We had to walk along the edge of the forest for what I estimated to be half an hour before we could safely turn and walk into the trees. The police cordon extended far past our turning point, probably wrapping around most of the forest for safety, and making me question its utility if it was too big to be fully watched.

I was immediately reminded of familiar sights once we made it past the forest edge and the city was no longer visible behind us. The woods we were in were strikingly similar to the ones we had strolled through on our trip to the mountain lake where I had met the wild eevee – not too surprising given that, according to Agnes, it was all one giant forest.

The edge of the Gloss Forest itself was remarkably visible, even from within the forest. A line of dirt with consistent width like a hiking track crawled along the trees that came to an abrupt stop in an almost perfect curve. Trees that were part of the Gloss Forest were larger and darker than their counterparts on the other side of the dirt pathway, but the leaves were the same kind, indicating that the trees were of the same species.

After taking me a little deeper into the forest, Agnes stopped.

"I had never realised the trees were different colours," she said. "I've never been here. I don't know what this dirt road is either. Maybe the forest was man-made and it's the marker for where it should end?" She turned to me. "I wonder what you were doing in the Gloss Forest. Do you remember anything?"

I shook my head and took a trembling step towards the dirt. My entire body was still in full alert and my anxiety only grew as I walked closer to the trees. Agnes silently stayed behind me, covering me with all her height.

The dirt had a smell. There was absolutely nothing remarkable about it or about the trees surrounding the edge. It was just a normal forest.

"What are you looking for?" Agnes asked. "I noticed you've been trying to say something about smells. You keep smelling the floor when we mention the crime scene. Have you picked up a scent?"

I shook my head again.

"Then what are you looking for?"

I sat in place, trying to figure out how to communicate the idea to her. For the first time in two months, I missed human speech – being able to just talk to the humans would have made all of this significantly easier.

Short on solutions, I sniffed at the ground again, then vigorously shook my head. Agnes stared at me with a mild frown, visibly confused, and I repeated the gesture before raising my head and closing my eyes.

"Let's get going," she said with a sigh. "We can discuss this again over lunch, okay?"

I couldn't repress an annoyed grunt at how much she failed to understand me, but hopped over to her nonetheless. I had a few hours to figure out what exactly to do. Maybe sitting down and resting would allow us to communicate more easily. At the very least, being away from the creepy dirt road and close to her would help me be less nervous.

Walking by her side instead of behind her was extremely pleasant. She hummed to herself a song that I did not recognise, smiling widely, and occasionally peeking at me to check if I was keeping up or wanted anything. She would stop regularly to pluck a giant berry from the top of a tree that was out of my reach and feed it to me. If my reaction to the fruit was positive, she would pluck a few more of them and store them in a bag she had brought in her backpack. I enjoyed the taste of most of them, but a select few made me retch or cough violently as soon as my tongue came in contact with them, and Agnes hurriedly tossed them to the ground below their trees before kneeling to comfort me.

By the time she decided to halt our march to take some rest, we had collected quite a few of those gigantic berries, making the back of her backpack bulge amusingly. We walked around a little to find a good area to rest in – essentially just looking for a rock or trunk for her to sit on.

"Let's take a break," she said, putting her backpack down as she sat. "I'm hungry and a bit tired. Are you hungry?"

I gave her a shy nod in reply – I wasn't supposed to eat at noon as my meals were only in the morning and evening, and I felt like I was doing something wrong by confessing to being hungry, especially given that I had never asked for food in the past.

She pulled a large pink berry from her bag and handed it to me. Of all the berries she gave me, it was the one I had liked the most. My tails began wagging furiously as she deposited it on a towel she had laid on the ground before me.

"You can eat," she said, pulling a ham sandwich out of her bag. "We're going to need energy for the rest of the day."

She opened the bread and tore some of the ham off, which she handed me with a smile.

I canted my head to the side, staring with confusion at the piece of meat she was holding.

"Eat it," she said. "Mom never allowed you to get any of our food, but I bet it smelled amazing, right? You can have this while she's not watching."

It took her a bit of time to convince me it really was fine for me to eat some of her food from her hand, but I couldn't have been happier when I finally did. After eating it, I grabbed my berry and deposited it in her open hand.

"Sorry, Ruby, I can't eat this. We call them pokemon berries for a reason. They taste horrible for humans. They're toxic for most people, too. I'm not sure I can eat them since I've never had any, so I have to avoid it for now. I promise I'll try every one of them when we're home, okay?"

I nodded for a reply and dropped the berry back on the towel to finish it. How could something this delicious taste horrible for humans? Was it something wrong with their sense of taste? I had noticed that my sense of taste had drastically changed when I turned into a vulpix, but the ham I had just been given tasted similar to what I remembered – and was just as good.

I ate the berry before Agnes finished her sandwich and sat by the towel, quietly observing her, my tails making muffled sounds as they rubbed the dead leaves on the ground with their slow wagging. She would occasionally rip out another tiny piece of her food to give to me, and I would joyfully eat it, careful not to bite the hand that fed me, making her chuckle before she resumed her meal.

