Chương 78: Chapter 63

I'd only ever been teleported once before, when Wilson's Xatu had whisked the two of us back to base after we'd encountered a rogue Maus swarm in Cesnine forest. That was three months ago now. It felt like it'd been a lifetime and change. And yet, the memory of it was still vivid in my mind. The sense of ascending, and then descending, of hopping from A to B in one giant leap. And the nausea, the intense unease that came afterwards. I'd almost lost my lunch when Wilson's Xatu teleported us.

I lost far more than that as we arrived in Kanto. My reaction must have been expected, because even as I was collapsing to my knees, vomit climbing my throat, someone was there, putting some sort of basin or bucket in front of me. I reached out instinctively, placing my hands on either side of the receptacle as my gut worked violently to fill it. It wasn't that the Kantonian woman, Natsume she'd been called, had offered a less smooth ride than Wilson's partner.

No, I think my malaise must have stemmed from the sheer distance involved in the transition. We'd crossed an ocean in an instant. And instant was the right word. When Xatu teleported Wilson and I, there'd been a noticeable lag from when we left to when we arrived. A few seconds where the three of us hadn't been anywhere at all, flying through the space between worlds. When Miss Natsume teleported us, the transition occurred in the blink of an eye. One moment we were in Ferrum, the next, half a world away.

The abrupt shift was dizzying. And worse, something about the process had given me a headache that felt like it might split my skull. The haze of mind-numbing pain made it all but impossible to get the roiling nausea afflicting my gut under control.

But none of that mattered right now, because at the edges of my perception I could make out the sounds of someone rolling my mom's hospital bed away, and guardians knew I wasn't going to let something like inter-continental teleportation keep me from following along behind them. Fresh thought threads spooled up, taking over for the parts of my mind too debilitated to be useful.

The segments of me experiencing pain, the ones processing the churning nausea in my stomach, all of it was sequestered away, smothered in fresh bits and pieces of my consciousness. I wasn't exactly sure this sort of forced-compartmentalization was safe, but I was sure that I didn't care about that at this moment. I heaved myself up, and stopped heaving out my guts, spitting the last of the vomit free from my mouth into the basin. I took a staggering step towards my mom's retreating hospital bed, and then another.

I almost fell on my face, but I managed to catch myself, to force my body to stand unbowed. My upright posture meant I could finally take in my surroundings, and did so passively as I took off after the nurse's wheeling my mother deeper into the hospital. And we were in a hospital, of that there could be no doubt. The cloying scent of antiseptic, the beeping equipment, the hustling personnel, it was all familiar to me from the times I'd visited mom at work (and from the other times I wanted to think about less).

The room we'd teleported into seemed purpose-built for that exact reason. It was a wide-open space within the building, and from it opened a bunch of different hallways and corridors. I saw Miss Natsume confidently striding through one of them, the powerful psychic accompanied by a pair of Alakazam and a couple of men and women in archaic robes. That wasn't the direction mom was being taken in, however, so I disregarded it.

As I stepped free from the teleportation hub into one of the ubiquitous hallways, someone fell in step next to me, and I turned to find another member of my mom's family walking with me. The pink hair and familiar blue eyes were a dead giveaway, even if her facial features were just slightly different from what I was used to.

"You must be Ella's daughter. Fione, right?" she asked me as we followed after the retreating bed.

"Are you feeling alright? I've heard intercontinental teleports can be rather difficult." The woman's Galarian was slightly accented, but her tone and voice were achingly familiar.

"I'm okay," I told her.

"Just– I need to give my approval for mom's treatment, right? I need to follow them." I gestured towards the retreating orderlies rushing mom's bed along.

"Your aunts are faxing that over now," the older Joy reassured me.

"Along with your citizenship application. Your mom's being taken into surgery right now, no more delays or red tape, I promise." The reassurance helped a little bit, but the hard pit of anxiety buried in my gut still weighed on me like an anchor.

"So she is going into surgery? What exactly is this procedure, anyway?"

