Chapter Text
It was infuriating, really.
Fern had started hearing rumors mere minutes after he stepped into Spinel Town about the “brave young hero” who’d “saved them all”. Apparently, they’d freed the town from the horrible, dreadful curse of floating objects – and chased out Team Meteor for good. If you listened to the really crazy ones, they’d even destroyed the entire Meteor base while riding on a giant steelix they befriended in the mountain’s depths. (Others attributed this to Saphira, which didn’t make sense either. For one thing, she was the Labradorra leader, and even a five-year-old knew that a steelix wasn’t a dragon type.)
It was all the town could talk about, and Fern got frowns whenever he tried to change the topic of conversation to something more productive. He really didn’t need to hear another story about how their “savior” had defeated Serra on their first try, not when there were more important things to talk about like the weather or news from Reborn City or information on where the fuck that one gym leader kid from Lapis had gone after he decided to run away from his league responsibilities. Like, seriously, Chrysolia wasn’t that big; the kid had to be somewhere around here.
He was starting to regret coming back to Spinel. Not only were the people unhelpful, but the “residual energy” causing things to sporadically move around was starting to get annoying (at least it confirmed that the Spinel Town residents weren’t entirely crazy). Fern had even tried to talk to the local gym leader to see if she could offer any help, but he was turned away at the door despite the fact that he very well knew the gym was open and running.
Whatever. If Serra didn’t know good advice when she heard it, that was on her. Theming her gym around mirrors and reflections was a decent idea, Fern could admit; it made fighting quite the visual spectacle. But the gym arena itself had to have been designed by a sadist who wanted challengers to suffer as much as possible until they figured out that breaking the mirrors was their only avenue to success. Her field was blatantly unfair and heavily penalized anything that wasn’t the graceful ice attackers she just so happened to train. Blaming him for simply pointing that fact out was just another one of her cheap tricks.
Everyone seemed to be turning against him these days, and it was all that loser’s fault. He was supposed to be the hero, not some scrawny teen who had barely lucked their way into mediocrity. Fern hadn’t climbed his way up the social hierarchy to be ignored like this.
He still didn’t understand how they’d managed to earn everyone’s adoration and respect like the protagonist of those crappy adventure novels the other kids used to pass around. Never mind that there was a clearly superior hero standing right next to them; they were the “chosen one” who happened to walk into good publicity wherever they went. Fern knew he sounded like Titania, back when she was a somewhat-tolerable literature nerd, but he wasn’t wrong. Fate itself seemed to be conspiring against him in favor of handing off his rightful destiny to someone else.
How many lucky blows or critical hits had they gotten on his team? How many times had attacks missed when they should have landed? Why did Julia praise them in the same breath that they’d insult him, or the Flobot actually seem to care?
At every turn, they’d received all the admiration that Fern deserved and claimed all the credit for what were in reality group efforts. They’d (reluctantly) been partnered together at Mosswater, yet only one of them had been invited to assist with the floral overgrowth in Obsidia. Yet again, in Rhodochrine, the police had recognized exactly one individual for assisting – not him, of course, even though he had risked his life to make his way through the damaged wards.
It didn’t make sense. But then again, nothing had made sense since the friendly local terrorist group had blown up Grandview Station, restricting travel into and out of the region, then claimed that they were merely trying to get people to leave because of some old folklore.
Speaking of Team Meteor, maybe they knew something about the not-so-local runaway gym leader since they claimed to have eyes on the city and all. He wasn’t getting anything out of Spinel, at least, so heading over to Tanzan would be the logical next step anyway, and according to the rumors that seemed so popular these days, there was a ruined base there.
No second-rate fake “protagonist” who lucked their way into victory would stand in his way any longer. Fern wouldn’t – couldn’t – let that happen. So hey, if making a deal with Team Meteor was what he had to do to reclaim his rightful place, that wouldn’t be so bad.