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Liza’s gotten good at sneaking out.
It’s not something she thought she’d ever be good at, it just sort of… happened. When she was younger, back when she and Tate shared a room, she always used to wake him up when she got up in the middle of the night for the bathroom or to get a glass of water. Maybe that’s where it all started. Now she knows to roll through the whole of her foot when creeping across the floor instead of constantly standing tip-toed, knows which spots on the hardwood are creaky, knows how fast to move the door so it doesn’t squeak and to always turn the knob when she closes it to avoid the little click of it latching.
She does all that and walks over to her desk, reaching out a hand and poking the floating figure next to it.
“Lunatone,” Liza whispers, voice still rough with sleep and cracking on the last syllable. When it doesn’t stir she pokes it again and calls out its name, but it takes a third pass for Lunatone to wake.
Its red eyes light up, casting an eerie glow across the room, and Lunatone rumbles a greeting to its trainer. Liza pats the top of its crescent and uses the light from its eyes to search her desk, snatching up her wallet and tucking it into the pocket of her pajama pants. With a glance out the window, she grabs the sweatshirt draped across the back of the desk chair and tugs it on over her head. It’s one of the old ones from the Space Center, back before they changed manufacturers and their sweaters got all weird and scratchy. She likes the design more than the newer ones anyway so it’s not… that big of a deal.
Gesturing for Lunatone to follow, Liza heads for the window beside her bed and undoes the latch; she lifts the window slowly but can’t stop the small thump it makes as it hits the top of the frame. With a cautious glance over her shoulder and back towards her door, Liza ducks her head and climbs out onto the roof. The air is heavy with humidity, so dense it's almost hard to breathe in. Liza tries not to squirm as she feels the sweat already forming on her brow and sticking her hair to the back of her neck. Lunatone is quick to follow after her and uses its powers to shut the window behind them, but as Liza starts to creep her way down the slanted roof and towards its edge— Lunatone starts to pulsate with psychic energy. Each wave rattles Liza to the core. Danger, danger, danger, it says.
“Don’t do that!” she protests with a harsh whisper. “You’ll wake up Tate.”
Lunatone doesn’t seem too happy about it but quiets the best it can, the nervous energy little more than a whisper in the back of her mind. Pushing it to the side, Liza closes her eyes, empties her mind, and searches.
It’s easy to find Tate. It always is. Liza tries to keep her thoughts as quiet as she can as she feels him slumber. Peaceful waves, the occasional peak and valley in the aftershocks as he dreams. A constant murmur. Satisfied, she keeps walking. Once reaching the edge Liza lowers herself down and sits at the end of the roof, dangling her legs off the side.
“You ready?” she asks. Lunatone hums and Liza wraps her arms around its middle, tucks her legs up and gives the signal. Then, she’s weightless.
Not the same weightlessness as when she’s at the gym and dancing through the air on psychic waves, or even when she’s battling side by side with Tate, high on adrenaline. Something flutters in her stomach as she slips off the roof and she dangles high above the ground, hugging Lunatone even tighter. It glides smoothly and guides her to the ground; Liza’s feet touch the ground gently and she releases her hold on the pokémon. She moves ten, then twenty feet away from the house. There’s nothing especially strange about it all: she can still hear the calls of Wingull down by the beach and the moon shines brightly overhead.
She presses forward, glancing over her shoulder at the house after a few moments. This should be far enough. Liza stills, focuses, and searches. She can hardly feel Tate’s presence at this distance, the tether between them drawn taut, the pulsating in her mind dulled significantly. This should be far enough.
Technically, she doesn’t need to do it like this. She could get Lunatone or Xatu or any of her other pokémon to teleport her straight out of the house, but it was just too risky. Tate was already a light sleeper. There was no way he’d be able to sleep through the energy generated from something like that. Besides, doing it like that wasn’t near as fun as sneaking out.
“Let’s go,” she says to Lunatone, voice slicing through the stillness of the night and placing a hand on its side, the grainy texture oddly comforting.
Her body resolidifies, feet gently touching the ground. Some things are the same— the sound of the waves and the light of the moon, and the Wingull are just as loud out here as they are back in Mossdeep, which is… comforting, in its own sort of way. The rest of Lilycove is quiet this late at night: it's not like Mauville or anything, even with the museum and the contest hall. It’s more lively than Mossdeep at least, even with Steven’s retirement meaning he gets to stomp around at the ungodly hours of the morning. The department store is still open, though, and that’s really what matters.
It's a lot quieter this late, the electric buzz of the lights being some of the only real noise in the store. Even the usual, endlessly looping music has been shut off. Liza thinks she remembers the news saying something about preserving energy while solar panels are being installed. She breezes by the lone cashier who’s staring out into space with headphones clamped over their ears, but Lunatone starts to grumble when she heads for the elevator in the back. With an affectionate sigh, she pulls a left and heads for the stairs instead. It flies alongside her for about halfway up the first flight of stairs before giving up on a direct parallel, flying forward and eventually giving up on it all and flying straight up the center of the spiraling stairwell.
Liza’s footsteps echo off of the walls as she scampers her way up, and eventually she reaches a door marked with a five. The first thing Liza sees when she steps out is her own face— one of the display TVs is playing some of their old gym matches. It’s a cute TV with a Skitty style frame, with ears and a tail and even little paws peeking out the bottom. Fine, fine. Enough of that: she doesn’t need to get distracted right now, just in and out.
