※
{I’m sorry,} you say politely when you’re released from the void you’ve come to recognize as a pokéball. {I think there’s been a mistake.} You shift uneasily back and forth between your three legs. When no one responds, you take a good long look at the other people in the room. {I can’t be here. I need to go north. Migration is happening soon, and if I miss it, I will not be able to catch them before the paths around Twisting Mountain become impassible and icy with the winter. I will be going now.}
Your gaze is drawn first to the human. He’s taller than you—but then again, most humans are. Maybe? The babies might be shorter. You haven’t really seen that many, just the one that was yours. You can’t really see all the way up to his face, so you look at his shoes instead. They’re a bit frayed on the edges. The rest of him blurs into progressively less focus as you look up—he has blue on his legs, and then the rest of him is a white blob with a smudgy face and a mop of black fur on top. But you can still feel his eyes roving across your form, sizing you up. The feeling of being watched makes you stop fidgeting despite yourself.
At his side is a small, blue humanoid clutching at a pair of scalloped stones. Behind them is a smug-looking, slightly smaller green biped wearing leaves. You’ve heard stories of pokémon like these, but those stories never came with names. They remind you of gemstones, with the way that their colors pop against the white walls. A blue one and a green one.
Mmm. Those will work for names, for now.
Around you, a shiny cave. The walls are smooth. You can’t make out the details on the walls; they’re too far away and you aren’t used to seeing this many lights at once.
You aren’t sure how you ended up here. The last thing you remember was trailing behind Spur a bit to look at a truly fascinating rock that glimmered with veins of stone and thunder, and then the sucking sensation of a pokéball, and then—
Panic begins to set in. Where are you? How long have you been in the pokéball? Where is your old human? Did he abandon you? You squint around the room, trying to find a trace of his mossy hair. He’ll come bursting through the door any minute, explain the situation for you, make things right.
Right?
{You speak. Who?} the blue one asks. Gruff-sounding voice, like he’s been gargling rocks for an hour. You pity him.
You shift your weight on your legs. Not just the voice—his words are hard to parse, too. But you do your best. {Hello. My name is Carnel.}
You look at the human, since usually they call the shots. He doesn’t look back. He’s pulled out a strange glowing box and is staring at it.
There’s a long pause. The blue one points to himself and says, {Ico.} His paw gestures to the green one beside him. {Maxis.} Now he points somewhere else in the corner, out of your rather limited field of view. {Ambrella.} Another pause. {You speak, Boldore. Who?}
You didn’t answer his question, apparently, but somehow he managed to answer three of yours. You aren’t quite sure how you managed to get yourself here.
{Who you want speak?} Ico repeats.
Oh. Yes, his grammar is quite bad but you can piece together what he’s trying to say. {The human. I want to speak to the human.}
{Cheren?} the blue one tilts his head. Beside him, the green one murmurs something you don’t understand, and the blue one responds with more incomprehensible words.
There’s a long silence.
And then the green one chatters something else, and this time there’s no mistaking the laughter in his voice, even if the words don’t have meaning. His tail flicks back and forth in a motion that you take as amusement, and the way that his face contorts into a grin is unsettlingly human-like.
{To our trainer? You speak?}
Is that a trick question? Perhaps. Do you answer it anyway? Yes. {Well. I expected him to answer. All good humans should.} Your last one did, after all.
Ico blinks back at you, and you aren’t sure if perhaps he can’t find the words to respond, or if he never had them to begin with.
{What kind of trainers have
you had?} a voice says from the corner.
You pivot slowly on your three legs so as to better see the newcomer, who delicately picks her way into your field of view on four spindly legs. She carries herself like no pokémon you’ve seen in the caves before—she’s light on her feet, like she doesn’t trust the earth beneath. Behind her, a triangular-tipped tail hovers like a different entity, flicking back and forth through the air, its tip floating three feet from the back of her head.
Her skin, too, is like nothing you’ve ever seen. It’s fur-clad like the webspinners, but where they were golden, she is like a gemstone. One of your kind was born different; the rocks of his body were not the bold colors of ore and gold, but were a deep, vibrant—you aren’t sure what word to use for the color. It is between clear sky and blood. That is her color.
