, toward the steelix whom he was sure was fretting both for him and for Jen off in that distant region at that very moment, and he winced at the pang of guilt that those thoughts brought.

“Just… be careful, all right?” he said.

“You know I have no intentions of doing otherwise,” Zilag responded.

“Hm…” Solonn didn’t question that in the least, but he found it hard to be quite confident that Zilag’s caution would prove sufficient. What he really wanted was for Zilag not to have to be so careful at all, and the only way that such seemed possible to him at the time was for Zilag and his family to be relocated.

"Maybe,” he said, “when Oth has recovered… if it recovers,” he forced himself to add, much as he didn’t want to, “you and your family could be brought out of there. You could leave Virc-Dho for somewhere safer.”

Zilag’s eyes flickered a bit, and he nodded slightly, but he also gave a little half-sighed laugh. “Hledas wouldn’t like that.”

Solonn tried to imagine Hledas doing without visits to her beloved gossip halls and nearly couldn’t. He gave a very faint smile. “Probably not,” he concurred. “Still, it’s something to consider. I’m sure she values you and the kids more than any gossip hall.”

“Oh, no question,” Zilag said. “No question about that at all.” He drew in a long breath and exhaled. “Well… we’ll get all this sorted out when the time comes, all right? My family, yours, these kids here… we’ll get it all taken care of. In the meantime, go and try to get yourself some rest,” he suggested gently. “I’ll go ahead and take over for you.”

Solonn hesitated at first, but then nodded in acquiescence and returned to the chamber where the others slept, still doubting as he set himself back down among them that he would see any sleep that night.

When he rolled onto his back and his eyes met the ceiling once more, he saw what he had unknowingly done up there while he’d sat awake earlier. He looked at the patterns, results of his unconsciously reaching out to his mother element for solace, and decided, albeit still no more than half-wittingly, to seek his element once more in the hopes of being able to vanish into it as he’d done so many times before—no thoughts for a little while, no fears, just that connection. In doing so, he hoped, he might finally get a bit of rest.

A short time later, the room got just a little darker.

* * *

(CONTINUED)

[Sike Saner]

Solonn opened his eyes. It seemed that he’d been right about simply being unable to sleep for the time being. Sighing in resignation, he sat up yet again. Soon after, he took to casting his gaze in a different direction every so often, figuring that it couldn’t hurt to have an extra pair of eyes watching over the party.

He looked out toward the exit, and at the same time, the glalie hovering there looked back into the chamber where everyone else still lay sleeping. It was Zereth who was currently keeping watch, and this struck Solonn as odd in a very detached way; hadn’t Zereth already done his shift? The peculiarity of the situation vanished from Solonn’s mind before it could truly light there, though, and the fact that Zereth didn’t seem to see him despite their gazes having met didn’t quite take root there, either.

The loud scraping noise that broke the silence in the next moment had no trouble at all seizing his attention, however, sending a spike of terror straight into his heart.

Much faster than he had ever made the descent or seen anyone else do so, an ice platform brought a group of strangers into the adjacent chamber. Zereth, still facing away from the shaft leading upward, seemed completely oblivious to their arrival—Solonn opened his mouth to alert him and the rest of the party, but couldn’t get a single syllable out before the intruders poured through the archway, far greater in number than it seemed could have come down on a single platform, filling the space around them with their eyelight. As if he were vaporized, Zereth simply vanished among them as they rushed past him.

Solonn made to shout again, invoking a protect aura to surround himself and calling upon a sheer cold strike against one of the attackers as he did so—but neither his voice nor either of the techniques that he’d attempted answered his summons. Feeling his heart rate easily triple, he tried charging at one of the invading glalie instead—only to find that he couldn’t move.

On the verge of panic, Solonn made attempt after attempt to rise and to lend himself to the defense of the party and children in whatever ways crossed his mind, but he couldn’t get himself to move an inch, nor could he command any of his abilities. The intruders seemed not to notice him struggling there at all, but before his eyes, he saw them begin to smash and tear into the rest of the party and the children. Cries of pain and fear rang out, and the air became heavy with blood mist, and all the while he remained unable to do anything against the attackers—

The horrible picture before Solonn’s eyes changed abruptly into an entirely different scene. Nonetheless, there was a delay before he truly recognized that there was no one there who shouldn’t be, that barring anything that might still be awry with Oth, everyone around him was all right.

Oh, thank the gods… he thought, taking a deep breath of blessedly clear, mist-free air in an attempt to calm nerves that still didn’t quite believe that the dream was over, feeling his pulse reluctantly slowing back down.

“Come on, move aside,” he heard Zdir say quietly. He turned and saw her gently shepherding the snorunt closer to the walls, clearing a space in the middle of the room into which she then brought another small snow pile into being.

<The rest of you should feed yourselves, as well,> Oth said, and the tone of its mindvoice told all too clearly that a night’s rest had not replenished its power as had been hoped. <We will be heading back out into the caverns above soon.>

Solonn held a dismayed gaze upon the claydol for a couple of moments. Though something inside him offered up a silent reminder that it had only been less than a day since Oth had found itself unable to teleport, that maybe it wouldn’t be much longer before it recovered from whatever was behind that problem, the possibility that it simply wouldn’t recover seemed to loom larger than ever. So did the possibility that he would never see Grosh or Jen again and that anyone who ran into trouble in the warren would be unreachable…

These thoughts brought it to his attention that he still didn’t know for certain if Narzen or anyone else who might decide to go back home was aware of the potential threat posed by the Virc authorities. There was, he recognized, a chance that Zdir might have told them back when she’d discussed their venturing into Shoal Cave with her in the first place; though he had been at least within partial earshot of each of those conversations, he’d had too much on his mind at the time to pay any real attention to what they were saying. At the very least, he reckoned, she might have had Oth run that matter by Narzen when the two of them had had their private discussion with him.

Still, he had to be sure. He approached Zdir, who turned a questioning gaze up at him at once.

“There’s something I need to know,” he said, whispering.

Zdir raised an eyebrow. “And that is…?”

“The others… do they know?” he asked. “About what was done to Father and to Oth and me, I mean. About… about what certain people might want from them, considering who they associate with.”

“Of course they do,” Zdir assured him. “All of them, including your friend. I made certain.”

A small wave of relief washed over Solonn at this. “Thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome. Now go on, get yourself fed so that we can move out soon.”

Solonn did as he was advised, and he once again found himself having to rush a bit to finish when everyone else was ready to go. Soon, Zdir and Ronal were riding an ice platform back up toward the surface, and it wasn’t long before everyone else had come up out of those chambers, as well. With that, the party set off, leaving Grosh’s home behind.

Apart from a pair of zubat who immediately turned tail and fled at the sight of them as they drew near, they encountered no other living souls as they closed more and more of the remaining distance to Virc-Dho. In passing once again through the place that had once belonged to spheal and the evolved forms thereof, they found it empty save for the occasional scattered shell of some unknown marine creature, just as it had been the last time that they’d been in the area.

Solonn found himself considering that perhaps those walrein and sealeo whom they’d run into the day before had come from here. He wondered, though, if such creatures really could have moved so far since the last time that he’d been here prior to following Zdir through this place, which hadn’t been terribly long before then—from what he’d seen of them, they were rather ungainly. Meant more for the water than for the land, his mother had said of them once.

Then it occurred to him that the walrein and the rest of their people might well have already departed the area sometime before he’d led Oth along this route to visit Grosh—as he thought about it, he didn’t recall having given terribly much mind to his surroundings at the time, knowing the path by heart and being fairly preoccupied with the conversations that he’d had with the claydol en route.

Solonn hoped that the former inhabitants of this place had indeed just relocated of their own accord, by their own power. The possibility, however remote, that they might have been whisked away by some unknown teleporter in league with the Sinaji still brought a shudder whenever he thought of it.

There eventually came a point at which he could see that the path up ahead was crossed by another, a landmark that Solonn recognized as a sign that they were very nearly at their destination. But before they could reach that intersection, <Raise your shields and retreat at once!> Oth called out suddenly, a command that Solonn didn’t hesitate in the slightest to obey—he’d seen what provoked it himself. There had been glalie passing by through the tunnel that crossed the one that the party was currently using, heading for Virc-Dho. The split in the path had been just far up ahead enough that there was some hope that the party hadn’t been spotted; nonetheless, they moved more than half again as far away from it as swiftly as they could manage before Oth indicated that they could stop.

Some of the blue eyes that surrounded the claydol cast questioning gazes at it or at Zdir, while others warily eyed the intersection from which they’d just fled. <Zdir recognized those glalie as members of the Security Guild,> Oth said to the glalie alone. To everyone present, it said, <There were some people up ahead, and we could not tell for certain whether they were friend or foe. Since they are heading toward Virc-Dho, we will wait here for a brief while before proceeding, long enough to put some more space between them and us in order to hopefully avoid any more close calls with them.>

Solonn continued to stare at the intersection ahead, more than half-expecting the guild members or someone whom he had equally little desire to run into to appear there at any moment, but minutes passed with no such thing happening. Eventually, Oth indicated to the rest of the party that Zdir felt that it was safe to continue.

When they reached the mouth of the narrow, curving passageway that led into the border cavern, however, the sound of voices from the cavern beyond became audible, telling them that moving ahead now would once again put them at risk of being noticed by the wrong people.

Solonn expected another command to turn back to be issued via Oth, but no such instructions came. Sending a part of his mind to the source of his protect ability, he turned toward Zdir and found her with that familiar look of deep thought on her face. He frowned, hoping to all gods that she would decide what the party was going to do next quickly, all too aware that the owners of the voices that they were hearing could choose to head back their way at any moment…

He caught movement out of the corner of his eye then, but it was only Zilag nodding at something. Solonn was certain at once that Zdir had just had Oth tell Zilag something and immediately began wondering what that something had been.

