kintsugi
golden scars | pfp by sun
In which the Heroes of Truth and Ideals realize it's rather silly that the fate of Unova would be settled over a single battle, and come to the only logical conclusion.
Hilda's hand twitched on the return mechanism of the pokeball. On her first pass, she didn't even push it down all the way; trembling, she had to force her thumb down a second time. Zekrom's unconscious form vanished in a flash of red light.
"You did it," she said hollowly. "You won."
Twenty feet away, N's face was a blur—perhaps the residual heat from Reshiram, Hilda told herself, smudging at her eyes with her free hand—but his voice was clear when he replied, "It would appear so."
It had all come down to this. One single battle for the fate of Unova, and she'd lost. Lost. "So this is the end, right? You're going to erase battling, separate trainers from pokemon?" Unbidden, her mind drifted to her emboar, safely unconscious in his pokeball. He'd wake up in an entirely new world. Would he miss her? Would he know?
Her gaze drifted around the shattered floor of N's castle. Below her, the league unfurled like a starry flag, its lights still twinkling in the distance, unaware that its fate had been decided. The stone steps had felt old when she ascended, sturdy beneath her feet but weathered, like they'd seen a thousand challengers before her. The marble halls leading up to the champion's dais had felt ancient, a bastion of everything she'd ever known. Everything anyone had ever known.
Soon, it would all come undone.
"What?"
Hilda jolted out of her reverie and found herself in the uncomfortable position of having both N and a god look at her with a pair of matching expressions that could only be described as quizzical. "You're going to end all of this now," she said slowly. "You won. So now you get what you want."
Reshiram rumbled, in an almost musical trill, and Hilda's heart fluttered. Now that the dragons had ceased their dance, she could finally take in Reshiram's majesty, a starburst of white feathers and flame. Blue eyes passed over her once, seemed to take in every aspect of her being, and then looked away.
"I agree," N murmured. "Spoken like a true Hero of Ideals."
"What?" Hilda strained a little closer. There was a good twenty feet between them and it was hard to hear.
"It's a rough translation," N repeated, more loudly, "But Reshiram says that your conclusion is much like flipping a coin to reveal tails, and assuming the coin is tails on both." When she said nothing, he continued, "There are two diametrically opposed solutions here. Revealing one to be the victor does not necessarily undo the existence of the other."
He paused awkwardly. Hilda said nothing. So he added, "But it's a simple binomial. If we wanted to determine which was more correct for Unova, there's really only one way forward."
Hilda raised one eyebrow. Flipping coins. "So you're saying …"
N nodded solemnly. "Mathematically, we need a larger sample."
The first few battles were awkward, cumbersome. Alder had shown up at some point, demanding that they leave the league premises—but under the current regulations, there was no wording for what would happen if both the challenger and the champion agreed that the battle was still ongoing. Getting a steady stash of healing items in sufficient scale had also proven difficult, but less so than proving that permitting laws did not explicitly exclude summoning a castle on top of league premises. But, as far as anyone could legally prove, either N or Hilda was the champion, and as long as they both refused to settle that, they could occupy the champion's chambers for as long as they saw fit. The castle was a matter for Plasma's legal team.
(It was a poorly-phrased rule, Alder had realized immediately. But unfortunately the petition process to change league by-laws required a committee vote, and unfortunately only the champion had the power to call committee meetings, so … )
"So that's forty-nine battles for Reshiram, and forty-seven for Zekrom." N looked up from the rapidly-healing gouge in Reshiram's side, which knitted itself together even as he continued to spray a potion on the wound. "Say, do you think we might be biasing the stats a little?"
"In what way?"
"Well, you and I both—" N fumbled for a word "—want something out of this, and now we both know that it's an experiment. So we might unconsciously be dictating what happens. We should do our experiment blind. Or double-blind."
Hilda swallowed nervously. The idea of closing her ideas and letting Zekrom battle … or worse, Zekrom closing its eyes and trying to battle … "Are you sure?"
A brief huff of flame from Reshiram drew her attention, and when she looked over, the legendary dragon was staring at her again, twin spirals of smoke spilling from its nostrils.
