Pokémon: Forever Wounded

Aeroplane

Drayton clenched his jaw, sitting at the gate, talking with Carmine discreetly, killing time, "so, let me get this right, all that the guy, Allejandro told us... none of that is true? Well isn't that wonderful?"

"Pain isn't that effective, they just tell you what you want to hear..." Carmine sighed, "I suppose there is a hint of truth to them being after Kieran, but-" 

"But the whole thing about recruiting him as a slave, probably a lie, or a coverup. Makes sense. The guy wouldn't make a good slave, bless his heart, he can barely lift his ba-" Drayton stopped as Carmine's glare intensified.

Carmine resisted the urge to punch this 'toothpaste-haired bozo' all the way back to Opelucid where he came from, but she relented, "the point is, we're no closer to finding out who it is they have on the inside. There's a few names that come to mind but-"

"Calling all passangers for the 5:30 am flight to the Kitakami Region."

That was their cue. They all began moving at once towards the plane, now being boarded. They couldn't fly to Moussi town directly, as the Land of Kitakami, only a province of the greater Kitakami Region, which encompassed a large part of the Tohokou region, the rural area of what was once one country, Japan. On the map, the different borders between the Japanese regions that were now seperate nations looked like stained glass windows in a church with their colours. Kieran remembered the last time he went back Kitakami, just a year before. He had been figthing the urge to cry the whole journey back. Kieran had always worn his heart on his sleeve. For Florian, he hadn't been to Kitakami in two years, having last been there for the whole 'Mochi' incident.

He was sat on the plane next to Florian, who told him how to turn his phone into airplane mode. Kieran put his pokéballs in a bag underneath his chair, as was mandated by the airline, and relaxed into his aisle seat. He rested his neck on his Furret-themed neck pillow. Furret. He'd be pleased to see him again, now that Zari was taking care of him on Kitakami. Zari was Kieran's older brother, a man who, since the death of Kieran's grandparents, had been taking care of the house. He had taken the mantle of the family, having learned to make masks, like his grandfather had done. Maybe Kieran would ask him how to make them one day. Most people had fallen asleep within an hour of the plane taking off. Kieran had taken a sleeping pill, as he had done most nights recently to get to sleep. His body had become too used to not sleeping from the days when he was champion, and he would spend his entire weekend training in the terrarium non-stop until he literally collapsed. Kieran hadn't quite got used to eating either, but food on planes was abysmal anyway.

When Kieran got up, he tapped at the TV on his plane seat and, after some searching, chose a Kaiju movie. He'd practically been raised on them in Kitakami, his grandparents had loved them. Kieran thought about their funerals the year before. He was definitely starting to get over having lost them. He just hoped Zari hadn't sold off the old VCR and the old tapes in the basement back at his home in Kitakami, he didn't intend on letting that stash of Kaiju movies go to waste in the basement of some collector that wouldn't ever actually watch them.  He couldn't believe those kinds of people had existed, but he'd learnt about them on his phone. Why would you have that many Kaiju movies and not watch them? 

He settled into his movie, seeing the silvery lens of 1950s Saffron City. He preferred the Kaiju films from the fifties, he didn't really like the ones from the seventies. Those ones were almost always either unsubtly referring to, or were outright re-enactments of the real-life 1967 Kyogre-Groudon reshaping. As a result, they all kind of blended into one another, and shifted from city to city in the same movie too much. He had heard stories about the reshaping. It was a very curious instance, he'd read all the books he could find on it at Blueberry Academy. It was very curious in that there were no recorded deaths as a result of it, and it seemed Groudon and Kyogre had done it as an expression of anger at the world. Especially towards what was now Unova and Galar. They damn near turned Galar upside down. It had very little affect on Japan as a whole, which had already split into separate regions that had renamed their cities and towns by 1967, and so the Kaiju films he watched from that period felt a bit unfamiliar and tacky.