Chapter Text
Jewel is antsy.
As they ascend the steps to the Champion’s Arena, it’s the first thing Sofia notices.
Infernape, as a species, are not known for their subtlety. Like most Fire-types bearing an open flame as a part of their anatomy, the blazing crown atop an Infernape’s head generally makes for a fairly obvious mood indicator. However, as with all things Pokémon, this is not a catch-all so much as a rule of thumb. The stronger a Pokémon grows, the more attuned it generally becomes to the fact that battles are just as much about information as they are a show of power, and the better it will learn to hold its cards closer to its chest.
Pokémon battling is a constantly moving chessboard of plays and counterplays that is never set up the same way twice. The pieces change, the board shifts. The only way to possibly know what will happen before it does is to learn to read your opponent, and to do this, you also need to do your best to ensure your opponent cannot read you. Control the flame, control the power, control the board, and you can control the victory.
Jewel is the most experienced Pokémon on her team by far, but when she’s known him since they were both children, reading him may as well be like reading an open book.
He switches to a bouncier gait on the third step, swishes his tail just a hair more frequently on the fourth. His arms come into play more as he passes the tenth. A tooth occasionally catches on his lip as he chews on it shortly after the fifteenth. By the twentieth step, the conclusion to be made is obvious: Jewel is nervous.
Truth be told, they both are. Sofia adjusts her grip on the railing—partly for something to do with her hands, partly because her palms have decided to sweat at a frankly unreasonable rate—and forces herself to breathe in for four counts, out for six. It doesn’t do much. It has never done much. People always suggest breathing exercises as though they are a magic off button for anxiety, but all she’s ever found they do is buy her just enough oxygen to keep thinking.
Step twenty-four. Step twenty-five.
Her brain, however, has always refused to stop thinking regardless of oxygen content, and it is currently spinning hypotheticals with the frantic energy of a Rotom in a short-circuiting computer. This is Cynthia. There is no precedent. No self-compiled database of previous winning matchups to reference. There are no VODs of her own battles to analyze that will be at all relevant to an opponent of this skill. A sickening awareness twists in her gut that she is about to test every strategy she’s ever had against the single hardest opponent in Sinnoh, and she isn’t sure whether that excites her or terrifies her.
What she does know is that she spent countless hours poring over every detail, every possibility, and she’s still not sure if it will be enough. Lead matchups alone had taken days of deliberation. Jewel into Spiritomb is inefficient but actionable; Jewel into Lucario is workable; Jewel into Garchomp is a disaster but Cynthia has never led with Garchomp in any officially recorded match since taking the title. Which means she might now, because Sofia has studied those matches and Cynthia is the type of woman to punish predictability.
Step twenty-eight.
Cynthia could also lead with Togekiss, in which case ideally Sofia would want to lead with Velvet. The Ice-Ghost into Flying-Fairy type matchup would be favorable. That, however, also creates the possibility of not having an available Ice-type when Garchomp comes out later. If not for limited switch-ins, Pretzel would be the safest choice given his bulk, but stranding him against Roserade could be catastrophic. So many options, so little time.
Step twenty-nine.
The Pokéballs lining her belt move in telltale pulses. Jet’s is rhythmic. Fang’s shakes and almost rattles in its clip at one point, overeager for a good fight. Velvet’s brushes the skin of her hip with a chill that’s unmistakable. Pretzel remains Pretzel, oblivious as only a Quagsire can be, bless him. Crouton is hardly moving, likely taking one last bask in the simulated sunny window that surely makes up his ideal Pokéball environment.
Step thirty.
Jewel’s posture changes again. He’s forward-leaning now and he’s not fidgeting anymore. He’s preparing himself as he always does on the approach to a major battle. It’s a ritual she knows well, one final pass over his own internal systems to ensure everything is primed.
Part of her envies him for it. Even after years of training, her brain lacks a comparable toggle switch. She can’t consciously flip herself from “anxious” to “prepared”; she has to stagger there in increments, assembling her composure from moving parts and praying that when the time comes they will fit together well enough to function. It’s a messy process, and not one she ever has full control over.
Step thirty-five. Just a bit more to go. Almost at the top now.
Jewel spares her one last glance to read her nerves before moving to walk a step in front of her.
The stairway opens. There’s so much, she quickly finds, that footage didn’t do justice.
For one, the Champion’s Arena is cavernous to the point it feels like it may swallow her whole. For another, the air is drenched in a sort of pressure someone could drown in. The walls stretch so high that the space between the ground and the ceiling practically becomes another sky, the spotlights blaze against the floor so intensely that the panels shine sterile with its reflection. It all makes everything feel suffocatingly official and she suddenly doesn’t feel like she should be here. Jewel falls back to stand beside her again upon noticing her hesitation, and while his presence would usually help her nerves, it does little to help her avoid feeling small in a place like this.
At the far end of the arena waits Cynthia.
Even from a distance, she carries an unmistakable weight to her presence. Her coat shifts with each step like a living shadow; her hair catches the light in a muted gold mockery of something divine. Her eyes, a cutting steel gray, scan the space in front of her with the languid ease of an apex predator. Her every movement is made with the confidence that her victory is carved in the panels that line the room. For many of the battles fought here, Sofia doesn’t doubt that they were.
Not that she gets much of an opportunity to ruminate on it. Cynthia wastes no time in moving toward her trainer’s box in the first steps of a song and dance every trainer on the planet knows by heart. Her Garchomp—a towering tyrant whose reputation alone has broken the dreams of hundreds of would-be challengers—walks behind her without a sound.
It’s a bait, Sofia thinks. A red Gyarados. Cynthia has never led with Garchomp in any recorded challenge but match and likely never will, but she could always change her mind and she is more than making it clear that the threat is there.
All of Sofia’s remaining doubts are hastily shoved behind a final, stuttered attempt at a deep breath.
Shaking out his arms a few times, Jewel grunts and nudges Sofia towards their own trainer’s box. A few small wisps of smoke trail out of his nostrils. He’s ready, and he wants in. Sofia, never one to deny her oldest friend a reasonable request, steps forward alongside him, meeting the gaze of the woman who might make or break her challenge run with a smile that’s almost feral.
Cynthia’s eyes flick briefly to Jewel before moving to focus back on Sofia.
“Welcome to the Champion’s Arena.” Her voice is smooth, carrying easily across the room. If she’s at all nervous about the battle to come, she doesn’t sound like it. “I trust the journey up was enough time to let you think things through?”
Sofia’s smile widens, canines flashing. “Thinking wasn’t the hard part.”
Cynthia lets out a soft breath in what might be amusement. “Good. Then I won’t give you much more time to do it.”
She reaches for a Pokéball. It’s as clear a signal as any.
“You’ve done well to make it this far. Together, you and your Pokémon have overcome all the challenges you faced, however difficult. Your strength is obvious,” she withdraws Garchomp with an elegant flick of her wrist, “but strength alone has limits. Champions are defined by how they push beyond them.”
Her fingers curl around another Pokéball. Just as Sofia thought, she’s not leading with Garchomp.
“If a Champion is what you wish to become, then I hope you’ve come prepared. I won’t be holding back.”
All at once, the temperature in the room changes. Sofia’s pulse drums in her ears, a rapid rhythm she has long since memorized the routine to. Every part of her, from the pounding in her chest to the anxious twitch of her fingertips, slowly starts clicking into alignment piece by piece.
Jewel glances over at her, waiting for the signal to step onto the field. Sofia waves him on with two fingers.
“Excellent,” Cynthia says, lips curling into a small smile. “Let us begin, shall we?”
No more hypotheticals, no more what-ifs, no more simulations; this is it. Real-time data collection, a test of skill with six hearts and one entire challenge run hanging in the balance, and no room for turning back.
Cynthia releases her first Pokémon—damn it, it’s Milotic—at the same time as Jewel settles into a fighting stance, low and limber.
“I, Cynthia, accept your challenge as the Pokémon League Champion!”
With a call to start from a league official over the speakers, the final battle of Sofia Hopper’s championship run begins.
Sofia’s first loss to Cynthia hits her pride where it hurts.
Not her ego; she doesn’t actually have much of one, not how interviewers like to imply when they ask her what being “one of Sinnoh’s best” feels like. She’s never wanted to be the very best, she can live with people being better than her. That’s never bothered her.
But a loss like this? A loss where she can see, visibly, measurably, that she could have done better? That’s the kind of thing that digs its claws in.