{H-hello,} you say, when you realize you’ve been staring at her for far too long. {My name is Carnel.}
{Tourmaline,} she responds frostily.
This seems to get Ico’s attention once more. {Ambrella,} he corrects.
{My name is Tourmaline,} says Tourmaline, looking firmly at you. {Cheren calls me what he wants. He will call you what he wants as well. Best decide now which one you want to keep.}
You look at this one. The longer you stare, the more there is to see. The fuzziness of her body is splattered with rings of gold, like the one that you had when you were a younger rock. {Well, I’m sorry to inconvenience you,} you say, and shift your weight a few more times than is strictly polite, {but there’s been a mistake. I need to be going. Could you translate that for me?}
Her tail goes dangerously still. {Translate? Between you and Ico?}
{Between us and the human. My last human understood me, and the rest of our team. If Cheren cannot understand me, surely he will listen to you?}
Ico whispers something to the green one, and they both laugh at you again. He repeats in the same broken syllables, mashing them together with all the wrong rhythm so you can hear: {Fool.} The blue one smooths his palms on the darker blue scales that border his legs.
{The human will not understand you.} But Tourmaline is staring at you. Her eyes glitter from the depths of her face. {I learned the dialect of caves from … from a time with a previous human, who worked with many of your kin.} Hmm, yes, now that she mentions it, you can see how she pitches her sentence the wrong way. She forgets to pause midway through her sentences to ponder the end. She flicks her tail toward the other two pokémon, firs the blue and then the green. {The dewott and the simisage prefer the dialect of forests. For your language, Ico’s tongue is unpracticed but his ear is sound. Maxis is deaf to you, and likely will be for some time.} One of her ears twitches, and an edge of amusement slips into her voice. {You must forgive him; he’s a slow learner.}
Oh, that’s interesting. Most of the pokémon you’ve known in your entire life spoke the one language, but you’ve never really gone too far from your home before this. Your last human had a strange, excitable turtle whose tongue had no translation that you could understand, but he was a strange one who preferred water over stone. Perhaps this
wasn’t a mere quirk of his kind.
You look over. The human—Cheren—still has his face buried in the box. The glow casts a strange light around his eyes, makes them even harder to see. He’s frowning at it with intense concentration, wrinkles in his forehead like dried mud. He looks up at the sound of your rumbling, and then looks back into the device again.
That settles it. {Then I will go,} you say.
{Ambrella,} the dewott grates, but he doesn’t stop you.
Tourmaline hisses something at Ico in a language you don’t understand. You understand a single word:
Tourmaline.
You look away from the human and back at her. {What are you telling him?}
Tourmaline looks at you smugly. {That Cheren is not my trainer, and cannot name me—} she pauses. A good pause. It reminds you of how your siblings speak {—and that I suspect he is not your trainer either.}
But her suspicions won’t help you go back home. He needs to hear. {Can you tell Cheren that, then?}
{Cheren caught many boldore before he found you. If he’s kept you around this long it probably means you’re strong in the ways he wants.} There’s something infecting Tourmaline’s voice now. It reminds you of rot. {Ico says he’s … particular like that, with those of us he chooses to keep.}
It’s not an answer though, is it? If he wants you but you don’t want him?
{Seventh,} Ico grates. {You lucky. Can fight hard with us now—}
“All introduced?” Cheren breaks into the conversation. “Great,” he says before you can respond. “Glad you’ve met the team. I’m Cheren.”
Your name is Monolith, he tells you. He’s your trainer. He has four other pokémon: a dewott, a simisage, a tranquill, and a liepard. The liepard is named Ambrella. The tranquil is being treated for some wounds he got in a previous fight.
He wants to get stronger. His goal is to be the strongest trainer in all of Unova. He’s been trying to beat a friend of his who has a powerful flyer, but he keeps losing. But that’s what you’re for.
He wants a gigalith, but you’re a boldore right now. He’s trying to figure some things out but he wants to make you evolve.
