A note: Happy New Year? I know it's been like 5 years but I've gotten a degree and a job and stuff in the interim, so that's cool. I want to make a concerted effort to keep doing creative pursuits in my life, and this chapter has been sitting on my hard drive waiting to be finished since early 2016 so it seemed like a good place to start. Hope you enjoy!

Chapter 11

Growth Experiences

"Maybe I don't want a Happy New Year, he said. Maybe I want an intense New Year with a lot of growth experiences

& I had to admit I'd never thought of that"

"If we weren't hiding from the police right now, I would so want to go get the police right now." Zap had eventually decided that walking in the dark with nothing but a Charizard's tail flame was for humans and unfortunate Pokémon who didn't know Flash; her fur bristled with a gentle but radiant light. The bits of corridor the three Pokémon could see at any given time were sterile and blank, maze-like.

The sound of Kindle's claws striking the linoleum with every echoing step was uncomfortably loud in the quiet dark of the laboratory. The Charizard flinched with every step and tried to walk more gingerly, but all that accomplished was allowing Gale to take point in their formation. "Talking about it's not going to make it any less creepy," he replied finally, terse, scanning the hall as he walked.

Zap, walking just behind Gale, doubled back to grab Kindle's dangling hand and climb up to perch on his shoulder. "Seriously, all we need is some writing in blood on these unnervingly pristine white walls," she whispered into his ear.

A full-body shudder ran down Kindle, nearly dislodging his passenger. "Would you stop that?" He squinted at her through the brightness of her Flash.

"The walls will be a little bloodier in a minute," Gale hissed irritably, turning about abruptly and halting their progress, "if you two do not shut up."

The threat knocked Kindle and Zap into several minutes of silence, even after they started forward again. The monochrome halls stretched before them – left turn, right turn, left, straight, left, ignoring the doors staggered every so often along the way with numeric panels and labels like "DANGER: RADIOLOGY TESTING" and sometimes simply a skull and crossbones, which got the point across just fine – following Zap's nose toward what she swore was the focal point of human scent in the laboratory. Barring there actually being blood on the walls somewhere, that would be where they would find Bill.

The Pokémon turned yet another corner and the first flash of color took them all by surprise. A threatening hiss escaped Gale, and it wasn't until the color disappeared and then reappeared that the Dragonair was able to control herself. It was a red light, intermittently flashing through a cracked door, this one with no warning signs at all. Zap gestured for the other two to stay back and dimmed her Flash, then allowed herself one more apprehensive pause before creeping forward on all fours and peeking in.

"By lightning…" she breathed, her tail springing up to arch over her back in shock. "No, stay!" she ordered when Kindle took a heavy step forward with half a mind to defend her from whatever was in the room. "Stay a minute. I'll call you in."

She slipped through the door and left Kindle standing at Gale's side, feeling the most peculiar need to make small talk in the shadowed hallway of a mad scientist's lab. Thankfully, Zap's uncharacteristically quiet voice instructing them to enter the ominous red room saved him from that particular ill-advised interaction. It did directly result in him shouldering his way into the small room and getting an uncomfortably close up view of his own face, however, so he would call it a mixed blessing overall.

The wall opposite the door was comprised of a great hulking computer monitor displaying a dizzying array of information and images, including persistent warnings via text boxes and video footage of the three of them. The whole screen pulsed red steadily like a heartbeat, the cause of the ominous light that drew them in. "What in the world is this?" Kindle gasped.

"Cameras, lots of them, and a good security system," Zap replied shortly from where she sat looking distinctly uncomfortable atop a low pile of dark metal tubes. "We were busted from the moment we landed here."

Gale kept her body coiled tightly and gave off the impression of a spring about to snap even as she navigated the room. One image drew her attention and made her breath stutter: Mirage and little Enya, outside, oblivious. Kindle followed her gaze and his heart skipped a beat. "With such stellar security, why were we not accosted?" the Dragonair asked, swinging around to face Zap like she had something to do with it.

"I'd wager it has something to do with how it looks like an Onix danced a ballet through here."