This isn’t her first time getting team wiped. It isn’t even her first time getting her ass kicked. Earning her first gym badge took three tries. Her second badge had taken two. Early in her career she spent a solid six months in an on-again, off-again pavement-eating streak while trying to get a grip on the fundamentals. She hadn’t forgotten what losing felt like, but she’d easily forgotten what it felt like to get completely outplayed like that.
Statistically, she and Jewel should have put up a better fight. The team was solid. They had good type coverage, acceptable offensive power (although her physical-special split is admittedly lopsided), and plenty of stamina to survive a sweep attempt. Even if Bertha gave her some trouble, their Elite Four run had almost been clean. None of the odds of coming out of that arena victorious were insurmountable.
Yet the VOD shows it all in brutal clarity: Sofia didn’t embarrass herself by any means, but she’d been thoroughly outclassed the whole time. Even when she landed strong hits, Cynthia had counters prepared. When she switched Pokémon to try and reset the field, Cynthia predicted the swap, punished it, and seized back control instantly. Cynthia’s Pokémon worked as a unit. Switch-ins were calculated and seemingly practiced in advance. It’s impressive to watch. And that’s the problem.
Sofia runs the VOD five times that night, pausing frame-by-frame until her vision blurs. Jewel’s Thunder Punch into Milotic should’ve been followed by U-turn; switching into Pretzel one minute earlier would have let her buy more time to wear Lucario down; letting Velvet take on Roserade was predictable; leaving Fang in on Spiritomb after the second Calm Mind was a mistake she shouldn’t have made. Hindsight is a perfect, merciless teacher, but its cruelty is objective compared to some of the critique posts she sees online.
She scrolls p/SinnohTrainers out of masochism. There’s no other explanation for it—she knows better, but she looks anyways. Almost every thread on the forum is discussing the match. Most are normal analysis, some are even kind. But then there’s a post by a guy with a pixelated Garchomp avatar confidently stating:
Sofia’s a post-conference washup with a candied-out Infernape and not much else that can put up a real fight at the highest level and it showed. Cynthia didn’t even need to try that hard once it was out of the picture. Hope the next challenger is more interesting tbh, we’ve had a real string of boring matches lately.
And it’s not the only one. The more she scrolls, the more she finds. There’s comments that dig at her, ones that dig at her team, a lot of notes about how she’s overrelying on her Infernape and how she’s too quick to switch in or too slow to switch out.
She stares at the screen for a long minute.
She doesn’t get angry at them; she gets angry because part of what they’re saying is accurate. She has been defaulting to relying on Jewel too often. She does lean on him as a crutch even when a different lead would be an objectively better choice. She does sometimes switch a Pokemon in or out when she shouldn’t and she’d gotten far too used to getting away with it. Old habits calcify, and they coated her every move in that battle like a thick layer of rust.
Cynthia punished every lapse in judgment, every obvious pattern. Any time Sofia spent second-guessing herself was stolen away before she could pick an answer. Any moment she turned to Jewel out of instinct was a weakness that was systematically exploited. It’s incredibly frustrating.
But strangely… the frustration feels kind of good? Cynthia is the hardest opponent Sofia’s had in years. Maybe ever. And instead of demoralizing her, losing that battle had a spark catching on something that’d been smoldering beneath her feet.
Sofia doesn’t want to be the best, but that match against Cynthia had been a stark reminder that she can do better. She craves a rematch, desperately. But she knows she isn’t ready for it. Going back in a couple of weeks without changing anything will only end up in the same result and an arguably longer wait time to try again afterwards.
So she disappears.
A week later, Victory Road’s trainers begin whispering that some sort of beast is haunting the upper levels. She spends an entire month in and out of those caverns: Jewel and Jet running speed drills until they’re panting, Velvet refining Ice Shard timing down to the nanosecond, Pretzel working endurance on the local wildlife so punishingly that even some of the more aggressive Onix start avoiding them, Crouton and Fang smashing and slicing so many boulders that her bag takes three full washes to get all the dust off. The team spars each other daily, purposely placed into unfavorable matchups to close gaps in experience.
She spends another month back home in Veilstone, where the grind welcomes her back like she’d never left. Her whiteboard turns into an evolving mess of scribbled notes and matchup diagrams. Her desktop becomes consistently buried in a mountain of half-finished spreadsheets. The VOD of her challenge match is picked apart on loop until she can map the slightest changes in Cynthia’s posture to their corresponding commands from memory. By the end of the second month, she’s exhausted, over-caffeinated, and frayed around the edges in a way she hasn’t been since her rookie days.
The prepwork for her second challenge is a tedious slog that never seems to end.
She’s never felt so alive.
The stairs feel shorter this time.
They’re not—she counted, there are still forty-four of them, all still spaced exactly the same—but the tension in every step just isn’t there anymore. They’re just stairs. It’s just walking. A bit anticlimactic, all things considered, when the last time she climbed them she spent the majority of the time frantically reevaluating a strategy she’d worked on for months. This time, she’s already nearly made it to the top before she thinks about questioning herself.
The Champion’s Arena has a way of holding its breath when someone steps onto the floor. There’s a tangible, electric sense of anticipation coating the air, and it settles over her skin like a livewire upon entering. It’s as if it knows that it’s a place where legends are made and it wants to forcibly hammer that fact into anyone who dares step foot inside its domain. Either that, or Fang is hungrier for this match than Sofia thought and she’s shedding static even through her Pokéball. Perhaps both—Fang knows the plan for today, and she’d been very happy about her place in it.
At the other side of the room, calm as the surface of Lake Verity, stands Cynthia. She hasn’t changed. Or maybe she has, and Sofia just sees her differently now. Before, she was a looming figure, an impossible wall for Sofia to throw herself against and see what stuck. Now, she’s the woman who, intentionally or not, reminded Sofia of exactly why she’d fallen in love with battling in the first place.
Cynthia’s gaze lifts when Sofia steps into the light.
“Welcome back,” she says.
Sofia gives her an acknowledging nod. “Thanks. It’s good to be back.”
“I had a feeling you would be.” Cynthia’s lips twitch upwards, not quite a smile, but something close. “You left quite the impression.”
Satisfaction curls in Sofia’s gut like a well-fed Arbok. Being remembered by her hardest opponent, being acknowledged by one of the strongest trainers in the whole region, feels… good, actually. Really good. She smiles, but it’s toothy and far too wide to be entirely polite.
“Let’s see what you’ve brought with you this time,” Cynthia says, reaching for a Pokéball.
Sofia steps into position, fingers brushing a Pokéball at her belt. Last time, she’d led with Jewel—a solid choice for most battles. This is far from most trainers, and this is far from most battles, and this time, Sofia will not be falling back on her comfort zone.
Her best option for a lead, by far, is Fang. High physical attack power, good intimidation factor, only a two in six chance of a completely catastrophic mismatch right off the bat, and that’s assuming Cynthia had decided to bring Gastrodon at all. If Gastrodon is out of the picture, the only unrecoverable initial matchup that Fang could end up against would be Garchomp, and Cynthia has still never led with Garchomp in any official match since taking the title. Sofia doubts this pattern will be changing today. She’d run the numbers until the probabilities felt carved into her bones. Opening with Fang is not a perfect answer, and it’s one moving piece of many that will need to go right for this to work, but it’s the best she’ll get, and she needs to trust in her Pokémon and the plan they’d made together.
She pulls the ball free. “Fang, you’re up.”
Her Luxray materializes with a crackle of static, fur bristling, eyes gleaming and hungry. This is what they trained for. This is what they live for.
Across the field, Cynthia makes her choice.
Spiritomb’s keystone materializes and lands on the floor with a loud thud. The rest of it oozes out not long after, an eerie keening sound echoing off the walls as it settles into position.
Sofia’s pulse starts drumming a steady rhythm in her ears. It’s not out of fear; she’s not scared. She’s not nervous, either, she’d studied too much for that and their opening matchup is serviceably neutral. She’s antsy, she thinks. The good kind of antsy.
This… this is it.
This is the adrenaline high she’s been chasing another taste of for months.
This is the battle she came back for.
It isn’t the battle she came back for.
It’s not clean. It’s not decisive. She performs well, but not as well as she knows she can. It’s technically a victory, but it doesn’t feel like one.
Crouton is still standing, but only barely—his legs are shaking slightly even if he tries to hide it, and he’s wobbly on his feet. Togekiss had thoroughly roughed him up and it shows. The leafy edges of his tail are sliced in several spots and the tip of one of his ears will probably take a good day or so to regrow. If Togekiss had a couple more seconds, if Crouton had been standing a few inches to the left to where that Air Slash would have hit him dead-on…
All of it really only starts to sink in as she withdraws Crouton, and the words “I concede” are flying out of her mouth before she can even really think about them.