You aren’t really sure what any of that means—except—you probably will miss the migration.
This won’t do. You look at Cheren after his explanation, and then, while he looks back at his glowing box for a moment, you turn resolutely and begin scuttling towards the exit of this strange, white cave.
{Stop.} You turn around to see Ico glaring at you. {Stay.}
{I am going,} you tell him firmly.
His eyes are black dots that narrow to thin slits. He doesn’t say anything else, just reaches out with one paw and tugs on Cheren’s pants.
Cheren looks down, and then at you. You’re halfway to the exit. He fumbles for something at his belt, and points the pokeball, and that’s the last you see.
※
“Come on, Monolith. Rock Throw!”
He doesn’t let you walk from place to place. That’s frustrating. Instead, he sends you out in the middle of a large clearing and has you practice different techniques, trying to get you to aim them at trees. He’s named each movement and made it into an attack, and he’s codified them in the little glowing box that he holds in his hands, and he wants you to use them again and again until they’re perfect.
But your last human didn’t make you do that. He let you pick the moves you wanted. And if you told him you didn’t want to fight, he listened, and let you stop.
There is no concept of practice in caves. That must be a Cheren thing, you decide. This little speck of a creature.
You know what he’s asking you to do. You’ve done it before. Once, a strange pokémon appeared in your cave, its body made of four stony arms. It rolled around and ate the young roggenrola that were too slow to flee. You aren’t sure where it came from—strayed from a traveling human, perhaps—but, alarmed at the intrusion, you and your siblings gathered together all of your energy and flung stones at it until it fled. If it wanted the rocks so badly, it could have them.
But that was for a reason, and even then, channeling the earth is dangerous. After many years a roggenrola may shapechange, trade two legs in for three. Once you’ve done that, your body is permanently studded in biotites—your blue becomes a mix of ore and orange. The biotites let you speak to the earth. Inside each crystal is the potential for great strength, but you must be careful with it. Use the power too callously and the earth may punish you for it. She doesn’t do it directly, no: she lets you take as much from her as you want. But if you take too much, she will forsake her structure and collapse on top of you. You ask for the earth’s help as a last resort; otherwise, you solve your problems without her help.
“C’mon, Monolith!”
There’s a boulder in front of you, a little bit bigger than you. It’s different than the kind in your cave. You could find out more by touching it, but even from a distance you notice no familiar frizzle of electric energy wrapped around it. Granite, maybe. It has flecks of black crystal, and it’s half-submerged in the dirt. There’s another, smaller piece of rock next to it, and a few more scattered around the clearing.
You won’t throw it. That would be rude. How could you? The rock came here for a reason. Clearly it does not want to be thrown, not if it dragged itself here and buried itself in six inches of mud.
Behind you, Cheren. The one Tourmaline says might not be your trainer. “Rock Throw!”
You don’t want to. Your last human understood that, so this one will as well. You let a fraction of the power flood through you; your biotites glow a faint orange. One of the baby rocks glows in response, calling to you, listening to you call back.
Yes, it certainly feels like granite. {Pardon me,} you tell the rock.
The rock hums back and moves where you ask it to.
“Great job, Monolith!”
You ask the earth to let the baby rock hover up and stack on top of the big one. The earth agrees, and the small rock floats to sit on top of the big one. You tilt your head. Yes, from this angle—
“No Monolith, you have to
throw it.”
Your biotites glow again, and you ask a few more rocks to join in. You let one support a slightly bigger one; this little strange one with a funny lip tucks under the one that’s mostly mica. An arch starts to form, and then a small tunnel, and then a little path leading up to the cleft in the boulder. Yes. That’s the shape, you’re sure of it. This is good. This is a good way to show him. You direct a small pebble to hover by the tunnel you’ve formed, and then you scuttle over to your replica of your cave and turn to Cheren expectantly.
{My cave,} you say. A big pause, so it can sink in for him better, since he seems a little slow. {This is my cave.} You let the small pebble by the entrance of the tunnel wiggle a little, and then you direct it to roll into the entrance, where the rest of its brothers and sisters are waiting. {Please let me go back to my cave.}
All of the little pebbles rattle in excitement when their brother comes back. You could direct them to file out of the cave now, go very very far away from this place so that when the snows start to come they can all stay warm, but—
“Hilda!” Cheren shouts. “How was Mistralton? Finally got your badge?”
