“Well, mission accomplished.”

Catherine was crouched between two thick bushes in a small local park, peering through an elegantly designed iron fence the shrubbery was growing around and through. Stampede was pressed in close to her, keeping guard. He snorted in response, focused on bodyguarding.

Catherine had spent a good while in the grounds bombarding the blackspear grunts acting as security with water, spores and lightning from a position of cover not unlike the one she was in at that moment. As the grunts had started closing in, her team had moved back towards her position and she had gradually returned them until it was just she and Stampede, who had been closest to her since he had the longest range. The guerilla team sufficiently downsized, she had managed to sneak all the way out of the grounds before a handful of the grunts had spotted her and given chase.

This wasn’t a bad thing necessarily, so long as she didn’t get caught. It meant that there would be less security on the premises while Haleigh was looking around. The distraction had been prolonged, she supposed.

She looked at Stampede, the Kingdra all business. There were other benefits to the scenario too. Stampede’s hesitance had been mostly forgotten. He had steadily defaulted back to his typical nature as the process had gone on. She was sure that this wouldn’t be the end of things on that front but, for the moment, he was his usual self. She couldn’t help but smile just a little despite the severity of her situation.

She pulled out her phone and checked for a reply from Haleigh. There was nothing. That was a little disconcerting, but she figured that the other girl probably had her phone on silent given the stealth mission she was on - and was also likely focused on that mission.

Catherine put her phone back in her pocket, watching as two of the grunts that were searching for her came to a halt at the mouth of a nearby alleyway at the corner of her vision. It was a good thing she wasn’t particularly tall or she would never have been able to cram herself and Stampede both into her hiding place. Still, it was only going to be a matter of time before she was found where she was. She had to get to the meeting place and with only two grunts around, this was probably her best chance.

“I need you to knock those two out, then we’re going to make a run for it.”

Stampede exhaled, then gave a nod. Together they backed out of the shrubbery. A moment later, the grunts were both blasted by torrents of water and left slumped against a brick wall.

---

It was a good fifteen minutes later when Catherine finally made it to the allocated meeting spot, a nearby PokeCentre. It hadn’t been quite as smooth a getaway as she had expected and she had ended up having to take out another grunt and run from the rest.

She showed up out of breath, covered in bits of shrubbery that had left her hiding place with her and looking very much like someone on the run. Still, the skeleton crew of staff didn’t seem to question it. They were probably used to trainers showing up in the middle of the night covered in miscellaneous crap and looking worse for wear. That was standard procedure during gym challenge season, Catherine suspected.

There was no sign of Haleigh yet though. Catherine had hoped that Haleigh might have managed to arrive at a similar time to herself given the detour she had to take… but apparently not. Catherine spotted a small counter with tea-making supplies left available for late night visitors to the centre and made use of them before finding a reasonably comfortable chair in the back corner of the room - out of view of the windows to wait.

It wasn’t the short wait that she had hoped for. It was another twenty minutes before Haleigh finally appeared through the door and Catherine had been close to getting up and returning to the mansion to lay siege to the place.

Haleigh was out of breath as she burst into the PokeCentre like a Tauros in a china shop. She looked considerably worse for wear than Catherine had been, being wet, having a swollen nose and dried blood on her face. Her gaze darted around frantically before making her way to the counter, where she quickly got five Poke Balls out of her jacket and dumped them onto the counter. Out of breath, she said, “Heal…them…please…”

The concerned looking nurse said. “Of course. Are you okay, though? Do you need a referral to the clinic next door?”

Haleigh shook her head. “No…I’m fine…please…heal them. They should be…fine…knocked out…in a battle…but fine…”

“Do you have any headaches, nausea, dizziness, or sensitivity to light?”

Haleigh replied, “Got a bad headache…but that’s it.”

The nurse examined her face for a bit, before nodding to herself. She said, “Your nose looks swollen, but it still seems to be straight. You’ve got a busted lip as well. Let me get you some ice, a blanket, and something to wipe all that blood off your face.”