Cynthia blinks, tilting her head just slightly. She carefully scans Sofia’s face for any hint of uncertainty and blinks again upon finding none.
“You… concede?”
“Yeah.”
Sofia opens her mouth, closes it, tries again. How do you explain to a stranger that winning doesn’t feel like winning if you know it wasn’t your best? A victory means you earned it. That you won. This wasn’t that.
“I concede. You win. Good battle.”
A startled laugh slips out of Cynthia, and this time it’s Sofia’s turn to blink.
“Well,” Cynthia regards Sofia with a look caught somewhere between impressed and genuinely bewildered, “I can safely say this is a first.”
Sofia frowns. “…What is?”
“I’ve never had a challenger win and then concede.”
“That wasn’t a win,” Sofia insists.
“Technically, by league rules, it was.” Cynthia gestures toward the arena. “Your Leafeon was still standing.”
“Barely, and not because I played it well. That was all him.”
Steel gray eyes dig into Sofia’s skin like they’re trying to dissect her and understand what makes her tick. It would probably be unsettling if Sofia were not already busy actively dissecting her own failings.
“Most trainers would call that perseverance. Or good fortune.”
“It was sloppiness,” Sofia corrects, insistent. “Mine. He wouldn’t have needed to persevere if I hadn’t put him in that position.”
Cynthia watches her—really watches her. What exactly she’s looking for, Sofia doesn’t know. Her face remains carefully neutral the whole time, a schooled mask of composure that refuses to crack.
“…You’re serious,” she says at last.
“Of course I’m serious. I don’t want a match victory I didn’t earn.”
“You think you didn’t earn it?” There’s no bite to her question, no malice to her tone. If anything, she seems genuinely curious.
“No.” Sofia shakes her head. “Not the way I’m aiming for.”
Cynthia lets out a quiet chuckle, more breath than laugh. “Then I suppose you’ve caught me off-guard. Most people would be eager to start calling themselves Champion at this point.”
She’s right. Most people would be well into calling themselves Champion. Most people want to be the best at their craft, want to be the strongest, want to be like nobody ever was and nobody will ever be able to replicate. But…
“That’s not me.”
That earns another long look. “…So I’m realizing.”
The silence that follows Cynthia’s words sticks like Floaroma honey and feels far longer than it lasts.
“Well,” she says, tone returning to even professionalism, “if this isn’t the victory you wanted, I won’t force you to take it.”
She steps back, giving the faintest incline of her head.
“When you’re ready,” she adds, as she moves to step away, “come back and show me what that win you’re after looks like. I’ll be here.”
If Sofia didn’t know any better, she’d almost think it was an invitation.
The headlines start hitting before she’s even a few hours into the trip home. Between the short Staraptor hop over to Sunyshore, the walk across Route 222, and the bike ride past Lake Valor, her notifications don’t stop buzzing for at least three days.
CHALLENGER DECLINES TITLE IN RARE MATCH RESULT
SOFIA HOPPER: NEW RIVAL OR LUCKY FLUKE? CYNTHIA COMMENTS: “COME BACK… I’LL BE HERE.”
SINNOH CHAMPION DEFEATED—OR NOT? CHALLENGER CONCEDES
Every person on what feels like every social network has an opinion.
@aipompompurinnnn_: that leafeon should NOT have still been standing lol
@mpregpokemonegg: DUDE WHAT IS HAPPENING IN SINNOH RN BRUH THIS IS NUTS 💀💀💀💀
@skibidevenstoned: goofy ass match, stan Steven Stone #hoennorgoin #itssinnohver
u/RemoraidPlaya25 +143
Wtf the challenger won
u/XxpachirisussybakaxX -5
@RemoraidPlaya25 she got the win off brute force and luck, cope harder. not a real win, its why she conceded lol. and dont downvote me cuz yall know im right
u/kickedfromthefurfroupchat +2
@PachirisussybakaxX maybe get a life and log off of pokéddit lol your post history is rancid 😂 if you think you can do better then YOU go fight it out in a league conference and battle Cynthia lmao wait look at that you can’t even get past two badges 🤡 cope harder bozo
Even Garchomp profile-pic guy comes back alive on p/SinnohTrainers to give his take.
Improvement, yes. Precision, no. It was a lucky outcome and it seems she recognized that. She did round out her team significantly better this time, though. Kinda feel bad for saying her Infernape was probs candied-out, she does clearly have some skill in training Pokémon. We all saw her Leafeon tank some serious hits and that Froslass wasn’t messing around either. Despite what I’ve said before I don’t mean to imply she’s a bad trainer. Even if she historically has a habit of overrelying on it, her Infernape is as strong as it is for a reason. But tbh she’s still no Cynthia. So my point still stands, I don’t want Sofia as our league champion.
Sofia can’t even argue with any of them. She replays the clip of the Air Slash exchange so many times that the sequence starts to blur.
Jewel pads alongside her as she walks the rest of the way home, keeping pace effortlessly. Eventually he gives a long, pointed huff and taps the side of her leg with a knuckle when she refuses to put her phone down.
“I’m fine,” she says, without looking up from the replay.
He snorts, sharp and unimpressed, and gestures between the screen and her tired face. He doesn’t need to be able to speak the same language as her for his statement to be clear: Enough.
“I’ll rest later; you worry too much.”
Jewel rolls his eyes so hard she can practically hear it. He mimes her passed out on her bag with her neck at a painful angle. He’s exaggerating horribly and his criticism is entirely unwarranted.
“That still counted,” she mutters.
His flat, withering stare says: Absolutely not.
She keeps watching the replay anyways.
A week passes. Then another. Sofia finally starts to settle back into routine: training, studying, meal prep, sleeping. (If Jewel had his way, more sleeping. For some reason, he never seems to think she gets enough.)
Then the news drops:
CHAMPION CYNTHIA ADDS EXTRA WEEK TO ANNUAL OFF-SEASON — SOURCES SUGGEST EXTENDED TRAINING PERIOD; LEAGUE DECLINES TO COMMENT
Sofia stops mid-step in the kitchen, phone still in hand. Jewel looks up from cleaning his fur upon noticing her freezing in place.
“…She always takes time off in late fall,” Sofia says slowly. “That’s normal.”
Another article loads under the first one, as if the algorithm can smell her confusion.
UNOVA TRIP CUT SHORT THIS YEAR — INSIDERS SPECULATE CHAMPION TO REINFORCE TEAM FOR UPCOMING SEASON
“That’s… new,” she murmurs, thinking out loud. “She never skimps out on Unova.”
Jewel lumbers over and peers at the screen, tail flicking with interest the whole way.
“She usually schmoozes with their League people a bit, gets some practice in with foreign trainers, hits the beach in Undella Town for some R&R, it’s a whole thing every year.”
Jewel gives a questioning grunt, as if to say: So why cut it short?
“She probably just…” She lifts a shoulder. “Wanted more training. Or the travel was inconvenient. Or—” She cuts herself off before she can say something stupid like “or because of our match,” because that would be insane.
Sofia scrolls again.
There’s no official reason listed anywhere. No statement from Cynthia, or the Gym Leaders, or the League at all, really. All of it’s speculation at best and the media is quickly turning it into a circus. Knowing it’s for the best, she forces herself to put the phone down and tries to focus on other things.
It doesn’t work.
She stays up late that night replaying the battle on her computer. Slowing it down frame by frame, tracking Crouton’s footwork, mapping out everything wrong with her timing, she’s done so much already and there still feels like there’s so much more to wade through. It’s like a puzzle she’s still finding more pieces for. Every time something clicks, something else doesn’t.
Jewel watches her pick away at things for all of forty minutes before planting both hands on her shoulders and pulling her away from her desk—gently enough to avoid hurting her but he’s definitely firm about it—in an attempt to force her to go lie down.
“I know.” She stops to rub some of the crust away from her eyes. “I’m going. Just… just one more look. There was this thing she had her Togekiss do where—”
He groans. Loudly.
“Okay, two looks. That’s it. Just another minute, then I’m done. Promise.”
He tugs at her again, harder this time, and Sofia knows this is a fight she won’t be winning. He’s not buying her excuses. Time to pack it up.
“Fine, fine.” She sighs. “Bedtime. I get it.”
He nods, satisfied, before chucking a set of pajamas at her face with a huff. He already had them on hand. Asshole.
When she finally hops beneath the blankets and closes her eyes, the only thing she sees is Cynthia’s expression during that long, searching silence in the arena.
The frame-by-frames of the battle are burned into her dreams.
