DARWIN

Monday, April 9, 2018

My room in our old, rental house had been a pretty hard place to work. I'd had a desk and chair, but the walls had been thin, meaning I could hear the TV in Mom's room clearly, even with the door closed, or our neighbor's kids outside screaming and chasing each other around in frantic loops on their scooters and longboards.

Grandpa Jon's place was just as bad though, despite the fact that the room was spacious, and the house was quiet: Mom was at work, and Grandpa? Who knew. Maybe I just hadn't gotten used to the constant silence.

Or maybe it was because looking at my planner generally turned me into a bleary-eyed zombie.

There were markings all over the damn place for the month of April — World History exam, chemistry packet due, hall still life due — with very few of them marked as complete. But the biggest, penned in red, marked by an asterisk, and circled several times, lay at on the eighteenth: COMBAT II MIDTERM, 2 PM. It had been there since I'd turned over from March, but now I stared at it like the lights of an oncoming train, wishing I could close my eyes and suddenly wake up on the nineteenth, instead of suffering all of the choking apprehension that would build up between now and then.

Today's assembly had made things worse: I think at any other high school they wouldn't have gathered the whole of the school in the gym to prattle on about practicals taking place next week, but we weren't just any school. As at all Trainer Highs, the Midterms were a schoolwide event akin to a field day, where schedules shifted around and audiences gathered to see whether you passed or failed. That's why they were denoted Midterms with a capital M — nowhere near your standard benchmarks.

This was mainly because of the Contest and Battle Branches — future Pokémon Coordinators took exams in the form of concerts for band and orchestra and choir, and art exhibitions where their pieces were judged by panels of Contest Branch staff. And of course, Midterms in the Battle Branch involved a lot more screaming and running around than usual, with a physical practical for both Trainer and Pokémon. I was going to be tested on how well I could crawl across a muddy field prone and jump through hoops. Brackish would be tested on how quickly he could retrieve a brick from the bottom of the pool, his swim speed and, ironically, how well he could jump through hoops held up by me. And Don...

Don...

Of course Don was going to be going up against Jamie the Vigoroth, and whether I passed or failed the tenth grade would be riding on if he could get Sergeant Marshall's Pokémon to eat dirt, or at least bend the knee. I shuddered. I didn't even want to think about that.

All of this and more had been explained at today's assembly. So that every Branch School could make use of the facilities, schedules on April 17th, 18th, and 19th were going to be quite different than usual, so that the Professorship Branch could make use of the athletic field for their field exercise on the 17th, and wouldn't clamor with the Medical Branch for use of the sleek new labs in SciTec. And, of course, the scheduling allowed the Contest Branch and the Battle Branch use of the gym without stepping on each other's toes. All other exams were scattered in between.

I'd gotten my exam schedule today in Advisory, and now that I was home, I'd hoped to map out all of my free time between now and the dreaded April 18th for studying, so that I could go to face Jamie without being sick over whether or not I got that dimensional analysis sh*t right in the chemistry exam. Except looking at all of it... Well, it was turning me into a slack-jawed zombie in some sort of involuntary, biological mechanism protecting me from stressing out over all of those due dates.

"Okay, let's come back to it later." I cringed — in the empty house, my voice came out way too loud. I got up, went over to my bedroom door, and peeked out into the sunny hall, listening for a moment. It wasn't my first time being home alone... But in such a big space, it was f*cking eerie. More than once since we fully moved in, I'd worried about not being able to hear what was happening on the other side of the place, and wondered about burglars, and home break-ins. But Quincy wouldn't let that happen... Would he?

"Quincy," I called.

He came slithering down the hall, looking irritated. What? his face said. I was sleeping, dammit.

I pushed open my door. "Come in here with me for a while," I said. "Keep an ear out for me."

His leathery old face was quizzical — An ear out? For what? — but he nonetheless came inside and promptly rolled himself into a loopy spiral in the corner, where the sunlight came through the patio door bright and strong. I cracked it to let some air in, and appreciated the sound of the creek, and the breeze rustling through the sun-blasted trees, even if it was hot and thin. I closed the floor vent with a toe — as not to waste the AC — before returning to the bed, where all of my school stuff was spread out across my blanket.