<Zdir is going to try and listen in on the conversation in the border cavern from out of sight in order to try to identify the nature of the speakers,> the claydol announced; once again, it spoke only to the glalie. <If she is able to determine that there are Security Guild members among them and no Sinaji, she will send the children ahead on their own into the border cavern and the guild’s custody. Narzen will stay with us, and I will be establishing a link with Zilag instead. We will allow a little time to pass between sending the children into the border cavern and sending Zilag into the warren—hopefully this will reduce the likelihood of anyone believing that he had anything to do with them.>

Solonn stared at Oth for a second, surprised at the change of plans. His eyes then darted to Narzen and then Zilag, finding the former looking not nearly as disappointed as he’d expected given how keen Narzen had seemed on the previous plan to establish the psychic link with him instead. Apparently, however much that idea had appealed to Narzen, the idea of staying out with the fugitives appealed to him even more. Zilag looked less at ease, but the fact that he had consented to the link at all gave Solonn the impression that he was surely either entirely over any mistrust that he had held for the claydol or else damned near entirely over such, at which Solonn managed to send a small, approving smile his way.

Zdir went into the curving tunnel then, and several moments that felt like several minutes to Solonn passed with her remaining there. Come on, hurry before someone finds us here… he urged her silently, shooting a quick glance back toward the other opening into the cavern that they presently occupied, still fully aware that the glalie conversing in the border cavern weren’t the only ones about whom the party had to worry.

Zdir returned in short order, looking fairly relieved. Soon thereafter, Oth set the children back on their feet, and the fuchsia aura that had surrounded them vanished. <The voices coming from up ahead belong to Security Guild members,> Oth said, its mindvoice sounding just as relieved as Zdir had sounded, and the way that the snorunt all looked up at it when it spoke told that it had not excluded them this time. The claydol lowered its head toward them slightly. <What all of you—> Its free hand drifted away from the rest of its body and drew an invisible circle encompassing the children alone. <—need to do now is to go to them. We will remain outside and make sure that no one who poses any danger to you can come in. Now go,> it instructed them with a waving motion of its still-detached hand. <Hurry, while they are still in there.>

A couple of the small, grey faces that regarded it held looks of uncertainty upon it for a moment, but soon their owners were rushing to catch up with the rest of the snorunt, who were now running into the passageway toward the border cavern. In nearly the instant that the last of them disappeared around the bend, <Get back out of here as fast as you can manage,> Oth instructed the rest of the party. It was rushing forward in the direction opposite to the one that the snorunt had taken even as it spoke, and all of the glalie followed suit immediately at its command.

They put a fair amount of distance between themselves and where they had parted ways from the snorunt, stopping at Oth’s signal at the point where the path first branched. There, they positioned themselves just within one of the tunnels leading out from the fork, simultaneously watching over the chamber that was the furthest point from Virc-Dho through which all people going there must pass and the tunnel behind them. They waited there for a time, giving the guild members within the border cavern a chance to deal with what had just run into their midst.

Solonn gazed out over the heads of those who were in front of him in the general direction from whence the party had come. He hoped as he stared into the presently empty chamber that the children had indeed gotten safely into the figurative hands of the Security Guild and were now being reunited with their families, or at least that they would be reunited with them soon.

Then it finally, truly hit him that some of them might not have families to return to any longer, and he turned away involuntarily as another wave of heartsickness rolled over him.

Eventually, <It should be all right to proceed now. Zilag, are you ready?> Oth asked, at which Zilag nodded from just inside the entrance to the cavern just in front of them. There was a flash of light in the claydol’s eyes that signified its connection with Zdir being broken, followed almost immediately by another that signified a new link being forged with Zilag. <It is done,> Oth told Zilag. <We are now connected.>

Telling him this seemed somewhat unnecessary to Zilag; he was sure that he had sensed, in some way, something entering his perception but staying just out of reach. It struck him as being rather like a memory that he couldn’t quite recall, with one difference: he could tell that it was most definitely not of his own mind.

Trying not to let that alienness distract him too much, he instead opted to test the connection. <Can you hear this?> he asked.

<Technically no, but I am receiving your message.>

Zilag couldn’t help but nearly laugh, wondering if Oth had actually intended any joke there. <Guess it’s time for me to head out, then, huh?> he asked.

<Yes,> Oth responded.

<Okay.> Zilag acknowledged, but didn’t depart right away. He held the rest of the party in his gaze for a few moments more, seeing varying degrees of concern and unspoken well-wishes in the faces there, with the eyelight particularly unsteady and the brows drawn tightly together on the largest face that he beheld. <Tell them goodbye for me,> Zilag said. <And tell them not to worry too much about me; I’ll take care of myself. You all just concentrate on taking care of yourselves, okay?>

Oth relayed the message, drawing acknowledging nods from the other party members. Satisfied as he could be that he was ready to part ways with them, Zilag then turned away and began making his way back toward the warren alone.

<There may well still be Security Guild members in the border cavern when you arrive there,> Oth told him as he traveled, <even if the ones whom we saw going in earlier have gone further on inside since the children joined them. Zdir believes that there may now be guards posted at the entrance and that it is to them whom the guild members we saw were speaking.>

Zilag absorbed this with very little surprise; he had been steeling himself as best as he could to have to deal with Security Guild members ever since Zdir had spoken to him of the interest that they might have in him. <So I should probably just expect that there will be, then. But I shouldn’t act like I expected to find them there if there are.>

<Correct,> Oth responded.

<Okay, then… They’re probably gonna want to know what I’ve been up to out here, right?>

<Most assuredly. You are advised to tell them that you had gone out hunting.>

<Yeah, that’s what I’d planned to do,> Zilag said. He’d been rehearsing the lie in his head from time to time since the evening prior. He just hoped to all gods that if anyone had been questioning Hledas in his absence, she hadn’t told them anything that would clash with his story. <I’m gonna tell them I couldn’t find anything, though. I just don’t trust my stomach to keep quiet enough for them to believe me otherwise. Gods, I can’t wait to get some real food again…>

It wasn’t long before Zilag found himself approaching the barrier at the entrance; <All right, I’m here,> he sent back to Oth. It appeared that there were indeed guards posted there; three glalie hung in midair before the barrier, and while none of them made a move to intercept him, their eyes followed him keenly as he drew nearer.

Hoping that he looked sufficiently surprised to see them there, “Uh… what’s going on?” he asked of them as he came to a stop a couple of feet in front of them, wearing a perplexed frown.

None of the guards answered the question, at least not right away. “How long have you been out?” one of them asked, though not harshly. “And what have you been doing?”

Zilag had expected to be hit with questions upon his arrival, though the fact that he’d managed to get a question in first did surprise him somewhat. “Too long,” he answered, half-sighing. “I was out hunting… or rather trying to. Went out late the night before last and found not a damned thing since. Had to sleep out there and everything.”

There was a moment of silence and a very brief look exchanged amongst the guards. “You’re lucky to have woken up,” another of the guards said seriously. “The steel creature and the psychic escaped while you were gone.”

Zilag’s eyes widened dramatically. “What?! Oh gods, my family…” he said at once. “Are they all right? I need to get in there—”

He’d made a move toward the barrier as he’d spoken, trying to vaporize it as he did so, but the barrier remained fully intact, and the guards moved in unison to block him. “Your family is fine, I assure you,” the second guard said. “There have been no further attacks since the prisoners escaped.”

Zilag didn’t have to fabricate the relief that showed through his features at this. “Oh, thank the gods…” he murmured.

“Now, I’m sorry you weren’t successful in your hunt,” the first guard spoke up then, “but we’re going to have to ask that you not go out and try again on your own, at least not anytime soon, all right? It’s not safe for just anyone to travel alone right now. You’ll need to go with the next hunting party.”

“Okay,” Zilag said, nodding, “okay.” He looked questioningly at the barrier, hoping that he would be let in soon. He wasn’t altogether certain that the guards were buying his story, and every moment he spent with them made him ever so slightly less comfortable around them. He was somewhat grateful for his unease, though, and didn’t make any real effort to hide it at this point, hoping that any nervousness that was showing could be interpreted as a reaction to having just learned about the escape.

The barrier vanished, but before he could enter the warren, “I’m going to be going home with you, all right?” the first guard said. “Like I said, it’s not safe for just anyone to travel alone right now.”

Zilag nodded in acceptance, unsurprised and figuring that he had no real choice in the matter anyway, especially given that the guard seemed to have decided on his destination for him. He only hoped that by “going home with you”, the guard simply meant that he would be escorting Zilag back to his family’s place of residence and not staying with them for any length of time.

Zilag entered Virc-Dho, his escort following, the barrier immediately reforming behind them once they were past it. <I’m being escorted home,> he told Oth. <Looks like Zdir was right about them not wanting to leave me entirely alone. They haven’t acted blatantly suspicious of me yet, though—not that I imagine they would, of course. They’re just claiming concern for me, what with the escape and everything.>

<There does remain a chance that they genuinely do not suspect you,> Oth responded. <Still, remain cautious. Continue to do as you have been advised and you may yet avoid trouble.>

Zilag heard the guard behind him draw a rather deep breath and felt something inside him tense as if anticipating a strike, but the guard only spoke. “I’m afraid I have something to tell you that you’re not gonna want to hear,” he said.

Zilag stopped, careful not to turn to face his escort too quickly, and fixed him with a troubled look. “Oh?”

The guard sighed. “You’re friends with a Mr. Solonn Zgil-Al, right?”

There was no use in denying it; as Zilag had been told, the authorities certainly knew who associated with those whom they didn’t trust, and the fact that the guard had asked such a question seemed to confirm it in Zilag’s mind. He nodded.

“Have you seen him recently?” the guard asked.

“Well, I saw him at the service,” Zilag said quietly, “but I haven’t seen him since then, no. Why do you ask? What’s going on?”

“Well, we think that he might have been the one who freed the steel creature and the psychic. Now, I know you might not want to believe that, but there’s something you need to consider: if it was him, odds are he wasn’t doing it of his own accord. We think he’s under some kind of psychic control.”

Zilag cast his gaze to the icy floor, his brow furrowed, trying to look deep in thought. “This… this wouldn’t be the first time he’s run into trouble with something psychic,” he said quietly, slipping a hint of dawning epiphany into his tone.

“No, it wouldn’t,” the guard said. “We do have reason to believe that the same thing that took him way back when is responsible for what’s going on now. It’s even returned the children it stole, just like it brought him back.”

Zilag’s gaze shot back up to meet the guard’s, the light in his eyes brightening. “Really?”

“Just earlier today,” the guard confirmed.

