Chapter 13: 5 Years Ago

“Hey! Buddy! Are you supposed to be in charge of this craphole? I was at the Rooftop Cafe, and the vending machine ate my money. You owe me a drink.”

Tommy must have recognized his brother’s voice, because all he did was shrug and continue counting inventory of weight belts. “Good to know the new Rip-off Idiots feature is working then.” Tommy put his scanning gun down on the counter and finally turned to face Sam. The brothers embraced, with Tommy slapping Sam hard on the back as usual, before he continued, “Don’t you have Advanced Theories of Pokemon Psychology tonight? What are you doing here?”

“Coach T. said he spoke with Professor Nelson about my being excused from class so I can train for my qualifying match tomorrow.”

Tommy nodded. “Well, coming to my work and pestering me is pretty strenuous training. I’m certain you have this one all wrapped up.”

“Man can not survive on pokemon training alone.”

“That’s cute. Did you learn that in class?”

“Probably. Let’s go with ‘yes’. Anyway, I was thirsty so I came out here; the machine upstairs really did eat my money.”

“We really did install a feature to rip-off idiots.” Tommy moved back behind his counter on the fourth floor of the Goldenrod Department Store and began rooting around for something. Tommy had been department manager of that floor–hardware and sporting goods–for a few months now and was expecting a promotion any day now based on the glowing quarterly report he’d just had from his supervisor. Sam knew Tommy secretly wanted to be put in charge of the sixth and seventh floors–pokemon goods, food, and supplies–even if he wouldn’t come right out and say it. Sam had been considering calling Tommy’s boss one of these days and reminding her of all the overtime and hard work Tommy had been putting in, but he also didn’t want to embarrass his sibling or speak out of turn. As Sam mulled over the possibility of calling her some more, Tommy emerged from behind his counter with a bottle of iced tea. 

“Isn’t that yours? That’s the kind we have at home that you pack for lunch.”

“You know me. If I don’t work through lunch, it’ll be a miracle. Better you have it than I waste it. What with all the vigorous standing around you’re doing in preparation for tomorrow, I’m sure you are working up quite the thirst.”

Sam bobbed his head slowly, eyes down. “Yeah yeah. I’ll be working on it when I get home. I think some of my teammates are coming over to work on our training in a group.”

Tommy’s face shined with mock amusement. “Oh, really? I love when you give me no notice whatsoever that I’ll be cooking for a dozen people.”

“Ha! I told them to eat before they come. See? I was thinking of you.”

“First time for everything. Hey, can you have Alison save me a seat tomorrow at the stadium? I’ll probably be running late. Opening shift. So you’re on your own for pre-match breakfast.”

Sam flinched. He felt bad that he hadn’t told his brother yet, but due to Tommy’s heavy schedule at the department store and Sam’s own classload and involvement in the NCPA, it had just never come up until this point. “Oh. Yeah. We broke up. I’m not…we’re not seeing each other anymore.”

“Wow, you’d been together since last semester.”

“Yeah, it just kind of–”

“That’s a long time for her to have just seen you naked for the first time.”

Sam sputtered a few sounds, but nothing of consequence. Tommy was laughing so hard his eyes were wet. “I hate you,” Sam finally said.

“I know. And I probably deserve it.” Tommy was still laughing. “So what happened?” Sam shrugged in response, causing Tommy to tilt his head. “Really, a shrug? Did you just turn fourteen again? Use your words.”

“She thought it’d be easier to date someone who lived on campus.”

Tommy clapped his hands together and then pointed at Sam. “Didn’t I tell you to live on campus this year? Why doesn’t anyone listen to me? I am full of unused wisdom.”

“It’s no big deal.”

“It is a big deal. It’s a big deal. You don’t break up with someone you dated for months and have it not be a big deal. I vaguely remember having relationships. It’s a big deal.”

Sam was beginning to regret coming to the store after all; Tommy was making him feel worse. It had only been a week since he and Alison had broken up. Tommy was right, even if Sam was trying to downplay it. They’d been together for half of a year, and just like that, she dropped him over what Sam thought was a pretty stupid reason. Tommy may have seen that etched in his brother’s face because he suddenly shifted gears. “How many people are coming over tonight?”

Sam did the counting in his head and came up with the answer. “Maybe eight?”

“Are you going to clean up after yourselves?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, but really?”

“Really!” Sam shot back. ”We‘ll take care of it.”

“Thank god, because college-aged boys left to their own devices…I shudder to think of it,” Tommy said with a smile. 

An elbow in his side knocked Sam from his memory. As he glanced around the bus, he was unsure whether he had been sleeping or merely thinking about that day. Most likely, he imagined, he was somewhere between the conscious world and the land of his dreams. Regardless, he hadn’t thought about Alison in quite some time.

