Chương 64: Chapter 52

My knights weren't out of energy, but my dad definitely was. Apparently even just keeping an eye on them had worn him out, and he'd begged off chaperoning duty. The hospital room felt a bit cramped with all thirteen of us arrayed about the room, but it was nice, having my family all nearby and close at hand. Dad claimed a third of the table by the window and pulled a clunky laptop out of his bag.

One of the three mauses would occasionally get curious and wander across the table to peer at his screen before shrugging and going back to working on their sewing project. After offering me a status update on their training, my knights trooped off again. I had to convince Dad that they didn't need minding, but it didn't take much effort, considering how worn out he was. Mana sent a small construct off to keep an eye on them anyway, and reported back to me periodically about their activities.

Mom watched my piscine partner chirruping away with a sort of bemused humor every time she butted into our conversation, only to float off again. I had a feeling that Mana was currently watching more than just my knights, but I trusted her to restrain herself, even if I was curious about the extent of her infiltration into the hospital around us. And Mom and I were continuing to catch up.

I had so many anecdotes and stories from my ranger training that I hadn't had an opportunity to share yet, and Mom was an endless well of crazy hospital and Pokémon Center-related experiences.

"I've never seen someone walk off so much blood loss before," she was regaling me with a particularly gruesome tale about treating a high level battle trainer.

"We had to sedate him halfway through the procedure. He just woke up after losing three litres of blood and tried to hop off the gurney. Ridiculous stuff."

"And you said he was in a car accident?" I tried to clarify.

"I didn't think you could go all that fast in the city." Mom grimaced, and shook her head.

"He was involved in a car accident, yes, but not as a driver or passenger. He was battling in one of those portable arenas and the edge of the field it made hovered over a street. A car hit the barrier at a bad angle and went end over front. The whole thing landed on him and–" Whatever she was going to say next was cut off by a shrill ringing from the phone on my bedside table. With practiced reflexes, Mom snapped up the receiver and spoke into the device, "Yes, this is four-oh-six."

Someone said something I couldn't make out on the other line, and my mom nodded, before covering the microphone and turning back to me.

"You've got a visitor, Sweetie. Are you up to seeing Alyssa?" I blinked a couple of times, nonplussed by the non-sequitor. Once I'd registered what Mom had said, however, I nodded eagerly.

"Of course! How'd she know to come though?"

"I've been keeping her updated," Mom admitted, before speaking into the phone again, "please, send her up." She hung up the phone, placing it carefully back on its cradle.

"I figured she'd want to know how you were doing. I did tell her that you woke up this morning, but I didn't realize that she'd come out today."

"Who else have you told?" I asked, before clarifying, "that I got hurt, that is."

"Just your Nuna and Bubu," she told me, using the traditional Kuuran term for 'grandma' and 'grandpa.'

"They actually said they want to visit as well. Do you feel up to seeing them tomorrow?"

"Can they get in that quickly from Polona?" I asked. The village my grandparents lived in was four hours on foot away from the nearest train station in Tellur Town, and as far as I knew, they didn't own a car.

"They said they can call a Cyclizar taxi," Mom explained.

"It shouldn't take that long for them to get here, and if they don't want to make a day trip out of it, we can always go out and buy an air mattress."

"Well I'd love it if they came out," I told Mom with a smile.

"I feel like we only ever see them at Golems' Feast." We were still a couple of months away from the harvest celebration, which took place on the second Saturday in October.

"What about your family?" Mom did a poor job of suppressing a grimace.

"We didn't need to bother with telling any of them. As soon as your name showed up in the hospital's system they all already knew." That… was probably true. Joys were almost as famous for being gossipy as they were for being kind.

"I guess Aunt Wilma and Aunt Min and Aunt Linnie will probably visit in their own time, huh?"

"I'm sure they'll finagle some time to swing by," Mom acknowledged, though she didn't seem incredibly excited by the prospect. I could understand why. Mom always got a little bit defensive about me not wanting to become a nurse, and her sisters liked poking at that sore spot in the way that siblings do. I'd never tell anyone this, but I was pretty sure that the pressure of being nice to everyone else made the Joy family way more Delcatty when dealing with one another.

It didn't help that Mom was so much younger than her three sisters (which resulted in them babying her mercilessly). Before I had time to ask after the rest of my Joy-side cousins, someone rapped on the doorframe separating my room from the hall outside. Mom and I turned to find Alyssa standing in the doorway, affecting an uncharacteristic slouch and holding up her hand in a pathetic wave.

"Hey," she said after making sure she had our attention, her voice quiet and uncertain but her eyes sparkling with mischief.

"Oh shut up!" I immediately shouted, though I wasn't able to keep a laugh out of my tone as I hurled one of the pillows on my bed at the interloper. The brunette battle trainer laughed as she caught the projectile, and used it to block the next cushion I sent flying her way.

