*

Jessica was anything but gracious about her brother losing to somebody that she thought was a pushover trainer; she was storming over to the pontoon, waving a huge hat in the air and yelling. “ Andrew, how could you lose? Here you are pretending you’re a great trainer and you lose to Gavin, who’s not even got a gym badge!”

Lisa watched from her spot on the beach sand a few metres away as Andrew tried to defend himself. She had been surprised how good Gavin had battled; she had always thought of him as being a rather weak trainer, despite the fact that the only time they had met on a battlefield – at the Whirlpool Cup – she had lost to him.

“ I bet if I battled Gavin I could totally kick his ***, and show you who’s the better trainer!” said Jess angrily, standing on the pontoon beside Andrew, facing Gavin as though she was about to fight him.

“ Um, all I have with me are Natu and Girafury, and this really isn’t a great place for him to battle, it’s too small, Jessica,” Gavin said, backing away off the pontoon and back onto the wet sand. “Perhaps another time, eh Jess?”

“ That’s not fair! I wanted to show Andrew up!” stormed Jessica.

A wild idea rose into Lisa’s head … maybe she could battle Jessica. After all, last time they had tried to battle, the match had been interrupted, and they had never continued. This would be the perfect opportunity to see who would have won.

Trusting that Olivia wouldn’t miss her (the girl was digging a massive hole, for what reason only she knew; Aipom and Spoink were ‘helping’) Lisa stood up, brushed the sand off her shorts and jogged over to the pontoon where the others were.

“ Tell you what Jessica, I’ll battle you,” she said quickly.

Jessica simply nodded, and walked to Andrew’s end of the pontoon while he went back to the beach with Gavin. The two boys sat down hear Olivia, Spoink and Aipom, all of whom were still digging a hole, or teetering on the edge of it. Lisa stepped onto the pontoon, wobbling slightly, and took her battle position where Gavin had been standing earlier.

“ This time we’ll see who wins, hey Lisa?” said Jessica.

Lisa just nodded, but she found herself surprisingly eager to win.

“ Go Murkrow!” cried Jessica, throwing out her pokeball to begin the fight. It burst open in midair and for a moment Lisa was taken aback by the bright white bird that appeared from the ball; she had forgotten that Jessica’s Murkrow was albino, rather that pitch black like most of them.

“ Go on Lisa, choose someone,” said Jess impatiently.

Lisa was trying to do just that. She was narrowing her pokemon down by elimination: Fiskmire wouldn’t be a wise choice, as he was likely to sink the pontoon; Electabuzz wasn’t a good mix with watery surrounds, especially since he seemed to completely detest Lisa; Dratini might work, but he wouldn’t be able to move anywhere when he was on the pontoon, and that would be a huge disadvantage against a flying pokemon. Aipom would have been the ideal choice, but he was halfway down a hole with Olivia.

That left Lisa with one choice. She threw out the pokeball and yelled, “ Go Vulpix!”

Vulpix appeared in a glittering explosion of light. Jessica looked a bit confused at Lisa’s choice – a fire type on a pontoon with ocean all around – but she didn’t hesitate more than a moment. Andrew yelled something out from the shore; Jessica pulled the finger at him, then looked at Lisa fiercely and yelled, “ Icy Wind, Murkrow!”

Vulpix wasn’t too happy with the vast stretch of water around him – he looked at Lisa for comfort. She grinned at him. “ It’s all right, just don’t fall in,” she said. He looked sceptical, but turned to the battle anyhow.

The albino Murkrow was wheeling around in the sky, then, without warning, it’s eyes glowed icily and it flapped its wings once – a moment later, a heavy barrage of Icy Wind berated Vulpix, and – inadvertently – Lisa was caught in the blast as well. Luckily for her, Vulpix stood strong; he had a type advantage, after all.

“ Stay agile, Vulpix, and use Firebomb,” commanded Lisa.