“Oh, that’s good to hear…” Zilag said with a sigh of relief. He then turned back around and resumed his drifting. “At least something’s gone right lately…”

“Well, we don’t intend to let anything else go wrong if we can help it.” The guard’s tone suggested that he was trying to be lighthearted in his response, but there was also something vaguely affronted-sounding in his voice, which sent a little wisp of worry through Zilag; had he said something that he shouldn’t have? “Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that Solonn’s whereabouts are currently unknown and that if you see him—be careful, all right? He’s probably not himself, and he might attack you. If you see him, you should probably strike at him and call out for help right away. If it turns out he’s not being controlled after all, I’m sure he’ll forgive you if he really is any kind of friend.”

“…Okay,” Zilag said quietly.

Soon after, the two arrived at the Zir-Arda residence. “So this is it, huh?” the guard asked.

“Yeah,” Zilag answered.

“Okay, then. Stay safe, all right?” With those words, the guard backed away a short distance, but he kept his eyes on Zilag.

Figuring that the guard wouldn’t leave until he went on in—if indeed he did intend to leave—Zilag opened the entryway and passed through it, sealing it shut at once. Inside, he found Hledas holding a gaze that was both troubled and questioning upon him, while Ryneika chased a somewhat irritated-looking Kavir around the main room. The young child broke off her pursuit almost immediately, however, having noticed her father’s arrival, and she ran up to him with a squeal of joy. Kavir sent Zilag a smile, grateful to have been rescued from her sister’s pestering.

“We need to talk,” Hledas said almost inaudibly.

Zilag shot a look back at the entrance. He saw no light beyond it to indicate a glalie lingering immediately outside, but figured that the guard would know better than to be so obvious anyway. Not knowing for certain if his escort was still within hearing range of anything said in the main chamber, as well as not exactly wanting his children to be privy to the conversation, either, he merely gave a quick nod of assent and made for the couple’s sleeping chamber. Ryneika tried to follow him in; “No, no. Play with your sister,” Zilag told her, earning a groan from Kavir.

Once both Zilag and Hledas were in the sleeping chamber, the latter moved to hover directly at the former’s side. “Did you succeed?” she asked right into his ear, still using the faintest whisper she could manage while remaining audible.

“Yes,” Zilag said, keeping his voice equally low. While it was true that Jen was still brainwashed in Convergence, Zilag was still confident enough that the snorunt’s mind would be restored to normalcy and that the rest of the party would ultimately be able to go back and retrieve him to consider the rescue mission a success.

“Thank the gods,” Hledas said as she moved to face Zilag once more, “both for that and for your return, as well.” She sat down. “The authorities came in while you were away,” Hledas then said. “They asked questions, Zilag. They asked where you were and if I’d seen Solonn lately.”

Zilag swallowed, turning to look her in the eye. “Well… what did you tell them?”

“That you were just out hunting and that the last we saw of Solonn was at the service.”

The light in Zilag’s eyes brightened, and he had to bite back a miniature peal of laughter that threatened to break forth at the relief he felt. Grinning, he moved forward to press his forehead against Hledas’s. “Oh, thank the gods you said that…” he breathed happily.

“Well, what did you think I would have said?” Hledas responded as Zilag drifted back once more. “I already could have lost you as it was. Do you really think I’d have done anything that could have even remotely run the risk of getting you thrown in a cell if you did make it back?” she asked, looking somewhat hurt.

Zilag’s smile faded a bit. “No… no, of course I don’t.” He drew close to her again, his eyes closing, letting his forehead rest against hers once more. “Thanks for taking care of things. I appreciate it,” he said sincerely.

To Oth, he then said, <I’m back home. That guard who was following me may or may not be hanging around outside, but at least he’s not in here with us. I think he might actually trust me—don’t worry, though; I don’t intend to get careless. And Hledas did get questioned, but her story matches up with mine—and… well, I’m not gonna get careless with her, either. I’ve decided not to tell her about our little connection here.> It had occurred to him prior to being linked with Oth that Hledas might become mistrustful of him or inclined to go to the authorities with his well-being in mind if he was known by her to have come home with a psychic link that he hadn’t had before.

<That seems like a prudent course of action,> Oth said. <From what I heard of the conversation that you two held with Solonn, she seemed… somewhat more inclined toward believing that I was at all responsible for the recent tragedies.>

<Yeah…> Zilag said, with a touch of vicarious guilt in his mindvoice and a further shrinking of his smile, though he also found himself possessed of something of an urge to defend Hledas in that moment. <But again, it seems she’s already saved my hide once, so…>

<She most assuredly has,> Oth concurred. <It seems as though you really can take care of yourselves, all of you.>

A sense of pride washed over Zilag, and his smile widened once more. <It does, doesn’t it?> he said. Now that there seemed to be at least a bit more hope than before that he and his family would be able to carry on without any harassment to speak of from the authorities, he felt a fair bit more confident in such claims.

* * *

<The Security Guild appears to have shifted its focus from maintaining the silence of the witnesses to keeping an eye out for potential threats,> Oth said to the small crowd of glalie gathered before it within the deep chambers that were Grosh’s home. After taking some time to hunt and feed, the party had decided upon this location as the place where they would take refuge, at least for the time being, and they had been there for roughly half a day by this point. <Zilag and Hledas, as well as friends of the latter, have seen known witnesses to the attack going unescorted and have seen known guild members patrolling the warren, and I am told that guards are indeed now posted at the entrance at all times.>

“I’d figured as much,” Zdir said in the hushed tones that had become the norm for the group, nodding. “At least as far as the shifted focus is concerned, anyway. Now that his prisoners have escaped and Hagen’s been forced to let the people find out as much—to let them recognize that they need to be on the look out for trouble from other glalie, even if they are being led to believe that said glalie are merely illusions concealing something else—he’s undoubtedly well beyond the point of feeling that he needs to keep people believing that they’re in no danger.”

“But Zilag and his family still don’t know for certain whether or not they’re being watched, do they?” Solonn asked.

<I am afraid not,> Oth answered. <Zilag wishes to assure you that both he and Hledas continue to do their best to keep the possibility of the guild monitoring them in mind at all times, however.>

“Hm…” was Solonn’s only reply to that, sounding somewhat less than fully assured. He hadn’t really expected for either of them to be careless in dealing with the guild, or at least not for Zilag to be, but the notion of them possibly being watched like that still kept a degree of gnawing worry and a vicarious sense of indignation attending him.

<He also has mentioned that there are rumors of the Security Guild intending to increase its numbers,> Oth then said. <There has been no official word from the guild on the subject, however. It may only be wishful thinking on the part of the public.>

“Hopefully that rumor will prove to be true. I’ll admit right now that I don’t exactly have the utmost faith in the guild’s current ability to defend the warren. At the very least, a small pack of guards at the entrance isn’t going to keep the Sinaji out if they show up in even only a third of the numbers I suspect them to have,” Zdir said grimly.

“Sounds like they’d do best to just do away with the Security Guild,” Narzen mused aloud, which earned him a couple of sanity-questioning looks. “What I mean is, they should probably just train everybody to fight like they do,” he clarified. “Just make everyone one of them, basically. From the way you’re talking,” he said with a glance at Zdir, “it sounds like they’re gonna need damned near the entire warren to stand a chance against the Sinaji.”

“I don’t imagine that that’s literally the case,” Zdir said, “but I do agree that making sure that as many people as possible are capable of defending themselves is something that should happen, yes. And that, incidentally, includes all of us, especially since we still have more than just the Sinaji to be concerned about as long as we remain here.”

“Which is unfortunate,” Ronal said. “I for one would like to have the guild on our side, especially with their numbers bolstered. I would prefer to take the fight to the Sinaji rather than let them make another move against the warren.”

“Under those circumstances, that might indeed have become an option,” Zdir said. “As it is, though, we are still fugitives and accomplices thereof in the guild’s eyes. We may be able to seek out allies once we can be teleported from this place—then, perhaps, we can deal with the Sinaji. For now, however, I don’t imagine that most of us are truly ready to face more than a stray exile or a guild member or two. You all need to be made ready. You need to be trained to fight for your lives. We need to make damned certain that we’re all truly prepared to face whatever lies ahead of us.”

______________________

Next time: You’ll see. :3 See you then!

- Sike Saner

[crazybarkz]

I mistrust Hledas. I think she snitched and she's helping the security guild lead Zilag into a trap for "his own protection".
On a happier note, the snorunt finally got home.Not knowing the consequenses they might be inclined to tell what happened.
Jen is harder to fix then the rest i wonder if that has anything to do with a sertain blob from TOoS.
Yet again a magnificent chapter and please forgive my poor review.

[Kthleen]

<Can you hear this?> he asked.

<Technically no, but I am receiving your message.>

Zilag couldn’t help but nearly laugh, wondering if Oth had actually intended any joke there.

Made me chuckle.

It is good that the Snorunt are home, though that "Then it finally, truly hit him that some of them might not have families to return to any longer" got to me.

[Sike Saner]

crazybarkz:

On a happier note, the snorunt finally got home.Not knowing the consequenses they might be inclined to tell what happened.

Indeed they can tell--but there remains the matter of whether or not what they say is believed to be true by the authorities or anyone else to whom they speak about that.

And don't worry; I thought that was a decent reply, actually. I always enjoy seeing that kind of speculation. As for whether or not the theories that you've given us to think about will prove true... we shall see. :3

Kthleen:

<Can you hear this?> he asked.

<Technically no, but I am receiving your message.>

Zilag couldn’t help but nearly laugh, wondering if Oth had actually intended any joke there.

Made me chuckle.

Heh. ^^ That's one of my favorite little moments in the chapter right there. It's another one of those things that spontaneously popped into my head while writing that I just had to use.

It is good that the Snorunt are home, though that "Then it finally, truly hit him that some of them might not have families to return to any longer" got to me.

Likewise. :( That's some pretty damned awful news to come home to.


Thanks to both of you for reading and for replying! ^^

[gmoyes]

Finally finished reading everything. It's amazing. Keep up the good work. Mind you, i read this before the origins of storm. but of course i'm reading that next. I laughed more at the replies than the story but it was still good. personally i like when you put a capital on all the pokemon but hey, it's up to you. One of the things that really stood out for me was latios. If he only did the things in the false memory in the first place. I can't wait for more.