"Okay, what next?" I mumbled. On the floor, Quincy rattled his tail — he liked to sleep in peace. But I ignored him. "Pre-Cal?"

Yes. That, at least, felt productive: I had an essay for World History, that damned study guide for chemistry, and a chapter to read for Battle Mechanics II, but I was burnt out on all of it. So instead, I turned back to my extra credit assignment and quadratic formulas. Yay.

I'd already finished all of it, but I wanted to go through the first ten problems again, even though I was pretty sure Thomas and I wouldn't even get through five during our planned tutoring session tomorrow during study hall. Well, I called it a tutoring session, but what Thomas expected was something more like a free hand-out: I'd give him the paper, he'd copy my work line-for-line, and boom, 5 extra points on the exam. He sure had today.

Which was why we'd nearly come to blows right there in the middle of the library: yeah, I'd promised him that I would help him with his schoolwork if he stopped kicking up a fuss about the Seawatcher orientation, but... Well, saying it and doing it were two different things. Even thinking about just giving him answers made me feel filthy; I didn't feel arrogant or hoity-toity about it or anything, and it wasn't like I hadn't done work for him with group assignments in the past, but it just... It felt gross. And, I tried to rationalize, what was the point of earning five extra credit points, when he was probably going to make something like a 60 on the test anyway? And wouldn't that make Ms. Underwood suspicious?

So I'd turned the straightforward exchange into a tutoring session instead. And like I said, he hadn't been very happy: he'd called me a liar and a sh*tbag, and I'd tried to convince him that knowing how to get the answers was about a thousand times more important than knowing the answers themselves — for Arceus' sake, Ms. Underwood's motto was "zero work, zero credit". And how was he going to even try to float by if he couldn't at least earn partial credit on the test?

Things had gotten dicey for a moment — I'd thought that Thomas would try to hit me, walk off, or try to wrestle me to the ground and dig the work out of my bookbag — but somehow my logic had worked its way through all those layers of testosterone, and he'd stayed. And, amazingly, he'd worked with me, as well as a guy who didn't even know the quadratic formula by heart could.

It was grueling work, though. I'd realized fairly quickly that Thomas and I were wired differently when it came to math, and my explanation for how I went through the problems would not work for him. I had to break the process down into building blocks that a toddler could understand... Which was difficult, because I took all sorts of shortcuts that I just kinda knew and didn't remember learning. So I had to go back and remember how I'd learned how to reduce fractions and simplify odd square roots and—

Needless to say, by problem three, I had a headache on the horizon, and Quincy was getting fed up with me explaining to the room how insert a binomial into the quadratic formula: "See, the...uh, the standard...form?...is ax2+bx+c, and so the number that stands in place for a goes where a is in the quadratic formula. And b and c, and then you start simplifying inside the radical. Once you find the value there, you go to a new line, and you take the square root of that number and—"

Goddamn, I wish I had a whiteboard. The thought came up quite suddenly, and just as abrupt was the realization that I had access to one: there were a couple of study rooms in the back of the library that were rarely used for studying — I'd heard one of my classmates once joke that guys went there to either slack off or jack off — and I was pretty sure that one of them had a chalkboard. Maybe if we can write all of this down on the board instead of a piece of paper...

"Okay, enough for now," I groaned, tossing aside my math notebook. "Next crisis. What do think, Quincy? Back to the Battle Mech textbook?" Or...

My Seawatcher journal was also in my backpack — I hadn't forgotten it over the weekend, but today's assembly had definitely pushed it to the back of my mind. Now I tugged it towards me, a lifeline because it was obviously not school or Midterm-related. Thomas and I were to report back to the Sea House on Friday afternoon for the Liaisons' weekly meeting, and I had to have... What done, again? Right — that form choosing supplemental volunteer activities, and my first entry into my Seawatcher journal. Nothing mermaid-related, just something about me, and who I was.

Might as well do it now. Things were only going to get more hectic as the week progressed, and I was liable to forget. I dug a pencil out of my pouch and turned to the first page, which was college-ruled and intimidatingly blank. I stared at it for a moment, just like I had my planner. How long does this have to be? A page? A page about Darwin Blakesley... I wasn't sure that there was anything interesting enough about me to fill a paragraph. Why did they care anyway?

