So I finished Obsession 22!

[blackjackrocket]

I'm on vacation in Tacoma this weekend and am posting this from lagomorphintime's computer! It's almost 2:30 am and I've been working on this since xalifesochanged visited back in JULY. It's also about the same temperature outside as it was then (srsly, mid-40s in July wtf). Anyway, let's proceed!



And then it was summer's end. Veronica and I had prospered off the information and had made quite tidy sums from it, investing and re-investing and overcoming small losses, always staying ahead of where we had been after that fateful morning. By the months passed, we had far, far surpassed that generous starting point.

We had both elected to keep our fortunes secret from our families, and I for one was having a surprisingly easy time of it. Thanks to the ample boutiques in Seafoam, there to cash in on tourist money, I had started to dress better, although not as fine as I would prefer. But finally I was rid of the denim shorts and slogan-ridden shirts my father had initially supplied me with. Veronica was still at the mercy of her parents' demands to look a certain way, but she was able to sway the endless parade of stylists ever so slightly. And she was doing better in school. She had been having difficulty in some of her courses at the Viridian Academy, and had been unwilling to approach her parents about hiring summer tutors, a detail she'd sworn me to secrecy over.

My father simply assumed that my sudden style change was Asaph's influence, and laughed that he should have given Asaph more of a discount on the C-class.

It was a cold summer that year, and fog off the ocean swarmed around my clifftop home. But I didn't spend much time there anyway. Asaph and the both of us were meeting more, doing more, going more places. It was liberating in ways that our previous excursions with him hadn't been, in ways we couldn't describe. We were closer to being his equals; that was the closest thing we could put words to.

Perhaps someday we could surpass him. We would outshine them all, he had told us, and the thought was more than idle fancy in my mind. It would be a ways off and we would have to maintain ourselves, but it was a thought we both entertained.

I would be ten soon. Asaph was quite eager for it and had let on that he was in the process of procuring a fantastic gift for me. For Veronica's birthday, her thirteenth, he had given her an early century duchess's circlet with brilliant gems of blue inset with red and a band of yellow that she recognized as being in the image of a Manaphy egg. Although she had told me after that what she had wanted most had gone dismissed; a Lunar Wing, the bended feather of Cresselia. It was an inelegant statement but I simply nodded.

That project of my father’s, his dream design, had lasted months and at times he would hole himself up on his days off to work on it for ceaseless hours. To me it still looked impractical, like a flying saucer from some cheap movie. But the longer he spent on it, the less time he could pester me. Not that he didn’t continue to be a source of embarrassment. It was humiliating having a father who delighted in the cheap thrills of the town, in the gaudy, shallow attractions of the constant carnival that was Seafoam. Even that annual surfing display saw him eagerly feed into the blitz of t-shirts and banners, and I had the good sense to leave town on that day.

I was headed to the north, to Veronica's home in Viridian. The glamorous city awaited, with its mansions and skyscrapers rising to the brilliant blue sky. And today was something special. Her mother Tierney was hosting a premiere of her company's latest line, and the grounds and home were decked out in anticipation. I wore my finest suit for the occasion, although it was far too hot to do so, and asked Igasho to turn on the air conditioning in the car. Asaph was already in Viridian, so we drove on alone in thankful silence.

Forest gave way to a seemingly endless expanse of farmland, mansions dotted along the hills between them. This was what artists sought to capture in so many landscapes, but it meant nothing to me as I sunk down in my seat a bit and thought about everything that had happened over the past several months. I had done that a lot, just as I had been pensive before that party.

To finally be respected...It was a step, but money alone wouldn't wrest me from that reinforced cage. I needed something further, and unfortunately the only thing that would satisfy my father in that regard would be to age. And that was something money couldn't buy, not in that direction.

It was something beautiful to be on my own, to be in the world as a person and not somebody’s child. Liberating and peaceful, although still unsettling at its core. Were they humoring me?

Those thoughts were kept at bay by the beauty of the sun streaming through the clouds.

I’d never been to Veronica’s home before, but once I arrived, there was no time to relax. The main entryway was overrun by catering trucks and magazine cadres, the side yard covered by workmen putting the finishing touches on a runway and arranging chairs around it. Tierney brushed past me in the main hall, talking over a large cellular phone, and I was left in a sea of people to find Veronica on my own.

But it was simple enough. After peeking down the hallway past the double doors marked “private”, I saw her under a cloud of hairspray, through a wall of stylists.

“Jiri!” she exclaimed, spotting me in her mirror. “Come in!”

I did as was asked, although the smell in the room was terrible, and stood next to her, stifling a cough. “I’m glad to see you,” I said, waving a hand in front of my face to expel the chemical cloud.

