Chapter 9: Present Day

Chispa whimpered unhappily. Sam thought that letting her out of her Friend Ball so that she could stretch her eager little legs would make her happy, but it quickly became obvious that all she wanted was to run about the deck of the cargo ship. Sam considered that this was not a great idea given that he had no way of knowing when any of the Phoenix Corporation crew might need to come out onto the deck, and so it went that she would start moving towards the edge of the crates where Sam and Barry had concealed themselves and Sam would have to issue the most stern whisper he could muster to get the Shinx to come pouting back to his side. This would last for a few minutes at best before she would start testing his attention again by creeping towards the opening that lead to the deck. 

If Sam were to be honest with himself, he was thankful for Chispa’s misbehaving; it kept him on alert for her and distracted from the three sensations within him that were joining forces in an attempt on his life and sanity. The first, and the one he most expected, was his seasickness. While the Canalave Ferry had only a calm strait to cross to get to Canalave City, the Phoenix Corporation vessel was circumnavigating the Sinnoh continent, and the waters here on the ocean were much more vulgar than those the ferry had to contend with. His stomach lurched with every wave that assailed the ship, and his mind was flooded with memories of the storm off of Cianwood in his youth. He had thus far been able to keep his insides under the control, but he couldn’t help but wonder how long that would last. 

The second sensation, one that was seemingly in direct conflict with the first, was that of hunger. Sam and Barry had been aboard this ship for almost twenty-four hours. Having not intended to be away from civilization for so long when they arrived in the city, the two of them had no inclination to bring any supplies or food with them. As the hours passed, Sam couldn’t help but ponder how long they’d be at sea before he’d have a chance to eat something. Anything. And what if the boat they were on did not dock near a town or a city? Would they have to abandon surveillance on the crew to get something to eat instead? He thought that one day without food was probably not terrible; people had survived much worse than that under more dire circumstances. It did little to settle him. He was still hungry. 

The third of these sensations was by far the worst at this point. The stowaway voyage had started in the quite temperate Canalave City, but as it stretched up the Sinnoh continent, bitter cold slammed his body. For as poorly as Sam and Barry had planned for a time without food, they were even less prepared for this insidious chill. Sam wore only two layers of short-sleeved tops and jeans; Barry was possibly even worse off with just a long-sleeve top and shorts. Sam wondered if he now missed the scarf he’d worn earlier to Lake Verity just for fashion. The cold was the reason why they’d released their pokemon to begin with a few hours ago; at least Vlam and Barry’s Monferno were capable of radiating warmth. It had gotten to the point where the risk they ran of being spotted due to the light of their friends’ flames was easily worth it. 

The thought of Vlam using her heat to protect him made him appreciative, and he reached out to stroke her back. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Chispa using what she must have perceived as his lack of attention to inch towards the edge of the cargo crates. Sam hissed shortly through his teeth, and she yelped in frustration but returned to him.

“I think we could train her here.” Barry’s mouth was having a hard time properly enunciating his words due to the chill within him. They had been quite conversational, if quietly so, upon boarding the ship, but hunger and cold and annoyance were settling in to both of them, and they spoke less and less. Barry probably, like Sam, just wanted the ship to dock as soon as possible. “She’s small, and we could probably do it here without being noticed.”

Sam shook his head, and it was more vigorous than he intended since his body must have taken it as a cue to unleash a prolonged shiver. “No,” he answered when he finally regained control of himself. “I’m not training her.”

He could tell Barry was already asking why not, but he was not sure he even had an answer to give. It reminded him of the same feeling he got when he was in Verity Forest and felt compelled to capture her. The Shinx looked back at him as he found himself studying her, and she wagged her sparking tail before flopping to the ground beside him, her belly exposed for him to rub. She was too innocent in the forest that day to know that she was supposed to run from him. Was that all it was? Regardless of the reason, Barry nodded without an answer to his question and went back to making sure his energetic Monferno wasn’t about to set the crates about them on fire with his tail flame. 

Sam still couldn’t believe the cargo was so brazenly labeled. The Acuity Project. What would an international shipping company be doing running around the lakes of Sinnoh? There were hardly any packages that needed to be delivered to protected national park lands. On the other hand, it wasn’t hard to write off how the workers on the Verity site reacted to his and Barry’s presence. Barry was an overzealous kid, and hell, he made Sam want to attack him, as well; that really might have been a misunderstanding on Sideburns’ part. It wasn’t a pleasant thought, the idea that he was freezing to death on this cargo ship, his stomach racing itself to see if he starved or threw up from seasickness first, all over a misunderstanding and some easily explainable happenstance. 