I waited until she finished eating and started paying attention to me again to turn my focus to the towel laid before me. Digging back in my memories, I recalled into my mind how the floating pebble felt, reshaping the energy inside of me. The pulsating I had yet to get used to resumed in my eyes, and I opened two holes in front of them from my protective aura to project the new energy onto the towel, my vision turning to a blue hue as I watched a beam of brighter blue shoot towards my target, pushing it and flipping it over telekinetically.

Agnes jolted.

"Ruby, was that you?"

I nodded with enthusiasm, and she became radiant.

"You can use telekinesis? That's amazing! Were you waiting for this trip to show me? When did you learn?"

I wasn't sure how to answer all of her questions at once and slowly shook my head, then barked with joy and pushed the towel further. She picked it up and ruffled the top of my head.

"I'm proud of you, Ruby. That means you can start learning new moves and we'll get a lot stronger in battles."

Proud of me.

My entire being inflated with importance as her words resonated in my head. Before I could drown in the new weight of my fed ego, Agnes had me experiment with my telekinesis to perform various tasks for her, most of which I failed as I didn't have good enough control over the energies yet, but my shortcomings didn't bother me. Just spending time with her, doing things or performing tricks for her, made me happy beyond saying.

After several minutes spent playing with my poor attempts at telekinesis, Agnes threw her backpack over her shoulders again.

"Let's get going," she said. "We still have quite a bit to go. We'll walk slowly for a couple hours, but after that we can pick the pace up and start investigating the forest. Is that okay with you?"

I nodded. I had completely forgotten about the investigation we were supposed to conduct – in my head, all this was just a simple hiking trip with my trainer.

I was abruptly reminded of the danger that lurked in the forest to our side and reflexively stepped away from it to hide behind Agnes' legs.

"What is it, Ruby? Did you notice anything?"

I let out a deep sigh and shook my head.

"Let's go. Bark if you notice anything unusual, okay?"

Progress through the afternoon was slow. Keeping an anxious eye on the forest edge, expecting a pale ghost to irrupt out of it to attack me at any moment, I slowed down my step in order to keep my nose close to the floor and always have the smells of the forest in mind. There weren't any pokemon or animal smells any close to the dirt path – some very faint human ones only, probably policemen – but I was smelling things without trouble. Whatever the absence of smell Ilma and I had noticed was, I couldn't link it to the forest itself. It had to be linked to whatever attacked the fire-type pokemon – and had attacked me. In the back of my head, I remembered Ilma's warning about the smell of rot – the one that Topa had mentioned from the stories she told me. Yet, in spite of all my caution, there was absolutely nothing remarkable about that forest, and we didn't see any floating blue lights.

Agnes was walking right behind me, almost uncomfortably close, and occasionally writing on a notepad she had pulled out of her backpack, keeping a close eye on me as I investigated smells. When she encountered an obstacle, even small enough for her to just step over, she had me push it away with telekinesis, and I was happy to oblige. She was just trying to keep the trip fun even though we were actually working, and I couldn't blame her – I could smell her being tense, hear her heart beating nervously, and see her peek too regularly at the forest.

Part of me was hoping we would see the lights come nightfall because I was curious to know what they really were. Agnes had seen them the night she found me, but was obviously unable to identify them. If they were linked to a pokemon move, I would be able to tell what they really were, but if they weren't, then they were actual ghosts and I would be as lost and scared as she was.

The afternoon passed all too quickly. We had gone deep into the woods, probably close to where we would camp for the night, our investigation and wariness had taken so much of our attention that we were no longer playing with each other through my telekinesis, fully focused on trying to figure out what exactly was going on in the forest. Agnes tried to find some of the blue lights, and I tried to figure out what that dirt road was if it wasn't naturally formed by the passing of pokemon and animals, and why it was so cleanly cut around the forest edge. The coming nightfall had brought the entire forest to a halt as it had become eerily quiet. Still trying to investigate the dirt road, I couldn't smell anything on it anymore – no animals, pokemon, or humans. Not even the smell of dirt and grass.

In fact, I couldn't smell anything at all.

I raised my head, intensely sniffing the air. Nothing. None of my senses seemed to work anymore. The forest was silent like a cemetery.

I turned to Agnes and began barking in mild panic. She reacted immediately, kneeling to my side and trying to comfort me, but I didn't stop trying to warn her, slapping my snout onto the floor then shaking my head with violence.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

Her eyes had widened slightly. She had clearly understood I was scared. In a desperate attempt to make her understand we needed to flee, I grabbed the leg of her pants and tried to pull her away from the forest.

"What did you notice?"

She looked at the trees, and both of us froze.

A smell of rot appeared so strong that we began gagging. With it came something from the trees of the Gloss Forest.

It was a ghost.

Pale and floating towards us slowly, it was made of white skin stretched to the point of tearing over the skeletal structure of a large human hand. Nails replaced with long red claws and muscle visible through wounds in the skin, it was almost as tall as Agnes herself, and although it had no eyes, I could tell that its attention was on us.