(Somewhere across the region, Sinnoh’s Pokémon League Champion is spending her night relentlessly picking apart the footage of the same match.)
Their third battle isn’t a disaster, but it isn’t close either. Sofia learns the hard way that somewhere between their last match and this one, Cynthia had done a surgical job of leveling up her entire team.
Crouton getting frozen solid is the headline in her brain, but it’s everything around that part of the battle that sticks with her more: the way Cynthia’s new Glaceon moved like it had already known all of Crouton’s attempts to dodge before he made them, the way her commands were timed to the exact instant Sofia hesitated, the way a good thirty percent of the Sinnoh Champion’s new move choices never showed up on any of the public records Sofia studied. A whole offseason’s worth of changes, and she’d walked right into it with a plan based on old data expecting most of the same battlefield.
Sofia reviews her notes on the way out of the arena (mental ones, she refuses to pull out her phone in the cameras’ line of sight and she’s definitely not doing that in front of Cynthia either).
The biggest thing: Cynthia’s team moved like they’d been entirely reforged. Garchomp’s footwork was different, lighter on its back leg. The range Spiritomb could stretch from its keystone was longer. Lucario was fairly similar, but its punches hit significantly harder. Milotic had, like, three new moves at its disposal. Togekiss, especially, was different. Instead of the swift, sweeping arcs Sofia studied, its Air Slashes now broke rhythm at strange intervals and randomly alternated between being wide and narrow. What had been a smooth, efficient pattern had turned deliberately unpredictable. Either Cynthia knew someone would study that footage, or she knew someone did.
Sofia stops just outside the arena doors. Jewel pads up behind her, letting out an uneasy rumble that almost sounds like sympathy. “Yeah,” she mutters, “I know.”
She doesn’t need to see the replay to realize the obvious: Cynthia had been training. Hard. And it wasn’t just to get stronger, she had specially prepared for this—for her.
Sofia hates how much that matters to her.
She steps outside for some fresh air and finally pulls out her phone. She doesn’t need to check the headlines to know what they’ll say. Likely something along the lines of “CHAMPION UNVEILS NEW STRATEGIES—AND NEW POKÉMON”, or “CHAMPION’S FIRST MATCH OF THE SEASON SHOCKS SPECTATORS: IS A NEW GOLDEN ERA INCOMING?”, or maybe even “CYNTHIA’S NEWEST TEAM MEMBER: WHY THE CHANGE?”. They don’t have to name her, and many of them won’t, but Sofia knows exactly what data Cynthia had been stress-testing today.
The part of her that still thinks like a teenage beginner with a Chimchar is buzzing so loud she almost feels nauseous.
Being used as a test run pisses her off. It pisses her off how well prepared Cynthia was. It pisses her off that she got read like a book live in 4K HD. It pisses her off that she failed her team again. That whole battle honestly pissed her off, but not enough to drown out the sharper, fiercer, aching hunger for a round four.
Jewel flicks her leg with a soft grunt, like he can sense her thoughts cannibalizing each other. She looks down; he’s giving her that flat, unimpressed stare again.
“I’m not spiraling,” she lies. He doesn’t budge. “I’m really not, quit looking at me like that.” He doesn’t quit looking at her like that, and flicks her leg again just to make a point.
Sofia exhales. Her breath fogs in the cold. She probably needs a new scarf; this one is starting to get a bit thin. Maybe a new coat, too. It’s not like she doesn’t have the money for it. Even if she hadn’t won against Cynthia, she’s got no shortage of tournament winnings to fall back on.
“She’s getting stronger,” she admits quietly. “Fast.”
Jewel grumbles, the fire on his head briefly flashing brighter in annoyance. This is a fact and he knows it too.
“...And I’m stagnating.”
Another flick, accompanied by a louder grunt.
“Fine. We’re stagnating.”
He nods and doesn’t move to push the issue further as they head back toward Victory Road, seeming satisfied with that correction.
The more distance she puts between herself and the arena, the more the details of the battle turn over in her head, arranging themselves into a map of mistakes and near-misses and outright disasters. Some of them she already knows how to fix. Others are going to require late nights and probably getting yelled at by at least three of her Pokémon.
Maybe, just maybe, this is what the start of a rivalry feels like.
The thought of it is enough to make her stop where she stands, sinking in her stomach like the S.S. Anne.
Rivals. She and Cynthia could be rivals. She can’t decide if she wants to run from the idea or chase after it.
u/theMetagrossMetaisReal +244
I don’t usually do longform posts, but I keep seeing the same takes flying around clips of Hopper’s recent League matches and they’re… not entirely wrong, but they’re not getting the full picture either.
So let’s talk about what went down in that recent match vs. Cynthia.
There’s a debate that comes up in competitive battling every few years, usually when someone very good starts losing matches they “shouldn’t”: is the obvious choice always the correct one?
Some people will tell you yes. Some people will tell you no. Most people will tell you that it depends and then not really give you much else beyond a few surface-level reasons. The real answer is that the obvious choice is often the correct one, especially if your fundamentals are strong and you’re piloting a team that does what it’s supposed to do well.
Hopper is very good at both, but if you’ve carefully watched enough of her battles, a pattern starts to emerge. Her answer to that question above, more often than not, is yes. She sees a problem, she deploys the most efficient tool she has to solve it, and nine times out of ten it works. It’s a solid strategy, when people don’t know you or know you’re coming for them.
But here’s where things get interesting: if you know that your opponent will always take the cleanest, safest line to victory, you can prepare for that. You can bait out their heavy hitters too early, or punish their switch-ins, or even take the time to set-up with the knowledge you’ll get away with it. If you know how your opponent tends to behave, and know that their answer to the question of “is the obvious choice the correct one?” will usually be yes, you can make the “correct” answer cost more than it should.
This is where I think a lot of people are misreading Hopper’s recent losses. She’s not losing because she’s a bad trainer or because she’s making bad calls. She’s losing high-level matches because other high-level trainers, namely our amazing Regional Champion (I’m a huge Cynthia fan, if you guys couldn’t tell from my post history), have started treating her habits as something they can and need to exploit.
That doesn’t mean Hopper should stop making the obvious play, of course, but she’ll need to make a conscious effort in future battles to decide when the obvious play is still worth it. There’s a difference between relying on a strong strategy and being unwilling to deviate from it, and that’s something she seems to still be feeling out.
To be clear: this is a very normal phase to go through for someone at her level. We’ve seen trainers getting their first taste of the top go through similar issues. Anyone else remember when Steven Stone was new on the scene in Hoenn? Because I do. The strongest trainers don’t come out of nowhere, people, they start off making mistakes that they learn from. Seriously, some of the takes I’ve been seeing are beyond ignorant.
You don’t get read like this unless you’re dangerous. You don’t get prepped for like this unless you matter. I don’t think the question is “Can Hopper switch things up in her strategies?” I think the question is “Will she trust herself enough to know when she doesn’t need to?”
Curious what others think, especially anyone who’s faced her in battle before.
u/budEWWW +2
@theMetagrossMetaisReal whole lotta words to say your goat is currently getting pwned man cynthia’s glaceon pulled up and said put the fries in the bag
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@HelloSk1ttyGurl22: glaceon ate holy shit the cuntquake from that ice beam was so big it was felt in kanto. that shit is kunto now 😭
@R0xieR0xx: idek why everyones so obsessed with cynthia all she does is battle lmao anyways stream roxie [MEDIA RESTRICTED BY COPYRIGHT OWNER]
@PPUP_POWER: is it just me or did cynthia like specially prep for this?? am i crazy?? she looked a little too ready to lock in that ice shard play
@ceruledgyyy: @PPUP_POWER you’re fucking delusional cynthia wouldnt cater her strats to nobodies
@PPUP_POWER: @ceruledgyyy who
@ceruledgyyy: @PPUP_POWER are you stupid fym who cynthia’s only had one challenge battle this season
@PPUP_POWER: @ceruledgyyy asked
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@PPUP_POWER: lmao he blocked me
@R0xieR0xx: cynthia won but her flop era’s still going roxie clears sorry not sorry xoxo stream roxie [MEDIA RESTRICTED BY COPYRIGHT OWNER]
u/TopPercentageRattata +3078
That Infernape has to be in the top percentage of all Infernapes. Holy karp that thing is a beast, to be able to last that long against Garchomp with a type disadvantage is insane. In case you guys didn’t see the battle, I’m attaching the link below.