He opened his eyes without even realizing he had closed them. Mentally, he made a note to watch that; the cold was apparently a more subtle foe than he imagined, and he doubted his body could afford the slowed heartrate that sleep would bring. Chispa was gone! The thought hit him in the face like a glass of water. He couldn’t feel her body next to him; she must have dashed out onto the deck when his eyes closed. Barry’s eyes were closed, too, so he couldn’t have noticed her leaving, either. Sam cursed himself for succumbing that easily. Before he was even on his feet to find and retrieve Chispa, he heard a familiar foreign noise. A voice speaking in a language he didn’t understand, and it was coming from the other side of the crates. Chispa must have been seen!

He rushed out from his safe spot, his body no longer recognizing cold or hunger or the rocking of the boat. There was a man in a padded coat waving his arms and shouting at poor Chispa who’d been backed to the edge of the ship. Sam had no way of knowing if this man wanted to throw her overboard or give her a treat, but he wasn’t about to find out.

“Hey! Leave her alone!”

The man turned to Sam. He had a dark, ungroomed moustache, and it made Sam think of Sideburns. Did these guys all come from the Cult of the Thick Facial Hair or what?

“Just back away from her, and we’ll talk this out.” Sam held up his open palms peacefully, to show he was no threat. “Just let me recall her, okay? We’ll play this however you want after that.”

The men at the Verity site seemed to understand and speak English, even if they weren’t particularly peaceful. That did not seem to be the case for this one, though, as his reaction to Sam pulling Chispa’s Friend Ball from his pocket was to shout back at him and reach for something in his coat’s pocket.

“Monferno, toss him!”

Sam’s attention was pulled to Barry’s voice behind them, and then immediately back to the man with the moustache. Monferno had sneaked close enough to him to grab around the waist. Sam looked on in horror as Barry’s pokemon flipped the foreigner overboard.

“NO!” Sam shouted. On pure instinct, he rushed to the edge of the ship, grabbed a life vest that hung there, and threw it into the sea as close to the man as he could. “Grab it!” Sam yelled, pointing at the vest. He was as relieved as he could ever remember being in his life when he saw the shivering figure make it to the safety device. “Are you psychotic, Barry?”

“What are you talking about? That’s basic problem-solving there.”

“That guy could die out there! The water here’s got to be about thirty-three degrees, and who knows how close to land we are. We’ve got to try to save him.”

“No. You should worry about to save yourself.”

Sam looked upward, to where the new voice had come from. Behind the railing going around the second level of the ship stood the rest of its crew, eight men all of similar foreign skin tone. Sam instantly thought back to the shout he let loose in horror as Monferno threw their co-worker overboard; they must have heard him, and here they were in response. Sam couldn’t help but jealously note that they were all dressed appropriately for the weather.

Next to him, Barry seemed frozen in the moment. He never even acknowledged the threat of the ship’s staff. He was still looking out over the side of the vessel; his hands were shaking, but Sam somehow got the sense that it wasn’t from the cold. Barry was rash–there’s a good chance he hadn’t thought about his actions when he ordered his friend to deal with the crew member. He must have locked up when Sam presented him with the reality of what could have happened. Sam felt awful now for yelling at him and questioning his sanity; he had just been trying to help and clearly didn’t want to hurt that guy. Chispa was cowering behind his feet, and Sam realized it might be up to him to get them out all of this.

“Thank goodness you guys are here,” Sam lied, “your friend fell overboard when we tried to present him our credentials. We need to get him back on-board before he freezes or drowns. I threw him a life vest, but the water is so–”

“We will put down a lifeboat for him. You do not worry about it. What you should worrying about is what we do to hitchhikers.”

The man who was speaking was surprisingly clean of facial hair, and he appeared to be very large. It was hard to say if he was as big as he appeared due to all the warm layers he was wearing. Snow pants, a padded coat like the other man’s, and a ski cap added to his size. He had the same accent that Sam remembered from Sideburns. 