"It's called Ditto-cell therapy. We'll be using some highly mutable Ditto cells to replace her damaged nerves and treat her head injury." I frowned at the frankly lacking explanation.

"And that just– works? There's no risk of rejection? And what about if–" I took a stuttering breath, "if she has brain damage from the TBI. I thought Ditto-cells are used to replace damaged tissues? You can't exactly do that with a brain."

"You'd have been right a few years ago," the nurse acknowledged, "but technology is always improving. Ditto-cell therapy is a little bit different from full-on replacement. Tell me, how much do you know about Ditto, the Pokémon?" I frowned, doing my best to remember my Pokédex's entry for the Transform Pokémon.

"They're a naturally-occurring shapeshifter, capable of adjusting their biological makeup by manipulating their own genetic-code," I recited.

"They're the only Pokémon known to learn the move Transform, and to possess the Imposter ability." The older Joy blinked a couple of times.

"Ok, that's more than I thought you'd know. Suffice to say then, that a Ditto's transformation is perfect in almost every way, if inherently unstable. That means that, with the proper stimuli, we can get Ditto cells to form exact replicas of existing cellular structures, and then use other stimuli to lock those configurations in place. Organ transplants, skin grafts, tissue replacement, even limbs can be recreated and reattached. That's what Ditto-cell replacement treatments are, or DCRs for short."

The woman paused, and after a few seconds passed, I realized she wanted me to acknowledge that I was following along, so I offered her a nod, and a question, "alright, so how does Ditto-cell therapy work then?"

"Far less simply," the older Joy replied.

"DCT takes advantage of the other facet of Ditto's impressive transformational abilities, their ability to copy the Impression of their target." The obviously-capitalized word made me blink in confusion a few times.

"Impression?"

"Right," the nurse confirmed.

"Just like we can stimulate orphan Ditto cells to replicate certain genetic structures, we've recently developed a way to get them to do the same for a person's Impression."

"And what exactly is an impression?" I asked, making my confusion plain.

"Ah, sorry, I got a bit ahead of myself," the foreign Joy acknowledged.

"An Impression is– it's the way a person's Ki is structured. Just like your genetics determine your phenotype in many ways, your Impression does the same for your Ki. Except, the latter is far more susceptible to change than the former, and shifts and adjusts within hours of any major adjustment." I breathed as understanding flooded my mind.

"Hence the time limit for DCT. If you wait too long before you start treatment, the 'Impression' changes away from what you're trying to restore."

"Exactly," the older woman nodded.

"With DCR, there's no need to rush, but DCT is time sensitive for exactly that reason. That's why we needed to hurry you so much." I felt a thrill of worry course through me.

"My aunts told me that mom's time was running out. Are we going to be in time?" I asked, my eyes flicking to the rolling bed ahead of us.

"Best results come from treatments that happen within six hours of the injury. From what I heard, your mother should be within that tolerance still. I can't– I can't make any promises about the result, but I can swear that we'll do everything in our power to give her the best chances possible." That wasn't exactly the reassurance I'd been hoping for, but it seemed it was the best I was going to get.

We both fell silent for a few minutes as we trailed the orderlies rolling my mom into surgery, and in the silence, a swirling miasma of concern and anxiety began welling up in me. It got worse when I was forced to wait in a surgery waiting room. The finely-appointed lounge had only a few other people in it, who looked up when I was escorted in before returning to their own worries. That suited me just fine, as I settled in to wait in a plush chair near the door leading back towards the operating theaters.

What didn't suit me fine was the sign telling us that Pokémon weren't allowed in the room. What if someone's partner was worried about them? Or if someone needed support in a trying time? Like me? My foot was tapping, beating a steady tattoo into the carpeted floor with little thought or input from my conscious mind. Different parts of my psyche swirled and churned with thought, dire portents and uncertain worries running through my head like untethered Rapidash.