"Oh, a fair point," N said to Reshiram. And then, with a faint smile, he turned back to her. "Hilda, don't take this the wrong way, but do you know what a blind experiment is?"
She shook her head, feeling hopelessly out of her depth.
To her surprise, N exclaimed, "Excellent! I have some books you might enjoy. Tomorrow can be a reading day. I think Zekrom would enjoy some time to themself."
Two days later, they ran into the snag that was very obvious in hindsight.
"Zekrom won't battle for someone who isn't the Hero of Ideals," Hilda found herself saying in what she hoped was a slow, calming voice to the sobbing ten year-old in front of her. "It's not your fault." Her words felt hollow in her mouth though—whose fault was it, then? "Say, do you like emboar? Mine's very friendly."
Half an hour after that, when they'd finally gotten their sample trainers to leave the league (and waved off Alder's tight-lipped glare), Hilda sighed. "We could just acknowledge that the experimental setup is flawed a little."
"We could."
There was the other slight snag of what to do with the actual results. At first Unova had been deeply intrigued by this clandestine battle at the heart of a strange castle, invested in whether Truth or Ideals would prevail—but their interest seemed to be waning. Strange. Didn't they know that all of Unova hung in the balance?
"Have you considered that we haven't accounted for environmental factors?" Hilda asked, glancing up from a dog-eared copy of Brase's Understanding Basic Statistics. "Zekrom could perform better at night, for example."
Zekrom grumbled something.
"That's true too." N smiled faintly. For Hilda's benefit, he added, "Under the current parameters a difference of two losses isn't statistically significant. We can't draw a conclusion."
"We'll need to conduct more battles."
"Of course."
These battles were conducted under nighttime, low-humidity, high-humidity, and heavy precipitation conditions. A full dataset including a full audio transcription of these sixty-four battles was included in Appendix E of their paper. It was concluded that environmental factors such as time of day, humidity, and rainfall had minimal effect on the outcome of a battle between two legendary dragons, although it could not speculate on battles between other pokemon.
"I can't believe they wouldn't take our paper." Hilda scowled as she paced a tight circle. Reshiram and Zekrom looped a much larger circle overhead, lazily trading bursts of thunder and flame until Zekrom fell from the sky, smoking. "Who do they think they are?"
N didn't look up from where he was casually transcribing the previous test's data into excel. "Presumably the head editors of the Unovan Statistics Association."
Hilda fumed, reading the message aloud for the fourth time. "We regret to inform you that we do not believe that your paper, 'Binomial Empirical Testing to Determine the Single Moral Outcome for Unovan Training Ethics' meets our criteria for publication." She glared over the screen of her x-transceiver towards N. "What criterion? You saw that tripe they published about the correlation between trainers who don't kick their pokemon and trainers who enjoy the pun in roggenrola."
"Their methodology was airtight," N noted serenely. "Also, they were sponsored by Clay. Reshiram is sure there's some relation there."
"I know, but—" Hilda cut herself off with a hiss of frustration. "Whatever. We don't need the USA's approval here. We know we're right." Zekrom pulled themself over to her, one wing charred into an unrecognizable lump, and Hilda idly spritzed it with a potion. "We'll call it here for the day. One hundred and seventeen to one hundred and twenty."
"Perhaps there's no solution," Hilda offered as she and N began tidying up their station. The sun was low in the sky—as was Reshiram, who hit the stone floor shortly after—and they were wrapping up their study for the day.
"Mathematically it doesn't make sense. There has to be a single formula that proves who is correct here. An equation that will change the world. And once everyone is told the solution, they will all immediately accept it." N plucked a charred white feather off of his notebook.
"They will," Hilda agreed emphatically, which made it true. "All of Unova will immediately agree to whatever conclusion we draw here, so we need to make sure our reasoning is airtight."
Reshiram hummed something. Hilda looked at N expectantly.
"They're asking," N said, his brow furrowed, "if we've ever thought about how there never seem to be incredibly good things."
"Pardon?"