Then, a form of energy appeared behind us that I didn't recognise, dangerously similar to what I had felt from Pride or from Topa's Will-O-Wisp move.

I turned to the ghost and began growling, but Agnes shrieked. Trying to keep track of the hand's position, I turned again to look at her. Her whole body shivering, she was stuck in place like somebody had taken a picture of her as she was stepping back, foreign saliva dripping from her forehead. There was a black figure as big as the hand floating before her.

A haunter.

I reflexively threw an Ember towards it. The surprise attack made it whimper and vanish, but more of the unknown energy appeared behind me. I jolted forward, dodging, and turned. There was another haunter behind me, and that one was looking for a fight.

"Ruby," Agnes said.

Her speech was slow and groaning. She was fighting the paralysis to talk to me.

"Stay behind me. Don't run."

Another voice came from the forest. A male, human one. "You can't escape."

My heart racing, I quietly obeyed my trainer, stepping towards her to hide behind her legs. Above me was her belt and the distress beacon the commissioner had given her.

"What do we do?" another voice asked. "This one has its trainer with it."

I focused on my eyes again, like I had done before with the towel.

"She's paralysed with Lick. She's not going anywhere."

Psychic power escaped through holes I made in my protective aura, and I pushed it into the large red button of the device.

"She's seen the haunters."

I threw an Ember towards the voices. Somebody cried out in pain, and the two haunter that surrounded me were staying in place. A string of expletives came from the forest, and the two men finally showed themselves.

They wore white robes and black masks that hid their faces. The smell of rot became stronger as they stepped towards us, to the point of masking their personal scents. Around us, everything was still silent. The energies I felt were coming from the two haunters I could see. As I focused on them to keep track of their positions should the pokemon turn invisible, I realised that the white hand was glowing with a similar energy, but muffled like a lamp shining through a cloth.

I shot another Ember in its direction, and it yelped as it got hit.

"Grab the vulpix!"

The two haunter then rushed in my direction.

One on the snout, one at the tip of the tails, one on each of the paws, and one at the centre of the back.

I opened my aura up as Topa had instructed me and poured as much power through it as I could. Before my opponents could reach me, my entire body became covered in Unfire. They stopped when they saw I had become one giant torch of power.

"Go in!" Agnes grunted.

Picking the haunter that was closest to me, I jumped as high as I could, throwing myself into it. It emitted another loud whine as we collided, and I continued forward as it was tossed aside.

"Ember!"

As soon as I fell back to the floor, I turned around and shot a fireball. The haunter was still trying to recover from my first attack when my Ember hit it in the back.

"Use Mean Look!"

The second haunter stared at me, its eyes enlarging and turning to a light purple shade similar to that of my telekinesis. They became so big that the entire forest became encompassed in them. When they vanished, I found myself unable to look away from the haunter.

"Got her."

"Ruby, jump!"

I jumped, and a ball of a now familiar energy flew below me. Shadow Ball. The energy I had been feeling was that of Ghost-type pokemon.

"To the side!" Agnes shouted.

I rolled, and the haunter my eyes were locked on harmlessly charged through my previous position. As soon as it turned around to face me again, my entire body turned on its own to face it in return, and I threw an Ember that hit it straight-on.

"Shut up," one of the men said.

He broke out of the cover of the trees to run behind Agnes and put a hand on her mouth, muffling her orders.

I managed to hit the haunter that had me locked on it another time, but a Shadow Ball coming from behind me toppled me forward. Groaning in pain, I stood once more, facing my opponent, and gasped in horror.

The white hand had moved from its position and was now facing Agnes. Capitalising on my hesitation, the first man ran to me and pulled me off the floor. Struggling with as much intensity as I could, I tried biting and scratching, but a muzzle was slammed onto me and I was rendered powerless.

"Why don't we just kill this one?" the man holding me said.

"Look at her belly. She's the survivor."

There was a short silence. The haunter my eyes were riveted on had moved over to Agnes, who was silently groaning, trying to fight the paralysis she had been victim of.

"Take her back to the lab. She will be useful for the experiments."

"What about the trainer?"

"We don't have a choice, do we?"

The man holding Agnes shook his head and let her go.

"I know what you're doing," she growled, panting. "That white hand is another haunter. Let my pokemon go."

"Not a possibility," the man behind me said. "Haunter."

The white hand disappeared, replaced by another pokemon – Agnes had guessed right. All the stories were wrong. The ghosts of the forest were just pokemon.

"Use Shadow Claw."

A powerful roar escaped me as I began struggling again. I didn't bother opening my aura this time. It was real fire that I ordered to cover my body.

The haunter that had disguised itself floated close to Agnes, levelling itself with her stomach as she impotently fought the paralysis. Its hands were coated in a dark purple aura. The energy that came from them wasn't an unpower.

"She's using real fire!" the man holding me shouted.

Heat had started emanating from me. The fire was only covering my legs, but it was enough to make the man grunt. Fighting with desperation, I pushed more of it onto my body.

The other man walked from Agnes with a rock in his hand. He barked an order to his haunter, who slashed her stomach.

I was knocked unconscious as she collapsed.