I arrived at our hotel room over four hours later. I stood at the doorway and pulled a long, blonde-brown hair off my shirt. I was missing a sock. Smiling broadly, I strode with a light step through the doorway and into the darkened room. “Tech?” I called out questioningly. “You there, pal?” A lamp suddenly illuminated the obscurity. It swung slightly, casting flickering, sinister shadows across the lair. Tech sat in a large chair in the middle of the room. He had his head lowered and remained in a pensive posture. His eyes were masked by the sentient shadows. Tech said nothing. I guess he’s asleep, I thought.

“Goddamn you,” he hissed at me, but was still eerily calm. “What have you done?” he snarled through the dark room.

“What the hell are you talking about, Jack?!” I demanded. “What’s wrong?”

“You damn well know,” he said. He slightly raised his hand and extended a closed fist towards me. I stood still for what seemed like an hour, then moved forward. He turned over his fist and opened it. A small, metal object glinted in the shadows. “What’s that?” I asked. I slowly took the smooth cylinder from his hand. It was about an inch and a half long, and shone with the golden pallor of brass. I held it up to a gap in the darkness. “Holy sh…”

“Are you FRICKING insane?!” he cut me off. “What in God’s name have you gotten us into?!” I looked back at the cold object in my hand. The piercing bronze glare of a magnum bullet leered at me through the darkness. “Where...where did you get this?!” I asked.

“Oh, it seems that some friends of yours left it on the damn coffee table! I went out to eat and when I came back, it was there. They were in the fricking room!” My fears had been realized. The CIA had found us. More specifically, the PRI…the Pokemon Research and Intelligence division. The perfect day had just become a nightmare. We would never be safe again. “What have we done?” Tech growled. “We’ve got to turn ourselves in. They’ll kill us, man!”

“No way,” I snapped back. “No chance in hell. We’ve been through too much to give up. And for what? They’ll probably kill us anyway!”

“DAMN YOU!” he shouted. “What now?! Are we just going to run forever? We can’t beat them!”

“Listen…calm down,” I said. “They need us alive. We still have Apollyon, right? They won’t kill us because they wouldn’t be able to get to it. Articuno’s the entire reason they’re after us in the first place! It’s why we’re not dead right NOW!”

“So what?! Then we’ll just give back the damn bird!”

“That is NOT an option!” I roared. “Hunter would have died in vain! We have to keep fighting! You knew what you were getting into when you came on this damn mission!”

“You’re out of your fricking mind,” he retorted. “We…we can’t.” He seemed to be calming down. He was just like me—scared.

“Okay man, here’s what we’ve got to do. We’re going to the Indigo Leagues. We are going to WIN. They can’t touch us there—we’ll be safe.”

“I don’t know, Neil. I just don’t know.”

“What, we’re sure as hell not safe here! The room’s undoubtedly wired right now,” I answered. “We’ll leave tomorrow. My girlfriend, Heather, is driving up to the Plateau in the morning.”

“So we’re going with her?” Tech asked.

“Oh, no way!” I laughed nervously. “Roadblocks, man. We’d be caught in a minute.”

“What then? How will we get there?” He paused. “Oh, no…”

“Oh yes,” I said. I nodded over to the rope, wound up in the corner. “Tomorrow we fly Apollyon Airways.”

“Jesus,” he said. “Alright, but what will we do after that?

“We’ll see…” I told him. “We’ll see….” I walked past him into the bedroom and said goodnight.

Page Six
Page Six

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