It took a while for the full situation with Kane to be resolved, and I missed most of it during my recovery.

  As it turns out, going swimming in the freezing ocean waters without a wetsuit or any clothes at all, and accidentally swallowing said water was not conducive to good health, and I had come down with pneumonia as a result.

  The Rangers had appeared a little bit after Byron did, skating across the river on a white and red boat, but by then the actual fighting had been over. Kane’s Pokémon had been put into their Poké Balls and stowed carefully in Byron’s pack, and then I had been hurried over to the Pokémon Center while the others were busy making sure Kane wouldn’t cause any trouble.

  I had protested being forced to go to the hospital, but it had turned out to be a good idea. So much adrenaline had been pumping through me that I hadn’t noticed how much my limbs had been shaking, and a frightening number of my toes and fingers had gone blue, along with my lips and ears.

  Even after the fisherman and Puddles had returned my clothes and I’d put them back on, they were still cold and wet.

  A little bit longer, and I would have been fully in the grips of hypothermia.

  Thankfully, I only had a somewhat-mild case of pneumonia and had to spend a couple nights in the Pokémon Center’s “human wing” to recover.

  Thanks to how small Iron Island actually was, there was no real hospital, so one of the Pokémon Center staff was trained in human medicine.

  Ted and Lucas filled me in while I was stuck in bed.

  Byron had stuck around until the Rangers had arrived, then teleported back to Canalave City after turning over Kane’s Pokeballs. The Rangers had tried getting in touch with him to report on the APB, but it hadn’t been until the fisherman had called in about the Gyarados loose in the harbor that they were finally able to reach him.

  From there, he had gotten his Pokémon together and teleported to Iron Island.

  Once the Rangers managed to get a response team together, they took over. Kane was locked up in the Canalave City Jail, awaiting trial. His Pokémon had been taken away from him, and turned over to a group that specialized in rehabilitating Pokémon owned by criminals, the same which had taken in Havoc.

  Kane’s boat had been impounded as well, and a team of police hackers and Porygon were scouring the hard drive of his computer - something we had completely missed while we were on the boat.

  Ted blamed the adrenaline for why we had overlooked such a big thing, and I was inclined to agree with him. I certainly wasn’t going to admit the reason had been because I was busy looking for a laptop, and had missed the large bulky computer tower in the hectic rush.

  All-in-all, I was in the hospital for nine days, and the situation with Kane had been resolved after four.

  The rest of the time my friends were busy getting into trouble.

  After all, we had initially come to Iron Island to get a Metal Coat for Mayfly, and to help Lucas train his Pokémon. The first had been achieved, but the second hadn’t, so Ted and Lucas had gone out into the caves of Iron Island to get some battle experience.

  This, naturally, ended up being a lot more than they had expected.

  /^\

  “Okay, so there we were.” Lucas said, leaning forward in the chair next to my hospital bed with his newest Pokémon on his lap.

  “We’re traveling through the caves, beating up any of the Pokémon that wanted a fight - we made sure to give them some berries afterwards to help them heal - and then all of a sudden this super weird Pokémon comes up out of an underground pool and starts attacking us!”

  “Oh?” I asked with a raised eyebrow. “What did it look like?”

  “Hmmm, kinda like a big white jellyfish.”

  “What, like a Tentacruel? Jellicent?”

  “No, and no. Honestly I’ve never seen anything like it before, it had these big star-like patterns on its head.”

  I stiffened in my bed, and stared at the two of them.

  “Did it sting you?”

  “What?”

  “Did it sting you? Did it touch you with its tentacles?”

  “Don’t worry.” Ted said, meeting my eyes. “It didn’t.”

  I relaxed a little bit, but only a little.

  If I was right, if that thing had been a Nihilego and had gotten its neurotoxin into my friends… things could be bad. Very bad.

  But… what would a Nihilego be doing here?

  I supposed Alola was fairly close to Sinnoh, all things considered, but it wasn’t so close that I would expect an Ultra Beast to make its way here naturally.

  I would have to ask Rowan about it when we next caught up.

  “Anyways,” Lucas continued. “We’re about to run away, but then this guy with a big hat shows up out of nowhere with a Lucario! And he’s all-”

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  Lucas waved his arms, making a bunch of noises as he showed how the Lucario had fought.

  The tiny Riolu in his arms looked up at Lucas, then began mimicking him.

  It was a very familiar Riolu too…

  “Anyways, we defeat the Pokémon and he gets us out of there, then tells us that he’s here training all the time. So we have a great battle, mostly because he says that I have a lot of ‘Aura’ or something.”

  It was my turn to sigh as I saw the devilish glint in Lucas’ eyes.

  He undoubtedly knew about Aura at the very least, but he was playing up his silliness for the sake of a better story.

  “Afterwards, this guy with the weird hat says that I have promise, and that he thinks that this little one should go with me!”

  The Riolu was looking up at me with its big brown eyes.

  “So, meet Benkei!”

  I carefully held out my hand, and Benkei leaned up to sniff it, then allowed me to scratch his head.

  “Hello again, Benkei.” I said, and he barked happily.

  “Wait, you two have met each other?” Lucas asked, a bevy of emotions flashing across his face.

  “Remember how I was in that cage? Well, Benkei here was one of the ones to help me break out of there. He took down a full grown adult by himself!”

  Benkei puffed up in pride at his accomplishments.