“I hoped you’d get here early,” she smiled as a curler worked its way into her bangs. “Although goodness, did you just sneak into a lady’s bedchamber?”

I think I stammered for a moment before retorting “Well, milady knows I’m an awful knave.”

That earned a laugh. “I think a good squirt of this hairspray would set you right. So I’m glad you’re here. Mom’s been terribly rushed today. This is her first time hosting an event like this, and she’s trying to show off as much as possible. Everything has to be perfect, and that means I have to be perfect too.” She reached out and squeezed my hand. “So I’m probably going to need to run off with you somewhere.”

I chuckled, although I wasn’t sure why. “I don’t think that will be a problem.”

“And you might have to go hide too,” she sighed. “One of the child models got sick and she thinks you’re around the right size to pick up the slack.”

Well, that was unexpected. I wasn’t sure what to say for some time, although I was dimly aware that my brow was furrowed, so I hoped that would suffice as reply enough.

“She’s going to be pretty adamant about it, so if you don’t want to, you should be prepared to hold on fast.”

I considered things. To be part of the presentation process could be fascinating. To be regarded along with the art, as essential as the frame…or perhaps I was just being overdramatic. “Either way,” I said although I was certain I hadn’t said the first part aloud, “it should be an interesting experience.”

“Hold off on saying that until you see the outfit,” Veronica warned.

Clearly, the only course of action was to forge ahead with it. Tierney had been brusque, yes, but the requested outfit was rather unique. It was reminiscent of nobility, the light blue ruffles and contours of the classical era, and it felt oddly empowering to wear it. Although I questioned her assertation that it represented the Lorainne region, as it was clearly far more northern than that. I turned around in front of the mirror, admiring the ties on the calf-fitting boots, the buttoned leggings, even the curl they’d put in my hair along the sides of my face.

I heard a giggle behind me, even though my dressers had left by that point. “You look nice,” Veronica said. “Like you stepped out of an old Windsor painting.”

“Thank you!” I exclaimed. “I knew it couldn’t be Lorainnian, but she kept insisting.”

When I turned towards her, she was frowning slightly. “...Yeah, she’s like that. Once she gets her head on something...but it doesn’t matter, I guess. Do you like my outfit?”

She was outfitted in a pink dress with fringe along all edges, a leather strand belt adorned with turquoise at the tips, high pink boots with a pokéball emblem embossed into their sides, and topped off with a wide brim cowgirl hat with a large darker pink bow flopped against itself. It was somewhere between comical and something that would be potentially trendy. “It’s very pink,” I observed to be funny.

It must have worked because she laughed. “I like it, actually. It’s a shame it would violate the uniform code or I’d wear it to school. Especially the hat. I think it’d take the edge off the people behind me if they can’t see the board. How did you get into distance classes, anyway? I think I’d enjoy that a lot more. Oh, but then I wouldn’t have as many excuses to leave the house. But at least I wouldn’t have to look any way special for it. Oh dear, I’m running at the mouth again.” She tried to shake it off by laughing again.

I put a hand on her arm. “We’ll have to save some of this for later.” Tierney was coming around the corner.

At the sight of the two of us, she gasped dramatically. “Oh you two are so--” and immediately set to work on last-minute corrections. She fluffed Veronica’s bow, set the fringe on her arms and at her knees straight, and tucked a stray curl under the hat. As for me, it was a flurry of tugs and fluffing as she tried to make the half-size larger clothes seem as if they were made for me. Finally she stood, and, licking her fingers first, wound them into the pre-curled hair at the sides of my face and tugged.

“Ow!” It was painful, but at least brief.

“Beauty hurts,” she said harriedly, looking us up and down again. “Aren’t you both perfect. Now, you’re going on near the end, as punctuation of sorts. I had to change the schedule around for that and Lada is very mad, so you can’t say a word about it. After you make your appearances, stay out there and all the other models will join you for a bow. But don’t bow until I do. And don’t pinch your face up, Veronica, I’m not sending you back to the makeup chair an hour before you go on. This is perhaps the biggest day of Mommy’s life so I need you to be absolutely perfect.”

Veronica had made a bit of a face at the mention of the famous model, but I didn’t think it was anything strange. “Are there any musical cues we have to worry about?” she asked.

“No, only the adult models are walking in time with the beat. Nobody expects that from the children. Now, I’d kiss you but I’m not going to muss your hair, so here.” Tierney leaned in and very gingerly put her arm around Veronica’s shoulder in what passed for a hug. “The director will give you your cues; you remember Nhung. He’ll tell you what to do and for now mommy has to go start things off, kiss kiss!” Without waiting for a reply, she hurried off again, a bluster of headset and designer fabric.