Edit: Thanks for the gold!
u/SixMagikarpKing +1
@TopPercentageRattata Funny you bring up Magikarp. We really need to see more Magikarp representation at the top level. I’m frankly bored of seeing pseudolegendaries everywhere. Real skilled trainers win with their favorites.
u/MudkipzSupremacist +1
@SixMagikarpKing not everyones favorite is magikarp dumbass
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Three months pass, and Sofia still can’t shake the feeling of being read like an open book. It’s an emotion that has somehow dug into the gray matter of her brain and started feeding on her thoughts like some sort of empathic parasite. While she hates how clearly she remembers each misstep, she hates how much she wants another round even more.
She closes her eyes and she dreams of that battle. She tries to sleep and she ends up staring at the ceiling thinking over what-ifs for how the next could go. Those matches started a craving she can’t seem to kick, and some days she’s half-convinced she’s going through withdrawals.
But Cynthia is still training, and Sofia can’t afford to keep trying the same thing over and over again. There are limits to what she can tweak with the same team composition, and there are rules in place forcing her to wait between challenges. She gets it—the restrictions are there to prevent someone from brute-forcing their way into a win—but she can’t just sit on her hands until the clock runs out. Going through the motions is how she’d ended up here. Something isn’t working. Something needs to change.
The solution, as much as it rankles at her, is simple: she needs another Pokémon, ideally a special attacker.
That, among other factors, is probably the biggest reason she calls her training on Mount Coronet quits and heads back home to Veilstone.
She spends another three months at home.
The Game Corner is as loud as it is grimy. The smell of stale cigarette smoke hangs so thick in the air it’s practically suffocating. Lights flash from every machine she walks past. Jackpots jingle left and right as gamblers cheer over wins they’ll probably feed right back into the same machine. The music playing in the background is disgustingly upbeat at all times. Sofia barely notices any of it anymore; weeks of grinding games in the house’s favor have slowly blended the clatter into a monotonous slurry of background noise.
She walks up to the prize counter nextdoor with a bucket of tokens. The attendant doesn’t ask what she wants. One glance at her and her tokens, and he’s standing there waiting for an order.
“Porygon,” she says.
The attendant nods with the solemn resignation of someone who is not paid enough to care about her life choices and dumps her tokens into the coin counting machine. Ten minutes later, she’s out the door with a Pokéball in hand and a vow to never step foot in that building ever again.
When the ball opens, the Pokémon inside blinks to life with a burst of chirping noises. It immediately fixes her with an unblinking, robotic stare.
Sofia crosses her arms and stares right back.
The Porygon hovers closer, tilting its head like it’s already analyzing her every move for discrepancies.
Good. She needs something that can think sideways, see patterns she can’t. It’s the most efficient way to break out of the rigid battle flow she’s built around herself.
A digital Pokémon is exactly what she needs, and Porygon wastes no time proving it.
SINNOH SENTINEL EXCLUSIVE: SOFIA HOPPER SPOTTED LEAVING GAME CORNER WITH NEW POKÉMON—IS CHALLENGE IMMINENT?
DEVON CORPORATION SHAREHOLDER MEETING BOASTS RECORD PROFITS
ALL ABOUT PORYGON, WHERE TO GET ONE, AND WHY YOU MIGHT NOT EVEN WANT ONE
SINNOH CHAMPION ON A HOT STREAK: WHAT’S NEXT?
u/throwawaytrubbish28962 +2
Throwaway account because you can’t ever be too safe when talking about this stuff, ESPECIALLY given we’ve seen past incidents of game corners going hand-in-hand with literal criminals. (Sorry Kanto folks, but people have NOT forgotten about your Team Rocket problem.)
I genuinely think the game corner in Veilstone City might be rigged.
I’m attaching a spreadsheet of results from when I went, but I found that the odds listed on the machines are entirely false. The amount of people I saw win and then feed everything back into the same machine hoping to win bigger genuinely made me sick to my stomach. It’s a vicious cycle and they engineer every click of a button to get you hooked.
Your best odds with anything are always with physical cards. Never trust a machine—especially not in a place where they offer Porygons to high-rollers. Who’s to say they don’t have an army of them in the electronics choosing who wins and who doesn’t?
I budgeted for this experiment and ended up at a net loss, but after this I realize I could have easily done much worse. Small mercies, I suppose.
u/GranbulllFantasy +11
Have you considered that 1-85 odds don’t necessarily mean that you’ll win once out of every 85 times you play? Real life doesn’t come with a pity system man, trust me, I’d know.
Training with Porygon is equal parts brilliant and deranged.
Sofia pulls up Cynthia’s battle footage on her laptop; Porygon plugs itself in, watches it once and immediately starts recreating Glaceon’s movement patterns with uncanny accuracy.
Crouton shrieks and tries to body-check it. Jewel refuses to be in the vicinity when it starts doing a jittery, scarily precise imitation of Milotic. Velvet heavily implies that it has no soul more than once and seems to be trying to convince her to ditch it. Jet flat-out hates it after getting hit with a Thunderbolt to the face in training, Fang doesn’t care so long as it battles well enough to put up a decent fight, and Pretzel, like with most things, doesn’t seem bothered much at all.
“Guys, it’s not mocking you,” she grumbles.
Porygon jerks its head at the exact same angle as she does, at the same time.
Crouton screams louder. Porygon doesn’t laugh at him, but it does go out of its way to repeatedly elicit this response. It goes on like this for days, even despite Sofia’s attempts to mediate.
Still, they’re learning. She’s learning. More than she expected, truthfully.
The weeks blur into each other: simulations, drills, rewatches of Cynthia’s commands timed like choreography. At the Battle Frontier, she earns enough Battle Points for an Upgrade, then evolves Porygon in a flickering hallway behind the Battle Arcade like she’s pirating its new form. A couple months and a couple of Frontier prints later, she gets her hands on a Dubious Disc off some shady guy on the forums she was half-convinced was going to scam her. Plugging Porygon2 into her laptop at half-past three in the morning for its second evolution somehow feels even more suspicious. Her brand new Porygon-Z emerges vibrating with energy, eyes blinking in a way that simultaneously breaks every known law of geometry, and immediately proceeds to make it clear that it does not care about legality in the slightest when it jacks itself back into her laptop and begins torrenting old footage of Hoenn Pokémon League challenges.
Sofia blinks back at it before coming to a horrifying realization.
“Oh. I never gave you a name, did I?”
It doesn’t answer with anything except a glitchy buzzing sound. If it minds, or if it even has an opinion one way or another, it doesn’t make it known.
“Great. Thanks, very helpful.” She pauses to think before an idea all but smacks her in the face. “…Actually, that’s perfect. Buzz it is.”
The Battle Frontier eats the rest of her time without apology. She fights weird trainers with weirder gimmicks, purposely seeks battles where the entire point is to punish hesitation or reward reckless usage of something unorthodox. She practices swapping Velvet for Buzz, Buzz for Jet, mixing and matching held items and team compositions to try different niches. Buzz spends nights processing data into palatable charts and graphs, highlighting important info she may have missed.
With Porygon-Z feeding her data and her other Pokémon adjusting to the new routine, Sofia feels herself turning into a sharper opponent. She sleeps on time by letting her newest teammate handle most of the gruntwork of data processing overnight. She eats better when she can walk over to the cafeteria and trade BP she’s swimming in for restaurant-quality food whenever she wants. She even manages to free up time on her schedule to make use of the Pokemon Center’s athletic facilities for a couple hours a week. By the time she finally leaves the Battle Frontier, she’s tired, in overall better shape, and buzzing with ideas she doesn’t entirely know what to do with yet, but she’s decidedly optimistic.
Then she gets home, pulls up footage of Cynthia’s most recent exhibition match on her phone, and immediately feels her stomach turn.
It’s a wake up call, to say the least.
Cynthia’s already improved. A new setup angle with Stealth Rock to bait out hits on Fire-types before Roserade comes into play, a strange feint that forces the challenger to cede ground if they don’t want to overcommit, a different strategy in Cynthia’s opening moves—they’re all small details, but they’re intentional ones.
Of course she wouldn’t stay still. Why would she? Why would she ever?
Sofia sits on the floor, hunched over her phone with her elbows on her knees, Buzz humming beside her like a broken metronome that can’t hold a steady beat.
Cynthia is still improving. It should discourage her. It doesn’t.
“Run some numbers and help me decide who to bring for a match with Cynthia’s current team. Then switch to six month projections for both of our teams.”
Buzz flies over to her desk without hesitation, plugs itself into her computer, and gets to work.