I recalled asking myself that same thing when I'd been surrounded by the rest of the Liaisons last Friday, ones that seemed queerly interested in me and my life story. What had they found so interesting? I remembered their questions and my answers and... Hm, maybe I have something here.

9 April 2018

Entry: About Darwin Blakesley

As of this entry, I'm sixteen years old and a sophomore at Rustboro Trainer High School. I have likes, dislikes, and hobbies, just like everyone else: winter, a good amount of personal space, and stability; summertime, loud and/or stupid people, and cigarettes; listening to music, housework, eating good food, respectively. But these days, I feel like I'm defined by what I do at RTHS, which is trying to keep my spot there by making good grades and trying to keep a low profile. It was doing this that landed me with the Seawatchers.

I'm not sure what to expect with these guys — I just started, and so far the Ms. Gray and the Liaisons seem nice. But how we got here wasn't. I think I'm mostly over it, but Thomas isn't, and I sometimes wonder if I'm taking this in stride a little too well. Maybe I should be more suspicious, but I'm too stressed out about Midterms for that. So I guess we'll see how it goes.

Two pretty chunky paragraphs, and they stretched three-quarters of the way down the page. I reread them and frowned. Kinda harsh... And am I rambling? I reached down to erase my last sentence, but Quincy suddenly jumped up, hissing.

Dully, I heard the front door open, as though from far away. Which it was, in this house. "Darwin?"

I got up and opened the door, and Quincy followed me into the kitchen, where Grandpa Jon had unloaded a bag of fruit before going straight to the dishes soaking in the sink. He ran some hot water and overturned them before smiling at me.

"There you are," he said. "Where's your mother?"

"Work. She'll be out until midnight tonight."

He frowned. "I see..." There was an iffy pause, there, and though brief, it made me remember the afternoon after the Abandoned Ship, and the argument that had ended with that unpleasant surprise on Grandpa's face, and Mom actually invoking Dad's name: Reggie, before, he...

Then it was over: "I suppose I'll be making dinner tonight, then."

I shrugged, trying to let it go: I kept wanting to ask about it... But there never seemed to be to right time, so I guessed it was better to forget it. "It's okay," I said. "There's some leftover casserole from Saturday, I can have that."

He shuddered. "You must get that appetite for leftovers from your Grandma Molly Mae. I could never stomach stuff more than three days old."

Actually, I was pretty sure I'd gotten that from necessity. We'd had to stretch meals in the old place, thanks to Ms. Jenkins' exorbitant rent.

"How was your day?" he asked.

"Okay. Midterms are coming up though, so..."

"I remember you mentioning that. How do you like your prospects?"

I wrung my lips out. "Fine, I guess."

"Just 'fine'?"

"I think I'm good in World History and Basic Drawing. I'm getting better with Pre-Cal stuff, and I did an extra assignment. Chemistry, though..."

I hadn't meant to be verbose, but I found myself babbling as Grandpa Jon finished scrubbing the dishes clean and stacked them out to dry. I kept going as he got a broom and began cleaning the floor, and sat down at a table as I talked, spilling out all of my woes. He listened patiently, and it felt... Nice. I didn't really have anyone else I could tell this stuff too: it was none of Thomas's business, and Mom was always distracted by other stuff. And of course, Quincy didn't really care. Grandpa Jon's attention was active and earnest though, much like the Seawatchers' had been during orientation.

"Sounds like there's a lot on your plate," he said sympathetically. "I don't envy you — high school was hard enough for me when I was young, and that was before all of these fancy formulas and calculators and computers. But..." He scooped the dustpan from inside the pantry. "That's how it's supposed to be, especially at a Trainer High School. I would be concerned, frankly, if it wasn't a bit difficult, even for you."

I sighed. "And on top of all of that... I've got the OC Club."

"Oh yes! Do you have another meeting this week?"

"Yes," I said. I'd just remembered, and I rubbed at my neck, where pressure was building up in the muscle. "It's not that, though... They're not due this week, but the president said we've got club dues to submit by next week."