Veronica was staring absently at the ground, and my gaze followed suit. “What are we looking at?”

She started suddenly, pulling in a gasp. “Oh, nothing. Just we should get over there.”

“Right.” I offered my arm and she accepted, smoothing out a bunching of fabric that had gathered around my elbow.

The end of the opposite wing was a maelstrom of swarming garments on the most polished-looking people I had ever seen. They didn’t seem real, but like very realistic puppets, or a cluster of especially well-trained Ditto. I wanted to say that to Veronica, in the hopes that a witty remark may lighten her mood, but something in the tightness of her mouth silently told me that I should remain quiet.

How strange, I thought. I had been told that that was a sign of nervousness and I accepted that, but with nothing better to do to fill the time, I pondered why that was. If someone had the want for quiet, wouldn’t it only make sense to say so? In our field, we were surrounded by such magnificent beauty; why would we want to take our eyes from it to look at each other?

Was that something I would learn when I was older? I hated to consider anything like that. Knowledge came with time, but age was something different altogether.

I shifted against Veronica’s arm, which she still held in hers, and thought about something else. I needed something opulent if I was to stand out among collectors, and had been considering an airship. The solution may have seemed obvious from the beginning, but nothing in my father’s catalog would serve my purposes if I was to live by my desires. Only the finest, the most luxurious, would do, and his crafts were still only vehicles at their core. My imagination had concocted a traveling hotel room, the sort of room found in upscale resorts I read about in my magazines, but my father’s ships at the top of his line only had a cot that pulled down from the wall and a tiny washroom, both unfit for any respected society man for anything but an overnight voyage.

Maybe I could talk Veronica into getting a ship as well. We’d be quite a pair, traveling the world and searching for our beloved legendaries with the only human company we wanted.

We’d have them someday; I knew we would. We had the drive, and the means were commonplace. If someone got to them before we did, we had the money, or we would in the future. Of course, that would eliminate the thrill of the chase, but the end result would be the same.

I wondered what Lugia’s feathers looked like up close. What they felt like. Those fins on its back, were they flexible or rigid, and did they have feathers as well?

And Veronica’s voice cut through, a wavering giggle. “What are you doing, Jiri?”

I had my hand out in front of me as though I’d been petting something. My imagination had gotten away from me. “Thinking about Lugia. Don’t you imagine what it’d be like to touch Cresselia?”

She shook her head, wider in scope than a simple negative gesture would be. Was she looking around for something? “Now’s not the time.”

Ah yes, that I understood. These things were secret, never to be spoken of in the houses of our parents. They were for us alone, just as our fortunes and our futures were. “That makes sense,” I agreed. “I apologize.”

She stood in silence again, absorbing everything around her. Sometimes I envied that, the ability to take everything in. I could internalise only some of what happened, whether it made sense or not. Asaph told us that we both had our strengths in our approaches, that Veronica had everything at her disposal while I could do things with my assorted knowledge that no one else could think to do, and that we came out about the same.

I thought back to the Madame Remi painting in his home, and how we had approached our interpretations of it. Such a novel approach to things, I mused.

Then we were shuffled forward in line by quite a pace, Veronica having to grab onto her hat to keep it on her head. A man with a headset and a very tight shirt awaited us at the end, just before a curtain divided us from outside. He looked us up and down, requesting that we turn around, and he straightened some of the frills on my outfit and some of the fringe on Veronica’s dress before speaking. “You’ll go down to the end; pace yourself as you walk, Tierney is going to talk about your outfits. Then pause, and turn around and go to the end of the line, you can’t miss it. Don’t talk to anyone; they’ll still be taking your pictures even when you’re in the line. Keep yourselves expressionless until you get in line, then big smiles!” He forced the corners of his mouth up with fingers to emphasise his point. “She’ll call you all back onto the stage, and you’ll do a faster version of what you did before. Got it?” He didn’t wait for any reply before ushering me forward, separating me from Veronica.

And then we were all that mattered, the targets of every eye surrounding the makeshift stage. Cameras clicked and flashed as I began my walk down to where Tierney stood. She narrated, voice coming from speakers on either side of us. “Add a touch of the classics to your journey with this decadent ensemble based on the timeless classical masters,” the description came in an oddly flat tone, and I wondered if that was intentional. But she wasn’t done. “The boots are practical as well as stylish, with the leg-fitted design keeping your feet safe from the weather, and the soles are made for anything from a ball to a trek through the woods.”