"The translation is hard. I …" N paused for a moment, and inhaled. "There are some concepts Reshiram is saying that I don't understand. But the gist is: we can name events where we think the world got worse. A lot of bad things that made us lose faith. A lot of people did things we couldn't believe in, and then they did them again, and again." When he looked at her, his stormy eyes were almost pleading. "But Reshiram—and I as well, now—wonder if you can think of a time that something happened where you could believe that the entire world changed for the better, and permanently?"
Hilda's breath caught in her throat.
When she was four, a petrochemical explosion at Virbank had rocked the country. She remembered watching her mother watch the television with tight lips and white knuckles. They must have played that clip of the man in a stiff-pressed suit a thousand times, his words like a worm in her head—Virbank Petroleum will be conducting a full internal investigation. Our customers are our family, and Unova is our home. Our sincerest condolences to those affected.
Later they would find that a subsidiary contractor had used faulty fittings, resulting in the explosion. The contractor went under. VP issued another public apology. Three workers had died. The first checks arrived in the mail two weeks later; Hilda had been too young to know what they meant, or why her mother cried.
When she was thirteen, the invitational to replace Castelia's gym leader began. There was a huge tournament, and she'd watched, rapt, as challengers pitted themselves against one another, each match more fantastic than the last.
Ultimately the position had gone to Burgh, the former leader's nephew. There was outrage for a while, and the bracket winner had joined forces with the runner-up to protest the nepotism that they claimed was rampant in the league. People had been interested for a while, but then Drayden had challenged Alder for champion, and league coverage was nothing but thinkpieces and speculation and interviews.
Had the rules changed? Had anything happened as a result? She couldn't remember.
When she was sixteen, she began her journey. Later than some, earlier than others—she was hesitant to leave home, although her mother had said for years that it'd be good for her—and she'd received a tepig, whom she'd nicknamed Reckless (they'd later agree to call him Haizi). This was where it could all be determined, she'd decided. Pokemon battles were a question of skill and little more. Talent and merit were all you would need to rise to the top.
On the battle subway she'd uncovered a cheating ring in which some trainers would purposefully throw their matches to allow other trainers to advance, splitting the betting money between them. It was very elaborate, and all told, roughly seven of the thirty-two trainers were involved. She'd reported them to the authorities, but the ringleader was a favored pick for the league, and his parents had made a sizable donation, and—
Back when she'd thought this would all end in a single battle, where defeating N would mean that injustice towards pokemon would disappear as well—had it felt like everything that was wrong with the world would vanish overnight? Surely not, if her convictions had failed her the first time. And N wasn't wrong—people hurt pokemon all the time. People hurt people all the time too. He couldn't look away from that truth, but she ... she couldn't relinquish that belief that things gradually got better.
There had to be something. Roxie's triumphant announcement that the Virbank disaster zone would be reallocated into a nature reserve. Haizi's flames roaring to life as he'd evolved into an emboar and scored them the winning seat on the battle subway. Iris, back ramrod straight as she won the seat for Drayden's gym, and then her lips cracking into a smile when she actually received it.
But had that felt like actual change? Change that could last?
Surely it had all been so small, so inconsequential. A patch of green in an ever-expanding sea of concrete, a victory in a lower circuit that didn't mean anything, one new gym leader out of eight. There wasn't a sweeping outcry, sudden reform, a single moment in which the world suddenly felt like there was hope anywhere else except around the edges.
Zekrom rumbled something in response, and although she couldn't understand the words Hilda could feel their meaning, low and steady like the riptide.
Maybe for a lot of people those moments meant nothing. But they meant something to us.
Change was won, not found. And it was won by people who fought for it, people who believed in it. Roxie had called her mother once a year, every year, ever since she'd become gym leader. There was a poster of Iris and her haxorus in Hilda's room back at home. And Haizi had been the one to inspire her to keep going after a series of difficult losses to Clay.
If they could do it, so could she.
What she wanted to say was, "The world trends towards justice. It has to. I've seen it. Otherwise ... wouldn't it just be a fool's errand to keep going?"
What she said instead was, "Anecdotes aren't evidence. We'd need more data to be sure."
Their paper, titled Truth vs Ideals: A Complete Statistical Analysis was finally published in the Associated Journal of Statistics on page fifty-four. It was forty-six pages long and largely unread. It was referenced in The Unovan Post as a supporting source to the conclusion that training caused cancer, and later was cited in CombeeFeed's quiz, What kind of berry juice are you?