"How much?"

"Seventy-five dollars."

He dumped the dustpan in the garbage can and then raised a bushy brow at me. "Can the president expect forthcoming payment?"

"I don't know. I think so. But I forgot to ask Mom." More like, I'd hesitated to ask Mom — the pressing matter of the dues had been bearing down on my skull like everything else, but after wasting her emergency money on Brackish's Great Ball, asking for a loan seemed like asking for trouble. She was already on edge enough with Grandpa Jon around twenty-four-seven.

He seemed to read my mind: "Hm." He put the broom away and then unloaded the fruit into a hand-woven basket in the middle of the counter before saying, "What say you don't bother your mother with that? I'd be happy to help you with your dues instead."

I tried to stop myself from sucking in a surprised and very relieved breath. "Really?" Then, realizing that made me sound desperate, I stammered, "I mean, you shouldn't feel obligated—"

"And I don't," he said. "I didn't spoil Heather when she was young, and I won't spoil you, either. Let's do an exchange, instead. I'll give you your club dues if you help me out at the Sea House for a few extra hours this week. I've volunteered to help out with some repairs in the Aviary, and I could use some extra muscle." He smiled and poked my bicep, which wasn't bony, but wasn't exactly muscle either. When I thought of "muscular", I thought of Thomas, whose arms couldn't stay in the sleeves of his polo half the time.

"Aren't I going to be doing that anyway?" I asked. "Working at the Sea House, I mean. For free?"

"Yes, but that's on your own time — I'm asking you to make time for me this week, despite your hectic schedule. If possible, a few hours today, then a few hours on Wednesday, alongside your commitment for Friday. What do you say?"

It was late and the sun was going to be going down soon — I should've been preparing for dinner and a shower, not planning  to go back out. But I also wanted one less weight threatening to break the scale. And besides, now that I had...sort of an entry in my Seawatchers journal written, I needed to take it back to Ms. Gray.

So I said, "Sure. When do we leave?"

***

Cora was there when we took the rickety wooden staircase down to the dunes. I had no idea how she recognized me from afar, but she did and came running, leaving behind a group of merfolk — judging by their white hair — making sandcastles further down the beach.

"Well met, Darwin! Did not expect to see ye until the end of this week!"

"Hi. Uh, yeah, Grandpa asked me to help him with the Aviary." It was somewhere inside the Seawatcher's lighthouse, which rose out of a fuzzy layer of scrub on a hill several hundred meters and one narrow inlet away. Apparently, the terrain was too dicey there to allow for a service road, so Grandpa Jon and I were hauling all of the necessary supplies — which included several wooden boards, hammers, nails, a saw, and a wrench and screwdriver — all the way over there by foot. And in the heat of the setting sun. We weren't even halfway there, and I was already regretting signing onto this BS.

Cora seemed to read this in my face and, amused, stuck out her arms. "Shall I help? I be not so dainty that I cannot carry a parcel or two."

I glanced behind her to the merfolk shaping heaps of wet sand into...shapes that did not look like castles. "But what about—"

"Oh that?" She waved airily. "A whelp's game! There be naught else to look to today, so I thought I'd join. But not now — ye cannot ask me to overlook a poor old man and his lad struggling under such a weight!"

She kept her hands out, and I glanced uncertainly at Grandpa Jon, who chuckled. "Who can possibly deny dear Cora?" he asked me. "All right, sweetheart, maybe you can help me with my bag, and take this bucket of nails. Then I can take one of those boards off of Darwin."

"Agreed!" She happily took a load off of Grandpa Jon, and he took a board off of me, which took an anvil off my poor, poor shoulder joint.

"Leave the work to us when we get there, though," Grandpa Jon told her. "I don't think you're dressed for construction today."

That was for sure: she was barefoot and in a dress, a flouncy pastel pink thing with no straps, and damn was she cute as hell. She also... Isn't wearing a bra, Thomas snickered in my ear, at which I almost started cursing, because she wasn't  and, like he'd said...it was something I definitely could not un-see.

