CHAPTER 17: THE POJOIN PROBLEM

Pojoin Town

As the band of explorers continued on the last section of their journey, the snow melted a bit more as the day wore on, allowing them to pick up the pace. Quincy opted to fly overhead, while Terry and Sofia rode on top of Mike, being the only ones small enough to fit on them now that Ryan had evolved.

Absolutely nothing of interest occurred this time around, as there were no more dungeons remaining separating the group from their destination, nor was there a significant distance. Thanks to the path having largely cleared up by midday, although it muddied the paws of the grounded pokemon, they were able to arrive at the gate to Pojoin Town by midday. The gate in question towered over even the tallest of the group.

Even after evolving, I still feel so small, Ryan thought as he knocked on the gate with a forepaw.

“Hello?” the glaceon called out. “Can somebody please let us in?”

From the watchtower on the left side of the gate, a black ovular pokemon seemingly wearing a triangular yellow coat holding what appeared to be a crossbow peeked out over the edge of the balcony.

“W-why do you n-need to come in?” the snorunt asked timidly.

“Aw, you don’t need to be nervous,” Ryan said gently. “We just need to check up on Pojoin’s branch of the Moon Continent’s guild.” He unclipped his badge from his scarf and held it up. “See, we were assigned by guildmaster Felix from a branch south of here because there hasn’t been any word coming out of here.”

“…o-oh,” the snorunt said. “Just a m-moment…”

Not long after the snorunt guard retreated from the balcony, the gate began to open, allowing the band of travelers to enter the town. It looked about how Ryan had expected it to given the town’s Scandinavian sounding name. In fact, given the colorful facades of the houses, he would have thought he was in a Norwegian village if it weren’t for the fountain featuring a dewgong in the center of the cobbled square. It felt strangely cozy to him despite the chilly air, not that that bothered him anymore.

The guild branch for Pojoin Town had its headquarters situated on top of a mound, and, predictably, it looked like a viking lodge.

Let me guess, Ryan thought, most of the guild members up here are ice types as well?

Upon attempting to enter, he found that he could not definitively answer that question, as, although not locked, the door was too heavy for any of them to open. So, Lena knocked on the door.

“Hello? Is anyone home?” she called.

They waited for a minute before they heard a response.

“Who are you and what do you want?” the voice called.

“Oh, someone is here, that’s a relief,” Lena said, then cleared her throat. “My name is Lena, and I’m with the guild down in Luneria Village. Me and my team, Team Seekers, along with Team Waterburn, were sent up here to investigate why there hasn’t been any word from this branch of the guild.”

A slot in the door opened, and a pair of bright blue eyes peeked out the viewport. They noticed that, with the exception of the metang, each pokemon present had a badge.

“Very well, then,” the unknown figure said as it began pull open the doors. It revealed itself to be a slender bluish-white fox with nine tails that almost seemed to blur together, a fluffy mane, and a stern, but not overly harsh, look on their face. Terry was confused by its appearance.

“Is that a ninetales?” he asked. “Because it kinda resembles one, but also not really at the same time.”

Ryan ignored what the pachirisu said and spoke himself. “Ignore him; are you guildmaster Ingrid?”

“Yes, I am her,” Ingrid said, flipping her mane elegantly. “Do come in. I’d hate to leave you all out in the cold.”

As the two exploration teams followed the ice ninetales inside, she said, “So, your two teams were here because you haven’t heard from our lovely guild in a while, yes?”

“That’s right!” Ryan said. “We wanted to know why that was the case.”

“Sure, um… what’s your name? Or do you prefer to just go by your species name?”

“The name’s Ryan.”

“Okay. Anyways, Ryan and friends, you may not know this, but Felix, Erin and I are not only colleagues, but good friends.”

“Saw that coming,” Lena muttered.

“Don’t interrupt, sneasel. Anyways, we keep up with each other even despite our distance, which is made possible by the communicators on the badges.

“Recently, though, that and other related features have stopped working. A couple days ago, though, one of my guild members found out that there was a signal jammer hidden on the back wall that was preventing all explorer badges inside the walls from working properly. Unfortunately, we have no mechanically inclined pokemon in our village, as all of them leave to pursue careers in the burgeoning tech hub that is Miobach City.”

Sofia tilted her head. “Can’t you just break it with an attack?”

Ingrid shook her head. “No, we already tried that, but the jammer is made from reinforced steel. It can withstand even the strongest of our attacks, probably with that purpose in mind. The only way to make it stop is to dismantle it with tools.”

Terry jumped up at this. “Well, luckily for you, you’ve got somebody now! Given the right tools, I can dismantle that pesky jammer for ya!”

“That’s wonderful news,” Ingrid said.

“Yeah, but… do you know who may have done this?” Ryan asked. “There’s nothing stopping them from just getting another jammer and causing this all over again.”