What if treatment came too late and mom was fully paralyzed? Could I make enough money to cover for her lost income? Where was dad, and why hadn't he picked up my Aunts' calls? How much was this all going to cost us? Emergency teleports and experimental, cutting-edge treatments in foreign regions couldn't be cheap. How long would this procedure even take? Even if DCT could repair nerve-damage, would that be a fast process? Or would we be stuck here for weeks? Or months? Or years?

And what about even worse scenarios? What if mom had brain damage? What if she deteriorated in a hospital bed day by day by day, just like– just like my other mom had? If I was forced to watch her waste away in the spaces between visits, our relationship reduced to impressions of weakness and half-remembered, fading smiles. What if– what if she never woke up at all? Distantly, some part of me recognized that my chest was hurting, and that my breathing had become labored.

For a few moments, I felt like I was outside myself, looking at my own quivering form, seeing my worry and malaise crystallize around me like a noxious haze. My ear was burning, and a half-remembered warning had me instinctively pulling the earring free. The shard crystal was pulsing, pustulant orange creeping in on the corners of the usually-prismatic stone.

"Shit, shit!" I cursed under my breath, the sight shocking me out of my panic. It felt like I'd just remembered that I was carrying a bomb. And in some ways, I was. The Weaver's Medicham had told Donna and I about this, back when I'd been hospitalized. A synergy stone gets corrupted when it's cut off from gaia spots and is in close proximity overwhelming negative emotion. I was about as far from any gaia spot as you could get right now, and I sure was experiencing some very negative emotions.

The reminder saw the stone darkening a little bit more at the edges, and I felt my eyes widen in barely-supressed panic. And that new concern just made it even worse! I either had to get control of myself, or get rid of this synergy stone temporarily, and I didn't exactly have anywhere safe to stow this thing. Except, Mana held onto the other shard of synergy stone just fine. Maybe my knights could keep this one safe for me so I could freak out without threatening to destroy this entire hospital?

I stood up, approaching the counter in the lounge while my mind did its level best to keep my extant panic at mom's condition and my new panic over the ticking bomb clutched in my hands under control. If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it. It must have been doing a poor job, because the receptionist at the long desk gave me an odd look.

"Is everything alright, ma'am?" the elderly lady asked in heavily Galarian. I offered a very, very shaky smile.

"Um, no? Not exactly," I admitted, while a small part of me wondered how the woman had known at a glance that I couldn't speak Kantonian.

"Is there somewhere nearby I can release my Pokémon while I wait? I'd like to have them with me." The woman frowned, but she pointed towards one of the doors.

"Out that way, down the hall to your right. Keep going until you reach the end of the hall, take a left, and a few doors down, you'll find an exit to a courtyard."

"Thank you so much," I shout-whispered as I rushed off, trying to hold onto the gratitude as much as I could. It was a thin bulwark against the encroaching tides of panic and anxiety, so I all but ran out of the waiting room, following the woman's instructions on shaky legs. I dodged around other visitors and busy staff, trying to ignore the strange looks and second-glances that I was getting as I hurried through the congested hallways.

Luckily, the courtyard ended up being rather close, and I broke out of the hospital's stifling corridors into a beautifully-appointed outdoor space. Green trees and the scent of freshly-trimmed grass assaulted my senses, as did the sounds of children and Pokémon playing. To my surprise, this seemed to be a mix of treatment and recreational area, with young patients in colorful hospital gowns interacting with friendly-seeming Pokémon, all watched over by experienced-looking caretakers.

I felt woefully out-of-place, but there were at least few benches around the perimeter of the play space clearly intended for family-members and outside visitors. A small number of people and Pokémon claimed some of the seating, but there were open options as well, enough that I could slink over to one without getting within earshot of anyone else. I released my partners in a hurry, and in a moment I was surrounded by the comforting forms of my family.

Mana nestled in her now-customary place atop my head, her scaly form cool on my scalp. My knights surrounded me, and accepted the proffered shard of synergy stone with solemn grace. Maushold ranged a bit, scouting the lay of the land for us and cataloging the sites and sounds around us, before periodically reporting back. A surge of gratitude welled up in me, that my partners could come together so strongly for my sake, even in spite of the argument we'd just been embroiled in.