The man next to Sam on the Arcanine Line bus across Sinnoh removed his elbow from Sam’s diaphragm, rolled back over to the opposite side of the seat, and continued his sleep. Sam looked out of the window and saw the beach of Sandgem Town in the distance; he’d finally made it. It had taken two days worth of bus rides, transfers, and waiting around in bus stations–the Oreburgh City stop was not in the most pleasant area of town, and Sam would be happy never to have to spend five hours waiting there again with rough-looking men trying to get him to wager on a card game in the corner of the building–but he’d be at Rowan’s lab in virtually no time at all. He made a mental note to never ride a bus again in his life if he could help it. Bus stations that seemed to be one sideways glance away from erupting in gang violence, cramped seats on the busses themselves that got you either elbowed by a sleeping neighbor or pestered about the health benefits of eating whole garlic by a chatty one, and air conditioning and heating that were spotty at best did not combine for convenient travel. Sam figured next time he’d just hitchhike. It couldn’t possibly be any worse. 

Whether the memory of Tommy had been a dream or just a recollection, his mind drifted back to the day that followed. Sam remembered that he’d lost his match that day, but what he most recalled was that Tommy did end up getting a seat next to Alison Parker. Apparently they chatted about her breakup with Sam and what Tommy would have to do to get her to take him back. When Sam finished his match and left the Whitney Williams Stadium to find his brother, he saw him standing with her, and the two of them were laughing at some joke he had told. Sam was a little befuddled at it all since Alison had been avoiding him since they broke up, but after whatever Tommy and she had spoken about, she kissed Sam on the cheek and assured him that they’d still be friends and that she’d still help him with Johto Agricultural History class (Sam had been having trouble staying awake, much less excelling, in that one). With that, she grabbed the university shuttle back to her dorms and stopped avoiding Sam when he saw her on campus. 

Sam jerked his head upward in attempt to make sure he did not doze off; missing his stop and spending a minute longer than he had to on this bus was the worst torture of which he could dream. He imagined a man being released from a prisoner of war camp and told he could be free if he took a bus back to his home and family across the country; the man would undoubtedly turn around and beg to be allowed back inside the camp. 

The electric sign at the front of the bus flashed “Seventh Avenue”, and Sam got to his feet and prepared to get off the bus. His feet kissed the concrete of the sidewalk, the bus behind him pulled away, and his stomach fluttered about in his chest. Two days since the incident in Snowpoint, and he still had no idea how he would react to Professor Rowan once they were face-to-face. Flipping out on Barry in the heat of the moment was one thing–and Sam was already regretting his behavior there–but confronting the professor was another entirely. Rowan knew Sam and Tommy personally, yet he deceived Sam regardless. Still, Sam knew there was a world of difference between attacking a fit young man in the heat of the moment versus doing so to an older scholar after having time to digest his rage. He walked absent-mindedly down the street, having not even decided how he would respond to the answering of Rowan’s office door when he found himself outside it. Sam shook his head and knocked.

Rowan answered, his fingers fumbling to open the wrapper of a piece of hard candy as he saw Sam at his doorstep. “Sam Stark! How are you, son? How may I assist you?”

Sam’s mouth curled, but he still didn’t have any idea what to say. His brain finally relented that at least he should step inside before saying anything. “Mind if I come in, professor?”

Rowan motioned for Sam to enter as he popped the candy into his mouth. Sam walked past him into the lobby with the plant. Rowan offered a piece of the candy to Sam, but he declined. “Is Barry with you? Will he be joining us?” Sam noticed Rowan was holding the door open and glancing outside for his assistant.

“Tell me about the Church of Cyrus.”

Rowan’s head stopped craning to look outside, and he slowly shut his office’s front door. “I expect Barry will not be coming after all,” he said.

“Not quite.”

Rowan rolled his eyes slowly. “Sam, Sam. What you must think of me…”

Sam lifted his hands. “Stop. Don’t want your pity party. Want to know why you lied to me.”

Rowan appeared ready to scold Sam, but his face dropped and his shoulders heaved. Sam couldn’t tell if it was guilt or not, but the professor seemed to forego whatever was coming and instead began the story of the Church of Cyrus.

“It was almost a decade ago, Sam, that a man named Cyrus first appeared. It was absolutely nothing at first; he was just some street looney who wandered from town to town with signs about it being the end times. He would stand on street corners and talk to passers-by about the coming end of the world. It got the point where he was just kind of…a thing. News stations would humorously cover where the crazy guy with the sandwich board was today. ‘He’s outside the Hearthome Contest Hall, he’s at the Floaroma Gardens, he’s in Pastoria’s Great Marsh Park’, that kind of thing. He was more of Sinnoh’s adorable mascot than anything else.

“Then people started listening to him. He’d be in one city, and he’d have followers set up in other locations to help spread his word. His signs became pamphlets which later became small books. People weren’t just listening to him and helping him spread his word; some started donating him money. Even then, it was just a joke. ‘The Church of Cyrus’. All these people who started following around the loudmouth.”

Rowan tugged on the end of his tie. “Like a lot of people, it was around then that I actually started listening to what Cyrus was saying. It wasn’t some doomsaying prophecy of the world’s end; he was calling for a bringing about of the end! His belief was that there was too much hatred in the world. Our entire human race had succumbed to racism and greed and pride. We as a people, according to him, could never reach our full potential, and those ‘in charge’ (whatever that was supposed to mean) were promoting disdain between the hemispheres so that they could keep all the money and power to themselves. His message was actually that the system was so corrupted from the top down, that the only solution was to literally bring about the end of the world and let our species start over. A World Without Corrupt Emotion. That was what his first book was called. It’ actually what he wanted.”