@suckmyloveballs: this year’s cynthia beach pics. 🥵 holy shit. 🍑😩 clearly i need to take a trip to unova because the view of the mount cynthias in person must be crazy
@HOOTHOOTERS: being a woman trainer at the top level must suck dude the amount of nasty posts ive seen about cynthia this year can yall keep your digletts in your pants??
@toys_aurorus_fan: @HOOTHOOTERS fr like she’ll never do another AMA if people keep acting like this. like yall your posts are public keep that shit in the drafts
@thiccoritAAAA: Cynthia’s yearly trip to unova is an aoe attack to every lesbian within 100 miles of undella town. how do people focus enough to battle her in that swimsuit. category 5 mothercane im afraid, I dont want her i need her.
@CYNTHCOMETOJOHTO: cynthia PLEASE come to johto
@theyreamoonguss: hopper racked up three gold prints and then left??? I know she was having trouble with the battle factory but like even still why stop at three 😭 i wanted to see her battle palmer
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R0xieR0xx2: STREAM ROXIE’S NEW SINGLE OR ELSE [MEDIA RESTRICTED BY COPYRIGHT OWNER]
@Hax0rus_: the rumors abt cynthia having an electric type now 👀 new goat?
@sirperiorityy: @Hax0rus_ don’t believe anything you see until its confirmed people say anything for 5 seconds of fame online
@Hax0rus_: @sirperiorittyy theres literally pictures of thunderbolts hitting her most recent training site near undella twn bruh explain that if its not confirmed
@sirperiorityy: @Hax0rus_ TMs exist and several of her pokemon can learn them genius dont auto assume its a new mon
@feelmypoliwrath: dude sofia hopper just beat the karp out of me on route 225 wtf since when did she have a porygonz?? that thing is sick in the head and i swear it laughed when it fried poli
@Metagrossed_Out: @feelmypoliwrath have you been living in a cave? her porygon has been battling in the frontier for a couple months now lol its old news
@Metagrossed_Out: @feelmypoliwrath on public record too btw
@feelmypoliwrath: @Metagrossed_Out my bad, some of us have lives outside of the internet yknow. no need to be an ass about it. have the day you deserve.
Sofia doesn’t tell anyone when she requests the fourth challenge.
There’s no announcement, no interview clip, no dramatic quote about destiny or perseverance or that she’ll win this time for sure, believe it! She submits the paperwork online, double-checks the date on her calendar no less than three times, and pretends very hard that her hands aren’t shaking when the confirmation email comes through the following afternoon. (That confirmation email is then double-checked another three times, just to be safe.)
The slot for her battle against the Sinnoh Champion is scheduled for early morning—too early for most to want, given it means their run against the Elite Four will have to start even earlier. The media doesn’t watch the earliest slots as closely; most of the bigger hitters like to make a show of things and tend to aim for spots when people can afford the time to watch the fight live. Sofia had taken the earliest spot she could without hesitation.
A bit over one year since her last loss, she ascends forty-four evenly spaced steps to the battlefield that will decide her fate once more.
The arena is quiet enough that she doesn’t trust it. It’s too clean, too sterile. It’s waiting for something. Maybe her, or maybe another challenger, or maybe its reigning ruler to come defend the crown that comes with its holy land.
Buzz’s Pokéball hums faintly at her hip, refusing to settle. Jewel’s sits beside it, steady and familiar. The absence of Jet is far louder than she expected, a negative space she keeps catching herself accounting for when she shouldn’t. Pretzel is probably going to be hungry after this, and Crouton’s going to demand fresh mineral water—the name brand one from the vending machines in the Pokémon Center lobby. Fang’s going to need a bribe too, now that she thinks about it. She’s not going to be happy about being snubbed out of a lead spot again.
She’s halfway through mentally reordering contingencies when a familiar voice cuts in from behind her.
“You’re earlier than last time.”
Sofia turns.
Cynthia stands a few steps back, signature black coat neatly folded over one arm. Her hair is pulled back in a loose braid, her jewelry thin to where it’s almost informal. She looks less like someone bracing to defend her title and more like someone checking in on an acquaintance; more like a woman than a headline.
“I figured I’d try something new,” Sofia says.
Cynthia’s eyes flick to her belt and stop there, deliberate.
“You changed your lineup,” she notes.
“Yeah. People keep telling me that’s a bad habit, but…” Sofia shrugs.
“I’d be a hypocrite if I told you to avoid changing things up.” Cynthia hums, assessing. “You benched your Staraptor.” She doesn’t give any indication to whether she thinks positively or negatively about this. Sofia’s not sure she’d want to know even if she did; half the fun of this whole experience is trying to get a read on her.
“You’re keeping tabs on me now?”
“I keep tabs on anything that forces me to adjust,” Cynthia answers easily. “History has a habit of repeating itself if you let it. I try not to enter any battle ignorant.”
The words land heavier than they should and squat in the silence they form like they own it.
The space between them is noticeably charged, but it isn’t hostile. It lacks the cool professionalism of their first match, isn’t drenched in the distance of the second. There’s anticipation, just like before the third, but it’s not quite as antsy, not quite as nervewracking. This feels more direct, like they’ve both stopped pretending that it’s a coincidence Sofia came all the way back to Lily of the Valley and climbed forty-four steps for a fourth battle over a title she doesn’t care about.
“I saw your Battle Frontier records,” Cynthia says. “Three gold prints. You didn’t stay long.”
“Three was long enough.”
“For most trainers, that’s where they start pushing to finish the set.”
“That wasn’t what I was there for.”
Cynthia studies her, curious. “Then what were you looking for?”
Sofia hesitates. This is the part she usually dodges directly thinking about, the part she usually doesn’t like admitting out loud. In front of Cynthia, the words come flying off her tongue like Jet is on her hip to personally coach them into it.
“I needed to stop leaning on things that only worked because I was used to them. I was adapting my plans to my comfort zone.”
And for a second, she considers leaving it at that. It’d be the smart thing to do, really—letting her answer pass as respectable and well thought-out instead of a personal failure she’d blurted without thinking. But Cynthia doesn’t look at her like she’s waiting for her to be quiet, and when it’s the first time in ages someone genuinely seems interested in what she has to say, Sofia finds that she can’t stop talking.
“Some things seem like fundamentals until you take them high enough and realize they’re just… sort of like a wall? They’re sturdy and easy to build off of, but you can box yourself in with them if you’re not careful.” She lets out a breath before admitting the ugly truth aloud: “I… wasn’t careful enough.”
“So I tore everything down,” she continues. “Focused on the basics and worked my way back up. I went out of my way to battle people who punished me for thinking too slow, or too fast, and learned the hard way that being rigid gets you trapped, but being too reckless just gets you screwed over. I needed to find a middle ground. Something that actually held up when shaken around. So I stayed until I found a way to build a battling style that better fit us—me and my team.”
Slowly, Cynthia smiles. It’s small, almost thoughtful. Sofia has never seen it on any of the footage saved on her hard drive. It feels strangely intimate, like the curtain has been pulled back and she’s finally getting a glimpse at Cynthia the person rather than Cynthia the Champion.
“In my experience, that’s usually when things start getting interesting.”
She looks like she wants to say more, but she doesn’t get the chance. The arena’s PA systems crackle to life, an official clears their throat, politely reminds them that they’re on a schedule, and the moment is gone.
Cynthia straightens, slipping on her coat. The mask of a Pokémon League Champion settles into place with each sleeve, armor she’s learned to wear like a second skin.
She turns to walk toward her side of the arena before she pauses. “I’m curious,” she says, with a glance over her shoulder, “to see what you kept.”
Sofia grins, toothy and wide and honest.
“Same to you.”
They’d prepared for Cynthia’s Eelektross. The headlines after it blindsided the first challenger of the season had been one of the largest factors in deciding to bench Jet.
While definitely pissy about this, Jet did at least seem to understand why he drew the short straw. It wasn’t personal and it wasn’t calling him weak. It was a strategy devised to fight one of the newest, largest threats in Cynthia’s arsenal, and he just didn’t fit in it when league rules only allow six Pokémon on a team. (He’d also been reminded, after Buzz repeatedly ruffled his feathers, that two of her gold Battle Frontier prints and no less than five of her gym badges were directly a result of his presence.)
She’d left options in her plan, plan C’s and D’s and Z’s of how to deal with that Eelektross. And for the most part, they worked, until Eelektross whipped out a massive Giga Drain and knocked Pretzel out in one fell swoop.
In older matches, that kind of wrench in things would have snowballed. She’d have been forced into recovery mode, reaching for any sort of control too fast, too desperately.
This time, it didn’t.