We'd still have to discuss that, and more, when we had the time, but for now, I simply reveled in their presence, and did my best to keep my thoughts and concerns from spiraling. It helped that it was a beautiful day. The bright sun and frankly sweltering heat had me confused, until I remembered that Kanto was in the northern hemisphere, and had reversed seasons to what I was used to. Here, it'd be the first day of fall soon.

I stripped my winter coat and windbreaker off, which, now that I thought about it, might have been the source of some of the weird looks I'd been getting. My t-shirt was still a little damp from Mana and I's journey to Techne General, but it was drying quickly under the afternoon sun. And it was in the afternoon here. Almost exactly three PM judging by the ornate, analogue clock hanging from the hospital building's facade. Apparently, Kanto was five hours behind Ferrum, a factoid I'd been unaware of.

And for a while I just– sat there, soaking in the radiant sun. In many ways, it felt wrong. For weeks now, we'd been jumping at every shadow, creeping through the short winter days, eyeing and being eyed by troops of suspicious city-goers. Just minutes ago, I'd been walking through what looked like the remains of a warzone, to discover that my mom had been a casualty in a battle that I didn't understand. And now, I was half a world away.

The sun was shining, the joyous sounds of children playing with Pokémon rang through the courtyard, and my partners looked more relaxed than I'd seen them in a month. I didn't understand. I felt like a fish who'd been on dry land for months, suddenly released back into the water. Why was this place more comfortable than my home? What had happened to Ferrum in the last couple of months, that I felt more at ease in this foreign region than I did in my own apartment?

I was spiraling again, but this time, I had my partners to drag me out of it. A cool mist from Mana washed over me, which didn't help my damp t-shirt situation, but was a welcome balm against the sweltering heat. Percy hopped up in my lap, doing a poor job of faking a need for attention. I obliged him all the same, pushing his little feet up and down, working the muscle in a way that I knew he liked.

More minutes passed in an uncertain haze, until a cry from Maushold caught my attention, and I looked up to find that some tiny interlopers had crept on us while I'd been distracted. The two children looked from me to my partners with obvious wonder in their eyes.

"Onee-san, Pokémon Trainer desuka?" one of them, a little girl in a colorful hospital gown, asked.

"Uh," I replied intelligently. Two expectant pairs of eyes stared at me, and my mind helpfully replayed what the little girl had said.

"Sorry, I don't speak Kantonian," I shook my head. I'd heard 'Pokémon Trainer' in there, but I wasn't sure exactly what I'd been asked.

"Ah, Galarian!" If anything, the little girl sounded even more delighted.

"Are you gaijin?" The little boy in shorts and a t-shirt standing next to her gave her a little tap on the forehead.

"Gaijintte iwanaide, shitsureidayo," he admonished her.

"Sorry miss," he turned to me.

"Are you a foreigner?" For some reason, he emphasized the article with a smug expression.

"Uh, yes." I confirmed, feeling rather out-of-place.

"I'm from a region called Ferrum." The little boy wrinkled his nose while the girl blinked a few times, "Ferrum? Where is that?" he asked, obviously confused.

"I do not know that region."

"We're pretty small," I acknowledged.

"Just a few cities and towns, really." That seemed to mollify the boy somewhat. The little girl nudged him, and he jolted, as if remembering something.

"Oh right. Aiya wanted to know if you are a Pokémon trainer."

"Are you, are you?" the girl, Aiya presumably, asked excitedly while staring at my partners with glittering eyes.

"Uh, no." I shook my head. Both of their faces fell, and I had to hurry to clarify.

"We don't really have Pokémon trainers in Ferrum. We have Battle Trainers instead." The little girl mulled over the foreign word.

"Battle Trainer," she tried it out on her tongue.

"That's weird. You're weird!" she pointed at me, expression gormless. The little boy, who I was starting to suspect might be at least a year older than his compatriot, sighed and pushed her finger down.