—he’s not listening any more.
“Do you even
look at the news?” a human voice calls back. You frown and try to place it. Have you heard her before? “Team Plasma was meddling. Huge riot.”
Cheren pauses. It’s a good pause. You could fit a full mountain in it. Then he says, “I heard.”
“Nice boldore. Is it new?”
“Yeah, I just picked it up in Chargestone Cave. It’s pretty strong. Where’s your archeops? I thought we could let our rock types duke it out.”
“Oh?” The trainer across from you—Zelda? Wilhma? Human names are hard; no wonder Cheren had to make up his own—holds up her hand, another pokéball at the ready. “Long story. You good with Amara instead?”
Cheren shifts his weight back and forth between his legs in a way that makes you think he’s not good with Amara. But he doesn’t say no.
You’ve battled before, with your other human, so you aren’t completely surprised when a few minutes later something big is in front of you, scraping a hoof across the ground. It sparks like a webspinner, but it has stark colors, like veins in stone. Black and white. A dash of thunder. Her nose-holes flare when she sees you.
You sidestep a little closer to your boulder to protect it.
“Wild Charge, Amara!” the human commands.
{Hi, I’m Carnel,} you say politely, looking at her.
She doesn’t respond. By the time the words have left your mouth, she’s already tackling you full-on, her body wreathed in sparks. Arcs of blue electricity jitter up your carapace. You shy back as they explode upon your skin; there’s pain in your shoulder. One of your biotites is loose.
“Rock Throw!”
A new thought occurs to you. Tourmaline said that you were strong in the ways Cheren wanted. That was why he kept you. But if you weren’t? If you didn’t fight? Tourmaline also said she suspected Cheren wasn’t your trainer. You can show him you believe that too.
Your biotites glow, and you firmly wiggle the pebbles at the base of your miniature cave. The pebbles there are happy because they are all sticking together. {Home,} you say slowly. {I want to go home.}
The Amara crashes down. A cloud of dirt erupts, and her hooves rip furrows in the ground with the force of the impact. She bowls into you, wild sparks in every direction, and you’re sent flying back, straight into the big boulder, which fractures along with a bit of your rear leg and some of the stone near your head. Your fuzzy vision goes fuzzier for a second.
When you blink, your eyes don’t clear—the ground beneath you is fractured. Wait, no. Blink again, and it’s still broken. The pebbles are scattered in every direction. You look behind at the big boulder in dismay; where you hit it, you cleaved it straight in two.
“Discharge, Amara. Close range.”
She brays in frustration, and another bolt of electricity erupts from her mane. This time it spears you straight through the shoulder, hitting the same damaged spot.
“C’mon, Monolith!” Cheren shouts. “Rock Throw!”
You look back nervously. Can’t he see what’s about to happen? If you so much as—
You shift your weight, and the stalk of crystal supporting one your damaged biotites snaps.
Oh. Oh no.
You shy back, a wordless chatter of alarm escaping you. The light is bright, angry. It burns at your eyes; you aren’t meant to look at the earth’s power directly. She gives freely, as she always does, even if you don’t want her to, even if you didn’t mean to make anyone get hurt, so—
There’s searing pain in your shoulder as the biotite detonates. Something dazzles across your vision, like flashes of red veins in stone. Cheren’s voice washes over you along with the heavy sensation of a pokéball.
“I said
Rock Throw, Monolith, not Explosion. We’ll need to work on your hearing. Nice try though. Ambrella, you’re up.”
※
The next thing you know, you’re all out again, on the floor of the human settlement Ico called a pokécenter. Some of your wounds have been healed, you notice distantly.
Cheren stands in front of you. Ico, Tourmaline, and Maxis stand at your side.
He doesn’t really need to say it; you can already tell, but he does anyway: “We lost.”