Zap was exaggerating, as always, but now that she mentioned it Kindle was able to take in more of the room than the arresting images on the monitor. Machinery lined the other walls, and there were more desks and chairs than strictly necessary for the one-man show Bill's laboratory was. Nearly all of it, including heavy metal equipment, was upended, like someone rather large had been looking for something rather small and didn't much care how much destruction they caused in the process. There were scorch marks on the walls and the furniture, but no lingering scent of burning. Glancing down at the cracked tile below his feet, the Charizard winced and sincerely hoped that none of the papers he had stepped on without noticing were too important. Perhaps Bill would let it slide this once. Perhaps Kindle could convince him it was Gale's fault.

As for the Dragonair herself, she had flown up to the ceiling and was investigating a hole blasted in the tiles, which did explain the debris on the floor. It was large enough to fit two Kindles through at once, and he was no small Charizard; whoever made that particular mess was either powerful or large or both (or melodramatic, Kindle found himself thinking somewhat hysterically). Zap hadn't moved so much as an ear.

He squinted suspiciously at her. She was too still, too quiet. "What are we missing? I know you want to tell me."

"Then how will you learn?" She rapped her knuckles gingerly against the metal cylinder directly beneath her, flinching only a little at the reverberating clang she created. Gale hissed and flew higher, which as far as survival instincts go wasn't a bad one.

Kindle tamped down his own desire to fly away and spared two seconds to wish for a Full Heal to help the headache he could feel coming on. "What are those?"

"Oh, these?" Zap stood and let her Flash build up again, revealing a label on the top canister with tiny print and yet more skulls and crossbones. "These are just gas tanks filled with some sort of neurotoxin." Kindle's wings flared involuntarily, and the Raichu leveled an unimpressed look at him before continuing, "Probably not deadly, just enough to knock somebody out given that Bill is unlikely to actually try to murder anyone, but then I'm no chemist."

"Should we be, I don't know, not breathing? Running away? At the very least, not sitting on it?" While Kindle could appreciate Bill's dedication to proper chemical labeling, the recurring skull and crossbones motif was hardly good for a Charizard's heart.

Zap reclined smugly across the metal tubes, though Kindle noticed she remained tense, ready to jump off at a moment's notice. "That's the other part you missed. These babies aren't worth anything unless they're hooked up to a dispersal system like the one over there." Gale hesitantly sank back down from the hole in the ceiling, hovering before the large monitor. Her shadow cast across the room, leaving Zap's Flash to filter through the shadows like static interwoven with the pulsing red of the alarm.

Kindle reached deep, deep down and managed to locate his remaining stores of optimism. "So what you're saying is we're safe. Tell me we're safe."

"Let's put it this way: there's enough evidence of our unwelcome that if we're safe it's not from lack of trying to hurt us."

It was difficult to give the Raichu the human middle finger when his hands only had three clunky claws, but Kindle did his best. Optimism gone to waste yet again. Zap chittered in a scandalized manner and returned the gesture with significantly more dexterity. "Something's happened to Bill. We need to find out who did it and figure out what to do." Smugger than ever, she hopped off of the tanks to stick a landing on the narrow edge of an overturned desk. "They're probably long gone by now."

"I would not be so sure," Gale hissed, furious and vicious and loud, slicing with a vengeance into the other conversation. She was a sinuous mass of coils backlit by the computer screen, knotting herself up even as she thrashed loose. Her tail rapped sharply against one particular window of video feed; it demolished the pixels and left a discolored mark on the screen like a bruise. "I have found Bill."

From their vantage point on the ground, neither Kindle nor Zap could see the video on which she'd fixated, and the Raichu's Flash fizzled to a distracted halt. "Alone?"

"He is with the attacker, obviously."

"And we know who it is, don't we." All of Kindle's optimism stores were plumbed dry.

"We? Speak for yourself. It's your favorite Dragonite."

"Tempest." For once, Kindle resisted the urge to rage against the team's unending joke about the Pokémon who gave him the scar on his wing. He settled instead on a nice swearword he had been saving for a special occasion.

They could say what they would about Bill's obsession with technology ("I think the man's first language was binary," were Enya's exact words when they first met the scientist), but at least all of his software was user-friendly. Indeed, so much so that three stressed-out Pokémon with minimal exposure to computers could figure out where a certain video feed was coming from after some trial and error.

Okay, a lot of trial and error. Zap had to be forcibly restrained from shocking the CPU twice, and Gale had no fingers and less skill in describing what she thought Kindle ought to click on next, but when telling this story later all three would somehow leave that part out.