Which was why I was glad that she was walking in front of me, chattering away with Grandpa Jon as we trudged slowly across the beach towards the lighthouse. Mostly, it was about Sea House stuff: she said that she'd had a science lesson earlier in the day, and had learned about foh-to-sin-thuh-suhs, before having a lunch of fruit salad and a relaxing sewing session with someone named Hattie. She'd wanted to paint, but Angel was scheduled to host the next art class, and wouldn't be in until tomorrow at eleven... Phil had brought her a canvas and a watercolor kit, though, and she'd started on a landscaping piece until she'd gotten bored, and had followed the kids out to the beach to join them for a sandcastle-building contest. Then she'd spotted us...

"And thank Arceus!" she said. "For ye have saved me from a most gruesome death by boredom!"

Grandpa Jon laughed. "You should count yourself lucky, my dear — I'm sure Darwin would love to trade his hectic school life for your quaint beachfront paradise."

Got that right, I thought.

Cora dropped back beside me. "School?" she said curiously. "Ye go to school, Darwin?"

"Yes," I said. My brow furrowed at the wonder in her tone. "Why?"

"How many people be there?"

"At my school?" Pause. "Um, in total? Or just my grade level?"

She cocked her head to the side. "In total, I suppose."

"I don't know. It's a Trainer High, so it's smaller than a public school. And there are a hundred and thirty students in the sophomore class, so..." I paused to do a quick calculation. "More than five hundred."

"In Arceus' name!" I didn't understand her amazement. "So many people in one place... How do ye learn yer lessons?" Before I could respond, she asked, "Do ye have lectures on the sciences?"

"Yes..." My shoulder was starting to scream again — I looked up to check and see how far we had to go, and saw, some with relief, that the inlet was growing closer. "You mean biology, right?"

"Aye! So ye know about biomes? And microscopes? And dee-en-ay?"

"Sure, we talked about all of that." I'd been quite relieved when we'd left the topic of DNA behind — it was a little...too sciencey for my tastes.

"What about the periodic table? Hannah promised to teach me about that next."

"Yeah. That's more chemistry than biology, though. We have a whole separate class for that."

"Kem...istree?"

"It's the study of chemicals and elements and their interactions...and stuff." I realized that sounded hugely complicated, but if anything, the admiration in her eyes only grew stronger, and I had to wonder if I'd made it sound more interesting than it actually was. "It's pretty complicated," I amended hastily.

"Can ye tell me more?"

I did. Tried to — just like with Thomas and that calculus, I had a very specific understanding of chemistry that suited me, an understanding that was hard to extract, put into words, and feed to another person in a way that made total sense. I got to babbling as we reached the inlet — it was a narrow, bubbling stream pushing inland from the ocean, separating us from the plate of peninsula the lighthouse sat on. On the other side, I finished my basic explanation and glanced at Cora's face, hoping I hadn't confused her. No — she looked excited, and shook her head wistfully as we climbed the hill.

"I wish I went to yer school," she said as she passed ahead of me. Grandpa Jon had located a set of wooden, sun-bleached steps and was going up. The lighthouse sat at the top of the incline, a blue-gray tower capped with a wrought-iron balcony at the very top. She started up, and I went after her. "Me family do find it foolish... But I do wish to learn such things as biology and kemistree."

There was a sincerity in her voice, a desire to learn that was kind of baffling, probably because it was absent in about ninety-percent of the kids her age who actually went to RTHS. "Do you have school in, like, your..." I trailed off, groping for the right word.

"Village? Nay. Delphirius do not believe in higher education. Most the adults know little beyond minin', sewin', cookin', cleanin', ye understand?"

They sounded...well, kind of primal, though I could totally understand why. Humans were so intellectually advanced because of technology, which couldn't really exist underwater. "What about the lessons here? You said Hannah was teaching you this stuff?"

"Aye, but alongside your learnin', Darwin, it feels somewhat lackin'. I feel like there be a lot goin' on that I know nothin' about."

I felt bad for her — ironic that here was one girl who seemed to have an open interest in STEM, but couldn't indulge because she was a mermaid, while jerks like Thomas and Riley and Patrick didn't really give a damn about what Ms. Scales said during biology, and were only in those seats because daddy had said so and paid for it. Maybe...