Maxis is squinting heavily out of one eye. Ico looks like he’s about to faint, just standing there. You can’t recognize what caused his wounds, but they are deep, still-oozing gouges all up and down his legs. The scaly armor’s been chipped away in some places, and he can barely stand. You sidle over to him, prop yourself so that he can rest the weight of his body against your right leg.
He takes your offer without a word.
“Hilda’s off to challenge Brycen. We’re a long way from being ready for the League,” he says at last. A big pause. A good pause. “But we’re going to get stronger, okay? We’ll train harder than ever.”
Ico nods, his eyes shining like black pearls. {We will all,} he promises. He looks at you pointedly, and that’s when you realize—he picked the harder tongue for a reason. Cheren can’t understand the dialect of stone. But you can.
Maxis grunts something that you take as affirmation.
You look nervously at Tourmaline. Neither of you say anything.
He recalls Maxis and Ico back into their pokéball and hands them off somewhere, says they’re getting more treatment. You rumble something in alarm, but Tourmaline stops you—they’ll be healed by morning, she says. Such is the way with humans. But she doesn’t sound happy about it.
He leaves you out, though, which lets you watch as he slumps around the settlement. The spring in his step is gone; the eagerness he had before this battle fizzled out.
Could you walk away? You were too slow last time, and that was before you hurt your legs. He’ll see you, and recall you, and then who knows when you’ll come back out. So you watch him instead.
Cheren mutters to himself, and you only catch a few snippets—
stronger comes up a lot. He has to get better, to prove himself to someone; even from here, the desperation is clear.
You know the feeling of always being two steps behind. But what did he really do here that exhibited weakness? What did she do that was strength? They never fought. Cheren could’ve been the Earthmother herself and it wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the fight, not when he kept all of his strength on the sidelines.
He doesn’t fight, he doesn’t listen. Were he in your cave, hungrily devouring boulder after boulder, you and your siblings would hurl rocks at him until he left.
But you aren’t in your cave any more, are you? You don’t have your siblings now. You aren’t even sure who you have instead. You sidle away from Cheren, letting him pace a tight track around the pokécenter in peace, and approach Tourmaline instead. This one is so angry. You don’t know why, but you wish you could understand. Stone has too much time to be angry. You edge a little closer to her, until—five feet away—she shifts her weight and backs up as well.
You’ve seen this before, back in the cave. Two rocks that repelled each other. No amount of pushing would get one to let the other approach. You would know.
So you settle down at the edge of her orbit instead. {You said Cheren is not your trainer.} You look at her. She’s got something wrapped around her rear leg, and you can tell by the way she’s sitting that she’s reluctant to put weight on it. There’s still a leaf tangled in the crook of her tail. She’s started grooming herself, but the fur is matted and eroded in some places. You don’t know how her tongue can fix that. {But … you also fought for him.}
Tourmaline licks the back of one paw, but she’s watching you carefully. {I did not hold back,} she agrees, using her teeth to extract a thorn from between the pads. {Did you?}
You get the sense that she already knows the answer to your question. But she never answered yours, so you ask again. {Why did you fight for him?}
{I have no love for Cheren. But Vaselva and her trainer irritate me even more. So in this case, he and I share an enemy. It has nothing to do with him.} She freezes in midair, her paw still held up to her face. She has pretty fur, you notice distantly. {Anything else, Carnel?}
That’s not a good reason, but you don’t want to tell her that. {If you liked your last human, why did you leave them behind?}
This time, she stands up. You can see the muscles rippling out from beneath her fur. If she leapt, your skin would take a few hits, maybe three. Then she would shred you.
You quiver and tuck yourself a little closer together, to appear less big.
Apparently satisfied, the liepard paces in a tight circle and then sits back down, resumes grooming her front paw. {I didn’t leave. I was stolen. That’s all I know. One second I was with my human, and the next, Cheren says he’s my trainer now. I asked him to explain and he didn’t. Same as you.}
{So were you …} You struggle to remember the name. {Gilda’s partner?}
She’s still as a statue, but all of the fur running down her spine stands to attention. {Absolutely not,} she says frostily. It’s like she has a second mane now. Fascinating. You wish you could do that. {Hilda will never be my trainer.} The liepard’s tail flicks errantly back and forth through the air.
