Lucki

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On the morning of the thirteenth day she continued east.

It was the direction she had to go anyway, for her next badge, and the pokemon thief had been heading east. The Team Magma members, Keegan, had said something about a submarine attack soon. So, she thought: the pokemon thief was probably going all the way to Lilycove, which was the only major thing to the east and where Team Aqua's base was, probably as part of a plan to steal a submarine there or something like that.

If not, she didn't have any other leads to go on. If she heard something about Team Magma clustering somewhere else, she'd turn around. Until then, east it was.

She met a trainer along the way who mentioned he'd seen some red-shirted guys hurrying in the opposite direction. She smiled and thanked him. I made the right decision, then. She sped up.

The path was smooth and straight, with none of yesterday's confusion. The sky was perfectly clear. Only by late morning, nearly noon, were there even three or four small puffy white clouds. The ground was dry and even radiating a pleasant amount of heat from the sunlight.

She reached Lilycove by noon, hearing the fight before she was even clear of the trees.

"Once the submarine gets hit..." Lucki remembered. Then they weren't even intending to steal it. Just to destroy it. The cold fury rose in her again. They were just going to destroy everything if they couldn't have it.

Here and there, rain poured out of a clear sky, and thunder crackled in response. Rushing in, Lucki suddenly realized why Keegan had chosen those new pokemon as a solarbeam blasted a hole through a building. She hadn't thought anything of it at the time. She hadn't been suspicious at all. It had been right in front of her, and she hadn't realized.

Vileplume could go against the water types of Team Aqua and would have an advantage in the same Sunny Day area as Magma's fire types. Voltorb would be for the opposite weather, its electric attacks devastating if Team Aqua tried rain dance. Mawile for resistance in case they ran into something else. From the looks of it, all the Team Magma members had gone a similar route. That's what they were doing poaching in Route 119,Lucki realized. Grass types...and the ones there are used to working in rain.

For a moment she wondered if somehow, they might actually win. But they couldn't have had these pokemon long – they'd only been poaching recently – and the main pokemon they'd raised would still be fire and ground types, the idiots. Any trainer knew better than that. If they thought they'd win just because they'd thrown in a few untrained grass types in-!

They were only managing this much because they'd tricked most of Team Aqua into leaving. They could cause damage for the moment, but even if they managed to hold off the members here, it was only until the full force of the Team arrived. Idiots. This was reckless, a bunch of brainless thugs rushing in without any idea how impossible it was they'd win. Probably even acting under the delusion they were actually right.

As if.

And Lucki would help speed up their inevitable loss.

The battle was going to be hard, though. Lucki paused, thinking, and pulled a pokeball from her belt.

When the absol formed, Lucki said, "Irin, listen, I really need your help. They've taken Flare and-"

The absol stared at her with inscrutable black eyes. "I warned you," she said in her mellifluous voice.

"What?" Lucki said after a second's pause, then, "No, you don't understand. I'm not blaming you. I need you to work together, as a team. We're going to be fighting Team Magma, and I need everyone's help to win."