"Maybe... I..." I stopped, wondering what I was saying. An image of the volunteer activity sheet flashed behind my eyes. Hadn't one of the checkboxes been "educational classes"? "I...I'm not an expert or anything," I said. "But I have a textbook. You know, for biology, and chemistry. Maybe you could borrow it...? While I'm here, I mean. I need it for school, and—"

She spun, eyes shining. "Really?"

"Y-yes." Goddamn, it was hard to not notice the no-bra thing. "Or I could, you know, tell you what I know, while I work. If you want." It could be a good way to study, as well as get in some volunteer hours.

"Oh, you sweetheart! Yes, thank you! But..." Some of her enthusiasm drained away. "When will ye be here next?"

"Well, uh, I haven't made my schedule yet... But I have to report for a meeting on Friday, and Grandpa Jon wants me to come in on Wednesday, so..."

"So Wednesday?"

"Sure." For some reason I was red as a stoplight, and I prayed she didn't notice. "If you want."

"Aye, I want!" Cora wriggled excitedly, looking almost like I'd surprised her with a fantastic present. "Thank you!"

"Looks like you two are having fun."

I glanced up — Grandpa Jon was waiting for us at the top of the steps, looking highly amused. Pedro Lowe moved past him, gulping from a water bottle as he descended. He nodded at me and mussed Cora's hair as he went by.

"What's got you in such a tizzy?" he asked her. Then he glanced at me and grinned. "Whoa! What have you done to our boy Darwin, Coragirl? I think he's redder than the actual sunset!"

"What?" Cora glanced at me, but I hurried up the steps towards Grandpa before she could get a good look.

***

Our task was the repair of a mew inside the Aviary, Grandpa Jon told me, one of the ones close to the ground floor that faced an eastern window. It had gotten soaked during last year's hurricane season, and the door the staff used to put in feed or substrate had been rotting away on its hinges and needed replacing. Hence me, Grandpa Jon, and armfuls of building supplies.

I searched for the Aviary when I reached the top of the steps, but saw only two buildings on this high hill that was surrounded by ocean on one side, and dry, sun-burned brush and scrub on the other. One was, of course, the lighthouse itself, staring endlessly out to the oceanic horizon. The other was a small cement building a ways down the hill. The single door stood open with a giant whirling fan halfway blocking the threshold, so I could clearly see that the inside was some kind of computer lab with at least twelve monitors, but only half or so were actually manned, by people in sharp blue polo shirts and khaki slacks. Communications, Grandpa Jon said, responsible for outfitting the Wingulls in surveillance equipment and monitoring the visual and auditory data sets they sent in.

Surveillance? I thought, baffled. But apparently it wasn't time to answer that question yet.

The actual Aviary, I found, was inside the lighthouse.

I didn't know much about lighthouses, but I suspected that the original structure had been retrofitted to house the peculiar, spiraling, and stacked structure of cages and mews that seemed to disappear into the far ceiling. Stairways and catwalks climbed and stretched between them, allowing five Seawatcher volunteers access to tall, wide, and squat cages filled to the brim with preening, sleeping, or eating Wingulls. Some of the volunteers were cleaning out these cages, replacing the old, flattened hay at the bottom with fresh heaps of alfalfa and sandlewood substrate. Others were refilling the water in metal troughs hanging from hooks within the mews, or shoveling grain into the feeders from giant bags sitting at their feet. Others still had mops and buckets, and were going level by level, cleaning out the floors and walls of empty mews.

It all made quite a racket, which was worsened by the echoes of dozens upon dozens of Wingulls keening and squawking within the narrow space, until it bore into my head like a din. All the same, I craned my neck, trying to get a better view of the place.

"What are all of these Wingulls here for?" I asked.

"Why, they're our little taskmasters," Grandpa Jon said. "The trained ones, anyway. Cora, dear, you might want to stay clear — all manner of things to trip over in here."

"All right," she said, easing her burdens to the ground. "I'll go visit the lab, then." She tapped my shoulder. "No sneakin' out, Darwin. Say bye before ye go." With that, she skipped away.

"Taskmasters?" I asked.