A cold silence follows, the bad kind of pause where all your thoughts dig too deep. {Will Cheren?}
You ask her for a simple reason: if Cheren becomes her trainer one day, he will become yours. And you don’t want that.
But she doesn’t see the sentence written in your pause. Her tail goes still. Her eyes narrow. She stands back up to her feet again and takes two steps forward. You flinch back. You’re taller than her, a little, but she still makes you feel small.
{When we fought Hilda. That trainer. You fainted to the serperior. What did Cheren tell you?}
{That I needed to practice my hearing.}
{And at the end. What did he tell all of us?}
{We lost.}
{And what does he claim his goal in all of this is?} she asks.
{He wants to get stronger.}
The liepard stares. You’re close enough that you can see the individual furs that run down her neck. {Listen to his words, Carnel, because he speaks against himself better than I ever could. Your hearing. Our loss. His strength. Cheren gives us many things, but never the good. When he fights, he is a trainer. There is no denying that. He isn’t one of us. And because he isn’t, he gets to pick and choose what he shares, what is taken and what is given.}
When the earth is about to fracture, she sends messages sometimes. Tremors before the quake. You sense them radiating around Tourmaline now, frustration building beneath the skin. Her next question is calm, but the earth usually is.
{How did you try to tell him?}
{What do you mean?} you ask.
{When he asked you to fight. You refused, did you not?} Tourmaline asks. {What did you do instead?}
You shift your weight uncomfortably, feel a pang of pity for making the boulder get hurt. {I tried to show him my cave. So he could see where I wanted to go.}
{Carnel.} You can’t tell what, but something in her face softens. {I will teach you something I have learned of the dialect of forests.}
{Really?} That would be … an interesting adjustment, at least. You don’t intend to stay here for much longer, but if you can speak to Ico and Maxis more, perhaps you could get through to them. Ico at least has Cheren’s ear; he got Cheren’s attention when you were trying to scuttle off. Maybe he can explain with his shell and his humanshape what your stones could not. {But you said earlier—}
{It will take you much longer than this lesson to learn how to speak it,} she says archly. {Even to merely to understand their words would take you many moons. You must listen, Carnel. Listen for what is not said.}
{I—}
Her bushy tail flicks errantly in front of your mouth. {Hush. Listen. Observe.} She gestures with her nose towards the corner of the pokécenter, where a large, tree-like pokémon sits, leaf-like arms folded across her lap. An enormous red collection of leaves is skewed across the slant of her head. {The lilligant over there,} the liepard says quietly to you, her voice taking on a low, careful cadence. You imagine Tourmaline’s voice stalking through tall grass that rises up to her shoulders, sneaking up on her prey. {What is she saying?}
You strain to listen, but no words come from her in any language you recognize—dialect of the forest or otherwise.
{She is silent.}
{Obviously,} the liepard drawls. {But look again. What is she saying?}
You look over at the pokémon, who finally seems to have noticed the two of you staring intently at her. She shifts her weight uncomfortably and turns away.
{I do not know,} you say at last.
{Look at the flower. Do you find it beautiful?}
The—oh, the colored leaves atop her head, you surmise. The flower. The color is a good one, a deep red, like a ruby. The shape is wrong; it wouldn’t make a very good crystal and it flops around in a way that makes you a little uncomfortable to look at. Were it made out stone it would melt away into mud immediately, a warning before a landslide. {I like the color,} you respond, so as to be polite.
{What is the flower trying to tell you?}
{What?} The flower certainly cannot speak in a tongue you understand, if its owner could not.
Not to be discouraged, Tourmaline breezily walks in a tight circle around you, passing in and out of your view. {In the language of the forests, beautiful flowers mean many things—an advertisement for pollinators, a cry for a mate, an ode to the sun. But look carefully, Carnel. It is not an invitation to fight. The lilligant, who has poured so much time into her flower, so much of herself—she would rather not see it destroyed. In the language of the forests, what she means to tell you is that she would rather grow and nurture something than tear it down.}
You tilt your head to one side. Grow something. That’s a tricky thing to process. Caves do not grow, not on the same timeline as any of you. You once watched a stone for six years, neither of you moving, neither of you changing. You’ve moved on. You’re sure the stone is still there.