Hilda's hand twitched on the return mechanism of the pokeball. On her first pass, she didn't even push it down all the way; trembling, she had to force her thumb down a second time. Zekrom's unconscious form vanished in a flash of red light.
"You did it," she said hollowly. "You won."
Twenty feet away, N's face was a blur—perhaps the residual heat from Reshiram, Hilda told herself, smudging at her eyes with her free hand—but his voice was clear when he replied, "It would appear so."
It had all come down to this. One single battle for the fate of Unova, and she'd lost. Lost. "So this is the end, right? You're going to erase battling, separate trainers from pokemon?" Unbidden, her mind drifted to her emboar, safely unconscious in his pokeball. He'd wake up in an entirely new world. Would he miss her? Would he know?
Her gaze drifted around the shattered floor of N's castle. Below her, the league unfurled like a starry flag, its lights still twinkling in the distance, unaware that its fate had been decided. The stone steps had felt old when she ascended, sturdy beneath her feet but weathered, like they'd seen a thousand challengers before her. The marble halls leading up to the champion's dais had felt ancient, a bastion of everything she'd ever known. Everything anyone had ever known.
Soon, it would all come undone.
"What?"
Hilda jolted out of her reverie and found herself in the uncomfortable position of having both N and a god look at her with a pair of matching expressions that could only be described as quizzical. "You're going to end all of this now," she said slowly. "You won. So now you get what you want."
Reshiram rumbled, in an almost musical trill, and Hilda's heart fluttered. Now that the dragons had ceased their dance, she could finally take in Reshiram's majesty, a starburst of white feathers and flame. Blue eyes passed over her once, seemed to take in every aspect of her being, and then looked away.
"I agree," N murmured. "Spoken like a true Hero of Ideals."
"What?" Hilda strained a little closer. There was a good twenty feet between them and it was hard to hear.
"It's a rough translation," N repeated, more loudly, "But Reshiram says that your conclusion is much like flipping a coin to reveal tails, and assuming the coin is tails on both." When she said nothing, he continued, "There are two diametrically opposed solutions here. Revealing one to be the victor does not necessarily undo the existence of the other."
He paused awkwardly. Hilda said nothing. So he added, "But it's a simple binomial. If we wanted to determine which was more correct for Unova, there's really only one way forward."
Hilda raised one eyebrow. Flipping coins. "So you're saying …"
N nodded solemnly. "Mathematically, we need a larger sample."
The first few battles were awkward, cumbersome. Alder had shown up at some point, demanding that they leave the league premises—but under the current regulations, there was no wording for what would happen if both the challenger and the champion agreed that the battle was still ongoing. Getting a steady stash of healing items in sufficient scale had also proven difficult, but less so than proving that permitting laws did not explicitly exclude summoning a castle on top of league premises. But, as far as anyone could legally prove, either N or Hilda was the champion, and as long as they both refused to settle that, they could occupy the champion's chambers for as long as they saw fit. The castle was a matter for Plasma's legal team.
(It was a poorly-phrased rule, Alder had realized immediately. But unfortunately the petition process to change league by-laws required a committee vote, and unfortunately only the champion had the power to call committee meetings, so … )
"So that's forty-nine battles for Reshiram, and forty-seven for Zekrom." N looked up from the rapidly-healing gouge in Reshiram's side, which knitted itself together even as he continued to spray a potion on the wound. "Say, do you think we might be biasing the stats a little?"
"In what way?"
"Well, you and I both—" N fumbled for a word "—want something out of this, and now we both know that it's an experiment. So we might unconsciously be dictating what happens. We should do our experiment blind. Or double-blind."
Hilda swallowed nervously. The idea of closing her ideas and letting Zekrom battle … or worse, Zekrom closing its eyes and trying to battle … "Are you sure?"
A brief huff of flame from Reshiram drew her attention, and when she looked over, the legendary dragon was staring at her again, twin spirals of smoke spilling from its nostrils.
"Oh, a fair point," N said to Reshiram. And then, with a faint smile, he turned back to her. "Hilda, don't take this the wrong way, but do you know what a blind experiment is?"