"Mata shitsureida yo," he admonished the girl again, before turning to me.

"What's a Battle Trainer, miss?"

"It's, sort of like a Pokémon Trainer," I told them, "but they only have one partner instead of a team, and they battle by synchronizing their mind with their partners, instead of giving commands." That left both children confused, probably by what I had to assume was an unfamiliar word.

"Synchronizing means they battle by sharing thoughts," I explained.

"It's comes fr–""Like Sabrina-san!" the little girl interrupted me with an exuberant yell.

"Is Sabrina-san a Battle Trainer?" I blinked a bit, caught off guard by the interruption and the unfamiliar name.

"That's Leader Sabrina," the boy corrected with a long-suffering sigh.

"Sorry miss. Leader Sabrina is one of Saffron City's gym leaders."

"Gym leaders, like the ones that give out the badges?" I asked, my mind flickering back to conversations with Janine and Drake.

"Yeah!" the little girl shouted.

"Daiki going to fight her soon!" she shouted, already distracted from her previous question." Is going to fight her soon," the boy gently corrected.

"And that's still a couple of years away." Oh, I knew about this.

"Your journey, right?" I asked.

"You start in a couple of years?" He looked awfully young to be setting out into the wilderness, but then again, from what Janine had told me, the proposed timeline meant he was eight years old right now, which about squared with his appearance.

"Yeah," the kid didn't seem particularly enthused.

"I still don't know if I'm going to fight Leader Sabrina though. She's kind of scary. I might go with the Fighting Master instead."

"No, you can't" the girl immediately protested.

"He's all sweaty and stinky! Leader Sabrina is way way better!" The boy looked a little uncomfortable at the proclamation, but he didn't protest her characterization of this 'Fighting Master.' Instead, he turned to me again.

"So are you a Battle Trainer miss? I see you have, " he looked around at my partners uncertainly, "a lot more than just one Pokémon."

"Uh, no, I'm not." I shook my head.

"I'm–" I hesitated, frankly unsure of how to characterize myself, especially since I'd been fired from the rangers.

"I guess I'm sort of like a Pokémon Trainer?" I finally allowed.

"We don't exactly have an official Pokémon League with gyms in Ferrum, but we do have an unofficial circuit, where I've gotten some badges." The girl's eyes somehow lit up even further.

"Really! Let me see, let me see!" After that, it wouldn't do for me not to pull my little badge case out of my winter coat, and show off the three little pins stuck there. And from there, I just had to introduce my partners to the two children, who were equally dazzled by the foreign, unfamiliar Pokémon. Maushold gamely let themselves be held and played with, seemingly to little complaint, while I regaled the children with stories about my partners.

I was explaining the story of how I'd met Mana, with a lot of the details sanitized, when a familiar voice reached me from across the courtyard.

"Ah, and here she is. You were right Miss Natsume." I looked up to find a familiar-looking Nurse Joy approaching us, accompanied by the psychic who'd teleported my mom and I here, sans her Alakazam. The latter still had the same piercing red eyes I'd noted in the hospital room, but her hair took on a blueish tinge under the summer sun that I hadn't noticed before. The reminder of why I was here and how I'd arrived instantly restored all the tension that'd drained out of me.

"Is everything alright?" I asked of the approaching pair.

"Is– is there news?"

"What?" the pink-haired woman looked confused for a moment, before realization bloomed on her face.

"Oh, no Fione, I'm sorry. No news yet. This is…" she trailed off, and then sighed.

"I'm sorry dear, I promised no more red tape, but as it turns out, there's actually one more silly little bureaucratic snarl we need to untangle while your mother's treatment is ongoing." Any reply I might have come up with was cut off by a gasp from one of the children, who'd stopped staring at my partners to look up and investigate the newcomers.

"Sabrina-san!" the little girl gasp-squealed as she pointed at the long-haired woman.

"Daiki! Daiki! Sabrina-san imasu!"