[Sike Saner]

gmoyes:

One of the things that really stood out for me was latios. If he only did the things in the false memory in the first place.

Yep, that might have changed how things went down. He just wasn't confident enough that things actually would play out as they did in the false memories to try and let them unfold without forcing Solonn's figurative hand.

I'm glad you've enjoyed the story so far, and I'm glad you're understanding about my choice of capitalization conventions. Also glad to "hear" that you're interested in checking out TOoS, though I ought to mention that the version that's up right now is due to be replaced at some point during the next few weeks with a revised version that brings quite a few major changes to the story.

I'm currently revising chapter 7 and will edit all of the new versions into the old thread once they're all done. If anyone who read the old version of TOoS wants to know when the new version's in place, PM me and I'll notify you when the time comes.

As for the next chapter of this story, work on that will resume once I'm done with revising TOoS.

Anyway, thanks for reading and for replying! ^^

[Sike Saner]

Chapter 17 – Safe

“Zdir…”

Pale eyes turned his way, and Solonn thought he detected a hint of weariness about them as though their owner were dealing with a tiresome child.

“Zdir… what if they hadn’t been Sinaji?”

No response, or at least none spoken. Her expression became harder to read.

“What then?” Solonn’s voice lowered of its own accord. “What would we have done?”

A pause. Then, “They could have joined with us if Oth had found them to be inclined and able to do so. If not…”

The lines of Solonn’s face sharpened, his eyes narrowing. Something turned to lead inside of him.

“If not,” she resumed, but then sighed. “I think you already know the answer, whatever you feel about it—and for what it’s worth, no, Solonn, I don’t like it, either. I would hope that any Virc who might find their way to us in future would prove to be no liability to us, but if not…”

She let it hang. Maybe it was that she couldn’t seem to bring herself to speak of it that stopped him from going off on her any further; maybe it made it easier for him to believe that she really did hate it as much as he did, or at least close enough to suit him.

He turned away, closing his eyes against the orange glow of the beams that were working to vaporize the lifeless intruders in the adjacent chamber, wishing that he could block out the accompanying sound and taste on the air likewise.

* * *

The days were starting to shorten again. The forest behind was beginning to change its colors, and the river far below was hosting a different set of creatures than before.

All of these changes to his surroundings served as reminders to the large, silver figure loosely coiled on the cliff of one constant that had persisted the entire time that he had been here in southern Mordial: throughout every day since, he had waited for the burst of golden light that would bring news of what had become of his family. That light still hadn’t come.

Grosh had feared for Solonn and Jen from the start, but had tried to maintain some measure of faith, some hope that the rescue effort had a chance in hell despite Zdir’s projection that their enemies outnumbered the search party several to one. He had known that they would largely be operating blind, scouring a network of tunnels that Grosh knew from personal experience to be vast and sometimes confusing, and that as such it could take quite a while for the party to return even if things worked out all right in the end.

But even given that, Grosh hadn’t expected for quite this much time to pass without seeing any of them again. And he had by no means forgotten what he had seen back in the Virc temple. Things could all too easily have gone horribly wrong, and he had no way of knowing for sure if they had.

He hated not knowing. He hated being kept across the sea while God only knew what was happening to the last surviving people in the world who meant anything to him. Grosh had never stopped wishing that there had been no reason why he couldn’t have gone with them. But he had, with no small degree of effort and despite recurring internal questions as to whether or not he was really making the best choice, nonetheless stayed more or less in the same area where they’d left him, not wanting to give them a scare with his absence should they return.

But his last drops of belief that they still could were starting to dry up. His waking thoughts were now very nearly as certain that something terrible had befallen them as his dreams had been ever since he had been brought to Mordial. His restlessness had grown as his faith had waned, and so had his hatred of the ones who had murdered Azvida and stolen one of her sons.

That they could have taken the life of the other—and by this time, Grosh couldn’t help but suspect to the point of near-assumption, they surely had—sickened him to his core. The notion that Azvida’s dying wish for her children to stay safe could have been shot down tormented him, and there came a point at which he just couldn’t wait around with that torment any longer. He had to act. Maybe it was too late to bring Solonn and Jen back to safety, but perhaps, somehow, he could make the ones responsible for that answer for what they had done.

He knew, though, despite the fact that his agitation was rising by the minute and threatening to fill his mind with haze, that he couldn’t do it alone. He couldn’t even reach Virc-Dho without aid, let alone attempt any sort of assault against what might very well amount to a miniature nation of glalie and snorunt.

Rising, he turned his back on the river and entered the forest, silently and occasionally not-so-silently cursing the noise he made as he twisted and crawled among the trees. He could hear the sounds of native pokémon fleeing as he made his highly conspicuous way through their territory, no more keen on interacting with the massive metal serpent than they had been when he’d simply been hanging around the outskirts of the forest. Just stopping someone long enough to hear him out about his need for transportation and support in mounting an offense against his enemies was going to be a challenge.

After some time, and with no real luck on his part in flagging down anyone who might be able to help him thus far, the forest thinned before him. Not far ahead, a dilapidated highway stretched across his path. He drew closer to it, sweeping a glance from left to right over its cracked, faded surface and the weeds sprouting up through its fissures. Where the road led, Grosh couldn’t exactly tell; it extended all the way to the horizon in both directions with no clear destinations in sight.

Before he had any real chance to decide whether or not he wanted to try following the road, a piqued instinct took hold of his attention. An elemental telltale was setting off a familiar warning that fanned out across his nerves in an instant, and it was accompanied by a light rumbling in the ground whose source was several yards off in front of him and approaching rather quickly.

Someone was coming, someone who might be of some use to his cause… or who might already be aware of his presence, unhappy about it, and intending to try and drive him off the hard way. Grosh moved a short distance backward from the disturbance, his eyes trained on it and following it as it moved despite being unable to actually see it at the moment, the end of his tail held up off the ground and shining even brighter than usual as he held an iron tail attack at the ready.

Once it was just a couple of feet away from him, whatever was approaching from underground decided to make a proper entrance. There was an upward eruption of soil, following which three fuzzy, brown heads popped out into the open air, blinking and twitching their noses under the sunlight. Almost immediately afterward, a section of the street behind the newly surfaced creature burst apart, scattering chunks of asphalt as a pokémon identical to the one who’d just appeared emerged.

“Oh, so that’s what that was!” said the second of the dugtrio.

“Certainly wasn’t what I was expecting,” said the first.

“Or, well, not the silveriness, at least. That I wasn’t expecting. But I knew he’d be big.”

“Oh, same here, same here.”

“But he’s not big; he’s huge!”

“I’ll say.”

“Could probably snap one of us up in two bites, I’ll bet.”

“In one bite, even!”

Grosh had no such intentions—he had even decided against bringing the iron tail he’d readied to bear against them, letting the steel-type energy dissipate—but as the two rattled on, he did find himself tempted to speak a bit less kindly to them than he might have otherwise, his segments twisting in impatience and a touch of lingering anxiety at the presence of the two ground-types.

He held down the outburst trying to shove its way out of his mouth, however, not wanting to scare away the only creatures he’d encountered in the area thus far who seemed at all willing to share his company. Instead, he merely cleared his throat to try and get the two dugtrio’s attention, though that still resulted in a deep, grating rumble that could easily be misinterpreted as a growl.

Thankfully, the noise didn’t appear to register as anything threatening to the dugtrio; all twelve of their eyes locked onto his in unison, and neither of the dugtrio looked terribly worried despite having been discussing the possibility of being eaten by the steelix mere moments ago.

“Hm?” the first of them said, cocking one of her heads. “Something you’re wanting from us?”

Grosh opened his mouth, but then: “Now come on, surely he can tell we don’t have anything on us,” the other dugtrio countered, his rightmost head turning to face the first dugtrio as he spoke, his other two faces still turned up toward Grosh. “Have you ever tried digging and carrying things at the same time? It’s not easy! I’ll bet Silvery here understands what I’m talking about; just look at him. Looks like a burrower himself, doesn’t he? Like a great big worm, don’t y—”

“My family and I need help,” Grosh cut in, his voice easily overpowering those of the dugtrio, who quickly fell silent at his interruption. “I’m wondering if you know of anyone who can get me to where our enemies are and help me fight them.” He didn’t imagine that they would be of much help themselves—however swift they were, he had his doubts that they could last long against a horde of well-trained ice-types and was prepared to dissuade them if they expressed interest in joining the fight themselves.

“Oh. You’ll want Valdrey, then,” the second dugtrio said.

“Oh yes, she’d be absolutely elated to help you out. Poor dear’s probably not seen a really good fight in years,” said the first dugtrio. “And she’s got friends all over; perhaps some of them’d be willing to pitch in, too.”

Grosh’s eyes widened and his head rose a bit further, but he made an effort to stop himself from getting too optimistic too soon. The dugtrio’s response seemed fairly promising, but there was no way of knowing just yet whether nor not this Valdrey person would really be as enthusiastic about joining his cause as the dugtrio had claimed she would be. There also wasn’t any way to know if she would have enough interested friends—if indeed the dugtrio were right about whoever they were referring to even being Valdrey’s friends—to stand any sort of chance against the exiles. His search for aid wasn’t guaranteed to end with this lead.

“Where is she?” he asked of them before they could get into another conversation amongst one another.

Both of the dugtrio jerked one or more of their heads back and to their right, toward the old highway. “That way,” they said in near unison.

“Just follow that path to Wisteria,” said the first dugtrio. “You’ll know it when you see it; humans used to live there.”

“Oh, now don’t assume Silvery knows what humans were,” said the second. “Doesn’t seem to be from around here; who knows what he has and hasn’t seen.”

“No, I’m perfectly well aware of what humans were,” Grosh assured them. “Thank you both kindly for your help,” he added, then made his way around and past the two dugtrio and set off down the road.

“Don’t mention it!” the first of them called out to the departing steelix.

Stone walls began cropping up to either side as Grosh made his way toward Wisteria. They soon rose high, higher than his line of sight; along with the way the road was now curving, this prevented him from being able to see where the path he had chosen was actually taking him.