Haleigh nodded and watched as the nurse went back to grab the supplies. Once she came back up front, the nurse handed them to Haleigh and grabbed the Poke Balls off of the counter to put them in the healing machine.

While she waited for the machine to heal her Pokemon, she took the wipes she was given and wiped the blood off her face. In her haste to heal her Pokémon, she had forgotten that she was supposed to be meeting up with Catherine at the Pokémon Centre. She looked around and found her hanging out in the corner.

She called over to the other girl and said, “Made it, just gimme a sec to let my Pokémon heal.”

Haleigh waited another minute before her Pokemon were returned to her. She took the bag of ice and blanket with her and walked over to the back corner, plopping down on the seat next to Catherine’s.

“What happened?” Catherine asked. “Are you okay?”

Haleigh exhaled as she peeled off her wet jacket and wrapped the blanket around herself. “Yeah, I’m fine. I ran into her while I was looking around the place. I ended up getting into a fight, tried to get the jump on ‘er, but she ended up sending out one of her brainwashed Pokemon and nearly got me.”

She used one hand to keep the pack of ice over her nose, while the other reached into her pocket and pulled out a Poke Ball. She looked pensively at it as she explained, “It was a Frosmoth. Not just any old one either, but my Snom. My mo — Vera — knew that I had come back for ‘im, and offered ‘im to me if I joined her side. That’s why she got Ian to kidnap me in the first place. She said that I had become this strong trainer and that Blackspear needed people like me.”

Haleigh sighed. “At least I managed to save him. I broke the Dark Ball he was in and used one of my empty regulars to keep ‘im in.”

“I’m glad you got him back,” Catherine said. “Nobody should have their minds taken from them like that. Did you find anything else?”

Haleigh reached into one of her inner pockets and pulled out a crumpled, water-damaged folder. “Yeah, I managed to nick this on my way out. Didn’t have the time to read it, and it’s not in great shape either…”

Haleigh looked around to make sure there wasn’t anyone who was paying them any mind. Once she was satisfied that no one was looking at them, she opened up and hummed as she examined the contents. There were some text documents with explanations of how the current Dark Ball worked, with plans to improve the design, but couldn’t make out more than that on account of some of the text being smudged. There were some schematics as well that fared better, but Haleigh couldn’t make heads or tails of them.

“This is definitely important,” Haleigh said. “But I doubt this is all that she’s up to. She told me that she was involved with the old Macro Cosmos plan to resurrect Etaernatus, so this is probably a secondary project to her.”

“Well, I know what I’m looking at,” Catherine said, “But I don’t understand any of it. It’s not useless, it links her to those evil pokeballs… but it doesn’t incriminate her bosses at all. I was hoping for something that would be irrefutable proof of their identities. It’s better than nothing at least.”

Haleigh nodded. “Yeah. You reckon anything would come of this if we turned this over to the authorities?”

Catherine shook her head, then half-shrugged. “I don’t know. But I doubt it. They’ve got too much money, power and influence. Simon and I left the rangers with evidence already and I haven’t seen any news suggesting it went anywhere.”

From the way Catherine was talking, it sounded like she already had an idea of who was behind the blacksuits. Vera never disclosed who she was working for. Haleigh asked, a skeptical tone in her voice, “Who’s ‘they?’”

Catherine sighed. “I should have been more careful. I guess you're someone who it’s easy to let your guard drop around. Well, part of that is that I don’t think you’d make a particularly great actor or liar - and tonight would have been a bit extreme for that.”

She hadn’t been planning on filling Haleigh in but, at that point, it didn’t seem like there would be too much harm in filling her in to Catherine. As long as Haleigh didn’t go around blabbing to anyone who would listen. “It wasn’t exactly a surprise to hear it, but I only know because of everything that happened with Simon. These blacksuits that keep showing up are working with - or are part of - Blackspear. But before you start grilling me with questions, that’s about all I know. I have no idea why they’re doing any of this. Honestly, it makes no sense to me. It doesn’t seem like they have much to gain when they already practically own Galar.”