"Yes. Come this way, and watch your step." We gave Charlie Gibbs a large berth — the Seawatcher was scrubbing the floor of the Aviary with a long-haired mop, and he bopped my shoulder in greeting as we went by. We stopped on the other side of the room, where lay a ground-floor mew that was empty, but clean, and had the rotten, splintered door Grandpa Jon had mentioned earlier.

"Hand me that screwdriver," my grandfather said. I did so, and he continued, "You see, Darwin, we have staff and we have volunteers and we even have some paid security, but for an organization that has pledged to house and care for the merfolk, we still don't have nearly enough hands to undertake that task, especially on the security part. So some thirty years ago, one of our rank had the brilliant idea to use Pokémon to fill in the gaps. Particularly, unassuming and highly-mobile Pokémon that are easily caught and trained. Hence, the Wingulls."

"What do they do?"

"What don't they do? Their prime responsibility is simply keeping an eye on the place. Did you notice how most of them are wearing collars? Contained within them is proprietary surveillance equipment, including a button camera capable of taking video and pictures, and a long range-microphone. The collar also contains technology that allows for the transmission of vibrational messages — Morse code. It takes a while to teach the Wingulls how to interpret these messages, but once they understand them, they are able to receive orders to observe, report back to the Aviary, escort or guide targets, perform sweeps, and even attack."

"Attack?"

"Oh yes." Grandpa said this on a harsh breath as he got to work loosening the screws on the first hinge. "Not physically, though, not usually: Supersonic is the weapon of choice for us. Imagine, for instance, someone who witnesses a merman shifting from landside to seaside form. A Wingull on site is generally given the order to knock this witness out until a team is able to transport them to quarantine, or until Berechiah is brought in to...speak with them."

I shuddered. "Wouldn't the Wingull be too late by the time it got there, though? Couldn't the human just run off?"

"You would think so, but this actually rarely happens." Two screws fell, and the top half of the door leaned away from the mew. I went over to hold it for him as he squatted and worked on the bottom hinge. "You see, most merfolk are sensible enough to come through the Sea House for Drought, and whenever they leave the premises, a Wingull is assigned to watch over them, make sure they don't get into any trouble. Wingulls are also tasked to canvas many of the major waterways in our Sea House's jurisdiction, to watch for merfolk who might wash ashore away from the protected beaches of the Sea House. So in either case, a Wingull is generally there to protect the merperson from exposure, and to guide them here, if necessary."

I thought back to how Nero had busted in my bedroom door, that thunderous look on his face. There hadn't been any Wingull there that day... Though it had hardly mattered. I'd wound up in quarantine all the same. Despite that fact, I was pretty floored with the idea. "That's pretty smart."

"Isn't it, though? Cheap, too, as you can see from the many winged brethren in our midst." More screws dropped to the floor, and the door came away entirely. "Ms. Gray likes to think that it's measures such as these that are staving off another Era of Bloody Water... And I think she's right."

That again... "What is that? Was that? It sounds like a war."

Slowly, we eased the old door on to the ground. Grandpa sighed as he began to move the new pieces of wood we'd brought in, arranging them atop the old frame. I held them in place while he laid down some new nails in the corners, as he said, "Not a war, but a sad time for the merfolk, nonetheless. It actually came after a war. A big one, between land and sea."

I frowned as the hammer went bang, bang, bang. This sounded familiar. "Do you mean the one between Groudon and Kyogre?" It was an ancient legend exclusive to the Hoenn Region, and so had been told to eight-year-old kids at bedtime for what I assumed to be generations. I'd been no different — Mom used to tell me the tale when I was six years old while she combed my ratty hair straight at night, and if I remembered correctly, there'd been a world famous documentary put out about it in the 2000s.

"Yes," Grandpa Jon said, seeming to read my mind. "It wasn't quite as you remember from elementary school, though. According to old Seawatcher journals, the age-old battle between Groudon and Kyogre — or the Cataclysm — was actually the climax of a ten-year-war between mankind and the merfolk."

The air left me. "Really?"