"Leader Sabrina dayo!" the boy corrected as he set one of the mauses down, only to still and then blanche when he saw where the little girl (who I was pretty sure by this point was his sister) was pointing.

"Leader Sabrina! Imouto o yurushitekudasai!" he blurted out, while hustling over to once again drag the little girl's outstretched finger down.

"Kinishinaide," the psychic waved him off, before switching to Galarian, presumably for my benefit.

"I told you she'd be here, Nurse Joy. She's not exactly hard to find."

"Sorry for doubting you Miss Natsume," the older woman looked chagrined.

"I'm certain I dropped her off in the waiting lounge, but I guess you needed some space to release your Pokémon?" That last question was directed at me, and now it was my turn to look abashed.

"Yeah, sorry. I didn't mean to wander off or anything, I just needed to be with my partners."

"All's well dear, all's well," the foreign Joy reassured me.

"But like I said, we do, as it turns out, need one last little thing from you." My partners surrounded me, and the eleven of us looked at the older Joy in askance. Maybe she hadn't anticipated so many pairs of expectant eyes, because she looked a little embarrassed, but forged on anyways.

"You see, here in Kanto, you're not technically considered an adult just because you're old enough to go on your journey. You need to either challenge at least one gym, or sit for an equivalency exam." I blinked a couple of times.

"So I'm technically not supposed to be able to give permission for my mom's treatment unless I've done one of those things?" The older Joy winced.

"Technically… no," she held up a finger to forestall anything I was about to say.

"But all's well, I promise. We're not stopping your mom's treatment or anything. As long as you get one of those two done today, no one will bat an eye. And we just so happen to have a gym leader right here at our disposal," she nodded to the psychic, who stared at her stone-faced for a few moments, before turning to me.

"Yes. My name is Sabrina, and I'm one of Saffron City's gym leaders. We should battle so I can get this whole thing over with." That seemed a little rude, but also this woman had just teleported my mother and I from one end of the globe to the other and (hopefully) saved her life, so I was more than willing to offer quite a lot of latitude to the stone-faced psychic.

"Okay. Sounds good. Do we go back to your gym?" I asked, doing my best to follow along with the pace of proceedings.

"Oh, Oh!" a voice interjected from the side, and we all turned to find the little girl raising a hand.

"Leader Sabrina, Leader Sabrina! This onee-san tsuyoi! She have three badges already!" That statement saw the two older women looking towards me in askance.

"I didn't think Ferrum had a Pokémon league," the nurse said with a wrinkled brow.

"Have you already done a gym challenge somewhere else, Fione?" I shook my head as I felt my face coloring under their attention.

"Um, no, not exactly. It's true that we don't have an official league in Ferrum, but there is a– hobbyist scene," I settled on.

"Along with an unofficial circuit, where I've earned three badges." For some reason, that admission made Sabrina's eyes sharpen.

"Really? I hadn't sensed that sort of strength in you," she commented, before her mouth turned down in a little frown.

"It's the strangest thing, but for someone so psychically loud, your presence in my foresight is rather muted." I was completely unsure of what to make of that non-sequitor, and judging by the wide eyes and uncertain expressions everyone else was wearing, I wasn't the only one.

"Hmm, yes, it's the shadow you stand in," the woman continued.

"It's wake obscures your own presence most effectively. How curious," something about her tone was hypnotic, almost mesmerizing. It sounded like she was spouting nonsense, but none of us could interrupt her as she continued.

"I see– momentous events and hard choices. Yes, we'll needs be quick. She's going to need you back before too long if you're to play your part." She clapped, and the sharp sound broke us all out of whatever reverie we'd been stuck in.

"Well, come along. No need to go all the way to the gym for this. The hospital has a perfectly serviceable battlefield that we can use." The gym leader began striding away, and after sharing a set of uncertain looks with my partners, I recalled each of my Pokémon, and made to follow. Esoteric portents aside, I had a badge challenge to make. And even if it was just a formality, even if nothing was expected of me as a foreigner who wasn't even a Pokémon Trainer, I had no intention of losing.