Haleigh was taken aback by the answer. Blackspear? Even though she wasn’t someone who followed the news or current events all that closely, she knew that Blackspear was the biggest conglomerate in the aftermath of the Darkest Day. They had their hands in pretty much any industry one could think of. Nothing that Haleigh had ever heard would suggest that they were the ones behind all of this, and, as Catherine had said, they already had so much power and influence already.

Still, the part about having tons of money and influence would certainly make sense as to how they seemed to have such a large, clandestine operation. As Haleigh knew all too well, Galar already had one major corporation with very evil people having worked for it, so having Blackspear be the ones to take their place made a lot of sense.

Haleigh gave a dry chuckle as she replied, “I don’t blame you for not telling me. I’m definitely not someone who’s the best at deceiving people or who gives off an air of seriousness.”

Her expression turned serious and an edge started creeping into her words. “I’m not one to treat this kind of stuff lightly, though. Not after how I’ve seen them try to endanger my life, or how they treat Pokemon.”

She looked back down at Frosmoth’s Poke Ball and rotated it in her hands. It was still hard to believe that she really had him back, after so many years apart.

Something didn’t quite feel right, though. It wasn’t that she wasn’t happy that he was out of that woman’s hands. There was something about the way that Vera saw Pokemon, as nothing more than weapons or tools, that made Haleigh think about her own journey up to this point. Battling, fun as it was, didn’t feel nearly as important to her as the relationships she had to her Pokemon. Corey, Coraline, Cornelius, Orion, Cerise, Reyna, Dart, Captain, and now Frosmoth.

Knowing that Frosmoth must have been through horrible ordeals on account of that brainwashing the dark ball subjected him to was a poignant reminder of how many other countless Pokemon were suffering a similar fate at the hands of Blackspear. It wasn’t even necessarily just Blackspear, either. There was the merchant she and Achille rescued Orion from. There were the unknown smugglers whose shipment of Pokemon Haleigh and Val had rescued Reyna and Squirtle from. Beyond even her own Pokemon, there were countless other Pokemon out there in need of help.

Haleigh said to Catherine, without looking up. “Hey, mate. I know we still don’t really know each other really well or anything like that, but can I…ask you about something?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“You talk a lot about becoming Champion and using your position to help improve Galar, that you want to inspire people to follow your lead. From what I’ve seen in your matches, and what you’ve helped me to do with getting Frosmoth back, I’m starting to believe you really mean it. Me, on the other hand, I never really gave it much thought about what I would do. I was so set on this journey to become champion, and yet now, I feel like I’m starting to feel that maybe there’s a different way of fulfilling that ideal of making Galar a better place.”

Haleigh straightened up and looked Catherine in the eyes. “I think protecting and caring for Pokemon is what’s really important in my life. Not the fame, not the badges, just that. And well…I don’t know if being a trainer is the way that I can best do that. At the same time though, I don’t want to just give up so close to the finish line. If you were me, if you felt this calling, what would you do?”

“Do what you want,” Catherine said. “I’m not about to complain if more of my competition drops out. But, if it were me, I’d keep going until there wasn’t anything left to gain from the experience. The more information you have the better, right? So if continuing the gym challenge is providing information that will be useful to future endeavors, there’s no reason to stop. Especially since the chances of you accidentally becoming champion are zero with me around. But if it’s not useful, don’t waste your time. So long as whatever you’re doing leaves the world better off in the future than it is now.”

As Haleigh sat there and mulled over Catherine’s words, thoughts of what she did want to do instead of being a Pokemon trainer entered her mind. She had spent so much time in the wilderness of Galar and, despite the dangers, loved the feeling of being part of the natural world. Helping Pokemon was something she was very passionate about, whether it was something as small as tending to an injured Pokemon’s wounds, or as grand as taking down a smuggling operation. She was someone who enjoyed exerting herself and pushing her physical prowess.