“We’re not hitchhikers,” Sam replied. It was true, at least. Something was lost in translation between their language barrier there. “We just…” He thought back to his plan in Canalave; it was worth a shot. “We’re here legally representing Secretary Rowan, and–”

The man whom had taken the lead speaking role for the crew raised his right arm, and his companions all pulled out various kinds of pokeballs. Sam paused, then started waving his hands downward to signify for them to calm down. Ending this without conflict, however improbable, was definitely ideal.

“Whoa! Hold on, guys! No one is in trouble here. We just have some questions about–”

“Sam, watch out!”

At Barry’s words, a dozen flashes of luminous energy erupted onto the deck of the ship; its crew had unleashed their pokemon. At least their abrupt aggressiveness shocked Barry out of whatever stupor had possessed him. It was Sam who now felt as though he had been stunned. Barry summoned his Torterra, as well as a third friend that Sam hadn’t seen him release before. It was a blue penguin-like creature with four white dots on its stomach and two yellow crests lining its head from its beak upwards. Sam recognized it as a Prinplup, a rare aquatic pokemon from the Sinnoh region. It shuddered, happy to be free and ready to battle.

“Sam, I really need some help here, if you’d like to get in the game! I’m handicapped enough as it is by how much Torterra can’t do on a boat.”

Sam nodded and recalled Chispa into her Friend Ball. Stuffing her ball into his right front pocket, he grabbed the Nest Ball inside it. Bree was released into the air just as Vlam bounded out from behind the safety of the crates to his side. The Phoenix workers’ pokemon outnumbered his and Barry’s friends more than two-to-one, and Sam quickly realized that Barry was right about the limitations of his most fully evolved and powerful friend. Without any earth beneath Torterra’s feet, it was going to be unable to use some of its fiercest attacks. Sam recalled the fissure it had used earlier and realized that was right out, but he was interrupted by a dozen voices he couldn’t understand before he could consider any others. The Phoenix Corportation pokemon were being ordered to attack.

“Vlam, confuse rays and baffle attacks! As many as you can handle, all right, girl? There’s too many of them, and I need them off balance! You’ve got to do that for me.” Vlam seemed to bob her head in agreement with Sam’s words before streaking off to the middle of the fray, her magnificent tails stiffening outward. “Bree, fly out of range as high as you can. I want you to put anything that isn’t with me or Barry to sleep. Can you do that?” Bree hummed a reply and sped up above the boat’s deck as fast as her silky wings would carry her. Trickery tactics seemed like the best bet at this moment given the odds; if they could keep their enemies off-balance, they might be able to hold out and calm everybody down. Vlam was moving fast, darting in front of enemy pokemon and stopping just briefly enough to hit them with a blue-toned light show before dashing off to the next foe. 

In the air, Bree was not so lucky; she had no sooner gotten into the night sky than a blue bird pokemon with a red breast began following her. The bird–Sam recognized this foreign pokemon as either a Taillow or a Swellow, he couldn’t remember which was the evolved form’s name–moved too quickly for her, and it refused to allow Bree the time to set up a sleep powder attack. 

“Bree, whirlwind! Blow it out of the sky!” 

Bree began forming a swirling vacuum using the power of her wings, but the bird opponent began doing the same. Sam cursed under his breath at not being able to discern who was giving it orders. The crew were all looking in every direction at the chaotic battle scene; it was impossible to discern who was guiding the bird. The bursts of wind crossed in mid-air, dissipating each other almost immediately on contact. 

Sam wanted to issue another command, but he was knocked from his feet by a charging iron lizard. Sam tried to right himself, but the spike-backed steel salamander before him stared him back down. It looked as though it would charge again if Sam didn’t stay where he was. He tried to crawl backwards and earn himself some distance, but the Lairon wasn’t having any of it; it was outpacing Sam’s backwards movement as it stepped forward towards him. 

Out of the corner of his eye, Sam saw Monferno rush away from the Lotad it was engaged with and knock the Lairon onto its side with right fist that ignited in a blaze upon impact. Lairon let out a shrill, metallic screech as it tried to get back to its feet; its frantic movements signified how much the fire punch had hurt it. Barry’s Monferno extended its left hand and pulled Sam back up to his feet. Monferno made a throaty, joyful noise which Sam acknowledged with a nod and then bounded back to the ground fray against Lotad. Sam glanced up to see that the avian pokemon had taken advantage of both Sam’s distraction and its speed advantage; it was striking fast with stiff shots from its wings. Butterfree was still aloft, but it was dazed and hurt. Sam decided to take a note from Lairon’s playbook and give the Swellow something else to think about for a few moments. 

