Lisa the Legend: Chapter 82 - Last Night on Earth now up! (24th June 2013)

[Gavin Luper]

*

She must have fallen asleep, because the next thing Lisa felt was two strong arms hauling her upright into a warm, sweeping embrace. She opened her eyes to see her mother’s beaming face before her, swimming with tears as she held her daughter close. Lisa collapsed in her Mum’s arms, sobbing desperately and clutching to her mother’s plump frame like a pathetic child, not caring what she looked like anymore. How long she hugged her mother – whether it was a minute or ten – she could honestly never say; all she knew was a surge of emotion through her entire being; something that warmed her throughout.

Eventually they each pulled away from each other for air. Lisa gathered a lungful of oxygen before her Dad appeared beside her Mum and swept her into his arms in turn, though he held onto her for only a few seconds before kissing her head and releasing her once more.

Lisa surveyed them closely, a lump in her throat. There was the man she called Dad, his black hair messy, exactly as it had always been, his manner still controlled and aloof like the man he was – but she had never seen him with his clothes torn and face battle-scarred, a dagger clearly visible at his belt. Beside him was the woman she called Mum; she too was just as she had always been, kind and plump-faced, free and honest with her emotions – but her honesty had not stretched so far as to tell her daughter she possessed a team of six pokémon, their pokéballs on display on her belt.

Icicles were forming in the pit of Lisa’s stomach. She yearned for an explanation – something that would justify all of this – but nothing came to her. Trying to swallow the lump in her throat, she said, “ How –” before her throat closed over painfully and she choked on the rest of her question.

Her Mum looked distraught, torn, maybe, at seeing her daughter so emotional. She tried to take Lisa’s hand but this irritated Lisa more than anything – she whipped her hand out of her mother’s grasp as if it had burnt her.

“ Lisa,” said Mum softly, “ we’re sorry. We’re really sorry that you had to find out this way.”

“ Find out what?” Lisa managed with difficulty, though she already knew the answer.

“ That we are both a part of this,” said Mum, her hands together, fingers interlocked as if she were in prayer. She looked deeply distressed. “ Now that we realise what you’ve been through – we can understand how strange you must be feeling.” She fiddled with a tattered thread trailing from the bottom of her muddy blouse before looking Lisa directly in the eye. “ Just imagine for a second if things had gone to plan,” she said sadly. “ You would still be living at home. You would never have seen a legendary pokémon and would never have been exposed to the Union. You would have got a job and stayed in Ecruteak training your pokémon. Things would have been ideal. And when you turned eighteen we would tell you the truth, the whole truth, and you would be shocked of course, but not like this. If we told you we were part of the group fighting the Union, it would have meant much less to you than it does now, after you’ve seen them, been targeted by them – and fought them, even. You will feel differently about the truth now than you would have … and should have.”

The lump had subsided a little now and Lisa found her tongue. “ I know you’re doing the right thing,” she said, trying to choose the best words. “ The Union are the bad guys and the Guard – you – are the good guys. As far as I see it anyway, since you all saved us tonight. But –” Her throat began to seize up again as she reached the hardest part of all, the thing that was tearing her up the most inside. “ But you’re my Mum and Dad. You raised me. You teach me to drive and help me with my homework. That’s – that’s what parents do!” she spluttered. “ You go to work each day to support your family. You dig for fossils and lost treasures and things. You attend meetings and seminars. But you don’t – you DON’T! -” (She nearly shouted this part.) “ – fight wars!”

Both her parents were stunned into silence.

“ And that’s why it’s hard,” said Lisa, her face burning. “ Because it’s just not right, it’s not right! You can be as shocked as you like about what I did without telling you, but you’re both grown adults who already knew about the Union, about this whole other world. I’m just a kid!” she cried. “ I didn’t know what was happening to me! I didn’t know why people were coming after me! I just had to deal with it as best I could and then I put it behind me. I pretended these things weren’t happening to me, that things weren’t as serious as they seemed. I felt like I could never tell you the things I had done, the kind of people I’d been exposed to … it felt like a horrible, horrible secret that I had to keep.” She felt a flush of shame. “ And the whole time – the whole time! – you both knew about the Union, were fighting against it, even …”

She trailed off, feeling suddenly dazed: comprehension of the awful irony had just dawned on her. The fact was, if she had told her parents the truth about being followed by the Union and the Legendaries when they first returned from Kanto in December, everything would have been revealed much sooner. She and Marina would never have been attacked; all the events of the last two weeks could have been avoided – and she, Lisa, could have been spared the terror, the mental strain, the brutality of battle … By keeping the truth a secret, she had very nearly caused her own destruction at the hands of the Union. Lisa finally saw the bitter reality: as much as she wanted to rage at her parents for not telling her the truth, and though she still felt she had that right, she understood that her own mistakes – borne of her youthful nescience and uncertainty – had played just as great a part. She was not without blame, either.

Unexpectedly, it was Dad who responded to her tirade. This took her by surprise a little: her father had never been much of a talker. He was mostly reserved and serious, content to keep his feelings and thoughts to himself unless someone particularly got under his skin. There were times when he would joke around with his wife and children, in which he would become quite talkative – but it was always the same subject matter. Lisa had never heard him talk about something serious, and so when he spoke to her now, it was as if he had suddenly become a different man.