She shook her head, feeling hopelessly out of her depth.
To her surprise, N exclaimed, "Excellent! I have some books you might enjoy. Tomorrow can be a reading day. I think Zekrom would enjoy some time to themself."
Two days later, they ran into the snag that was very obvious in hindsight.
"Zekrom won't battle for someone who isn't the Hero of Ideals," Hilda found herself saying in what she hoped was a slow, calming voice to the sobbing ten year-old in front of her. "It's not your fault." Her words felt hollow in her mouth though—whose fault was it, then? "Say, do you like emboar? Mine's very friendly."
Half an hour after that, when they'd finally gotten their sample trainers to leave the league (and waved off Alder's tight-lipped glare), Hilda sighed. "We could just acknowledge that the experimental setup is flawed a little."
"We could."
There was the other slight snag of what to do with the actual results. At first Unova had been deeply intrigued by this clandestine battle at the heart of a strange castle, invested in whether Truth or Ideals would prevail—but their interest seemed to be waning. Strange. Didn't they know that all of Unova hung in the balance?
"Have you considered that we haven't accounted for environmental factors?" Hilda asked, glancing up from a dog-eared copy of Brase's Understanding Basic Statistics. "Zekrom could perform better at night, for example."
Zekrom grumbled something.
"That's true too." N smiled faintly. For Hilda's benefit, he added, "Under the current parameters a difference of two losses isn't statistically significant. We can't draw a conclusion."
"We'll need to conduct more battles."
"Of course."
These battles were conducted under nighttime, low-humidity, high-humidity, and heavy precipitation conditions. A full dataset including a full audio transcription of these sixty-four battles was included in Appendix E of their paper. It was concluded that environmental factors such as time of day, humidity, and rainfall had minimal effect on the outcome of a battle between two legendary dragons, although it could not speculate on battles between other pokemon.
"I can't believe they wouldn't take our paper." Hilda scowled as she paced a tight circle. Reshiram and Zekrom looped a much larger circle overhead, lazily trading bursts of thunder and flame until Zekrom fell from the sky, smoking. "Who do they think they are?"
N didn't look up from where he was casually transcribing the previous test's data into excel. "Presumably the head editors of the Unovan Statistics Association."
Hilda fumed, reading the message aloud for the fourth time. "We regret to inform you that we do not believe that your paper, 'Binomial Empirical Testing to Determine the Single Moral Outcome for Unovan Training Ethics' meets our criteria for publication." She glared over the screen of her x-transceiver towards N. "What criterion? You saw that tripe they published about the correlation between trainers who don't kick their pokemon and trainers who enjoy the pun in roggenrola."
"Their methodology was airtight," N noted serenely. "Also, they were sponsored by Clay. Reshiram is sure there's some relation there."
"I know, but—" Hilda cut herself off with a hiss of frustration. "Whatever. We don't need the USA's approval here. We know we're right." Zekrom pulled themself over to her, one wing charred into an unrecognizable lump, and Hilda idly spritzed it with a potion. "We'll call it here for the day. One hundred and seventeen to one hundred and twenty."
"Perhaps there's no solution," Hilda offered as she and N began tidying up their station. The sun was low in the sky—as was Reshiram, who hit the stone floor shortly after—and they were wrapping up their study for the day.
"Mathematically it doesn't make sense. There has to be a single formula that proves who is correct here. An equation that will change the world. And once everyone is told the solution, they will all immediately accept it." N plucked a charred white feather off of his notebook.
"They will," Hilda agreed emphatically, which made it true. "All of Unova will immediately agree to whatever conclusion we draw here, so we need to make sure our reasoning is airtight."
Reshiram hummed something. Hilda looked at N expectantly.
"They're asking," N said, his brow furrowed, "if we've ever thought about how there never seem to be incredibly good things."
"Pardon?"
"The translation is hard. I …" N paused for a moment, and inhaled. "There are some concepts Reshiram is saying that I don't understand. But the gist is: we can name events where we think the world got worse. A lot of bad things that made us lose faith. A lot of people did things we couldn't believe in, and then they did them again, and again." When he looked at her, his stormy eyes were almost pleading. "But Reshiram—and I as well, now—wonder if you can think of a time that something happened where you could believe that the entire world changed for the better, and permanently?"