Grosh hoped that the dugtrio hadn’t in fact sent him off in some useless direction—or worse, had pointed him toward trouble. It was only now, with the faint glimmer of hope that the dugtrio had put in front of him taking just enough of the edge off to clear some of the haze from his mind, that it occurred to him that the two ground-types might have been feigning their lack of mistrust for him in order to guide him into a trap.

He started to berate himself silently for trusting them so readily when no one else in Mordial had seemed friendly toward him prior to that point, but caught himself short. Come on now, don’t beat yourself up over it too much, he tried to placate himself. This might still work out. And you had to give it a try. You know you did.

The steelix carried on in the direction he’d been shown, trying to focus on the name of the person to whom he was being sent in case he needed to ask someone else for an audience with her. Eventually the stone walls shrunk back into the ground, and a cluster of buildings soon came into view.

It was then that Grosh realized that he’d left the dugtrio’s company before giving either of them a chance to perhaps tell him just where in Wisteria Valdrey was to be found.

Grumbling in annoyance at himself, Grosh slithered along the downward slope that the road took toward the city below. Now he had more asking around to do—he could only hope that it would go better than it had back in the forest.

Inauspiciously, the first few pokémon that caught his eye darted away as soon as they were sure his attention had fallen upon them, while others, remaining unseen altogether, could be heard scuttling away from him, evading him among largely empty and decrepit shops and houses and down slowly darkening alleyways whenever he tried to follow those sounds.

At some point, he faintly heard what sounded like a whole crowd of people gathered and chatting somewhere neither too near nor too far. Before very much longer, he pinpointed the source of the noise: there was a large, circular building up ahead, and as he got closer to it he could see a faded sign with a symbol on it that he recognized from his time as a trainer’s pokémon as a symbol of the IPL. He was looking at an old gym, he reckoned.

Grosh figured that if there really were as many people hanging around in there as it sounded like there were, then at least someone among them might hear what he had to say before they could get a chance to flee the building.

Granted, they were sure to know that he was headed their way before he got there, but he still hoped that being all cooped up in a large building as they were would impede their escape long enough for him to get a chance to make someone among them hear him out.

As he continued to approach the gym, trying not to move too fast in an effort to at least minimize the noise he made as he dragged himself along, he saw a sawsbuck emerge from it, using his red-leaf-covered antlers to push his way out through the large double doors warding the building’s arched entrance. The moment that the sawsbuck raised his head once more, his eyes met Grosh’s across the remaining distance between them, and he immediately turned tail and went right back in through those doors.

“Damn it!” Grosh spat, not quite under his breath. He was sure that now they’d have even more of a warning and more motivation to get the hell out of there, what with their apparent lookout letting them know exactly what was coming for them.

Nonetheless, he decided not to give up on asking about Valdrey at the gym. It could still work, he willed himself to believe as he kept on moving toward it. Hell, maybe this Valdrey’s in there herself. She doesn’t sound like the type who’ll run—not if those two were right about her, anyway…

Just as Grosh was about to reach the doors, they opened again. This time, three pokémon stepped out into the parking lot. There was the sawsbuck from earlier, accompanied by a rapidash and a golden-armored centaur pokémon that Grosh didn’t recognize: an aurrade.

Both the rapidash and the aurrade awoke little threads of elemental unease in Grosh, and the look on the former’s face suggested that the feeling was mutual between him and the steelix. The aurrade’s expression was a little harder to read; there were hinged plates of her armor covering most of her face, leaving only her eyes visible.

“Hi,” she spoke up crisply then, her voice resonating a bit oddly from within her armor. She clasped her hands in front of her waist. “Care to share what brings you to these parts?”

There was a faint sense of relief at the fact that these three seemed sufficiently uninterested in running from him, but Grosh maintained a degree of wariness; they also seemed like they might be well-trained, much moreso than the dugtrio had, and he wasn’t so sure that he could take them all on if they decided that they didn’t like what he had to say for whatever reason.

“I’m looking for someone named Valdrey,” he responded.

“Well, mission accomplished,” the aurrade said; Grosh saw the dark gray skin around her eyes crinkle in a way that made him wonder if she were smiling behind those faceplates. “Any particular reason you were looking for me?”

“I need help,” Grosh said. “Me and my son, and his brother, and their whole nation. They’ve got enemies, horrible ones. They…” He suddenly felt like a stone was lodged in his throat. “They took the love of my life from me,” he said, his gaze lowered. “They’ve taken many lives. And I don’t doubt for a second that they’ll take more.”

Valdrey cocked her head slightly. She cast a quick glance to each of the creatures at her sides; both of them looked somewhat less apprehensive toward the situation than they had before, but neither’s expression had quite softened completely.

“Sounds like they need to be taught a lesson,” she then said as she looked up at Grosh once more and folded her arms across her chest. Her tone was notably softer, more sober than before.

“Yes,” Grosh said, nodding. “But I can’t do it alone. I can’t even get back to where they are on my own—there’s an ocean and God knows how much distance in the way. Please… if there’s anything that you or anyone you know can do to help…”

Valdrey stepped forward, then made her way around the sawsbuck to the doors and pushed one of them open. “Come on in,” she said. “Let’s see what we can come up with for you.”

* * *

Crash.

A solid body was smashed against a stone wall. One of its horns snapped clean off, falling to the floor and rolling a short distance away. Ice cracked audibly, bits of it flying everywhere.

With the impact still ringing faintly in Solonn’s bones, he withdrew his horn from the side of his attacker’s head. He pulled back, panting, staring down at the broken form before him.

In the next moment, his victim dissipated into thin air.

“Well done,” Zdir said from nearby. “And that goes for you, too, as always.”

The other one to whom she was speaking was Oth. It had been puppeteering the “glalie” against whom, or rather which, Solonn had been training, just as it had been doing for him and the other fugitives in the months since it had volunteered the idea.

The ice dummies were conceived to reduce the amount of injury and thus need for recovery experienced by the fugitives during their training, though they did still continue to include some sparring against one another for the purposes of increasing their elemental power.

Though the glalie could manipulate the dummies themselves, Oth’s telekinesis was significantly stronger and ultimately proved better suited to making the artificial glalie move with the same speed and force that the real things used.

Oth was unquestionably grateful to be able to provide this service for them. Solonn was glad for it, as well, and not only because of its usefulness in training. Throughout all this time, the claydol still hadn’t regained the ability to teleport; being able to do another sort of good for the fugitives in the meantime seemed to be helping Oth to finally stop casting blame upon itself for this fact.

“I think that’ll do for now,” Zdir then said. “Back to the chasm, everyone.”

While Grosh had abandoned the place where he’d been waiting, the Virc fugitives and the claydol among them had stayed put for the most part, only venturing out of Grosh’s home to hunt.

They descended into the chasm a couple at a time as usual. Shortly after they had all made it down, <I am receiving a report from Zilag,> Oth announced, at which everyone gathered around it, awaiting whatever news it had to relay this time.

Thus far, the news had been largely good. Zilag’s reports from Virc-Dho told that the Sinaji had stayed out of Virc territory since the initial attack on the temple and the snowgrounds. The Security Guild had indeed swelled their ranks as rumors had suggested that they might, adding to the likelihood that the Virc might be sufficiently defended in the event of another strike. And while neither Zilag nor Hledas were quite ready to assume that the guild no longer kept eyes upon them, the authorities had avoided being overbearing toward them all this while.

After a few minutes, <A hunting party apparently had an encounter with two exiles yesterday,> Oth told the others. <All of the Virc survived. Beyond that, there has been no trouble among the Virc.>

“That’s good to hear,” Zdir said.

“Yeah,” Narzen said. “Sounds like two fewer problems for us to deal with.”

The fugitives had had to deal with some of the Sinaji themselves during their time up in Shoal Cave. They had had a couple of run-ins with them during hunting excursions, which had left a couple among their number with some new scars and had partially depleted their stores of the revival herbs that they’d dried and frozen.

On top of that, the hole in the ground that had become the fugitives’ erstwhile home had proven that indeed it wasn’t impervious to being found by outsiders. A pair of Sinaji hunters, having gotten separated from the rest of their party and lost following a skirmish with a gang of walrein, had stumbled upon the hole in the ground and opted to descend into it. They had been struck down almost as soon as they had appeared, and once they had been identified as Sinaji, their fate had been sealed.

Following the report from Zilag, the evening proceeded as most evenings since taking refuge in Grosh's home did, with the five glalie conjuring ice for themselves and conversing in lowered voices among themselves and with the claydol. At some point, “All right, let’s resume,” Zdir said, at which everyone who wasn’t already hovering rose and gathered behind her to begin filing back up into the cavern above for some more training.

She had barely begun to generate the ice platform for them to ride on when she immediately dissipated it. No one questioned her actions. They all heard the faint voices coming from outside just as she did.

The tension in the chamber where the fugitives now warily and watchfully huddled together seemed to harden the air, making it difficult to breathe. Solonn stared into the adjacent room, keeping himself as still as he could manage, his heart pounding. Its pace only quickened at the sound of ice slithering audibly down the walls of the chasm leading toward them.

As every other glalie alongside him did likewise, he tapped into his sheer cold ability and put it on standby, hoping to the gods that if it came down to his shot saving their lives, it would succeed. The rigorous training that Zdir had put everyone through in the past several months was intended, among other purposes, to put the advantages of the knockout attack firmly into their figurative hands, but both the Sinaji and the Security Guild were well-trained, too, and so there was always the lingering doubt that it had been enough.

The fugitives waited for their uninvited guests to descend sufficiently, and Solonn was less than fond of the suspense. He accepted it, though, understanding well why they waited. Zdir had explained how it was better to get a clear line of sight before attempting to strike, how it was preferable not to knock out whomever was generating the ice platform from below and risk the bodies riding on it crashing down before their innocence and what should be done with them could be assessed, how the intruders should be allowed to come down far enough to make getting back out and bringing knowledge of the fugitives’ location with them more difficult.

A silver of deep blue light framing the lower halves of gray-and-white bodies lowered into view. The eyes watching it maintained their color, the turret-hands pointed toward the approaching intruders holding their fire. No sense in striking at shielded targets.

And then there the intruders were. Just a few feet away, three glalie in a triangular formation and a fourth actually sitting atop their heads were staring with wide eyes behind protect auras that were due to fade at any moment.

“Wait, don’t strike!” the foremost of them cried out. “We surrender! We don’t want to hurt you!”