“Oh, I have an idea alright,” the guildmaster said. “For the last couple of months, there have been sightings of a zorua. Other pokemon have followed it into the forest and haven’t returned. I have reason to believe that there is a zoroark serial killer out there that set up the jammer to try to keep us from sending for help.” The ninetales sighed. “It’s a good thing Felix and Erin started to worry about not hearing from me.”

“Yeah… wait, a zorua?” Ryan said.

“Yes, it was a zorua. Is something wrong?”

“Last night, Mike- that’s the metang here- spotted a zorua and had me go with them. That ghostly fox led me right to an icy rock without my everstone and it made me-” Ryan stopped himself, as he realized he was getting worked up again about being forced to evolve. He took some deep breaths before continuing. “Anyways, when I was there, I saw… a zoroark. I think she wanted to try to kill me because she thought I, or maybe Mike, wanted to hurt her son, when that couldn’t be further from the truth. I usually don’t like inflicting pain on others, especially when I have no reason to, unless I have no other choice. Though, the fact Mike blasted her with a flash cannon after I crashed into the ice rock probably didn’t help with that. They’re probably fine though, but I doubt they stayed there.”

Ingrid winced. “Yep, that sounds like the zoroark, all right. Ryan, Mike, you two may have encountered a serial killer.”

Ryan’s heart sank and his eyes went wide. W-what? He thought. I could’ve died last night? The glaceon walked over to Mike and embraced its arm.

“I-I don’t know what to say,” he said. “I could’ve died, and you… you saved my life. You… I wish I could repay you.”

The metang just gently patted his head. “I was just doing my job by protecting my master. You do not need to show any emotion.”

Ryan sniffled. “Yeah, it is pretty embarrassing to cry in front of others as a guy, isn’t it?”

Ben, who had just been standing off to the side previously, shrugged as the glaceon took deep breaths to calm himself. “Eh, I’ve always been taught that it isn’t healthy to bottle up negative emotions like that. Especially when you’ve just learned that you had an up-close encounter with a very violent pokemon.”

Ingrid nodded. “He’s right, you know. Anyways, I think that the zoroark in question likely went off and hid in the Chill Cave mystery dungeon. It’s a perfect place for outlaws to hide out when they’re on the run.”

“Well, now that we know what to do, let’s get to it!” Sofia said enthusiastically.

“Hold your mudbrays, little sprigatito!” Ingrid said, raising her paws defensively. “I personally do not believe that it is such a good idea for a small grass type such as yourself to be heading into such a cold dungeon.”

“B-but I could handle the Wistful Winterlands!” the sprigatito protested.

“Sure, you may have handled that dungeon, but Chill Cave is far colder and far more dangerous to grass types, especially smaller ones such as yourself.”

The sprigatito harrumphed. “Fine.”

“That doesn’t mean the rest of you can’t go, though. In fact, I would really appreciate if you could capture the outlaw and bring her back here. Her son, too; I’d hate to see him grow up, only to follow in his mother’s pawsteps.

“For now, though, you’ve been travelling all day today, so I think you all should rest for now. You can handle the mission tomorrow, as I highly doubt that she’s going anywhere.”

Quincy cleared his throat. “I think I speak for me and Felipe alike when I say that us Waterburners stick together, so if Sofia can’t go, then we aren’t going either.” Felipe nodded vigorously.

“I probably shouldn’t go either,” Mike added. “The zoroark will attempt to flee again if I show up, and the difficulty level of this job will increase from my previously calculated thirty percent difficult to fifty percent difficult.”

Starting to get annoyed, the ninetales deadpanned, “Anyone else dropping out of this mission?”

The official members of Team Seekers all shook their heads.

“Good to see it. Now, Terry, and Ryan if you would like, come with me to the tool room…”

The pachirisu glided onto Ryan’s back after Mike lifted him a bit into the air. He fistpumped.

“Nailed it,” he whispered. Ryan rolled his eyes, but with a slight smirk on his face to show he wasn’t annoyed this time.

After Terry settled down on the glaceon’s back, the pair of ice foxes headed further into the lodge while the others stayed behind, unsure of what to do next.

The ‘tool room’ was more like a general storage and maintenance room. It contained a water heater, which is very necessary in this colder climate to keep the water from freezing, and a boiler. More importantly, there were boxes full of various types of items stacked all over the place containing a variety of items.

Ingrid began using a claw to open up boxes, hoping to remember which one had the toolbox she was looking for.

“Just bear with me, okay? I’ll find it soon enough!” she promised to a patient Ryan and a significantly less so Terry.

“You’d better be right!” Terry complained. “This is taking forever!”

“It’s been less than a minute,” Ryan replied. “Does time feel slower as an electric type or something?”

“Come to think of it…”

“It was a rhetorical question, Terry.”