They found Bill tied to a rolling desk chair in the middle of a space that was more clutter than room. Peering through the gap in a dented metal door left slightly ajar, they were able to make out strange rows of blinking machinery and hissing copper pipes, endless filing cabinets and bookshelves haphazardly stuffed full of similarly endless paperwork and patent certificates; a few bare bulbs illuminated the area with harsh light. The room was carpeted with a ratty green runner, which was the strangest part to Kindle as it went against the obvious trend of Bill's aesthetic, but it was possible he was focusing on minute details in an effort to keep his cool. Who could blame him (except Gale because of course she would) – he was hard-pressed not to give in to a little fire rage at the very sight of the massive figure looming over Bill.

To Kindle's memory, the scientist wasn't a little guy; sure, he was rangy, but he was taller than the Charizard himself and had a personality loud enough to fill the entire lab. To see him now – slumped, unconscious, with that brilliant mind shut off – he seemed unbearably small. The scientist's protective lab attire hid any injuries on most of his body, but even from a distance one couldn't miss the scalp wound bleeding sluggishly down the side of his face and matting his carefully curated beard. Kindle's patience for reconnaissance running dangerously thin, he motioned for his companions to stay low and muscled the door open. He was able to take one impulsive step forward before the Pokémon standing guard took notice.

"Kindle!" The fearsome Dragonite tittered with delight, dropping the paperweight she had been examining. She failed to notice a small rodent and a serpent slip into the room behind the Charizard's bulk and ever so gently shut the door behind themselves.

"Tempest," the fire Pokémon in question ground out between clenched teeth.

"Oh my twisters, it's been so long! I saw a television report that you were living with the wild Charizard on Cinnabar Island!" Tempest was only average-sized by Dragonite standards, but she still made any room she entered feel cramped, and her hands dwarfed Kindle's when she reached out and grabbed them. She effortlessly held on as he tried to regain his aloof distance; he wasn't even sure she noticed his attempts. "How's your wing? I feel so bad about that still. I have not miscalculated a Hyper Beam like that in years."

"It's fine." Kindle managed to snatch his hands away and flattened his wings to his back. A faint snicker reached the Charizard's ear slits only to be willfully ignored. "Stop bringing it up every time you see me."

Tempest's eyes, large and sad, actually teared up. "I'm just so sorry," she fretted.

(Low voices whispered to one another under the hiss of leaking steam and the buzz of a light bulb about to blow: "What in lightning? She has tear ducts? I thought you guys were reptiles!"

"No, it is weird, but we have them. I am simply not a feeler of things and so you have not seen me cry.")

Kindle did his level best to ignore his teammates who apparently didn't understand the importance of silence on stealth missions and focused his irritation on the easy target in front of him. "Hey, since you feel so bad, I've got some questions. What are you doing here?"

One pearlescent claw gestured vaguely to Bill. "Master Lance has been devoting his time to some special projects for the Pokémon League ever since he had to cede the Championship," explained Tempest with the air of someone who knows she's been sent into a situation without the full picture but doesn't quite care enough to find out why. "Since your Enya disappeared," she continued conversationally, crossing her arms and leaning one hip on a tan file cabinet that immediately began to buckle, "the title went back to this touchy young man named Caspian. The kid's a bit intense for me; wouldn't want to be on his team."

Kindle forced himself to stay relaxed and wrested his flaring tail flame under control. "Please concentrate. Why have you kidnapped the nice scientist, Tempest?"

"Official Pokémon League business, apparently." The shrug was audible in her voice, but she went ahead and did it with her body just to be clear. The cabinet groaned under the shift of her weight. "They got me to blast some holes into some walls and overturn a little bit of furniture." For a seven and a half foot tall dragon-type voted Most Eager To Battle by the Kanto region's premiere tabloid, she didn't really seem too enthusiastic about the whole thing. "Hey, is it getting kind of dim in here?"

Kindle was ready to rip her antennae out. "Come on, focus! You've tied a man to a chair. A swivel chair. With computer cables. What part of that says official business to you?"

"The part where Master Lance asked me to do it! Besides, Master Lance did all of the tying; I don't have the dexterity for it, you know?" Tempest straightened and gave a conspiratorial punch to the Charizard's shoulder at a speed that belied her size. "Of course you know!"