"Just copying my best friend's example," Alyssa explained to my mom, who was looking between the two of us with a confused expression.

"I think I really captured the essence Fe was giving off when visited me in the hospital a few months ago."

"Shut it!" I reiterated, though I found myself out of projectiles with which to punctuate my statement.

"That was so completely different and you know it!" I complained.

"All I know is that it was our first time talking in months and the best you could give me was, 'hey'," she affected the same uncertain tone, and gave us another abbreviated, hesitant wave. Mom turned to me, and I could already tell from the grin on her face that she wasn't going to miss this opportunity to give me grief.

"Now Fe, I know I've taught you better bedside manner than that."

"I'm getting ganged up on. Do you see this?" I asked my partners and father, injecting incredulity into my tone.

"Here I am, laid out in a hospital bed, and they're ganging up on me!"

"I'm sure you can take them, Fee," Dad said without looking up from his computer. Maushold were more supportive, scampering over to my bed and holding up their sewing needles in my defense, but I found my allies quickly suborned, as Alyssa cooed over the cute Normal-types.

"Ooooh I was hoping I'd get to see you all again, Maushold! Fe told me that you've been doing some sewing recently, and I picked out this lovely thread for you!" To their credit, Alyssa's bribe was quite princely. The spool of thread practically shone under the sunlight filtering in through the hospital room's windows. It seemed like it changed colors every time Alyssa's hand shifted slightly, the prismatic material glittering like an aurora.

"Its Spinarak silk soaked in a dye made from shed Bruxish scales. The shopkeeper said that it's a little bit psychically reactive, which makes it super easy to work with." Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site. That they turned on me for such a thoughtful gift only slightly mitigated the sting of their betrayal.

I could do nought but watch in muted horror as they hesitated for only the barest of seconds, before absconding with their prize and leaving me alone at the mercy of my tormentors. One of whom was now within striking distance. And without a moment of warning, she pounced! Arms wrapping around me in a gentle, heavily restrained hug.

I could tell that Alyssa wanted nothing more than to squeeze with all of her strength, but my best friend was too conscientious to submit to that impulse, and she instead wrapped me in a much softer embrace than I knew she preferred.

"I'm glad you're okay," she told me, her voice as tightly controlled as her hug.

"When your mom told me you got hurt…" she trailed off, clearly unsure what to say.

"Now you know how I felt," I told her as I returned the embrace, suppressing a wince as the movement pulled at the bandaged cuts all over my arms.

"Thanks for coming."

"A Machamp couldn't have kept me away," my best friend reassured me with a grin, as she took a step back.

"So– what happened? If you don't mind telling me."

"That's, actually a more complicated question than you'd expect," I told her.

"I, uh, I'm not really sure how much I can say." Alyssa blinked a few times, clearly nonplussed.

"What, did the Lake Guardian nip out of the sacred lake and use you for target practice?" she asked, her tone laughing, but her expression much more uncertain. That… wasn't too wild a question, actually, considering the escapades I had told her about.

"Nothing like that," I shook my head.

"Just–" I had to forcefully keep myself from looking over to where Dad was typing away at his laptop.

"It's sensitive. Ranger stuff."

"That's…" Alyssa clearly wasn't enthused by my reticence, but my mom put a reassuring had on her shoulder before she could pry further.

"She won't tell us either, if it's any consolation," Mom commiserated, a look of mock outrage on her face, only barely stifling the very real upset I knew she felt at being kept in the dark.

"Her own parents, can you believe it?"

"Just seems inconsiderate," Alyssa replied with a grin, though I could see a little bit of relief in the expression.

"Her best friends, her parents, those aren't the sort of people you keep secrets from."

"All I got from her sergeant is that she was attacked by a Pokémon while in the line-of-duty. Don't you think we deserve more than that?" Now Mom was working herself up into real, if deserved, outrage, and I quickly spoke up to head off the already-trodden argument.

"I promise I'll tell you whatever I can, I just need to finish debriefing with the sergeant first. It's for a good reason, I swear." That seemed good enough for Alyssa, but not for my mom. No doubt Janine would be getting an earful from her later, but at least she wasn't pressing me on it again.

"So how's the season going?" I asked Alyssa, forcefully steering the conversation back to safer waters. Alyssa's face scrunched up again, frustration plain on her features.

"Ugh, don't get me started. Pikachu and I were on a sixteen match win streak, and then someone from the the green league top one-hundred challenged us." I blinked a couple of times.

"So don't accept their challenge?" I suggested, my expression wry.

"Well that obviously wasn't an option!" - Apparently, there was a lot more politics involved in Battle Training than I had thought. Which, when I really reflected, made a perverse sort of sense. After all, it was how our Champion got picked. To hear Alyssa tell it, once you were in the Primary (Red, Blue, and Green) Leagues, challenging people and being challenged was substantially more complicated than in the junior divisions.