The plans broke; she let them. She kept the reins but didn’t overtighten them, worked with the battlefield rather than reacting to it. Switches that would have been desperation plays a year ago were now tools chosen with intent, used to bait out damage on tough matchups she’d be forced into later. Strategies formed and changed with each call of an attack. The battle stopped being about executing the right part of a script and became something with its own heartbeat, moves and countermoves alive on an ever-shifting chessboard.
It was so, so close to the thing she’s been looking for.
But the paralysis… that part sticks between her teeth.
Thunder Fang paralyzing Roserade when it did was luck. She knows the odds. She knows how thin that margin was. Roughly ten percent. Without hitting a one-in-ten chance to paralyze, the endgame of the match would have dragged into territory she wasn’t confident she could still make something out of. The win tilted on that hinge, whether she likes it or not. It makes the victory feel compromised.
By the time the match is officially called, the background noise of the arena barely registers. Sofia is too busy cataloguing everything she still doesn’t like about how it ended, and she doesn’t even notice Cynthia approaching until the sound of her voice snaps her back to the present.
“Well,” Cynthia says. “That answers that.”
“Does it?” Sofia lets out a quiet, bitter laugh.
Cynthia’s hair is loose again, freed from its braid sometime between the battle ending and now. The only remaining evidence it had ever been tied back are the faint waves that now cling to its edges. It’s the sort of casual look many supermodels would probably kill for and Cynthia pulls it off effortlessly.
“You didn’t try to force a strategy where it wouldn’t hold. You adapted faster when I purposely derailed your plans. You’ve grown.”
Sofia hesitates, then admits, “Paralyzing Roserade was luck.”
Cynthia hums. “Yes.”
“That’s noth—”
“You put yourself in a position where luck could matter. That’s not nothing.”
“It’s not nothing, but I don’t feel like random chance is anything I can really build on.”
“No,” Cynthia agrees. “But you can continue building on the rest of it. You’re clearly already on the right track; you’ve improved quite a bit.”
Sofia rolls the words around in her head, testing how they sit. They don’t change how she feels about the battle, but they don’t feel hollow either.
“I’m not taking the title,” are the words she chooses to eventually break the quiet. They only earn her a slight lift of a meticulously shaped eyebrow.
“I didn’t expect you to.”
That surprises Sofia more than the win did. The look Cynthia meets her with is deliberately unreadable in a way Sofia’s learned to recognize as the reigning champion holding her cards close to her chest.
“You’re not finished yet. Neither am I.”
She says it like it’s a fact. Something about that makes Sofia’s chest feel tight.
“I… I’ll come back.”
It’s a threat. It’s a promise.
Cynthia smiles again—the same small, private curve of her lips she’d offered Sofia a glimpse of before their battle started.
“I know,” she says. “I’m looking forward to it.”
Hours after the battle, Sofia sits on the steps outside the Pokémon League. Fang rests her head against her knee and Buzz hums softly beside her, hooked into her phone processing data she isn’t ready to look at yet.
Cynthia was right: she doesn’t feel finished. There’s still a whisper in her ear to keep pushing, keep studying. There’s still a gnawing hunger for a rematch. The intrinsic, bone-deep drive to climb those forty-four steps again, as many times as she can and as many times as it takes, hasn’t left.
She doesn’t feel lost anymore, either.
@manicvulpixie: i am a total arcanine when it comes to sniffing out gay subtext and when i say the way cynthia and sofia looked at each other after that battle was NOT straight i mean it
@butterfreerealestatee: @manicvulpixie oomf I love you but you cant use the phrase “gay subtext” to describe actual people 😭
@manicvulpixie: @butterfreerealestatee girl what did i say about gay subtext stop saying i love you or imma start getting ideas. kidding but like also tell me im wrong like did u see them just stare at each other??
@Tentacoolstory_Dude: @manicvulpixie people can look at each other without it meaning they’re gay???? people can just be awkward or autistic yknow
@manicvulpixie: @Tentacoolstory_Dude being autistic doesnt mean theyre not able to be gay too lmfao ableist much?? enjoy being blocked lmao.
@manicvulpixie: anyways oomfs never let it be said that I am not the first to ship this shit cuz #diversitywin and i am EATING
@karpacc10: am i the only one who thinks shipping real people is genuinely freak behavior?? Like those arent characters those are real people with their own opinions thats kinda parasocial tbh 😬
@manicvulpixie: @karpacc10 if youre gonna vaguepost about someone maybe make sure they’re not following you first lol. im literally not hurting anyone maybe stop projecting and being the morals police
@suckmyloveballs: cynthia in a braid got me acting a little unwise 😩
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@GranbulllFantasy: If I get another bad pull off a free ticket I swear on my account I’m flying over to Kanto and beating the devs asses personally this is so unfair
@echo_chamberzarebad: why @/manicvulpixie is a narcissist who doesn’t respect boundaries and never takes accountability for herself, a 🧵 (more evidence in attached doc, 1/8) https://docs.pokoffice/document/d/4LeDL02lOlmAnCca96
Going for a fourth gold print is supposed to be something to keep her occupied in the required downtime between challenges.
It’s not supposed to be easy—the Battle Frontier isn’t a place anyone can go looking for an easy win—but it’s supposed to be familiar enough for her to not overthink things. She knows the facilities, she knows the rules. She knows what types of teams generally show up and how those teams generally like to play things. She’d made it to the thirty sixth floor of the Battle Tower before; none of this is new. At the end of the day, all of the facilities have their different quirks, but the overarching themes of battling in any of them remain the same: knock out all of your opponent’s Pokémon, and you move on to the next round.
Sofia has always favored an aggressive battling style. The trade-off with that, of course, is that 1) most sweepers tend to be frail when push comes to shove and 2) some Pokémon tank hits better than others, meaning if you can’t knock them out quickly, that can be a match decider right then and there if they use that time well. If she gets put on the defensive or caught-out without a counter for a bulkier enemy Pokémon, then it’s game over. It’s one of the biggest reasons why she’d added Pretzel to the team—not having anyone who can tank a few hits is more often than not compositional suicide in a six-on-six battle.
The Battle Tower, and the Battle Frontier as a whole, has its own set of strategies. A good portion of them can be directly attributed to the various facility gimmicks, but a sizable amount of them can also be attributed to the fact that all single battles in any of them are three-on-three.
Three-on-three single battles, by nature, limit team compositions. Type coverage options instantly shrink. Every held item matters more, because there are three fewer slots to hide a bad pick. And that’s not even mentioning that once you’re locked in, you’re locked in, and your same strategy needs to work for every potential opponent you come across. Any mistake—Pokémon, items, who you lead with, who you switch into—will, by design, cause a challenge run to fall apart within the first twenty floors. Make it past the first twenty? Then the battle pairing system will increasingly attempt to throw you off your game with matchups tailored to put you at a disadvantage. It’s a sink or swim environment designed to punish people used to the pool, and it’s easy to drown in if you don’t prepare accordingly.
Sofia’s usual strategy for most of her Battle Tower runs sits somewhere between aggressive and technical. Jewel and Velvet hit fast and hit hard, and when she needs to force the pace to slow down, Buzz uses Trick to shove its Choice Specs into enemy hands to stall for time. Trick is new, and she plans around it carefully.
Buzz, Jewel, and Velvet are still her three Pokémon of choice. Buzz’s held item changes for obvious reasons, but Velvet and Jewel’s get adjusted too: a Lax Incense and a Focus Sash, respectively. Jewel’s moveset shifts toward punch-based moves to better take advantage of his species’ strengths. Velvet picks up a few status moves to act as a fallback if Buzz goes down earlier than planned. Buzz’s own moveset is tweaked to account for the fact that one slot is now permanently occupied by Trick.
More importantly, she makes a conscious effort not to default to the same opening Pokémon every time. A nagging voice in the back of her head is constantly reminding her that relying too heavily on one Pokémon is a bad habit.
It’s why, when the matchup screen flashes and the optimal lead against Rhydon is immediately obvious, she hesitates. Jewel would be the obvious choice here. Between Close Combat, Thunder Punch, U-Turn, and Flare Blitz, he’s got the type coverage to put pressure on a variety of Pokémon early, and he hits with enough force to punish anything greedy enough to try setting up in front of him. The opposing team isn’t built to handle that; most of their Pokémon are slow and even if they’re sturdy enough to tank one hit, they can never afford to tank two. She’s seen variations of this team type dozens of times by now. She knows how this goes: they’ll try to stall for time; they’ll go down fast when you don’t let them. She also knows she’s been overrelying on what she knows for the past five matches to the point people have noticed.
She leads with Velvet.