“Oth,” Zdir prompted, not missing a beat.

<We must subject you to a psychic scan to verify your claims,> it said.

“What?” another of the intruders said in response, sounding more than a little alarmed at that prospect.

But, “Fine, fine!” the one who was being carried said, nodding rather frantically, raising an unpleasant noise as the armor covering her belly scraped against that which covered the heads of the ones underneath her. Then, as a few seconds passed with apparently nothing happening, “Is it done yet?”

“No,” Zdir said.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” the intruder who had spoken first said, then winced slightly as if fearing that she might be pushing it. A second later, her protect shield fell, as did those which surrounded the others among her party.

“That,” Zdir responded, at which Oth drifted forward. The rest of the fugitives maintained their stare at the intruders, ready to strike again at any moment.

Oth rose and stopped in front of the glalie who was still perched atop her party members’ heads, and said glalie made a valiant but not entirely successful attempt at concealing some degree of unease at its presence. Solonn narrowed his eyes at her, hoping that her discomfort wouldn’t lead her to try and attack the claydol.

Meanwhile a faint and familiar discomfort of his own reared its head, but it was fleeting. The scan was voluntary this time, after all, and the awareness that he still might have to strike in order to save his friend at any moment was taking up too much of his mind to allow for much else to linger there.

Eventually, <Our visitors are Moriel La-Virj—> Oth pointed toward the glalie whom it had just scanned. <—Evane and Viraya La-Zyar, and Alij Van-Zaria.> It swept a hand from left to right over the other three as it named them off. <Moriel intends no harm to any of us, and from her knowledge of the others, it appears unlikely that any of them do, either. They are all deserters. They have all fled from Sinaji territory, and all of them have expressed strong disinterest in re-affiliating with them.>

Moriel watched Oth as it moved backward away from her, then turned her gaze toward Zdir. “…Can I please come down from here?” she asked tentatively. “This is really rather awkward.”

The set of Zdir’s brows suggested that she was at least somewhat deep in thought, but nonetheless she spared a nod for Moriel. Acknowledging this, Moriel extended a sheet of ice downward between Evane and Viraya’s heads, descending the ramp she’d just made toward the stone floor and then making it vanish in a cloud of vapor.

“You can come forward as well,” Zdir told the others, who did so a bit hesitantly.

“Will we need to have a scan, too?” Alij asked.

“Possibly,” Zdir said, “but probably not. For now, I’d like for you to tell me what finally convinced you to leave the Sinaji.”

“There’s something wrong with their leader,” Moriel said. Her response was met with a derisive noise from Narzen, which she ignored. “He hasn’t been acting like himself. Not since they were invaded. Some enemies of theirs got in and out without anyone even noticing, and ever since then… I swear, the leader’s gone crazy. He’s been babbling something about ‘repayment for the blood of the rannia’, whatever that means.”

“And something about the honor of the ‘Vanished Ones’. Maybe they’re the same thing,” Evane supposed out loud.

“Maybe,” Moriel concurred. ”All I know is that he didn’t even sound like himself anymore, and neither did the ones closest to him. And there near the end, before we got away, they were threatening us, threatening our lives. And they made good on it with some of us.”

“We’re not the first to try and get away from them,” Viraya said morosely. “Just the first to survive trying.”

No one said anything for a few moments after that. Then, “Understandable that you’d want to get away from such a climate,” Ronal said. “But I do find it troubling that knowing that these people had been involved in murders and kidnappings wasn’t enough to convince you that you should want nothing more to do with them.”

All of the apparent defectors turned to him with what looked like genuine shock. “What… When the hell was this going on?” Moriel demanded.

“Right before that invasion you mentioned. Are you telling us that you honestly weren’t privy to these doings?” Zdir asked.

“We had no idea,” Alij said hollowly.

“None whatsoever,” Moriel said. “You can have the psychic look in our heads again if you don’t believe us.”

“Sanaika and his gang have had a bad reputation in Virc-Dho for a long time,” Narzen said. ”Surely you knew what sort of people you were involved with from the start.”

“Whatever reputation they had down there is news to us,” Evane said. “We haven’t lived in Virc-Dho since we were children. Not since the humans took us.”

“So that’s what became of you,” Zdir mused aloud.

“You knew they’d gone missing?” Solonn asked, only for it to dawn on him as soon as the words left his mouth that of course she’d had the means to know such things. The Security Guild, and by extension the Council, had found out when he’d been taken. The same was likely true of all abductions, he figured.

“Mm-hmm. And I know the names of Virc-Dho’s exiles. None of theirs are among them. So,” she then said to the deserters, “I suppose when you finally got back here, you encountered Sanaika’s people first?”

“Yes,” Evane said. “A clefable brought us here—teleported us to just outside these caverns, under the sun. The Sinaji told us that Virc-Dho had become corrupt. That their leaders had been overthrown and anyone who acted against them was being attacked and driven out. There was a lot of fighting going on up in these caverns when we arrived, and the Sinaji told us that we were only safe at all with them. Since no one else seemed to win when they took the Sinaji on, we believed them.”

“They trained us,” Moriel said. “Trained us in case the Virc showed up and we had to defend our new nation against them. We made them regret it.” She smiled, but there was something rueful in it. “We had to use every last trick they taught us, plus spring a few surprises we picked up on the outside. It was just barely enough… well, mostly enough.” The light in her eyes dimmed considerably. “Wasn’t enough for Kanjara, but…”

“Well,” Zdir said at length. “We are willing to provide sanctuary to you if you’re willing to accept it.”

“Yes, yes of course,” Moriel said; the other three nodded in concurrence. “Thank you.”

“Now, considering the training the four of you have undergone, we would also appreciate it if you were to aid us in any confrontation with the Sinaji that we have in future,” Zdir told them.

“Of course,” Moriel repeated. She lowered her head slightly, averting her gaze. “It’s… the least we could do.” She shook her head and sighed. “I regret ever having had anything to do with them.”

“We all do,” Viraya said. “I would definitely have liked to have given them more of a… parting gift, but… well there were only five of us against nearly three dozen of them.”

“Three dozen of them and some unseen mind-controller,” Narzen said.

“I suspected as much,” Evane said, and she sounded distinctly uneasy. Her eyes shifted toward Oth. “It would explain why some of them have been acting so strangely.”

“The fact that we know next to nothing about this psychic, or whatever it is, that they have in their midst is still a strike against us,” Zdir said. “But the numbers of the Sinaji being as they are is welcome news. I had allowed for the possibility that there could be thrice the number you’ve reported.”

“It’s a good thing there weren’t. We wouldn’t have had a chance if…”

Alij’s voice faltered, a look of vaguely troubled confusion on his face as, from above, a strange, continuous grinding sound from above came rumbling downward through the stone overhead. Solonn, Oth, and Zdir, meanwhile, looked notably less perplexed.

Eyes wide, Solonn shot a look at Zdir, feeling a thrill of hope surge through him. “Gods, that sounds like…” He found that he couldn’t quite dare to finish the sentence. “Is it… could it be possible?”

<Conceivably. Perhaps he found a way to return somewhere in Mordial,> Oth said.

“What’s going on?” Evane asked, sounding a bit concerned.

Solonn stared up toward the wonderful, presently invisible possibility that had just reared its head, hearing the sound slowly grow fainter as its source kept moving onward. He’s not coming down here, he reckoned, suddenly unable to help further entertaining the notion that yes, he was indeed hearing what he hoped to be hearing. He didn’t doubt that they would still be able to track the source of the sound by its sheer loudness and catch up with it easily, but he wanted to know if he was right about what it was, and he didn’t want to wait. ”We’ve got to go check it out,” he said.

“Agreed. Come on,” Zdir said with a dip of her head toward Solonn, then led him into the chasm leading upwards. Solonn promptly set about forming the ice platform that would lift them out of there, his eyes blazing and his heart racing as he willed it to ascend as fast as it could.

Please let it be him, please let it be him, please…

The two of them reached the top, and the sight that greeted them halted Solonn’s thought processes at once.

There was Grosh… and there was a small, multispecies army alongside him.

(CONTINUED)

[Sike Saner]

For a moment, Solonn could do nothing but gawk at the sight. Then, “Father!” he greeted him.

The steelix turned his head immediately, as did most of those who accompanied him. His face lit up like the sun. “Oh my God, you’re all right!”

The pokémon accompanying him parted as he turned and began making his way toward his son as fast as his coils could carry him. Solonn had begun rushing toward him in nearly the same instant and soon reached him. He buried his face against the steelix’s chest, shaking with joy and relief, and as Grosh gently brought his coils around him in an embrace, he felt tears fall upon his head from above.

“Father… how did you get here?” Solonn asked.

“That’s how,” Grosh answered, nodding toward a lanky, red-furred biped with a long, skull-like face and a black mane. “Quiul here was kind enough to help round up these people for us and bring us here.”

Solonn met the gaze of the mercirance to whom Grosh had referred. “I can’t thank you enough,” he said sincerely, the light in his eyes wavering. He’d had legitimate reason to wonder if he would ever see Grosh again, and now here the steelix was. And Solonn recognized that now he could perhaps also be reunited with some other loved ones from whom he’d been separated…

“Oh, it was nothing,” Quiul responded with as much of a warm smile as her face could manage.

“I do hope one of you will consent to a scan,” Zdir spoke up. Solonn looked up in initial disbelief… but then he followed her line of sight. There was a pack of unfamiliar glalie there. None of them looked particularly hostile, but that didn’t mean anything.

“I… what?” one of them responded.

“We’ve been under threat of attack from not only our own kind but collaborators of an unknown kind for months now,” Zdir said.

“Those guys are from Sinnoh,” the aurrade who stood next to Quiul said. “They’re here for the same reason we are: to make your enemies wish they were never born.”

“Valdrey’s telling the truth,” Grosh said. “She and Quiul spent most of the past couple of days getting these people together. I was with them the entire time.”

“I don’t personally suspect them,” Zdir said, “or you. But it would be irresponsible of me to not seek confirmation.”

“That’s fine,” said another of the newly-arrived glalie, drifting forward a bit. “I’ll volunteer.”

“Very well,” Zdir said. She turned an expectant look toward Solonn, who followed her back to the hole in the floor and descended with her.