"Technically, the provisions for declining matches exist to keep people from punching down too hard or from reaching beyond their station," she was explaining, her expression and hands animated.

"In theory, this is exactly the sort of match I could have refused, but practically, it would have hurt me more to turn down the match than it did to just suck it up and accept the loss."

"Okay, but why?" I bit the proffered bait.

"You get a loss, and you lose out on some battle points. How is accepting the match better?"

"It's all about optics. Say I refuse the match, suddenly, I'm seen as the sort of battler who only battles when her matchups are favorable. Plus, with the matchup disparity being as extreme as it was, Pikachu and I only lost a couple of points for the experience." I blinked a couple of times.

"But– that makes no sense. You're taking and issuing challenges all the time, right? And if you're climbing, you're not just going after people ranked under you."

"But that's not how people perceive it, sweetie," Mom jumped in, taking over the explanation.

"They'd just look at her record, see how many wins she has, see that she's declined a match, and draw their own conclusions."

"And they wouldn't exactly be wrong." Alyssa said with a shrug.

"Battles are getting tougher, but Pikachu and I are still chewing through the competition. In our last match before the one we just lost, we beat someone in the top thousand, and it wasn't even really that hard. We didn't even have to use a synergy burst." I felt my eyes narrow in suspicion.

"Hold on. You just wanted to battle someone from the top one-hundred, didn't you?" My best friend shrugged.

"That might have been some part of it," she admitted without shame.

"You don't often get chances to fight someone so far above you."

"But you lost."

"But it was so close!" Alyssa refuted in a rush.

"If our launcher was just a little bit stronger, we could have won that last clash and comboed them out," Alyssa's eyes were shining as she recalled the memory, almost as bright as the Pikachu studs glittering on her ears.

"And he and his partner had such incredible combinations. We'll be taking that Mach Punch into Sky Uppercut combination into the lab for sure! I know we can do something similar with Quick Attack and Iron Tail." Words continued to tumble out of my best friend as she proposed all manner of stratagems and combination attacks. She didn't seem bothered by her loss. Rather, she seemed energized by it.

"So how close are you to reaching the top one-thousand?" I asked. Technically, ranks 1 through 1024 of the green league qualified for the promotion tournament, but because tie-breakers go to more senior league competitors, it was generally safer to try to get into the top nine-hundred for younger battlers.

"Not very." Alyssa said with a shrug.

"But we've got plenty of time. Forty-three more weeks should be absolutely plenty." What Alyssa wasn't saying was that she probably needed to win somewhere around eighty more matches in those forty-three weeks to get into the top one-thousand for battle points, let alone the top nine-hundred. It'd require an absolutely blistering schedule, with barely any room in it for any losses. And yet, my friend didn't seem particularly worried. Frankly, I couldn't find it in myself to doubt her.

- Alyssa stayed a few more hours. The conversation turned to, of all things, fashion. Apparently, my best friend hadn't been fully satisfied with her wardrobe recently (and also she'd gained a couple of centimeters since her last shopping trip, which I definitely didn't resent). She managed to extract a promise from me to join her for an excursion to the local mall, once I was discharged.

Mom and Dad stayed for a couple more hours after she left, but eventually they had to go get dinner, leaving me alone in the hospital room with my partners. My knights had managed to tucker themselves out. In spite of the bluster they'd been showing me, I could tell that they weren't fully recovered from their battle just a couple of days ago. They were napping in a pile in the corner, soft snores and gently clinking shells occasionally issuing from their cuddle puddle.

Mana was similarly tired, and had long since retired in her travel bowl, though small azure constructs still flickered about the room, seemingly disconnected from my piscine partner's waking consciousness. They filtered about, aimless and directionless, but every once in a while, I could swear I'd catch a hint of red shining in one of them, watching me. Maushold stayed up with me, less exhausted than their fellows.

At some point, they'd pulled their project to the bed so they could work on it while being close to me. The gentle sounds of needle piercing cloth and sharp teeth clipping threads worked in concert with my natural exhaustion to make staying awake a chore. I knew Mom and Dad meant to return after getting dinner, so I tried to keep myself awake, first by focusing on Juan's journal. Of all the reading material my parents could have brought me, this was probably the most interesting.

The writing was just so dense, and required so much deliberation and focus, that there was no way to read it without thinking about it actively. Unfortunately, my exhaustion, paired with the distracting ache of my wounds, made it impossible to give the text my full attention. Next, I tried to distract myself by fiddling with my Pokégear, but the little device just couldn't hold my focus. Maybe if I had my jailbroken Macross Gear, with its access to Galar's web, or the PokéDex Professor Birch had sent me.

My parents hadn't known to bring either device, however (and I never risked having them along with me on ranger missions). Eventually, the sweet call of my bed was too powerful to resist any longer, and I slipped away into slumber, already dreading an entire week spent cramped in this sterile room.