"Indeed. How the conflict began is not entirely known, but many described it as the merfolk pushing back against the toxic monopoly that mankind had over the entire planet. You see, in those days, humans were aware of the seafolk and even had cordial relations with them. But as we inevitably progressed, and expanded from coast to coast, horizon to horizon, building our metal cities, churning out our filthy waste, consuming, consuming, consuming, we soon turned our eyes to the great blue, and used it to feed our unstoppable upward progression. I'm sure you can guess how: overfishing, oil drilling, dumping... Most merfolk lived close to coastlines during those times, for easier means of trade, and so were directly affected by these actions, to the point of intolerance."

He finished with the upper two corners of the new frame, and started on the bottom. "And... Groudon and Kyogre?" I asked.

"I'm not sure. The journals are a bit sketchy on those details. All I know is that soon the two sides came to blows, and someone on either side realized that something had to be done. And so these two powerful beings entered the conflict on behalf of the land and the sea, one hoping to end the other. What is clear, however, is the nature of these spearheads: the Seawatcher journals say quite clearly that Kyogre was a creature of great power that actually lived in the seas with the merfolk, and was revered as a god and a king, and a being of purity. Groudon, on the other hand, was a monster, an abomination created from blood, magic, and dark energy on the bones of an actual Groudon — apparently, the species died out during the Cretaceous period."

"Magic?" I said skeptically.

He shrugged. "Who knows, my boy. Whatever the case, a Groudon was there, and so was Kyogre, and they took each other down, doing cataclysmic damage to the Hoenn Region in the process and decisively ending the war. Only scanty records here, but it's said that for years afterwards, flood waters drowned the region up to the neck of what would soon be Mount Chimney, and the seas themselves boiled as though resting atop the earth's molten core.

"Humanity and the merfolk survived, of course, as they always do, and there was a period when they once again lived in relative peace... But as the hellscape began to settle, humanity once again began to exploit its undersea counterpart, across a span of several centuries that reached its peak during the Era of Bloody Water. During this time you began to see things like merfolk in aquariums, merfolk flesh consumed to induce immortality, merfolks scales crushed and brewed into tea, merfolk corpses vivisected and displayed in museums... Atrocities, Darwin, that decimated their numbers and made them quite frankly the most endangered species on the planet."

"F*ck me," I muttered, and then flinched guiltily. "Sorry."

"Don't be—all of these things are true, according to Seawatcher accounts, and all of them are terrible. At this time, the human race had quadrupled in size while the numbers of the seafolk had diminished significantly. And so, in an effort to protect itself from further exploitation from the human race, they effectively became legend — they ceased communications with all but a trusted few humans — the Seawatchers — and went to ground. They dissolved their kingdoms and their tight-knit communities, preferring to live in family groups rather than in large clusters. They stopped going onto land except for during Droughts, and did more hiding than living. All this so that they might survive." He shook his head. "Can you imagine?"

I said nothing as he hammered in the last few nails, fixing the chicken wire into place, and lifted the new door to the old mew. It had been a lot all at once, and though I believed everything Grandpa Jon had said, given my own experiences with the merfolk... Arceus, what a lot to process. My mind was stuck on the Era of Bloody Water: I tried to imagine merfolk in aquarium tanks, maybe forced to do water shows, or Cora or Nero getting caught in the net of a trawler, and their flukes ending up on the dinner plate of some fancy politician in an upscale restaurant. It disturbed me that these images were a little too easy to visualize, and how stomach-wrenching they were. Maybe because it had actually happened before.

"When's the last time something like that happened?" I asked softly.

For a moment, I thought Grandpa Jon didn't hear me. He was still screwing screws, but his eyes went far away for a moment, to somewhere dark and unpleasant.

"I wish I could say decades," he replied, his voice just as soft. "But that would be a lie."

Then he looked at me with those shadowy eyes, and they told me that something like that may have happened within his life time — in his lifetime, to him.

Then, a call, cutting through the dark like a sword: "Mr. Jonathan, are you down here? A Peliper just came in, I think it's Peeko!"

My grandfather's face brightened immediately. "She's back! Come, Darwin — I'd like you to meet someone very important to me."

Silently, I followed him to the nearest stairway, up to a higher floor of mews, and tried not to think about that dark look on his face. Probably, some deep intuition told me, it was better not to know.

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