“So what’s the situation?” Narzen asked them once they reached the bottom.

“We may have just received reinforcements,” Zdir answered him, “as well as access to teleportation and a safer place to stay.”

“Ha, excellent!” Narzen responded. Several of the others mirrored his enthusiasm in some way, particularly among the defectors.

“So it’s really happening, then?” Moriel asked. “We’re really gonna take them on?”

“So it would appear,” Zdir said. “But we do need to have one of them scanned first, just to be certain of what we’re dealing with.”

Wordlessly, Oth moved forward, accompanying Zdir and Solonn as they returned to the cavern above. Zdir indicated the glalie who had offered himself up for scanning, and the claydol went to work at once. <This is Roskharha Nharitas,> it eventually reported. <He is not of this region, nor has he ever been here before, and the same is true of the rest of the glalie who are with him. They are soldiers of the Hirashka people.

<These are allies,> it said, and there was distinct hope and wonder in the tone of its mindvoice. <All of these people—> It indicated the entire crowd of various pokémon gathered there. <—are here to try and deal with the Sinaji.>

Zdir looked back toward Valdrey and Quiul. “We’ll aid you in your endeavor,” she told her. “We and our new associates. They were formerly involved with the enemy and have already yielded useful information about them. They may have more to offer us all.”

Valdrey tilted her head back, making a faint, intrigued-sounding noise. “Sounds like your people and mine could do with a good chat.”

“Yes, we could,” Grosh agreed. “I’d like to know how you all have been holding up these past few months.” He cast a look down toward Solonn as he said this, one that told that he hoped for the best.

And not only for himself and for Zdir and Oth, Solonn was sure, but for Jen, as well. He tried to put on a face that suggested good news on that front—they had, after all, indeed successfully delivered him from the Sinaji, and he was, as far as anyone was aware, still someplace very safe. But he didn’t imagine that Grosh would be altogether happy about Jen having been left behind, and he suspected that the steelix was hoping to be able to see him tonight.

It’s all right, Father. We might still have him back very soon. With a teleporter available, they could indeed possibly retrieve Jen that very night.

Valdrey swept a glance over the room. “This doesn’t seem like the best place for that though. Mind coming back to my place? It’s safe and spacious.”

“That sounds fine,” Zdir said.

<I will go inform the others,> Oth said, at which Zdir nodded in assent. It drifted down into the chasm, and soon after, glalie began filing up to join the pokémon gathered above them a few at a time.

Once they were all up, “All right now, gather together, everyone,” Valdrey instructed them. When it looked as though everyone had, “Are we all ready to go?” Valdrey asked, at which everyone gave some form of confirmation that they were. “All right then, let's go!” And with those words and a burst of light, the small crowd vanished from Shoal Cave.

* * *

The fugitives and their new allies all reappeared under a night sky, but there was a degree of somewhat harsh, artificial light shining upon them from nearby, at which Solonn initially winced. Once he had adjusted sufficiently, he took in his new surroundings as best as he could given the fact that he was partially surrounded by other pokémon, some of whom were taller than he was.

But he didn’t have to see much before he realized that he recognized this place as the Wisteria gym in Mordial. He had been here before, back when he was traveling the world to spread word of the Convergence project. The gym had been lit by sunlight back then rather than by the few among its lights that still functioned, and there had been humans dotting the bleachers, watching as the gym leader’s pokémon raced each other for fun on the track that ran around the actual battle platform.

“Welcome to Wisteria,” Valdrey said as the rather tightly packed crowd began dispersing a bit, the eyes of some of its constituents sweeping the alien environment in curiosity or wonder or mild wariness. She stepped out in front of Zdir. “This is my home, and for as long as you have need of it, it can be your home, too.”

“Thank you for your hospitality,” Zdir said. She settled herself at the edge of the racetrack, and the rest of the Virc fugitives, along with Oth and Grosh, joined her there. Many of the other pokémon clustered off into little groups, as well. “Of course, I do have to wonder what inspired you to come to our former nation’s aid.”

Valdrey shrugged, spreading her arms wide. “It’s just the kind of thing we do. Me and most of these guys here used to do this kind of work all the time back in the days after the Extinction. I guess we just never tired of being able to lend a hand. Or, well. A figurative hand, in some cases.”

What the aurrade was describing sounded awfully familiar… “You wouldn’t happen to know an alakazam by the name of Sei Salma, would you?” Solonn asked her.

“Hmm… no, I can’t say I do. What about you?” she asked Quiul.

“I’m afraid not,” the mercirance replied. “Sorry.”

“That’s fine,” Solonn said, supposing that he shouldn’t be too surprised. It wasn’t as though Sei and her group of psychics were the only ones capable of deciding to come together and aid people in the wake of humanity’s end.

“So I take it you—” Zdir nodded up toward Grosh. “—found her, or the other way around, and she took it from there,” she surmised aloud.

“Some locals directed me toward her,” Grosh said. “But yes.” He drew in a breath and let it out on something of a sigh. “I… do regret not seeking help sooner than I did. I was just worried about not being there if you came back to where you left me.”

“It’s all right,” she assured him. “No real harm came to us or to the Virc as a result of your timing. They’ve been lucky these past few months.”

No sooner were the words out of her mouth than her eyes darted almost imperceptibly toward where the defectors were gathered together, and there was a hint of guilt in her expression. Solonn remembered Moriel mentioning one of their own apparently not making it away from the Sinaji. He could only wonder if indeed that person could have fared better had help arrived sooner.

<I would nonetheless have liked to have been able to have come back for you sooner,> Oth said. <Unfortunately, I lost my ability to teleport shortly after we rescued the abducted snorunt. We have yet to determine what caused this, and I have yet to regain the technique.>

“Hmm…” Quiul approached the claydol. “What you’re describing sounds rather like a case of spontaneous move deletion.”

Solonn’s eyes widened. That was a phrase he hadn’t heard for many years, not since the days of his involvement with the IPL. He’d heard of humans inducing the loss of techniques via artificial means for various reasons, and he supposed then that he must have been taught of it happening on its own at some point but had merely forgotten it.

“Can it be cured?” Zereth asked.

“I can’t say for certain,” Quiul said. “All I know is that it’s not within my capability to heal.”

“It might be within the capability of the people at the Haven,” Solonn pointed out. “And… we might be able to get Jen back while we’re at it.”

Grosh frowned. “You didn’t get them back?”

“We did,” Zdir said, “but Oth’s teleportation misfired and then failed altogether before the mind-tampering that Jen was dealt could be undone. He was left behind at the Haven.”

“Well then we’ve got to get him back!” Grosh said, throwing a glance at Quiul.

Solonn sighed. “It… might not be that simple,” he said. “Considering how long it’s been since he was left there, they might have come to figure that we abandoned him. Even if they haven’t, they’re not necessarily keeping him there. And even if we knew where they were keeping him, it might not be a simple matter to get him returned to our custody.”

Grosh stared down at Solonn all the while as the latter spoke, and Solonn knew that whatever was going on behind those red eyes, it probably wasn’t acceptance. Solonn wasn’t fond of the way things were, either, nor was he especially fond of the way Zdir had told him to approach these complications back when he’d first recognized and spoken of them. But ultimately, he had come to understand with and agree to them.

“If it is, it is,” Zdir said, addressing them both and holding the two of them in her gaze as best she could. “We’ll bring Jen here. He’ll be safe. If not… he is, as Solonn has said, safe there, too. Safer than the Virc are in their own homes. We should tend to doing what we can for them first. We mustn’t delay them that help for too much longer, and we mustn’t squander the time and generosity of our new allies.”

“I’m ready anytime,” Quiul said. “Just say the word.”

“Would it be all right if we could bring Zilag’s family here as well?” Solonn asked. “It would in all likelihood be a single trip.”

“Sure,” Quiul answered.

“See if they’re ready to go first,” Zdir instructed Oth.

Oth nodded in its fashion. A couple of minutes passed, during which a couple of the groups of gathered pokémon began conversing among themselves; then, <They are.>

“Very well,” Zdir said, and nodded toward Quiul.

The mercirance made beckoning gestures toward all those who had spoken on the matter of retrieving Zilag’s family and Jen. Only Solonn and Oth moved toward her, however.

“I… think I ought to stay here,” Grosh said, though he sounded somewhat regretful about it. “Jen’s obviously been through a lot since he was taken, and even though he knows about me, it might be a good idea for you to let him know well in advance that I’m gonna be here before he sees me. And… I don’t need to be in Virc-Dho again. Not even briefly.”

Solonn almost tried to reassure him on the first point, at least, but decided against it just as quickly. It made sense, he realized, especially if, gods forbid, Jen’s memories still hadn’t been restored and he had to learn about the massive steel-type all over again. As for the second point, he didn’t even think of arguing against it. Grosh would probably never be safe in Virc-Dho after what had happened, nor would he likely ever be comfortable there again.

“I’m going to stay behind, as well,” Zdir said. “There are a few things I wish to discuss with Valdrey; I might as well get to them.”

“I guess everyone’s ready, then,” Quiul said. “I assume at least one of you has been to the places we need to go?”

<Yes,> Oth answered. <I will transfer the memories to you at once if you wish.>

“Please do,” Quiul said.

As soon as the memories were transferred, “We’ll see you all later, then,” Quiul said, and then teleported away, taking Solonn and Oth with her.

* * *

Solonn, Oth, and Quiul appeared in front of the Haven after making a stop in Virc-Dho to retrieve Zilag and his family, as well as a stop back in Mordial to drop them off there.

Though the family had agreed well in advance to leave Virc-Dho one day, it was clear when the time had finally come for them to do so that they weren’t doing it wholly without regret. Oth had long ago raised the possibility that they could still live among their own kind, in some other nation, in the hopes that letting them retain some familiar element in their lives would make the transition easier on them, and the Hirashka had proven perfectly willing to give them a home in Sinnoh upon meeting them. But while they and especially Hledas had latched on to the idea, the fact remained that they were still leaving their home and their lives as they’d known them behind. As they had sat there, all at once in this alien environment and surrounded almost totally by strangers, their faces told that only now was the change that they’d chosen truly sinking in.