Vulpix responded swiftly. His eyes glowed with a kind of power before he opened his jaws, which had vermilion flames collecting within it, trying to escape. With a loud BANG, the ball of fire was expelled from Vulpix’s mouth and barrelled in the direction of Murkrow, who was hovering above him. It gave a loud squawk and dived out of the way, so that the fireball missed completely. However, just as Murkrow and Jessica were both looking triumphant, the ball of fire exploded with the force of a small bomb, sending out a massive wave of heat, while showering Murkrow with fiery sparks and flames. Only the blast of heat actually connected with the white Murkrow, though; it swooped away and managed to dodge every single flame.

Lisa screwed up her face in frustration. She had thought that move was more or less foolproof. She heard Gavin half-supporting her, half-mocking her with a cry of, “ You can do it!”

Something clicked in Lisa’s head. The reason she was losing so far was because Murkrow was too fast. To win, she needed to slow it down, and to slow it down, she had to –

“ Vulpix! Hypnotise Murkrow!” she ordered.

Her hopes were dashed almost instantaneously.

“ Uh, Murkrow … uh … Mirror Move!” cried Jessica, tripping over her tongue in her haste to get the words out.

Lisa was watching Jessica make the command more than she was watching Murkrow carry it out. By the time she looked back at the middle of the pontoon, she saw Vulpix’s eyes spinning as it looked into a mirror that Murkrow had produced out of thin air. A moment later, he collapsed, sound asleep on the pontoon.

“ No, wake up Vulpix!” Lisa cried uselessly.

“ Good work, Birdy,” Jess congratulated her Murkrow. “ Now use Pallid Beam!”

Lisa knew the battle was won, and not by her. She cringed as Murkrow fired off a massive beam of white light at Vulpix. The light was astonishingly bright – Lisa had to shield her eyes with her hands – and when she finally got the nerve to look back at the battle, it was to see Vulpix, eyes closed and fur ruffled, spread-eagled on the pontoon, and Murkrow soaring in a victory circle.

She sighed and returned Vulpix to his pokeball wordlessly.

“ This would’ve been different if I had’ve used Dratini, Jessica,” said Lisa, aware that she sounded like a sore loser, and felt like one too. It had been a while since she’d lost a pokemon battle, and all the wild pokemon she had beaten a couple of days ago at Ecru Lake had made her feel invincible. And now here she was, being beaten by Jessica, of all people. She tried to smile happily but her heart was definitely not in it.

Andrew and Gavin were walking over, looking impassive.

“ Congrats Jess,” Andrew said blandly, not smiling. Lisa had a feeling he hadn’t wanted her to win at all.

Jessica grinned, clearly ecstatic at her victory over Lisa. “ Thanks, I told you I was a better trainer than you, Andrew.”

“ Wow Jess, you pulled that battle off pretty well,” said Gavin, coming up to congratulate Jessica also. “ Hey Lisa, how long has it been since you actually lost a battle?”

Lisa shot him a look of pure venom as they returned to the hotel for the night.

*

The Port Valeo Courthouse was more impressive than Lisa could have imagined. It was almost ten-thirty the next morning when the police escort drove up the paved drive to the courthouse, and as the police car approached, Lisa wondered how she had never seen the courthouse before – it was the biggest building in the entire town. The courthouse was a two-level structure, made of elegant terracotta-coloured stone. It had white columns all around the lower level, making it look immensely formal and serious. The entrance was up a short series of marble steps, through a set of polished oak doors. Above the doors was carved an elaborate coat of arms, divided into four sections; Lisa couldn’t see what was engraved in any of the four sections, but she did see a sleek Dragonair – the international symbol of peace - set in the centre of the crest.

Lisa saw all this from the police car, in which rode herself, Aipom (sitting still, for a change), Gavin, Andrew and Jessica, along with Officer Rule, the police officer who was in charge of the four of them. What she didn’t see at first, though, was a gaggle of people clustered on the grassed area outside the marble steps. Lisa peered more closely at the people, her face pressed against the glass as the car drove right up to the entrance; it seemed to be a crowd of news reporters and journalists – most of them had notepads, microphones and there were two or three TV cameras. Lisa turned to the others and grinned; Jessica looked unimpressed at the newspeople, but Gavin and Andrew both looked keen at being interviewed.