“Found it!” Ingrid said, standing over one of the five boxes she had opened. Various items were strewn about the place, including pokeballs that had long ago rusted to the point of being unusable, but there was also a strange device with dual satellite dishes that appeared to still possibly be functional. Within her maw, however, was what they had been looking for: a red metal box that, on its side, somebody had written ‘electronics box’ on it using an Eterna permanent marker, which is so permanent that it never comes off.

“Mind if we take that device there?” Ryan asked, pointing a forepaw at the handheld machine with dual dishes. Maybe its something that I can use to help Lena with her memories.

“Yeah, you can have it; it’s just gathering dust in here.”

The glaceon tried to slip the machine, which had a label that read ‘mutual mind reader’, into his bag, and he would have if it weren’t too large to fit inside.

“You think you can take it, Terry?”

“Don’t worry, Ryan, I got this,” the pachirisu said, taking up the surprisingly lightweight machine before struggling to clamber onto the smaller ice fox’s back. “Now let’s get out of here. Personally, I’m not a fan of this dank, dingy atmosphere.”

The other two agreed and took him out of the room.

---

Before heading out to the wall where the jammer had been planted, they stopped at the storage box. Ryan found that it was still operational despite the warnings that it may not be. The storage box system is a novel one. It effectively creates a new pocket dimension for each individual pokemon that uses it, to store whatever they choose, and places those items in a sort of stasis where the state they were previously in is preserved until the item is removed. It can hold any item, big or small, which makes it an invaluable resource for exploration teams, as they collect many treasures of all varieties on their travels. Ryan had chosen to store his possessions that had been brought over from the human world in there as well, rather than keep his backpack in his team’s room.

After dropping off the mutual mind reader and some assorted items from his bag, it was time to take care of the jammer. Ingrid led Ryan and Terry out the front gate and around the back of the wall, revealing a silvery box with blinking lights mounted to the wall. After the ninetales set down the metal box on the snowy ground, Terry climbed off of Ryan’s back and dug through the toolbox. He pulled out a pair of wire cutters and a wrench.

“This should be all I need to deactivate the jammer,” Terry thought aloud, before realizing that he was too short to reach the machine from the ground. “Well, shoot. Ingrid, would you mind lifting me up?”

“Certainly, anything to get this… thing taken care of.”

Unscrewing a bolt revealed the internals of the device, which contained a computer board and some wires. Terry had assumed that there would be some kind of explosive that would trigger if a wire was cut, but there wasn’t anything that looked explosive, so he thought it would be fine. Taking out the wire cutters again, he snipped all four of the colored wires, and the lights stopped blinking as the humming of the machine stopped.

“…have you done it?” Ingrid asked.

“Only one way to find out,” Terry replied, unclipping his badge to send a message to his own guildmaster. It seemed like it went through, and after a couple minutes of waiting, Felix replied. The three pokemon cheered in a celebratory manner before Terry jumped on the box forcefully to dislodge it from the wall.

---

Later in the evening, Ryan provided an explanation for what had happened with the mission, omitting his evolution, believing it to be irrelevant to the story.

“…and that’s pretty much all we had to do,” Ryan finished explaining to Felix and Erin over his communicator.

Although Ryan couldn’t see it, Felix winced. “Not good that outlaws are becoming more tech savvy,” he said, “or that this one is a serial killer. Still, your teams have done a great job. We’ll come up there tomorrow and confer upon you your silver rank badges.”

Ryan tilted his head. “I thought you said you were gonna give them to us when we got back.”

“Yeah, well…” Erin said, “that would be a pretty long walk back. We’re not gonna make you do that again for now. Besides, I’ve been wanting to see Ingrid, see how she’s been doing lately.”

Changing the subject, Ryan said. “Speaking of Ingrid, she gave us a mission to capture the zoroark before she can kill anyone else. I’m more than willing to do that, seeing as I barely escaped from that fate myself… I’d hate to let other innocent pokemon die.”

“I see,” Erin said. “Well, we’ll be seeing you tomorrow, then. Congrats on evolving by the way; I knew you’d come around on that front.”

“Uh, first of all, it was accidental. Also, how did you-“

“Oh, Ingrid told me. Well, she said that the team that came from Luneria to help her had a glaceon on it, and your two teams are the ones we sent up there… it didn’t take too long to figure it out after that information.”

Not wanting to discuss this any further, Ryan then said goodbye and hung up before turning to his teammates in the room they had been given as temporary quarters in the guild hall.

“Hey, guys, good news! The expedition is officially a success! Team Seekers will officially be silver rank after our mission tomorrow!”

The others cheered at that news. Ryan smiled too, as today was a good day in his book. Although he was a bit disappointed that he had to spend tomorrow, his birthday, doing a mission instead of celebrating, he knew that it was for a good reason. Besides, it’s not like he can’t order a dessert or pick up a gift for himself afterwards. For now, though, he curled into a ball on the straw pile, as this guild used for its beds, and drifted off to sleep.