Chapter Text
The plane ride to Unova was as startling uncomfortable as settling back into the role of ‘Dawn’ had been.
Though the flight itself was terribly uneventful, she had grown accustomed to flying on Togekiss - to feeling the sharp, biting wind nipping at her face and numbing her exposed hands. Being confined to a single seat and breathing stale air made her want to get up and pace up and down the aisle; made her want to let her Pokémon out so that she could get more eyes on the other passengers, the crew, the exits.
Business class made the journey easier to endure than Economy would have been, yet Dawn had been tempted – on more than one occasion – to open one of the doors and let Togekiss carry her the rest of the way to Unova.
The lack of connection to the outside world only made her nerves worse, unable to scour the online world for more news of the attempted coup at the Pokémon League last week. There were no close-up videos of the coup itself or the participants of the battles that must have raged within Unova’s League Building, but shaky videos from afar showed the sheer magnificence of the castle that had engulfed the League Building.
Then there were the eyewitness testimonies of two great dragons leaving the area, not long after the shaking of the earth itself ceased. Too many of them to be just another rumour.
Dawn had done her research in the aftermath of her return to Sinnoh. She knew Unova’s mythological history inside and out, and she would bet PokeDollars that she knew it better than most of Unova’s own residents – save for the historians, archeologists, and the man she was looking for himself.
Given what she had learned, she hoped she knew where to find him.
The Arrivals area of Mistralton Airport was sparsely populated.
In the aftermath of disaster, tourism to regions tended to trend downwards. A prime example was the decrease in inter-regional tourism to Hoenn following the clash between Kyogre and Groudon a few years back, a natural consequence of the widespread destruction from the devastating extreme weather. It wasn't the only one, though - she remembered her mother commenting on Johto suffering the same following a radio tower hijacking. The Spear Pillar's distance from any populated settlements was the only reason that Sinnoh had been able to escape the same fate.
Despite her face having been plastered all over the news, the skeleton crew at the airport let her pass without blinking twice. She couldn't have been more thankful, given the massive bags under her eyes. As soon as she was able to, she released Empoleon, letting some of the tension drain from her body as he stood guard while she did her best to navigate the foreign airport.
Unova’s air was drier than what she was used to. Though coastal, the region wasn't surrounded by ocean in the same way that Sinnoh was, and industrialism had a tighter grip on the land. Her nose filled with the acrid smell of dirty pollutants and heated tarmac, her ears still ringing from the loud whirring of the plane’s engines - both those still on the runways and those in the skies.
She hastened to find somewhere in the city, further from the airport, where she could release Togekiss to get her the rest of the way.
Once she entered the city itself, the assault on her senses dampened. To her mild surprise, she found that Mistralton City itself didn’t a hold a candle to the modern giant that Jubilife had become. Yet most of the wonder of seeing a new region had been pushed to the bottom of her priority list.
As she consulted the map of the Unova region that she had downloaded to her Pokétch, she let Togekiss out so that they could prepare for flight. The border of Mistralton and Unova's Route 7 was far enough from the runways that it would be safe to take to the skies from here.
“We’ll fly southeast until we see Driftveil City,” she narrated aloud to Togekiss, consulting both the map and a compass to make sure she was pointing in the right direction. “Then we’ll head across the drawbridge, continuing directly east until we reach Nimbasa City.”
Togekiss trilled in response, bobbing her head close to peer at the compass.
Dawn tilted it so that she could see, only to realise that doing so moved the orientation of the compass away from its intended position.
“Don’t worry.” She told Togekiss. “We’re following the official routes, just from the sky. That way, if you start to feel tired at all, we’ll be able to land safely.”
A chirp.
She ran her fingers through her dear friend’s crown feathers, comforting herself with the simple gesture. Togekiss was hers, raised from the egg that Cynthia had gifted her all those years ago. Despite knowing the woman’s true identity, she was loathe to carry any resentment over to a Pokémon who had barely met Cynthia – and who had certainly never met Volo.
“Ready?” She asked.
Togekiss chirped again, ruffling her wings.
Pulling her flight gear on, Dawn hopped aboard.
When Akari had initially returned to Sinnoh, it had been to her bedroom at home, two years older than she had been when she had left.
It took her a second too long to respond when her mother called her name – it hadn’t been her name for years. ‘Dawn’ was too modern, too at odds with the person that she had had to become to survive in the wilds of Hisui, long before her mother’s mother had even been born.
‘Dawn’ was the name of a Champion, a young girl who had beaten the odds and come out on top over all the other trainers in the Sinnoh Region, who had been lauded as a battling prodigy on the cusp of a decorated career. It was the name of a starry-eyed child whose life was brimming with opportunity.
Akari was no longer that child.
Her former name held a weight that she hadn’t quite anticipated, stories that had piled up in her absence resulting in expectations that were ready to find shoulders to bear them once more.
And yet ‘Champion’ was a title that opened doors which an ordinary trainer would never have the ability to. It was a title that came hand in hand with duty, but one that held no small amount of power – power that could be used to scour the earth for hints of a dragon that most relegated to mere myths and legends.