Hilda's breath caught in her throat.
When she was four, a petrochemical explosion at Virbank had rocked the country. She remembered watching her mother watch the television with tight lips and white knuckles. They must have played that clip of the man in a stiff-pressed suit a thousand times, his words like a worm in her head—Virbank Petroleum will be conducting a full internal investigation. Our customers are our family, and Unova is our home. Our sincerest condolences to those affected.
Later they would find that a subsidiary contractor had used faulty fittings, resulting in the explosion. The contractor went under. VP issued another public apology. Three workers had died. The first checks arrived in the mail two weeks later; Hilda had been too young to know what they meant, or why her mother cried.
When she was thirteen, the invitational to replace Castelia's gym leader began. There was a huge tournament, and she'd watched, rapt, as challengers pitted themselves against one another, each match more fantastic than the last.
Ultimately the position had gone to Burgh, the former leader's nephew. There was outrage for a while, and the bracket winner had joined forces with the runner-up to protest the nepotism that they claimed was rampant in the league. People had been interested for a while, but then Drayden had challenged Alder for champion, and league coverage was nothing but thinkpieces and speculation and interviews.
Had the rules changed? Had anything happened as a result? She couldn't remember.
When she was sixteen, she began her journey. Later than some, earlier than others—she was hesitant to leave home, although her mother had said for years that it'd be good for her—and she'd received a tepig, whom she'd nicknamed Reckless (they'd later agree to call him Haizi). This was where it could all be determined, she'd decided. Pokemon battles were a question of skill and little more. Talent and merit were all you would need to rise to the top.
On the battle subway she'd uncovered a cheating ring in which some trainers would purposefully throw their matches to allow other trainers to advance, splitting the betting money between them. It was very elaborate, and all told, roughly seven of the thirty-two trainers were involved. She'd reported them to the authorities, but the ringleader was a favored pick for the league, and his parents had made a sizable donation, and—
Back when she'd thought this would all end in a single battle, where defeating N would mean that injustice towards pokemon would disappear as well—had it felt like everything that was wrong with the world would vanish overnight? Surely not, if her convictions had failed her the first time. And N wasn't wrong—people hurt pokemon all the time. People hurt people all the time too. He couldn't look away from that truth, but she ... she couldn't relinquish that belief that things gradually got better.
There had to be something. Roxie's triumphant announcement that the Virbank disaster zone would be reallocated into a nature reserve. Haizi's flames roaring to life as he'd evolved into an emboar and scored them the winning seat on the battle subway. Iris, back ramrod straight as she won the seat for Drayden's gym, and then her lips cracking into a smile when she actually received it.
But had that felt like actual change? Change that could last?
Surely it had all been so small, so inconsequential. A patch of green in an ever-expanding sea of concrete, a victory in a lower circuit that didn't mean anything, one new gym leader out of eight. There wasn't a sweeping outcry, sudden reform, a single moment in which the world suddenly felt like there was hope anywhere else except around the edges.
Zekrom rumbled something in response, and although she couldn't understand the words Hilda could feel their meaning, low and steady like the riptide.
Maybe for a lot of people those moments meant nothing. But they meant something to us.
Change was won, not found. And it was won by people who fought for it, people who believed in it. Roxie had called her mother once a year, every year, ever since she'd become gym leader. There was a poster of Iris and her haxorus in Hilda's room back at home. And Haizi had been the one to inspire her to keep going after a series of difficult losses to Clay.
If they could do it, so could she.
What she wanted to say was, "The world trends towards justice. It has to. I've seen it. Otherwise ... wouldn't it just be a fool's errand to keep going?"
What she said instead was, "Anecdotes aren't evidence. We'd need more data to be sure."
Their paper, titled Truth vs Ideals: A Complete Statistical Analysis was finally published in the Associated Journal of Statistics on page fifty-four. It was forty-six pages long and largely unread. It was referenced in The Unovan Post as a supporting source to the conclusion that training caused cancer, and later was cited in CombeeFeed's quiz, What kind of berry juice are you?