{Look now, over there,} Tourmaline says, and gestures with her tail to a strange insect buried in a spiraling rock. {The tongue of sands is closer to a dialect you know. This dwebble. What do you see?}
You’re starting to understand Tourmaline’s lesson now. You strain forward and narrow your eyes a little, so that the light comes through better. This pokémon is much different, much more like you. There’s a gentle reassurance in the sturdiness of their shell, a sort of abnormality within the straight edges that reminds you of your cave, of the migration north.
{This one takes their home with them,} you say at last.
Tourmaline’s tail flicks through the air. You can’t quite tell, but it would seem that the liepard is pleased. {Yes. You would know this better than I, Carnel. Does the stone look like any you’ve seen in this area?}
You tilt your head. On closer inspection, it’s different from the smooth, dark boulders of your home. This rock looks soft, almost, like if you continued to rub it, it would slowly whittle away like dust in the wind. {No.}
{No. This dwebble has carried his home from a far away desert, miles and miles from here, and now it protects him in the battles that he must face. But do you think he wants it damaged?}
It isn’t a question she actually wants the answer to, but you give it to her anyway. {No.}
{Then why do you think he would bring his home with him this far?}
{I would think … } The answer comes easily. {Because he didn’t want to leave it.}
Tourmaline nods to herself and then sits back down by your side. She looks over one shoulder to stare at you, unblinking. {This is what you think. This is what I think as well. But we are colored by our expectations of others.}
{Like a gemstone is colored by the light it sees,} you agree.
{Precisely.} Her tail flicks once more. {Like you, the humans do not understand the language of the forests, or the language of the sands. So these pokémon have taken to expressing their desires in a different way. They tell us much without their words, Carnel. In the wild, the leaves that shed from a simisage’s tail can be used to treat most wounds. The ones Maxis sheds here are bitter and atrophied. What do you think he is trying to tell you? What do you think he is trying to tell himself? When I witness this, I find an answer of my own. But now let us look at the room again, as if we were humans.}
{Humans?}
{Trainers,} she corrects, misinterpreting your question. {Look at the lilligant again, and her flower. Look at her not as yourself, but as a trainer. What do you see?}
You look back at the lilligant, who is twirling idly in place. Spinning is motion without movement, you think, thoughts absently drifting to Spur. Tourmaline’s gaze is sharp on your shoulder, though, and you guess, {A dancer.}
{You still see her as yourself.} She sounds disappointed. {The dwebble. View him not as you would, but as a human would. As Cheren would.}
As Cheren would? You try to think, straining as hard as you can. But the dwebble is so far, and the lights overhead are so bright. What would Cheren see? What
does Cheren see? You think of him buried with his nose in the pokédex. His gaze drifting across the battlefield.
But your eyes are drawn back to the dwebble’s shell. The stone is like nothing you’ve ever seen, but you can understand why someone would love it so dearly that they would take it with you. Wistfully, your legs twitch. The ground here is too firm to plunge into and submerge yourself, but were you back in your cave, you and your siblings could each dig burrows for one another and—
{Do the humans have a word for a person who doesn’t have to fight?}
Tourmaline’s response has spikes. {Yes. A human. A person, perhaps.} The fur on the back of her neck bristles. {We are pokémon, Carnel. Those words are not for us.}
The answer crystallizes for you. {If I were a human, I would see that the lilligant’s flower can produce paralyzing spores.} You think of how Gilda’s green blur raked leaves across your body until bits fell off. {The dwebble’s shell could block much physical damage.} The excitement of finding the answer fades just as quickly as it came. {And if they saw me …}
Tourmaline has no triumph. {Look at the pokémon around you. They have put their pain and their desires in an outward place, hoping that trainers will see them and understand. You had a human before, Carnel. You did not have a trainer. A trainer is one who seeks strength. A trainer will marvel at the beauty of a flower, or knock their hands against the strength of a shell, or wonder what happened to make a lone minccino’s song so tragic. With those same eyes, they will look at a scolipede’s venom, or at my claws, and tell themselves—
yes, this means they must want
to fight. A trainer will clap for us, cheer us on, laugh with us. They will tell us that we are amazing and powerful as we fight to keep ourselves and those we cherish safe. They will take our victories and give you their weakness. But they will do everything except listen, Carnel.}
You look at the dwebble, feel a pang of envy as he tucks himself beneath a table and retreats into his shell. Your cave would not fit in this falsecave; your brothers and sisters would need to stack three layers thick if you were all to line the walls. {But I want to go home.}
{Ignore it,} she says tightly.