"Stop bonding with me," Kindle rubbed his shoulder and eyed the Dragonite warily, but she was distracted by giving a chuckle at the state of the warped filing cabinet she'd left behind. "Where is Master Lance, by the way?"

"Oh, he'll be back any minute now, if you want to say hi. I think he went to make a call. Signal is terrible down here for some reason!"

Kindle was so tempted to believe that she was messing with him – any member of his team, up to and including the stoic Mirage, absolutely would be doing so by this point – but against his wishes and better judgment he had spent a fair amount of time with her immediately after Enya had won the Championship. The Dragonite was a genuinely terrible bluffer, and it would take more artifice than she could muster to fake the sincerity of her body language. He sighed and applied one careful fingertip to his temple. "That reason would be that Bill is a paranoid man who's not always incorrect in assuming people are out to get him. And also I'll be rescuing him now before your trainer comes back."

"What?" A calculating look crossed Tempest's face for the first time. She brought a hand up to Kindle's chest, bodily blocking his path to her captive. "Wait, what are you doing here? It's weird that you'd show up here without a reason. It's weird, right?"

A quick and powerful wing flap vaulted Kindle over Tempest's shoulder before she could grab at him again. "Don't worry about it. Gonna leave now." He began tearing through the wires holding Bill captive with clumsy fingers, slicing through the cushion in his haste.

"I'm sorry, but I really don't think I can let you do that." A massive hand clamped onto Kindle's shoulder – the same one that Tempest had punched earlier, in case anyone cared to throw some sympathy his way – and whipped him around, away from Bill. He slammed into the damaged filing cabinet and it finally collapsed, breaking a pipe that began to vent its steam inches from his face and sent unease trickling down his spine. The heat didn't bother him, of course, but rather than dissipating as usual the vapor ascended in a winding stream to the ceiling like a twister. Kindle rolled to his feet and allowed a growl to build in his chest.

"Don't worry, you won't have to let me. I've been planning on doing it by force this whole time anyway." Without his notice or intent, his chest began to glow like a coal as he focused on drawing attention to himself, away from the broken pipe. Zap would do some research later on the Pokédex and learn that this was a display meant to show off how intense a Charizard's inner fire was, usually for the purpose of attracting a mate. It would take years for the ribbing to die down. "Non-violence was Plan B."

Tempest's eyes lit up, her sense of self much more secure now that she understood a battle was imminent. "Oh, okay! I haven't had a good scuffle in a while; this should be fun!" She widened her stance in front of Bill and cracked her neck.

"Scuffle may be the wrong word," Kindle warned, distracted from making himself an easy and tempting target by some remaining sense of fair play.

The ceiling gave one rumbling boom and that was all the further warning Tempest got before a complex series of forked lightning bolts struck her down. She fell to the floor to reveal Zap perched on the arm of Bill's swivel chair, the wires tying him down neatly chewed through and discarded. Gale descended from within a layer of dark roiling clouds that enveloped the ceiling, electricity still sparking between her and the condensing vapor.

"You call that the element of surprise, Scarizard? I barely had time to get the steam charged," Zap complained. Her fur stood up on end and crackled as Gale began to dissipate the storm system above them.

"Well, sorry!" Kindle snapped back, nudging her out of the way and hefting Bill up into his arms. "You try making small talk with your bitterest rival and see how long you last!" He gestured to Tempest's body and made a questioning noise.

Zap hopped onto the Dragonite's chest, her weight barely making an impression in the scales. "Small talk? You insulted her trainer and accused her of kidnapping! Heartbeat's steady, by the way, she's fine."

"I'll admit the scenario played out differently in my head," Kindle sighed, stepping over the two of them to head for the door. "I was much sneakier and less outraged. Gale didn't slap me on the back of the head in that one."

"I have not done so yet." With the remaining static electricity collected in a halo around her tail, the Dragonair looked like the was considering it just on principle.

Kindle turned to keep a baleful eye on Gale trailing him as he walked, keeping Bill cradled protectively to his chest. "There's still time."

"Your faith is touching." She watched, impassive, as in his distraction the Charizard ran his knee directly into a squat black electronic server and disconnected it from the wall.