Just like downstairs there’s just one worker behind the counter, but this one is lazily flipping through some magazine. Liza has to cough a little to catch their attention, and the teenager peers over the counter with a dazed expression.
“I should have an order in the back for pickup?” She smiles. “Sorry it’s so late.”
“Hmm? Oh, sure. What’s the number?”
Liza scrunches up her nose, thinking for a brief moment. “337338.”
“Okay. It shouldn’t take long.” The worker straightens up and heads for a door just behind them, painted yellow and marked with a cheery “Employees Only” sign across it. Liza stands silently for a few moments, listening to the rummaging in the back before turning around and starting to wander.
They’re always bringing in new stuff but she recognizes a lot of it: the Wingull posters and most of the patterned rugs, little plushies of Togepi and Smoochum, ones of Chikorita and Cyndaquil and Totodile with magnets in their little hands that link them together. Liza brings one of the hoodie strings up to her mouth and chews at it absentmindedly, continuing to peruse the aisles. Swablu, Pichu, Azurill… there’s row after row of cutsie pokémon, slowly getting bigger in size as she moves along. The last shelf has the big ones, all crammed in next to one another, their plush bodies distorted in slightly disturbing ways. Lapras, Snorlax, Rhydon and Charizard all stacked on top of one another. There’s a whole shelf of Venusaur and Blastoise left over, which makes her kinda sad.
Damn things are expensive, even during the sales they do up on the roof. Still… they’re really cute. They’re the whole reason she’s here, really. Heard about that woman in Galar who made life-sized plushies from a worker up on the roof at one of those sales.
Right before she’s about to turn down the next aisle and leave all the plushies behind, Liza glances over her shoulder and something catches her eye. Doubling back she squints at the particularly dense pile of Skitty and Ditto, at the tail sticking out the bottom— pink with a white, tapered edge. When she reaches over and yanks it out the Slowpoke comes flying from the bottom of the pile. A few of the Jigglypuff roll off the top and bounce onto the floor, but she’s quick to toss them back into the pile. The Slowpoke is weighty for such a small plush, slightly stiff with the heavy stuffing beads. Even though it wasn’t really the reason she came… it couldn’t hurt to hold onto.
“Miss Liza? Are you still there? I found your order.”
“Oh, okay! Sorry,” she says, spitting the string of the hoodie out of her mouth and tucking the Slowpoke under her arm.
She turns the corner and as soon as she does she sees it: looming from behind the checkout counter, barely restrained by the poor worker. It’s perfect. Liza grins and rushes forward, pulling the toy Claydol into her arms and grinning from ear to ear. It’s bigger than she is!
“Would you like me to ring up the Slowpoke for you?”
“Yes please!” Her voice is muffled, almost comically so, so instead she sticks out a hand and gives a thumbs up instead. Lunatone floats the Slowpoke over to the employee, who giggles at the way Liza struggles to fish her wallet out of her pocket. Instead of watching her struggle more, Lunatone pulls the Claydol away from her, not even bothering to return it once she’s done paying.
It takes Slowpoke as well, levitates them both far above her head when she tries to snatch them back down, it just makes them go even higher. It turns away and heads for the stairs once more— the normal ones that snake their way down the department store one floor at a time.
“Have a good night, Miss Liza. Get home safe!” the worker calls.
And, well, with her hands free and being made to march across every floor one by one, it makes sense that she gets a little… distracted on the way back down. Mostly by little things she doesn’t really need: berry tree starters because they keep forgetting to replant the Kasibs, some potions to replace the ones they’d burned through in the last month. And, well, if she gets a Fluffy Tail to try and bribe Lunatone into letting go of the plushies, that’s not anyone's business.
At the ground floor she heads for one of the self checkouts, and as she scans the items one by one, she pauses for a moment before snatching up a few of the dark chocolate bars from the display. They've always been Tate’s favorite. Hopefully they’ll make it all the way until their birthday, just two days, but if they don’t she could always use them as distractions to keep him away from the real surprises. She really hopes she won’t have to. It’ll be what, two days? She can handle that. He might be able to find the presents their parents got for him over the years, but this was different. Push and pull. Equal and opposite. She doesn’t always know what he’s thinking, so he doesn’t always know what’s going on in her head. Push and pull.
Leaving the department store, she heads for the beach, the bag at her side crinkling and rustling with every step. It’s a paper one, so she doesn’t mind its noise as much as she does with the plastic. Liza doesn’t let her feet hit the sand, stops right before it: not really a mess she wants to be cleaning up right now.
She gently adjusts the bag in her arms, and Lunatone takes her back to Mossdeep.
Grabbing the Claydol from out of the air and wrestling it to fit under just one arm, Liza approaches the house, Lunatone quieting the rustling of the bag and with an instructive jerk of the head from its trainer, levitates Liza up onto the roof. A little risky, sure, but with their precious cargo something would’ve been moved along like that anyway. When she doesn’t feel anything, she pries open the window and climbs back inside.
Liza kicks off her shoes and strips off her hoodie, tosses her wallet back onto her desk and tucks the presents away into her closet. After a moment of contemplation, she opens one of the dresser drawers and dumps an armful of clothes on top of them. A poor disguise, sure, but it was something. She could deal with it in the morning. She doesn’t bother to open the door any wider. She doubts anyone is really going to notice.
Tucking herself into bed, Liza hears Lunatone hum. Low then high then low again; a charming melody, wishing her goodnight. Liza hums back and closes her eyes.