There is a phrase for her kind of request. She would not know the story, but—there was a tale once of a roggenrola that tried to climb a steep mountain. As he neared the top, he lost his footing, and rolled back to where he started—in the process chipping off some of his protruding crags. The more times he tried, the rounder he got, and the more impossible his task became.
To ignore this thought is to push yourself up the mountain. Each time you do it, the more impossible it becomes.
{How can we fix this?} you ask instead, gesturing wide with your shoulders, which still ache. You saw Cheren’s tears and his frustration after your loss, even when he tried to make sure no one was watching. He hurt too, in a language that had no words. And you could see it, as clear as the dwebble’s shell. It makes you sad to look at, but it doesn’t make him right.
{You don’t.}
That’s not a good answer. Rocks are patient. Sometimes they take a hundred years to move. But even if it takes them a century, they still move. {We have to.}
You expect laughter, like Maxis. But Tourmaline stays quiet. In a soft voice, she says, {My last human felt like you do. She couldn’t hear my spoken words, but she could hear the unspoken ones. She and I worked together to free pokémon like you. Like me.} Her tail coils tightly around her feet, hugging herself close. {I will go back to her one day. She was a good human. But until then—Cheren is a necessary evil. I dream of clawing his face off at night, but I also know he is not the worst trainer in Unova. Some of the trainers we rescued pokémon from were truly vile. Cheren is merely a fool. If I stay with him I cannot be caught by someone else.}
That’s a bad answer. That’s a bad answer and you
know it. But you can’t say that, not to Tourmaline, not when you can see how her back sags a little talking about her old human. She has no rocks with which to build a miniature cave, but she builds a valley with her shoulderblades and guards her head with it.
Tourmaline is fast. If she sees her human again, if she has a chance to claw out Cheren’s eyes and turn tail, will she wait for you? You’re not agile, not lithe. You’re the round roggenrola, still running up that hill.
But for Tourmaline it’s deeper than just one cut, or two, or the network of rehealed wounds that you know must lie beneath her coat, dappling it, threatening to reveal that the stone beneath isn’t a geode at all. She can’t wait years for things to get better. If she runs to her human and doesn’t wait for you … you wouldn’t blame her.
{You do not have to listen to me, Carnel. I wouldn’t fault you. This lesson is hard to learn. But I will explain this to you once, and once only,} she says stiffly, and it’s in looking at her head-on that you finally see: she is chiseled from muscle; her fangs and claws are razor sharp. Her fur catches the light and devours it greedily, morphs her silhouette into a shadow. She wastes no time with flowers or beauty, not the kind that the humans can see.
When you look at her, her message is clear: do not look, do not touch. Humans will not pity, but maybe they will fear instead.
{You are from a different part of our lands, so do not waste your time with the dialect of the forest or the sand. Humans will not understand you regardless of how you choose to speak.}
She gestures with her chin towards your biotites. {Your cave. Your siblings. All those bits of you that can still feel. Hide them deep, deep away. Where no one else can see them. Not me, not Cheren. Not even you, unless you know exactly where to look. Hide them somewhere no one else can take it from you. Do not bring them into battle with you; they will only get hurt.}
Tourmaline leans forward. Taps you gently with the tip of her nose. {You will return to them one day, but until then, hide them away. Cheren takes our victories and our strength. But your dreams are yours, and yours alone.}