Officer Rule pulled the police car up to the entrance and braked with a jolt. “ Alright, go straight inside, guys,” said Officer Rule, at once both serious and casual. Lisa saw Jessica smile in his direction as she piled out of the car, but the policeman appeared not to notice.

Lisa stepped out of the car into the bright sunlight, and before her eyes had even adjusted to the light the reporters immediately descended like seagulls upon the four of them.

“ What do you think should happen to Lenina?” shouted a man in a black suit, directly in Lisa’s face. She opened her mouth to answer, but before she could reply, a woman in a dated floral dress ambushed her with a microphone: “ Lisa, could you please give our viewers a blow-by-blow account of your ordeal?” Lisa muttered a vague, “ Um, I have to go,” to the reporters and tried to escape, but she was hemmed in on all sides by reporters and cameramen, all of them firing questions at her which all seemed to be the same.

Aipom took matters into his own hands – or tail-hand, to be exact; he bounced up and down on Lisa’s shoulder as he slapped the reporters away. Lisa watched, amused, as Aipom felled three reporters. As the third one fell, a woman with beehive-shape hair, Lisa saw a gap in the throng of reporters. She lunged through the gap and found herself free of the crowd at last.

“ Thanks Aipom,” she said. The purple monkey smiled toothily.

Lisa didn’t waste time in escaping the media – she scampered up the marble stairs and breezed through the oak doors, not even bothering to look back. She strode through a second set of doors – glass ones – and in to the lobby of the courthouse and instantly felt as though she didn’t belong. The floor was marble, like the stairs outside, and there were pillars placed throughout the room. A long mahogany counter was set on the opposite side of the lobby from the door, and to the left and right hand sides of the room were corridors that presumably led to the courtrooms.

“ There she is!”

Lisa turned, expecting to face another surge of reporters, but she was faced instead with Jessica and Gavin, who came striding over from the counter, both looking very respectable in their good clothes.

“ They’re mental, aren’t they?” said Jessica.

“ Absolutely,” Lisa said breathlessly, looking around the lobby. “ Where’s Andrew, and that policeman?”

Jessica rolled her eyes and Gavin pointed behind Lisa. Lisa turned around to see Officer Rule walk through the glass doors, Andrew in tow.

“ … supposed to be early, it makes a good impression,” Officer Rule was saying reprovingly. He glanced at the rest of them. “ OK then, this way, we have to go through registration,” he said simply, and swept off across the room and down the left corridor. Lisa, Jessica, Andrew and Gavin followed him nervously; now that the time had come, butterflies were hovering in Lisa’s stomach.

Officer Rule led them down the bright corridor to another large room, which also had a long counter with a sign saying ‘Registration’ over it. Everyone handed their pokemon in to be checked out, then had them returned. It was then that Lisa realised how much security there was now – the registration for starters, the police escort – and, now, she realised that the passage Officer Rule was about to lead them down was laced with video cameras and a metal detector.

“ Just walk through here one at a time, then,” said Officer Rule to the group at large.

Feeling guilty for no reason, Lisa took the plunge first, but the machine didn’t beep at all. The others followed through with no problems until Gavin passed through and the machine beeped loudly. Before Officer Rule said anything, Gavin had taken off both his shoes and handed them to the policeman, then he walked through again, this time with no alarm.

Officer Rule looked puzzled.

“ Steel-caps,” said Gavin, and Officer Rule nodded, returning the boots.

“ Why’ve you got steel-caps?” Lisa said sternly.

Gavin shrugged as Officer Rule swept down another corridor, this one green-carpeted. The entire group was silent now, and Lisa could feel the nervousness of the others. Officer Rule led them to a door that had ‘Courtroom Six’ emblazoned across it. Lisa handed Aipom to him, and he promised to keep him under control in the lobby. Officer Rule then tugged at the handle of the wooden door, hissed, “ Good luck,” to all of them, and left the door open for them to enter the courtroom.