Solonn felt for them, and as he entered the Haven with the mercirance and claydol at his sides, he hoped that his newly displaced friends would be fully at peace in their new situation soon. At the same time, however, a good portion of his thoughts were trained toward Jen and Oth and the hopes, however cautious, that he would be leaving Convergence tonight with the former at his side and the latter in full possession of all its techniques once more.

The three crossed the lobby to the front desk, where a chansey sat watching them approach. “Can I help you?” she asked when they stopped before her.

<Yes,> Oth said. <We came here several months ago with eight snorunt who had suffered mental tampering. One of them was left behind when I involuntarily teleported before his treatment was finished. I subsequently lost the ability to do so, voluntarily or otherwise. We have returned to retrieve him, as well as to perhaps have my lost technique restored.>

The latter was even more of a longshot than the former, Solonn knew. He had recalled there having been humans who could restore techniques just as there had been some who could erase them, but he didn’t know if anything of that art had survived the Extinction. And similarly to the situation with Jen, if it was determined that it would take too long to restore its teleportation ability, that restoration would be postponed.

“…One moment, please,” the chansey said, and turned her sights downward toward something on her desk and out of sight. “Teresa?” she said to what was apparently some sort of paging device there. “Could you come to the front desk, please?”

Soon after, another chansey arrived on the scene. “You came back,” she said simply.

Solonn nodded. “We never meant to leave,” he said.

“They claim that something went awry with the claydol’s teleportation,” the chansey behind the desk said. “Something that caused it to teleport away with the others involuntarily and prevented it from coming back.”

“Have you been trying to teleport without any success all this time?” Teresa asked.

<Yes,> Oth said. <It’s as though I never even knew the technique.>

“Hmm…” Teresa’s mouth drew into a thin line. “We might be dealing with a move deletion here,” she said. “We can run a couple of tests to confirm it, but in the event that your teleport technique has deleted itself, I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do.”

<We had anticipated as much,> Oth said, though it still sounded a bit disappointed all the same.

“Hopefully we’ll be able to work this out. If you’ll follow me, we can find out.” Teresa began leading the way out of the lobby, and Oth and those who accompanied it followed.

When they reached their destination, Solonn somehow expected to find the same gardevoir there as he and the rest of his party had dealt with before. Instead, it was a hypno who stood behind that door, casting an inquiring look at them. Teresa explained the situation to her, then motioned Oth into the room with the hypno, closed the door behind it, and began ushering the others toward a waiting room.

“What about Jen?” Solonn asked as he and Quiul followed her lead. “The snorunt who was left here,” he clarified. “My half-brother. Were his memories ever successfully restored? Is he here?”

“I’m afraid the answer to both of those questions is ‘no’,” Teresa replied.

Solonn’s heart sank. He had dearly wanted what was done to Jen to be undone, and the thought that he would be greeted with confusion or disbelief or even fear whenever he finally reunited with Jen was hard to bear. Especially since it was now really starting to look like that reunion would lie further in the future than he’d hoped.

“Is—” He tried to remember the gardevoir’s name but failed. “Is the gardevoir here? Can I speak with him?”

“If you’re referring to Adn, then I’m afraid that’s another ‘no’. He’s not here right now and won’t be back before the weekend is over.”

Solonn sighed, vaguely wondering to himself what, exactly, he’d hoped to accomplish anyway in talking with Adn. “Could you tell me where Jen currently is, at least?” he asked as the three of them entered the waiting room, turning to face Teresa directly as he spoke.

Teresa gave no response at first. Then she took a deep breath. “He was declared abandoned,” she told him. “He was placed in another’s custody, and I’m sorry, but we’re not at liberty to mention whose.”

Solonn stared at her. That they’d decided Jen had been abandoned didn’t exactly come as a surprise to him, but he hadn’t expected to be barred from him quite so completely. “Is anyone?” he asked.

Teresa shook her head, insofar as she could. “I’m sorry.”

For a moment, Solonn couldn’t respond. The light in his eyes dimmed, and his throat threatened to close up on him. Then, “But… he’s safe, right? He’s being cared for?” He almost couldn’t continue. “…He’s happy?”

“I can assure you that he is,” Teresa said consolingly.

“…Good…” Solonn managed, very quietly. “That’s good…”

Beyond giving the two of them a quick rundown on where certain facilities were, she said nothing more to them before departing. Solonn watched her leave, then sank to the floor.

He heard Quiul sit down beside him. “This doesn’t mean you’ll never see him again, you know,” she told him gently.

“I know,” he said, though in a way it still sort of felt as though he definitely wouldn’t despite his knowledge that that wasn’t a certainty. “I just… wish I could see him with my own eyes. I wish I could really confirm that he’s all right… insofar as he is. And I wish I weren’t being treated like I can’t be trusted around him, for the gods’ sakes.”

Quiul laid a hand upon his back. “Someday this will all be sorted out.”

Someday… Solonn drew in a breath that shuddered slightly, hoping that she was indeed right.

Eventually, Teresa returned with Oth beside her. Solonn and Quiul both rose to greet her.

“I’m afraid it was move deletion,” the chansey reported once she and Oth had entered the room.

<It is all right,> Oth assured everyone present. <I do not need to be able to teleport.>

Solonn supposed that it was right, especially what with Quiul on their side now. Still, he would have liked for at least some part of their endeavors in Convergence that night to have been successful. “Thank you regardless,” he said. “and give the hypno my thanks, as well. At least now we know for sure.” Teresa nodded in acknowledgment.

“I suppose that concludes our business here,” Quiul said then. “Thank you for your time.” Oth joined her and Solonn where they stood, and then the three of them departed.

In the wake of their vanishing, Teresa stood for a moment blinking the lingering flash out of her eyes, then turned and left for elsewhere in the Haven. As she walked, she felt a strange sense of something being off, and not for the first time in the past few months.

She frowned at it, wondering if she should see Adn about it. But that would have to wait. For now, she simply carried on about her business, as did everyone around her.

______________________

    Spoiler:- Fakemon info:

Show Spoiler

 
Aurrade
Blade Pokémon
Type: Fighting/Steel
Ability: Battle armor, light metal (hidden)
Average height: 6'2"
Average weight: 505.2 lbs
Evolution: Aurcent -> Aurrade (Lv. 20 if attack and speed are equal)
Appearance: A centaur covered in gold-colored armor. What skin can be seen between the plates is gray. Its "helmet" has two bladelike protrusions at the sides that stick out in a V-shape, and there are hinged plates covering its mouth most of the time. Its eyes are green. Its tail is like a horse's and covered in long, golden hair. Shiny aurrade are closer to yellow-green and have purple eyes.
Additional info: Aurrade are able to generate and wield blades made of steel-type energy. They are one of three different evolutionary forms of aurcent, the others being aurrail and aurrow.

Mercirance
Wandering Pokémon
Type: Normal/Ghost
Ability: Healer, scrappy (hidden)
Average height: 5'0"
Average weight: 99 lbs.
Evolution: none
Appearance: A lanky, red-furred biped with a hairless opossumlike tail and a stringy black mane growing from its long, low-slung neck. Its face is also hairless and resembles a long-snouted skull. It has spindly fingers and rodentlike feet, and its eyes are bright yellow. Shiny mercirance are blue with a bit more of a greenish tint to their eyes.
Additional info: Mercirance travels about in search of sick or injured pokémon and humans to heal using its abilities. It is able to tell when a patient is beyond hope of salvation and their spirit is longing to be set free; the mercirance will usually help it do so in that case.
 

Next time: The Sinaji are paid a little visit. See you then!

[Kaizer]

Holy Crap, this is still alive! This is awesome, I had never expected to see it finished. Beyond that, this was a really, really busy chapter to the point that I almost felt it was kind of rushed. It was great that things happened, but I guess it just makes for a lot to take in all at once. I mean, in one chapter we have the Sinaji issue basically solved with everyone escaping and making a ton of new allies, everyone's reunited, and the teleport mystery has been solved while setting up an even bigger mystery. On the other hand, the timeskip in-universe does kinda match up with the real-life wait and I'm now very excited for what will hopefully be a very exciting fight next chapter.

My only other thought is a bit nitpicky: Grosh tends to refer to other pokemon as people, which makes sense for a group as a whole, but feels odd for individuals. Wouldn't they be thought of as pokemon? Especially by one who actually new humans? Like I said, a bit nitpicky but as a whole I enjoyed this and I'm glad it's back.

[Sike Saner]

Kaizer: Yep, it's still alive. I've said I'd finish it, and I meant and still mean it, no matter how long it takes to finish any given part of it.

Beyond that, this was a really, really busy chapter to the point that I almost felt it was kind of rushed. It was great that things happened, but I guess it just makes for a lot to take in all at once. I mean, in one chapter we have the Sinaji issue basically solved with everyone escaping and making a ton of new allies, everyone's reunited, and the teleport mystery has been solved while setting up an even bigger mystery.

Yeah this... could really have probably stood to be more than one chapter.

A lot of them probably could have, really.

My only other thought is a bit nitpicky: Grosh tends to refer to other pokemon as people, which makes sense for a group as a whole, but feels odd for individuals. Wouldn't they be thought of as pokemon? Especially by one who actually new humans? Like I said, a bit nitpicky but as a whole I enjoyed this and I'm glad it's back.

For what it's worth, Grosh was with his own kind prior to capture for longer than he was with humans.

Thanks for reading and for replying!

[Dark Latios]

Sike! I'm so glad to see this story up and running again. it's been so long that I actually started over three days ago so everything made sense again. I'm loving the new Pokemon you're introducing into the story.. Especially the ghost/normal type. Brilliant. Also love the connection to auurade and fights.. Can't wait to see how this turns out. 17 was definitely worth the wait regardless of how things aren't going exactly peachy for solonns party.. At least you didn't leave us on a cliffhanger haha.

I really hope knowing I'm still alive you'll keep up with this more often because I'm watching.. Regardless of having a husband and all now.

[Sike Saner]

Dark Latios: Well it's definitely up but I don't know about running, heh. I'd personally be surprised if there were another chapter before year's end--although at the same time, I wouldn't rule it out entirely, either!

Glad you're digging the fakemon! And that type combination, as well. It's one of my favorites, and I really hope to see an official pokémon with it someday.

Thanks for reading and for replying, and congrats!