The rationale is sound, at least on paper. Velvet gives her more information up front on the off chance something is different and provides special attack power early without overcommitting. If Sofia can feel out her opponent’s strategy first, she can bring Jewel in later to clean up once the field is in her favor. Leading with Velvet prevents having to risk Jewel losing his Focus Sash too soon.
That’s the idea, at least. What actually happens is messier.
Her opponent switches Pokémon immediately, pivoting into a stall tactic with an Umbreon. Velvet misses a Blizzard that would have chipped the Umbreon if it hit (but not enough to matter, given Umbreons tank special attacks like a champ) and also misses the Will-O-Wisp she tries for immediately afterwards. The returning Toxic to the face doesn’t miss Velvet, which puts pressure on her Sofia can’t afford right now, which then means Sofia switches into Jewel a hair later than she should have.
By the time Jewel hits the field, the situation has already worsened.
Jewel’s type advantage forces Umbreon to either switch or take a knockout, but now he’s putting that threat against a team that’s already prepared for him. Umbreon immediately hits Jewel with a Yawn on switch-in. Now on a time limit to use Jewel or lose him, Sofia tries to brute-force through it. If she doesn’t take out Umbreon now, she’s not getting through it at all—Buzz and Velvet are both special attackers.
She gets the knockout in two hits, because of course the Umbreon has a Focus Sash she needs to break through first, but it’s at the cost of Jewel tanking a Faint Attack that makes his own Focus Sash effectively useless. Additionally, the extra time on the field is long enough that Yawn’s effects finally hit, leaving Jewel asleep when Rhydon comes back into play.
From there, everything goes downhill. She swaps into Buzz to take out Rhydon, but her opponent’s final team member—a Metagross—doesn’t so much as flinch at anything Buzz throws at it. Velvet takes a Meteor Mash to the face. Jewel, still asleep, goes down without a chance to fight back. All of her Pokémon are rendered unable to battle one by one.
The standings screen updates and the judge calls the match. Sofia exhales through her nose and recalls her team.
She rolls Jewel’s Pokéball once between her fingers before clipping it back onto her belt.
Forty-one floors. She’ll try again.
She doesn’t count the steps this time. She doesn’t need to.
There are still forty-four, all evenly spaced. What waits at their peak is still the same. For the fifth time, she’s ascending the final staircase of the Sinnoh Pokémon League to issue a direct challenge for a championship title held by a woman who has consistently stood at the top of Sinnoh’s trainer rankings for over four years straight.
Her hand rests loosely at her side, fingers brushing the edge of her belt where her Pokéballs sit. The order is deliberate. The team, finalized weeks ago, hasn’t changed since she first made it. There’s no last-minute tinkering this time. What she brought with her today is what she trusts, and that, more than anything else, is new.
The doors are already open when she reaches the landing.
It’s the same arena it always has been. The space is cavernous to the point it feels like it may swallow her whole. The air is drenched in a sort of pressure someone could drown in. The walls stretch so high that the space between the ground and the ceiling practically becomes another sky. Spotlights blaze against the floor so intensely that the panels shine sterile with its reflection. None of it feels intimidating anymore. Either the room has finally stopped passing judgement on her, or the part of her constantly whispering she can do better finally believes that she deserves to be here.
She steps inside alone.
Cynthia stands across the field, already waiting. She’s not wearing her coat this time. There’s no pretense of ceremony. She’s dressed casually in a way Sofia has learned to recognize as intentional: black strapped heels, short sleeved blue blouse, hair loose down her back. It’s a summer outfit she’s seen in a few articles.
Their eyes meet. The look they share is a check-in, almost, a question posed without words:
Will this be the win you wanted?
Sofia squares her shoulders and opts to let the battle answer for her.
The Hall of Fame terminal hums quietly as Sofia enters her information.
Name. Region. Team composition. Date and time.
The screen flashes, records updating in real time as it finishes scanning her Pokéballs. Her victory slots itself neatly into League history like it was always meant to be there. Somewhere, she knows, headlines are being written, clips are being queued, and analysts are already arguing about what it means for Sinnoh. There will be more after she leaves, speculating on her reasoning for all of this. She’ll need to have Buzz filter her inbox more heavily for a little while.
One press of a button to confirm everything, and it’s all over.
The door opens behind her as she’s slotting her Pokéballs back on her belt.
Cynthia steps inside, coat folded over one arm. She must have gone to gather her things after their battle finished. She doesn’t look tired, or disappointed, or shaken, or anything like someone who’s just lost a title she’s held for years.
“Congratulations. You’re the Sinnoh League Champion.”
Sofia turns.
“For about five seconds,” she hums, and before things can settle into something awkward, adds, “I’m done.”
Cynthia blinks, whatever train of thought she had intended her statement to lead to sufficiently derailed. “Done? How so?”
“I’m withdrawing,” Sofia says. “Effective immediately, I won’t be defending the title. I’m done challenging the Sinnoh League.”
Cynthia laughs. Not politely, not carefully—a real laugh, surprised and utterly unguarded. It’s a pretty, chiming sound, and just like the smile before their fourth battle, Sofia has never seen or heard it in any footage on public record.
“I was wondering how long it would take you to grow tired of it. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.”
Sofia snorts. “I’m sure the Elite Four is tired of me, at the very least.”
“Aaron may have had a few choice words about your most recent battle with him,” Cynthia says diplomatically.
“You can say he acted like a sore loser. It’s okay.” Sofia waves a hand. “You can also let him know I’m not coming for his title anytime soon, even if Jewel consistently wipes the floor with him.”
A beat.
“Being part of the Pokémon League isn’t just about winning battles, you know.” Cynthia says. “You’re on call for the region more often than not. It’s a responsibility just as much as it is a measure of skill.”
“I know,” Sofia blurts. “I, uh. Did my research.”
An eyebrow lifts.
Sofia winces, then laughs at her own mistake. “Not in a creepy way, I wasn’t stalking you guys or anything. There wasn’t exactly a shortage of interviews, and I wanted to be prepared for my challenges.” She gestures vaguely. “I may have read… most of them.”
“Most.”
“…All of yours, at least.” she admits. “You’re everywhere.”
“That tends to happen with this job, yes. The media always wants to know what you’re up to. They can be quite persistent.”
“Persistent is one way to put it. I don’t know how you deal with it all. I’m allergic to the press; half the time I forget to answer some of their questions and the other half I sound like I’m actively trying to dodge answering anything.” She shrugs. “I mean, I sort of am, but still.”
“I noticed.” Amusement flickers across Cynthia’s expression. “You never took many interviews, and the ones you did… Didn’t feel especially PR-trained.” She’s politely vague, but the incident she’s referring to is clear enough.
Sofia bites down a laugh. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”
“It was one of the reasons I assumed you wouldn’t keep the title long. You never seemed interested in playing the part.”
“Probably because I wasn’t. No offense, but doing that for a living sounds miserable,” Sofia tells her frankly.
“Part of it is, to a degree,” Cynthia agrees. “But it’s also rewarding work, if it’s the sort of thing one enjoys.”
She reaches into her pocket, pulling out her phone. After tapping it a few times, she turns the screen toward Sofia and offers it out, new contact page open.
“If you ever need to reach me,” she says lightly. “Off the record, Champion or otherwise.”
Sofia takes the phone without hesitation. She adds her name and number, sends herself a quick text to lock it in, and hands it back a moment later, doing her best not to dwell on the fact that she now has Cynthia’s number saved in her phone, holy shit.
“I hear you’ve been collecting Frontier gold prints again,” Cynthia says casually.
“Four so far. Went back and grabbed another after our last battle.”
“Changed your mind on finishing the set?”
“Maybe.” Sofia hums, thinking it over. “I’ve been debating going to other regions for a while. I truthfully don’t love the Battle Factory’s whole gimmick and I’ve heard good things about Hoenn’s Battle Frontier. Might head across the pond for a bit and try giving it a go.”
“Do that later.” Cynthia tilts her head. “Come train with me first.”
What.
“If you’re worried about paparazzi, don’t be. The outer highlands of Mount Coronet don’t draw much of an audience; wild Pokémon there are less than forgiving of trespassers in their territory.”
That gives Sofia pause. Training with Cynthia is an invitation few will ever get. She’d be stupid to say no, but what would she even be training for at this point? What is there left to chase?
“Yeah,” Sofia says slowly, still processing that this is happening at all. “Okay. Uh, sure. When?”
Cynthia smiles, the honest, private kind that makes Sofia feel like she’s been let in on something people aren’t supposed to see.
“When are you free?”