When the role had fallen to her once more, she hauled it up over her shoulder and kept walking.
The trains that journeyed from Anville Town to Nimbasa City stopped at Mistralton on their way, but the thought of being trapped in a rattling metal cabin, speeding along through an underground tunnel, under the power of an engine that held neither consciousness nor agency…
Dawn had much rather preferred to fly.
They touched down just outside of the enormous edifice that housed a nexus of rail lines, forming the core of Unova’s subway network. It was impossible to miss, what with its brilliant crimson banners emblazoned with an all-too-familiar logo.
She had never stepped foot in Unova before her impromptu jaunt to the past, but she had become intimately familiar with the symbol of Gear Station over the last two years.
Keeping her scarf wrapped around the lower half of her face, she tentatively stepped over the threshold. The entrance immediately gave way to a short foyer with elevators to one side and a well-marked staircase that plunged into the earth a few paces ahead. Opting to take the stairs, she joined the crowd of people flowing deeper into the subway’s depths.
The chatter bounced off the low ceilings and tiled floors, the pedestrian tunnels amplifying the clamour of voices into a cacophony, in a way that the plains of Hisui would never have allowed. Without flora to entrap the sound, the reverberations of both machinery and conversation continued to echo throughout the underground.
At this time of day, most of the commuters were working adults, dressed formally in monochrome colours. Against the steel interior of Gear Station’s inner walls, they blurred together into an indistinct fog as they spilled out into the building’s central hub.
A large load-bearing pillar took centre-stage in the central hub. All around it, countless tunnels lead even further down, heading towards the train platforms proper.
She walked down one at random, unsure of where to start.
Thankfully, the platform she emerged onto held only two passengers speaking in rather agitated voices with one of the men in green uniforms. After a few more exchanges, the two turned around and left via the staircase that Dawn had just entered by, evidently disgruntled.
“Are you here for the Singles Line?” The Depot Agent called out to her.
Dawn hesitated.
Ingo managed the Single Battles of the Battle Subway, did he not? Her research into the Battle Subway of Gear Station indicated as much. She didn’t particularly want to battle, though she knew that it wouldn’t take long if she needed to battle in order to come face-to-face with her adopted uncle.
Would her status help her here?
Pulling her scarf down, exposing her face for the first time in hours, she suppressed the urge to wrinkle her nose as the musty air hit her nose, just as she opened her mouth to respond.
“Is it running?”
The Depot Agent frowned, slotting a radio back onto his belt. “I’m afraid not.”
“Is there someone I can speak to about that?” Dawn asked, cocking her head to a side as her hair fell out of her scarf to frame her face.
She knew without checking a mirror that this was the image of Sinnoh’s young Champion that people tended to recognise. Her hat might have been replaced by the Survey Corps’ handkerchief, but her hairstyle had remained the same thanks to Arezu’s expertise and care, and her face was on full display without her scarf to hide it.
Indeed, the Depot Agent blinked a few times in quick succession, before standing straighter.
“Champion Dawn!”
“It’d be wonderful if I could speak to a Subway Boss, if either are present.” Dawn said politely, firmly. A Champion’s title, even a foreign one, tended to command respect that she wasn’t beyond taking advantage of.
The Depot Agent shook his head. “The news said that you’d just returned from a two year absence, didn’t it?” A polite way to say that she had been missing, presumed dead, given her rather distraught team had been found in the same place that she had vanished from. “You must not have heard – Subway Boss Emmet has been on leave to help with the clean-up at the Pokémon League.”
“And… Subway Boss Ingo?”
She had never known him as a Subway Boss, only as a Warden. But it was the title he was known by, and was the title that this age would recognise.
The only response she got was a flinch.
“Champion Dawn, the only Subway Boss at Gear Station is Emmet, these days.”
It turned out that Ingo was still formally missing, and she had just stepped on an Electrode that she hadn’t been aware that she needed to avoid.
Trying to change the subject to the Pokémon League helped, if only marginally. Though still a sticky topic, moving the conversation away from Ingo – whose absence seemed to lurk in the every shadow around Gear Station – went some way to teasing more conversation and intelligence out of the Depot Agent.
Not that he knew much about the coup.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, her own intel was infinitely more detailed than that of an ordinary civilian, even one who had been in the region at the time of the event. He agreed that the Dragons of Truth and Ideals had been sighted; that much seemed to be popular opinion. Though he couldn’t supply much more than that.
Yet though the tunnel had suddenly gotten a good deal longer, there was still light at its end.
Gear Station had been a dead end. But she now knew she was looking for Zekrom, not Ingo, and so she would need to adjust her plans accordingly.
If she was to be chasing myths and legends rather than a human man, her stay in Unova was going to need to be extended indefinitely. And she knew just where to take a pit stop. After all, there was someone hiding away to the east of the region who had both the capacity and skill to take back the helm that she was going to need to neglect.
And Cynthia owed her.