Rowan stopped for a moment as if to grant Sam a chance to ask any questions. Sam had none; the story was mildly interesting at best, but all he wanted was for Rowan to get the part where using the legends to cure his brother’s sickness was unacceptable. 

“Yes, so. Cyrus’ plan was to use two of the historical legendary pokemon, Dialga and Palkia, to destroy the world and recreate it in his own image. Now, on this I am telling you the truth: no one has ever seen these two. I honestly have no idea if they exist or not. But Cyrus claimed they spoke to him, that they somehow whispered to him. That should tell you the caliber of man we were dealing with; he was hearing voices and attributing them to mythological pokemon. He claimed that with the power of the guardians of the lakes, he would be able to summon Dialga and Palkia. It was at this point that the Prime Minister contacted me and told me that my Department and I were charged with stopping Cyrus. So I called upon some of the most talented trainers I knew. Two of them were Barry’s parents.

“Unfortunately,” Rowan rubbed his nose at the word, “I underestimated just how fervent Cyrus’ supporters were. There was a riot when news broke that the government had declared him a threat to national security, and… well, Barry’s parents did not make it back with us. We were able to apprehend Cyrus; he’s been remanded to the care of a psychiatric institution in Veilstone. Barry, meanwhile, I took him in with the assistance of a friend in Twinleaf. I thought I’d never have to use someone close to me in these matters before, but when Barry saw those men at Verity, I think some part of him wanted to live up to his parents’ legacy.”

Sam crossed his arms. “And you couldn’t have told me all of this when I first came to you?”

“With the look in your eyes and your determination? Would you have believed me? Would you have cared what I said?”

“No.” Sam’s statement was unabashedly plain.

“That’s why. So I figured it was safer to have you go look for yourself and figure that the legends didn’t even exist anymore.”

Sam tightened his jaw so hard, he felt a sharp pain shoot through his molars from being ground together. “So I came to you for help, and you led me around like a dog on a leash because you think I’m no different than a psychopath who,” Sam laughed at his final words–they were just too ridiculous, “wanted to destroy the world?”

“Sam–”

“Oh, until Barry and I saw something strange, and then I was more than good enough to get sent out to do your dirty work.”

“Sam, listen–”

“So you sent me and Barry out to die just like you did his parents. I was good enough–”

Rowan’s fist slammed down hard on his desk, knocking down pictures that had been sitting there of Rowan with various children, shaking hands with colleagues, and with his arm around a woman. “Mr. Stark! Whatever you may think of me, you will not speak to me that way in my office. I will not stand for it.”

“Righteous indignation doesn’t fit you very well, professor. Not right now.”

Rowan did not back down; he simply glared into Sam’s eyes. “I would never knowingly put Barry at risk. Never.”

“Just my brother, right?”

Rowan sighed. “And what happens with the guardians after you bring him back?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just what I said. Say you found them and brought them back to Johto. And say they could even cure your brother. Then what?”

Sam paused; he had not considered this before. He rubbed his hands together as he thought about what he would do then; he had not realized how sweaty his palms had gotten since his arrival at Rowan’s office. He meant what he told Rowan earlier when they met the first time; he had no interest in the legends. He didn’t want them for himself. “I would let them go. Either let them leave them as they want or bring them back here so they’d be home.”

“Do you honestly think it would work like that?”

Sam narrowed his eyes. What was the professor getting at?

“Once you’ve brought them into society and gave the world irrefutable, visual proof that they exist, do you think they could ever just go on with their lives? Everyone would want them. Crazies like Cyrus would be just the start. Every ambitious trainer in the world would be after them. Even well-meaning folks like yourself. All of you, trifling with forces mankind was never meant to control, for your own personal gain. The legends are able to keep the forces of nature in balance because they are free to do so. Without that peace, who knows what would come of things?”

“But my brother’d be–”

Rowan slammed his hand down again. “There is more to life than your brother, Mr. Stark!”

Sam pursed his lips and gritted his teeth again. This conversation was clearly going nowhere, and Sam knew at that moment what he had to do next anyway. “Not to me, there isn’t”. Before Rowan could issue another word of protest, Sam walked out the front door.

He had gotten several yards away from Rowan’s laboratory before he felt secure that the professor was not going to follow him and try to continue their discussion. Most likely, he was as exhausted from it as Sam was. Sam couldn’t help but wonder why Barry and Rowan couldn’t see how much Sam needed this. Why were they being so selfish and uncaring? There was a life at stake, and it was apparent that they would do anything in their power not to help save it. If that was the case, Sam would simply get in touch with those he knew would be on his side. As soon as he found a place to stop, he’d make a call to the Phoenix Shipping Corporation. Mr. Alonzo would have to take his call since Sam suddenly knew where to start looking for the guardians.