Zap darted under Kindle as he hopped from one foot to the other and muffled grunts of pain, reaching the door first and pressing her left ear to the cool metal surface. "Can we please go before our stroke of good luck backfires in some horrible fashion?" she demanded even as she rolled her eyes at the sight of Kindle struggling to hold onto Bill while trying to right the server and rub his knee. "I think we're okay to make a break for it if -" She cut herself off, eyes flying open wide in a panic, and flattened her back to the door like her body would really be that much of a deterrent to someone else coming in. "Too late. Lightning, I should really learn to keep my mouth shut. Incoming Lance. I can't believe he's still wearing those tacky shoes." Lance was the owner of a pair of equally expensive and unfashionable Arbok-skin boots with steel on the toes which he wore with great pride; they made his footsteps unmistakable.

Kindle realized that he really should have saved his special swearword for this moment, but what was done was done and escaping was more important than regrets. He scanned the room as if a new way out would simply appear by magic if he searched for one frantically enough, but when that plan fell through he looked up.

"Gale, can you Horn Drill through the roof as an escape route?"

She was up there in a heartbeat, tapping the beige ceiling tile with her horn experimentally. "Do you know how much effort it takes to collect all of the vapor in a room and turn it into a thunderstorm in silence? All you did was stand there and talk." A white light began to build at the base of her horn, wrapping around her temples and unfurling in tendrils through the remnants of her storm clouds.

"I got information from her!" Even Kindle could hear the click-thump of Lance's footfalls approaching the door now. He abandoned any attempts at subtlety, reared back, and kicked a heavy bookcase in front of the door as Zap made way.

"Oh, yeah!" the Raichu hissed scathingly as she scurried up the shelves to perch at the top with one ear plastered to the crack at the doorframe. "Super vague information, my favorite! Shh!"

"You're the one -"

"Shh!"

The footsteps stopped right outside the door. If there was any lingering doubt that they belonged to Lance, it disappeared as soon as his voice – gruff with a heavy lean into the vowels – called out, "Come on, Dragonite! I told ya to keep the door cracked, now I gotta find the…" The voice trailed off to be replaced by the sound of crinkling paper. "Goddamn…cryptic scientists…don't gotta have a different code for every goddamn room." A sequence of beeps began and Kindle turned a desperate eye to the Dragonair above.

Gale was resplendent, her body a spear of light as she delicately touched the tip of her horn to the ceiling, all laser-sharp focus as she fought to remain in control of her powerful percussive attack. A tiny wave of force pulsed from that point of contact, pressing a divot into the tile; a small shower of dust wafted downward. Eyes squeezed shut, she gave another pulse, breaking through the tile into the vent space above. She grit her teeth and the wild tendrils of light still whipping around her face thrashed, but her next pulse bore her exactingly upward until she could see a pinpoint of daylight, no noise marking her progress but the soft patter of debris to the carpet and the continued electronic beeping at the door.

At this point, Kindle let himself hope that maybe Bill's extreme paranoia and absurdly long door entry codes would save the day, which is probably why several unfortunate things happened at once.

One, Lance made a pleased noise and there was the distinct chunk of a lock disengaging. The handle jiggled as Lance tried to push the door open – the bookcase with Kindle's full weight pressed against it held, but the Dragon Master had a functioning sense of suspicion and immediately began to bellow for his Dragonite. She, of course, did not answer.

Two, Gale's Horn Drill sliced through a maze of wires installed just below the outside roof, placed there to deter thieves and saboteurs who might try that as a point of entry. Once again, Bill's definition of deter differed rather significantly from a lay-person's, in that Bill considered two ounces of plastic explosive per square foot of ceiling to be a reasonable deterrent.

Three, Bill began to stir.

At this point, things began to happen very quickly indeed. Lance kept shouting for his Dragonite, and by the time he thought to release his two Dragonair to force down the door, Kindle had grabbed Zap by the tail and abandoned his post in front of the bookcase. The Dragon Master – tacky shoes, excessively styled hair, red and black jumpsuit, full length cape and all – burst into the room at last to see his own prized Dragonite out cold on the floor and the former Pokémon League Champion's iconic Charizard in the middle of the room, looking rather caught out under a conspicuous gaping hole in the ceiling. A familiar Raichu, tail caught in the Charizard's fist, was sparking furiously and chewing on his knuckles, and a bloodied world-renowned Pokémon researcher was draped, woozily protesting, over his orange shoulder. Above, the missing Champion's Dragonair plummeted out of the hole in the ceiling and curled into a protective ball even as an uncontrolled wave of light burst from her horn and crumbled every metal object in the room, including the toes of Lance's favorite boots.