To that end, it seemed like a Pokemon Ranger was Haleigh’s calling. It just felt right, given all that Haleigh has been through.

Would continuing on the journey help her with that goal? She had already learned so much, about the world, about herself, about other people. But of course, there was always something new to learn.

Haleigh said, “I think I have my answer. I want to be there at the finish line, to tell myself that I’m not limited in what I can do. Even after all this, whether as the champion, or a Ranger, I’ll keep moving forward, keep growing.”

She smiled warmly. “I really have to thank you, by the way. What you’ve done means the world to me. Not just with helping me get Frosmoth back, but for pushing me and inspiring me to be better when I was still struggling. Maybe you’re surly and blunt, but you got a good heart underneath it.”

She gave a nervous chuckle as she added, “Sorry for getting all sappy there, I just…I don’t know, I feel like I trust you a lot more now.”

“I haven’t done anything special,” Catherine said. “I’m just trying to do the right thing - and I’m trying to give others the chance to do the right thing. I haven’t changed my mind about the world or anything, but people have to have the capacity to do better otherwise there’d be no point to anything I’m doing.”

Haleigh nodded. Same old Catherine. Haleigh wasn’t really sure if she could ever be friends with her in the same way as Mel, Simon, or Achille, but she felt that there was at least a mutual understanding that was a far cry from hostilities that had defined their relationship in the past.

Haleigh smirked and said, “Now that I’ve figured out that I’m not going to drop out and make this easier for you, what’s your plan for the gym? Goin’ to take on Gordie, or Melony?”

“Gordie probably. He’s weak against nearly my entire team and from what I’ve seen doesn’t have any particularly great countermeasures against water-types. If Melony would put me at a theoretical disadvantage I’d consider her instead for the statement but she’s not in a much better position than her son. Probably wouldn’t be worth the small extra effort. You?”

Haleigh shrugged. “Probably Melony, but I know that she’d probably try and wash Corey away with her Lapras. Still, with Electro Ball, some clever strategies, with Reyna as a backup or Coraline to wall her off, I reckon I could work past that.”

“I wouldn’t suggest winging it like that - unless you already have these clever strategies planned out. Her whole team has countermeasures for fire types - some of which cover a wide area. The terrain is going to hinder maneuverability and make your hit-and-run tactics harder - especially when you mostly favour glass canons who aren’t going to appreciate having to constantly shift in and out of battle to avoid getting Perish Songed into oblivion with that jagged battlefield causing problems. Meanwhile her team are going to be used to dealing with that battlefield so it won’t hinder them as much. You should do something about the battlefield and take out her Lapras quickly.”

“Yeah, that’s a good point.” Haleigh grimaced as her head started throbbing again and used her free hand to massage her forehead. “This whole bloody thing’s got me too knackered out to think about it though, and my head’s killin’ me.

Catherine thought for a moment. This could be a good opportunity. She could help someone out, spread a message of cooperation and maybe even keep Stampede focused on what he liked doing so he wouldn’t slip back into his more doubtful mindset he had fallen into. It… wasn’t exactly comfortable territory for her, but she had to be willing to push her boundaries.

“What if you didn’t have to think too hard about it then?”

“Mmm?” Was Catherine really suggesting what Haleigh thought she was suggesting?

“Well… we clearly function fine as a team. We could partner up. I can deal with the battlefield and cover for you. You can do what you do best and run amok.”

She was suggesting that! Though, maybe it wasn’t that much of a surprise in light of everything that had happened. Though Haleigh had dipped her toes in playing around with the environment, there was no doubting Catherine’s prowess when it came to controlling the battlefield. Having that, on her side…

Grinning widely, Haleigh replied, “I reckon we’ve got ourselves a deal then! When do you want to do this?”

“In the morning. No point drawing it out.”