A swarm of Volbeats is impressive.
The sky over Greenlight City was an entire ocean of them—more numerous than the stars, and somehow kinder.
I… Kadabra stared at Akiyama, and next to him the green ocean overhead went dim.
When Kadabra didn't finish the thought, Akiyama just smiled and turned his eyes back up.
And promptly lost himself in it.
Butterfree crossed the sky in drifts, catching the falling motes of light.
"There's a Scizor."
A streak of red went past with more than a dozen Scyther trailing behind it.
"Scizor! I challenge you!" Somewhere below, a Trainer who'd clearly come a long way for this called it up at the swarm, Pokémon already out.
Scizor pulled the whole formation to a halt, looked down at the Trainer on the ground, and descended, slowly.
It was one of Greenlight City's unwritten rules. Pokémon like Scizor and Scyther wanted to fight. Beat one and it was yours to take.
Scizor, though, clearly didn't rate this challenger. It flicked a look over its shoulder, and one Scyther stepped out of the ranks in its place.
The Trainer's face went sour, and the battle started anyway.
Far off, Nanami glanced over. Then her eyes closed again.
Akiyama stopped paying attention too, and looked up with his Pokémon.
The sky over Greenlight City had become an ink painting that moved. The scenery shifted, and then the style shifted—now and then something up there looked like a warped patch of starfield.
It pulled you in whether you wanted it to or not.
At some point the battle ended. The Scyther swarm hadn't lost a single member. The loser was down in the grass licking his Pokémon's wounds.
The night wore on toward its deepest hour, and when the sea of light was at its thickest, the aurora came—as if someone had dragged one fat brush loaded with a color no one had a word for straight across the sky, leaving a green streak that swayed.
"Gorgeous."
"Garde…"
Kadabra…
It took something genuinely strange to break the spell.
"Mew? No—that's not right."
Akiyama frowned up at the little Pokémon dancing through the air. It passed over the heads of Trainers and Pokémon alike, and behind it, wherever it went, a translucent green fruit appeared.
But the Trainers weren't reacting. Not one of them so much as looked up at it.
"Can you two see that Pokémon?" He pointed.
There's nothing there, Kadabra said.
"Garde!"
Gardevoir could see it.
"Weird. Why just us?" No answer came to him.
It reached them soon enough, and up close Akiyama could see how insubstantial this Mew was. More like a shadow of one.
But when it saw them, something quickened in its eyes.
A moment later a thread of energy, blue and violet braided together, lifted out of Akiyama and out of Gardevoir.
Whatever the shadow of Mew saw in that, it liked it. Pure delight came rolling off it toward them.
The two threads faded, and two fruits dropped into their hands—noticeably bigger than the others.
Mew left a small one with Kadabra and floated off to grace somebody else.
Akiyama turned his over and compared it against Kadabra's.
Not just a size larger. The lights suspended inside his weren't all green.
They were green, blue, and violet.
"So can we eat these?" he wondered aloud, and then ate his.
It melted the instant it touched his tongue, and warmth spread down his throat and out into every part of him.
It feels like something's being incubated in there. His head felt clearer, lighter, more responsive.
He shut his eyes to feel it out properly, and saw Gardevoir's mental landscape.
And Kadabra's.
That was new. He'd never looked at Kadabra before.
In a pitch-black world, a pair of enormous purple hands hung open. Across the ten fingers, moves cycled endlessly, flickering through the colors of every type there was.
There might not be another Kadabra like him anywhere on the planet.
Akiyama opened his eyes.
Before tonight he'd needed physical contact to see any of that. He'd just done it from across the grass, from nothing.
The fruit had upgraded his gift.
"It's safe," he said.
Only then did Gardevoir let her guard down and put hers in her mouth.
It didn't take long before she felt something shift inside her.
Akiyama closed his eyes again. The tree that stood for Gardevoir was still rooted at the peak of that silver-white mountain—but there was blue energy moving inside the trunk now. A little more than before.
"What is that stuff?" He opened his eyes, no closer to knowing.
Since eating the fruit he could feel the same energy in himself. He'd never encountered it anywhere.
Three colors braided in the fruit. Green was the Mother Tree's own power, that much was obvious. Violet was mental strength.
Blue he couldn't name.
And after Gardevoir ate hers, the line running between them had thickened again.
Shuiyi Nanami was right about that part, he thought, and looked over at Kadabra.
Kadabra finished his fruit. Nothing at all changed between them.
"What the hell? Was I lied to?" Under the Mother Tree, Nanami was frowning at her own hands.
She couldn't feel a single new thread connecting her to Gyarados.
"Lying bastards." She ground her teeth, remembering how confidently she'd fed Akiyama that story maybe two hours ago, and felt her ears go hot.
"Strange." Akiyama triggered his gift again and looked at Kadabra.
That purple ocean hadn't moved an inch.
So it came down to the braided energy that had risen out of him and Gardevoir. Nothing else.
"Then where did that come from?" No answer to that one either.
Not that it seemed like a bad development. He could feel the fantasy energy in him quietly accumulating.
Gardevoir's too.
Maybe someday there would be enough of it to fix what she'd been born without. And if all it ever did was let him use psychic power himself, he'd take that.
"So Mew's behind the fruit." He set the rest of it aside and looked up at the still-glowing tree.
Is this the World Tree? Can't be. That tree in the central tower in the Prisma region is way bigger.
But Mew lived here. At least that much.
Half the veil over the Mother Tree, lifted.
"Garde!"
Gardevoir grabbed his arm out of nowhere and shook it, pointing off into the dark.
"Huh?"
He followed her finger and found a pink Butterfree, fluttering along all by itself.
"Garde, garde!" She was already pulling.
She wanted it.
She hadn't drawn a Butterfree out of that mystery box on the bus. Fine. She'd catch a live one and secure the good luck herself.
"You're impossible," Akiyama said, and started running after it.
Kadabra hurried after them.
The Butterfree saw the three of them coming and startled badly, beating away fast.
Gardevoir was not about to let that happen. She overtook Akiyama in three strides.
Behind them Kadabra swung his spoon, and Confusion closed around the Butterfree.