“Vlam! Use a fire blast on that bird!”

Vlam came to a halt from her rapid-fire offense and belched a sofa-sized fireball into the sky. Butterfree’s opponent caught sight of the attack at the last instant and rolled out of its path. It might have singed a feather or two, but it mostly avoided the fireball. That was fine with Sam since it had now given distance between itself and Bree,

“Bree, psybeam! Stop it from staying airbone, at least!”

Bree’s antennae twitched, found the bird across the air from it, and then stiffened. The bird froze, then let out an agonized squawk and began spiraling downward. Sam’s exclamation of victory was short-lived, however, when he saw Monferno crash to the deck after a burst of water attack hit it dead on. Above the fray, Bree did not have even a moment to catch her breath from her previous battle; a Golbat was now chasing her through the sky. 

“Vlam!” He wanted to call out another fire blast from his Ninetales, but she was equally engaged in dodging the rapid-fire strikes of a Meditite whose psychic powers were able to defend it from Vlam’s confusion tactics. Vlam let out a pained howl; the Meditite, floating in the air in a yoga position, must have been using its invisible telepathic powers. “Vlam, fight it off with a fire spin!”

Vlam shook her head to fight off the Meditite’s attack and unleashed a spinning vortex of flames. The Meditite seemed at first to be engulfed by the attack, but it appeared in an instant outside the flames. It must have teleported free, and it went back on the attack on a stunned Vlam.

“Barry! This isn’t working out super well for us! Please tell me you’ve got a back-up plan.”

Just a few feet away, Barry nodded and recalled Monferno into its pokeball. “Use a surf attack, Prinplup. As hard as you can, buddy!”

The penguin pokemon shoved away a a tiny lobster pokemon that had been trying to attack it with its pinchers. Before the Corphish could right itself, Prinplup blasted it with a concentrated burst of water from it beak for good measure. Prinplup crossed its wings in front of its body, and its eyes began to glow with blue energy. The foreign enemies seemed to pause and brace themselves for a big attack, but as the seconds passed, it became clear nothing was happening.

“That back-up plan was underwhelming,” Sam sighed. “Anything else?”

“I don’t know. I really thought that’d work better out here on the ocean.”

The Phoenix crew’s pokemon, who had previously been cowed by Prinplup’s potential attack, regained their assurance and started pressing forward again. Golbat was again terrorizing a weakened Bree in the air, and Vlam was back to facing off with the Meditite. Sam suddenly wished that was all of the bad news.

“Oh god,” he muttered in Barry’s direction. “What did you do?”

Barry turned, presumably to ask Sam what he was talking about, but he didn’t even need to get any words out; it was impossible to miss what Sam had seen. An enormous wave was barreling towards them, having formed several dozen yards out in the ocean. It had to have been the result of Prinplup’s surf attack. With the whole ocean and the force of the water and wind behind it, the wave attack had reached massive proportions. And it was bearing down on the ship. Sam figured the crew had to have seen it by that point, too, but he was too mesmerized by it to check them.

Sam gained just enough of his wits back to withdraw Bree and Vlam into the safety of their pokeballs right before the wave hit. The world vanished in a flush of water which quickly became all he knew. He felt the force of the wave push him backwards, causing his back to slam into a hard object. It forced the air out of his lungs, and he was barely able to gulp another lungful down before the water pulled him all the way under. He pinballed off several more things–one felt like the railing on the ship and another like one of the crates he had been using for protection–but he forcefully held onto the precious oxygen in his lungs until the impacts ceased. He lost all track of what happened to Barry and the ship’s crew, but that was replaced by another realization: he was no longer on the boat at all. Whether he was washed away alone or the entire vessel tipped under the ferocity of the surf was unknown to him. He was underwater in the middle of the ocean, and he had no idea which direction was which. He tried to swim in the first direction his body would move towards in the hopes he would find air, but the water was frigid and it assailed his muscles; they refused to work with him. He collided with something large, and it was propelling him in the direction he then knew must have been down; the object must have been one of those crates, and that most likely meant the entire ship was down. His lungs felt like they would rip open if that’s what they had to do to release his last breath. The air inside of him seemed like a vicious enemy now, but he knew he had to fight to hold onto it. If he exhaled now, he was finished. A thousand lights flickered against the backdrop of his eyelids, and consciousness was becoming just a memory as the cargo box continued to ride him to the bottom of the sea.