Unsure if I should do anything, I turned on my heel to reveal the soles of my shoes to the audience. It was met with more camera flashes, and my head swam from the commotion.

“The layers will keep trainers protected from the elements, and the soft blue color is easy to spot in an emergency,” she went on, and I had a jolt of distress. It wouldn’t help if someone was drowning, and I started to lose my enthusiasm, unaware of what else she talked about. Absently, I wandered to the end of the line of brightly smiling models lining the side of the building near the stage.

But the moment was over at the sight of Veronica in the spotlight. How did that take me out of it? I wondered internally, and my smile came naturally.

“This exotic ensemble is a Towan fantasy, from the soft pink Miltank leather throughout to the hand-polished turquoise that dot her outfit. Don’t let the delicate appearance fool you-it’s as durable as it is lovely. Note the ease of movement, the holding capacity of the belt,” here, Veronica demonstrated that the strands came apart, affording one rope for each pokéball, “the beauty and strength of the open range.”

Veronica had reached the end of the runway by that point, and twirled around as she crossed the mark, fringe spinning outward. She blew a kiss to the audience before joining me at the end of the line.

She looked so happy, I thought, a marked change from just a few moments ago. But I couldn’t say anything, so I kept smiling and thought how delicious it was that here was another part of my life that my father would never know about. It was a wonderful feeling, so liberating, and I hoped that someday, Veronica would know that same freedom.

“Let’s go away,” I heard, and I looked at her. We weren’t supposed to talk yet! But “Let’s go away,” she repeated, this time in my line of sight.

I shook my head, widening my smile in the hopes she’d get the hint, and averting my eyes back to the audience. I noticed Asaph was present, near the end of the runway, and I thought I saw Lucrezia and Mr. Higuchi as well, although I wasn’t certain. One person I was positive was not in attendance was Lucrezia’s son, although I scarcely blamed either of them for that. He’d spoke of breaking away from our parents, something he’d yet to do. For all his success, he was still in his mother’s shadow. It was no wonder he had rebelled, as strange a way as it was to do so. Becoming a trainer...it was almost silly, really.

More pictures, more polite applause, more dull narrative, and finally we were herded back to the stage, retracing our steps after Nhung readjusted our clothes. The music, which had been a nondescript soft piece that merited no description, switched to a pounding beat, and the older models pounded their heels with the beat, working it into their walk. Tierney had talked about that, how no one expected the child models to do that. And I didn’t try to copy it, despite seeing the words as confrontational at best and demeaning at worst. I kept to my own pace, walking a gentleman’s walk as I’d carefully learned.

A brief pose at the end-I bowed gracefully, while Veronica did another twirl-and we headed back inside, single-file. The other models, working almost as a single entity, went back to the dressing rooms, but Veronica grabbed my hand. “Let’s go now.” It was no longer a request. The tightness of her grip and the slight bulge of her eyes told me that it was a command.

“All right, milady, where will we be off to?” I tried to make light of it. Her and her hiding.

“Viridian. Let’s go to Viridian. There’s a bus that goes by here every half-hour and the pickup point’s only a five-minute walk from here. Let’s go!”

She really meant to leave? Not simply another game of hers? I followed along, towed by her grip but of my own accord. “Your mother will be cross with us,” I told her even knowing it would do no good.

“After-parties are boring anyway. We won’t miss anything. We’ll be back by evening. No one will know we’re gone.”

If she was adamant about it or simply trying to convince herself, I couldn’t tell the difference.

She led me to the main entryway, deserted save for empty vehicles and a reporting crew that had suffered equipment failure and was loading their van. They paid us no mind and I was glad for it. About halfway down the driveway, Veronica let go of my wrist. “...Jiri, I’ll pay fare for both of us. It’s not much, but I don’t think you have your wallet on you, do you?”

How long had she been planning to do this? The thought slightly disturbed me. “I have to say, we’ll be quite the sight in these outfits. I know they’re meant for trainers, but they’re so...elaborate.”

Her pace slowed and she fell back with me. “I didn’t think you’d be in one. But still, I need to get away from there sometimes. Besides, Viridian is a great city! I don’t think anyone will notice!” She started humming something under her breath, a skip suddenly in her step. “Viridiaaaan, Viridiaaaan, hmm hmm hmmmmmm.”

As much as her mood swings puzzled me, I had to admit that it would do me good to get away as well. Living at a fast pace had its place, but not all the time. I skipped along with her, recalling the mood of my outfit and the child noblemen in all their carefree fortune.

The world was open to us, wasn’t it? It would do no good to stay in one place. And as the bus pulled up, I felt the size of that open world swell in the air around me.