  I frowned. “But how did you end up with Riley?”

  “Wait.” Ted said. “We never said what his name was.”

  He saw the somewhat guilty look on my face and sighed. “Let me guess, more of your Faller shenanigans?”

  “Not a Faller, but yes.”

  Ted shrugged. “It’s the first thing I think of whenever I have to try and figure out stuff with other worlds.”

  I shot him a suspicious look, and he didn’t elaborate, so I let the topic drop, for now.

  “We’ll have to ask Rowan about it later.” I said, turning back to the Riolu. “Maybe he figured you would be in a better spot with Riley than going back to the other Lucario?”

  Benkei didn’t have an answer, but I wasn’t expecting one either.

  Then a wicked thought entered my mind, a way to get back at Lucas for all of his wild schemes.

  “You remember Kane?” I asked, semi-rhetorically, and a dark, ugly look entered the Riolu’s eyes.

  “We took him down.” I continued. “He’s now in a cage himself.”

  The Riolu was easy to read, a look of frustration flashed across his face that he wasn’t the one to do it, followed by a sense of satisfaction that Kane was taken down at all.

  “And,” I said, pointing at Lucas. “He helped do it.”

  Wide eyes looked up to Lucas.

  “Yeah,” Ted said, a devious tone in his voice as he caught onto what I was doing. “In fact, he fought Kane hand-to-hand! Tackled him even though he was hurt!”

  “Wait.” Lucas waved his hands as the Rilou began getting more and more excited. “I’m not like a martial artist or anything.”

  “Oh but you’re great in a fight.” I teased.

  “Think of all the things you could teach Benkei!” Ted added.

  The Riolu began bouncing up and down in Lucas’ lap as we laughed, and he shot us a dirty look.

  “Now I’m going to have to learn martial arts.” He muttered to himself, though he didn’t look too disappointed.

  /^\

  A few days after Ted and Lucas returned from their mine excursion, I was finally released from the hospital, just in time to miss the ferry.

  “The next one will be along in a few days.” The kindly old man at the docks said. “Feel free to stop by then.”

  We trundled our way back to the hotel, where the three of us sat around a small table, staring glumly at each other.

  “What now?” Lucas eventually asked.

  “Is there another way off the island? Maybe the Corviknight Taxi?”

  Ted and I shuddered at the thought, but Lucas shook his head.

  “I called her yesterday when I thought we might miss the ferry. She's busy with a job on the other side of Sinnoh and won’t be free for a few days.”

  “Can we rent a boat to get to the mainland?”

  “We could.” Ted hedged. “But then it would still be a long trek to get to Snowpoint City. Longer than it would take to wait for the ferry at the very least.”

  The three of us moped for a little bit, until Lucas looked at us slyly.

  “We could… go on an adventure?”

  Ted and I sighed.

  “No wait, trust me! Listen, I was talking to an old miner who used to work on the northern end of the island, and he told me that there’s a cave down there that he was exploring with a bunch of strange things! He never had a chance to fully explore it, he hurt his knee, but he gave me a map to find it.”

  “Uh huh.” I said flatly. “And how much did he charge for the map?”

  “That’s not important!”

  Ted laid a hand on Lucas’ shoulder. “Lucas, I’m sorry, but you just got scammed.”

  “No, look!”

  He shook off Ted’s hand and pulled out a ragged, folded piece of paper, laying it out on the table.

  “Huh.” Ted said after a minute of looking. “This… actually looks legit.”

  The map was a yellowed sheet, but it wasn’t the hand-drawn affair I had been expecting. Instead it was printed and clearly marked as having belonged to the “Tamahagane Mining Company” and looked like something that would be handed out at a board meeting.

  All of the mines and tunnels on the island were clearly marked with their depth, width, and the amount of materials that had been pulled out of each of them, at least as of 1983 when the map had been printed. True enough, at the northern tip of the island, in a deep tunnel, there was a hand-written note about a cavern that had been opened up.

  “The mines are built on top of a bunch of old tunnels, I think they were called lava tubes? Anyways, Iron Island used to be a volcano, but it’s been dormant for centuries, and the Tamahagane Mining Company drained out all the lava before they started mining operations.

  But the company closed in late ‘83 when new environmental protections were put in place, and Iron Island started going downhill. They never had a chance to explore the cavern, and the guy I got this off of said there might still be stuff down there.”

  “Stuff?” Ted asked.

  “I mean, he didn’t get a good look, but it might be ruins? Maybe it was a connection to the Grand Underground!”

  I sat back and crossed my arms.

  “No offense Lucas, but even if I trusted this map and your miner-friend, which I don’t, I’m not sure I would want to go back into any caves or tunnels again. Not for a while, at the very least.”

  “Oh come on, it’s not that deep! Look- it’s only,” he squinted. “A couple hundred meters deep. Okay, that’s kinda deep, but what else are we going to do? Sit on our hands for the next few days?”

  Ted and I shared a look, and had a whole conversation in a brief glance.

  “Okay.” I said, resigning myself. “But! I’m going to make this a day trip. I’m not going to go another night sleeping on rocks, you hear me?”

  “Yes!” Lucas pumped his head above his head. “Let’s go!”

  “Tomorrow.” Ted said sternly. “Alina just got out of the hospital, after all. Give her a day at least.”

  Lucas beamed, and my heart sank.

  I really, really hoped that this wouldn’t end up like the last time we had decided to check out a cave.