He staggered back in pain, mouth agape as with a deafening roar fire erupted from the ceiling. He waited in agony for heat, for burning, but in front of his panicked eyes the explosion slammed into a shimmering blue barrier which caught the roiling flames and collapsing ceiling wreckage, setting it neatly down along the edges of the room as the inferno lost momentum. With a quick compression of the barrier, the fire was snuffed out, leaving behind gently smoking objects rendered unrecognizable by a thick layer of soot. The scent of scorched technology and the acrid sulfur from the explosives were overwhelming.

There was a beat in which no one did anything, caught up in their own heavy breaths and the ringing in their ears, mortal panic still ricocheting through their chests. The moment was broken by Bill, who slapped an uncoordinated open palm against Kindle's shoulder blade and screeched, "Will you people stop destroying my lab?"

In the next moment, Kindle chucked Zap upward to latch onto Gale's coils and slung Bill around into a secure cradle hold; the Dragonair took it as her cue to make her hasty exit through the ruined ceiling, speeding past Mirage who hovered just within the blackened remains of the roof looking enormously pleased with herself. Kindle got as far as flapping his wings twice to follow before being set upon by Bill's twin Dragonair.

"Come on, guys! Two on one, seriously?"

"Sorry, dude!" Storm – or maybe it was Squall – said, wrapping himself around his feet.

"Besides, you got two on your side, too. Get in here, Mirage!" Squall – though it might well have been Storm – said encouragingly. He swooped around above them, generating a severe downward draft that made Kindle's wings snap flat to his back out of self-preservation. "Maybe this is the future! Double battles!"

"Don't be ridiculous," Kindle grunted, trying to keep his grip on Bill tight without accidentally squishing the man; the scientist stared upward with wide, terrified eyes that refused to close against the wind. "Like that would happen. Though actually, Mirage, any help?" A wall of psychic force flickered into being and slammed the flying Dragonair into a sooty wall, pinning him there as he writhed like a Weedle caught in a Pidgeot's beak. The air immediately stilled. "Thanks!"

Lance was coaxing a Max Revive down his Dragonite's throat when he became utterly distracted by the entrance of the creature who must have been behind the barrier that saved them all. She descended from the hole in the ceiling (though truth be told, the ceiling was more hole than not anymore), both hands occupied with directing the blue psychic attack which pinned down one of his own Dragonair. He recognized instantly the missing Champion's Kadabra, never evolved because the girl couldn't bear to part with her, wearing a ratty backpack and a peculiar sash across her chest.

The Pokémon League was going to have a field day with this: all they needed now was her Gyarados and Aerodactyl and the entire team of missing Pokémon would be accounted for, though the absence of the Champion herself was troubling. He was going to have to try to capture as much of her team as he could – the Pokémon were all clearly dangerous, even outside of whatever they were doing with Bill, and would be better off in a Pokéball until this whole mess got sorted out.

First things first. His Dragonite slowly blinked open her eyes, shaking her head in confusion and clearly not getting any useful information from her surroundings, which made sense as the last time she saw this room it did not look nearly as much like a crime scene as it did now. He tapped her cheek. "All you need to know is that we need to take in those Pokémon. The Charizard first, since Dragonair's got his feet already." Indeed, burdened as he was with a human who occupied his arms and precluded his fire attacks, the poor creature's attempts to free himself were hardly successful against a thirteen foot long serpent wrapped around him up to his stomach. "Hyper Beam. Miss the good doctor if you can."

The confusion fled from Tempest; she knew Hyper Beams, even if her track record with this particular Charizard might suggest otherwise. She could hit him and spare the human even while crouched over and still experiencing phantom spikes of electricity in her chest. This she could do. She aimed.

The sling on the Kadabra's chest twitched, and the psychic-type didn't even notice with all of her focus still on Squall. In fact, the Eevee inside the sling managed to wiggle out of it and land with moderate grace on the carpet before anyone, much less Tempest, registered her presence, and by then it was too late to stop the massive bolt of plasma being loosed from Tempest's jaws, barreling toward her target. But a child on the field of battle is enough to ruin anyone's careful aim – hopefully Storm would forgive her after he got healed up, but in the meantime he was definitely about to eat a Hyper Beam. She could only hope it would miss the kit.

Enya, for her part, didn't really have a plan. She just needed to contribute somehow, and only got so far as thinking maybe she could distract the other Dragonair long enough for Father to escape before she was squirming her way out of the sling. She landed on all fours – thank you for the jumping lessons, Aunt Zap – and took off running toward Father's attacker across a rough green surface that must have been grass but felt so odd beneath her paws.

She cleared the Dragonair's lowest curves and sank her teeth into his tail tip just in time to flick one ear in the direction of a piercing noise that grew exponentially louder in a split second; harsh yellow light subsumed her vision and an overwhelming force like a herd of Tauros blasted her off her paws. She tumbled ears over tail and hit a hard surface with a resonant clang. The Dragonair's long body followed immediately after, made a significantly louder crash, and buried her in his coils.

Kindle had just a moment to be grateful that Tempest sucked so very badly at her job that she'd hit Storm or Squall or whoever had been pinioning him while only grazing his legs. Then Mirage gasped "Enya!" and Tempest screamed, and his moment turned into horror at the sight of a limp brown and white tail draped between two loops of the downed Dragonair's body. They were piled up in a charred heap by a crumpled filing cabinet.

The tail twitched.

The tail twitched and then was pulled painstakingly into the heap of unconscious Dragonair scales before Enya was able to get turned around and nudge her little head out into the room, looking bloody and battered and dazed but very much still conscious. Kindle had time either to have a series of breakdowns about the impossibility of Enya enduring such an attack when it handily took out a full grown Dragonair, or to grab her by the scruff and drop her unceremoniously in Bill's lap as he flew away from the scene. Though both options were tempting, never let it be said Kindle wasn't pragmatic – he mentally penciled in his breakdown for later that day and took the latter option, collecting Mirage in his wake as he fled after Gale and Zap. The Dragonair that Mirage had pinned to the wall fell like a length of rope to the floor as she moved out of range and let her force field dissipate.

Lance and his Pokémon were left to sit in the charred remains of Bill's lab with the stunned silence and disbelief of people who weren't quite sure when they had lost the upper hand but definitely did. The Dragon Master ran shaky hands through his hair before he remember how much product was in it and swore to himself. Then he tried to stand and swore again, this time to the whole room, as the crushed steel tips of his Arbok-skin boots dug into his feet and reminded him about a few toes that may or may not be broken. The swearing did not stop as he wrenched the shoes off his feet and flexed his abused toes inside his novelty Dratini socks. His mom had given those to him for his birthday and now they had blood stains. Great.

The swearing did peter out as he pulled Pokéballs off of his belt and returned his Dragonair to them. He levered himself upright with help from Dragonite's shoulder – she blinked up at him before returning to staring into the middle distance. Then, he began to laugh, hair in disarray and socked feet unsteady on singed green carpet, and kept chuckling as he pulled a thick plastic cell phone from his pocket and dialed a long number from memory. The laughter cut off immediately when someone picked up, congealing into a borderline hysteric intensity in his voice.

"Arthur, I found what we're looking for! An actual sighting!" He peered into the clear blue sky through the broken rafters. "No, they're long gone…I would have, obviously, but I didn't have the chance…Bill's lab has taken some property damage, by the way – I'll make sure his insurance company only finds evidence of self-sabotage. There may or may not have been a Hyper Beam in here, but that was only after Bill's own goddamn ceiling exploded, and that's on him." His feet shuffled like they wanted to pace, and his free hand returned to his hair to mindlessly snarl in clumps of red spikes.

"Listen, Lyle's team was here, I saw almost all of them, and they just took Bill, all right? We need to track them. The doctor's still got information I want, but the mission has new parameters with this sighting. This is the closest we've even gotten! I know it's dangerous." He gingerly slung a leg over Dragonite's back, careful of his toes and a new electricity burn between her shoulders, and directed her attention to the open sky. Her wings flared obediently. "Hmm? Oh, an Eevee. Yes, seriously!"