“ You’re right,” he conceded in his deep voice. He stood up and folded his muscled arms. “ It must’ve been hard for you. But when we started all this, you weren’t in the equation. We founded the Guard twenty years ago, way before you were born, Lisa. There were no kids to think about, no-one else’s feelings to consider but ours, the founders’. Years later, when you were still young, we realised, too late, that our kids were going to be affected by this as well as us. But we never knew when. We thought you’d all be adults before you had to face the truth – and by then, you’d be old enough. Our plan was always to tell you when you were eighteen. I hate the Union more than ever now; it’s because of them that we have to do this so much earlier. I wish it could be different …”

He trailed off. Lisa knew he wasn’t done so she kept her tongue, even though something he had said had sparked her curiosity.

“ We have to tell you everything now, Lisa,” he said finally. “ Everything we weren’t going to tell you for another three years, and yet somehow, feel like we should have told you long ago. We know you’ve been told lots of different things by lots of different people. Some of them told the truth and some of them lied; but none of them told you the full truth, the whole story, as we know it to be true. We’ve already heard your story, through Tom –” Lisa recalled divulging everything to her older brother yesterday morning – was it really just twenty-four hours ago that she spoke to him? “ So now it’s our duty as parents,” he said unaffectedly, placing a hand on his wife’s shoulder, “ to tell you our side of the story.”

Lisa’s heart rose hopefully. Finally, after all this time, a chance to understand – to know the real reason she was pursued, the real reason her parents were part of the Guard – the real truth about the Legend.

“ I’m listening,” she said boldly.

Her mother, who had sunk into the wooden chair beside the bed, didn’t seem to hear her; she seemed preoccupied with clasping her hands together, looking downright apprehensive at the impending tale. Her dad, on the other hand, gave a rough, lop-sided smile at her plucky response.

Taking a breath, Dad sat down on the end of her bed. “ This all started way back in 1984, almost twenty years ago.

“ I was on my first project as a junior archaeologist. I’d been lucky from the beginning, or so I thought. I’d been offered the job just a few months after I graduated Uni at the end of ’82 – and it was a high-profile dig, too, a two-year assignment to the north-west of Ecru Lake, led by one of the greatest archaeologists of the last century. For me to have been chosen was nothing short of lucky, as I was so underqualified, but my Dad knew the people in charge of the dig, so he gave me a leg up.

“ The excitement I felt at the start of the dig fell away pretty fast as I realised the reality of my job. Hours and hours every day in the hot sun, excavating this ridiculously huge area and finding hardly anything noteworthy. It started to get tedious. More than tedious, I was pretty fed up. But I kept going, stuck to my job, partly because I knew it was going to get me far in my career to be able to say I’d worked under that particular professor of archaeology, and partly because of the other people I met on the dig.”

Dad smiled reminiscently. “ There were four of us who were only in our early twenties. Everyone else on the dig was so much older and so much more experienced than us, so at first we were grouped together out of necessity. But eventually we grew to like each other; after a few months we were best of friends, the four of us, and it made work so much easier …” He cleared his throat. “ I’m getting distracted. Anyway, one of my new friends was my boss’ son, and so we eventually got to know our boss – sorry, his name was Professor Hudson – a lot better …”

He frowned. “ That’s partly why it happened. It was just over a year into the project, the autumn sun was still hot and we were all exhausted. Spirits on the dig were at a new low. Funding hadn’t gone through on time, causing a two-week delay for a particular section of the excavation. Plus, we still hadn’t found what we were looking for and things weren’t looking any better. The person who seemed most affected by the setbacks was the professor. As the months wore on he got more and more attached to the dig. He worked seven days a week, every week. Some nights he didn’t sleep, just kept searching. Eventually he started to drag his son down to the dig on weekends when we were supposed to be resting and forced him to help. Being as I was his mate, I’d sometimes join him on the dig to keep him company.

“ And it was on one of those weekends, sometime in April ’84, when it happened.”

Lisa sat up higher in her bed, clutching tightly to the bedsheet she had absent-mindedly tied into a knot.

Her father looked at her plainly. “ I don’t know if you’ve worked it out yet, Lisa, but the professor’s son was Lance, Lance Hudson. That’s how we met, on the dig. The four of us: me, Lance, Azura Frost and Jim Donovan.”

It wasn’t the mention of Lance, but rather the name of the woman, that caused Lisa to accidentally rip a massive hole in her sheet. “ Azura Frost?” she repeated, her ears ringing. “ As in …”

“ As in Marina’s mother,” finished Dad, while Mum nodded gravely.

Lisa’s mind recoiled. “ So …” She struggled with the notion. “ So when Marina came to stay with us – you knew who she was?” she spluttered.

“ Of course we knew,” said Dad. “ What spun us out was that you and her should have had a chance encounter and become friends, as if it had been somehow been willed by fate.”

Lisa recalled the time at Christmas last year, when her parents had given Marina presents despite the fact that they barely knew her. At the time it had seemed a little overly generous; now, though, it suddenly made sense – they had known the whole time she was really the daughter of their close friend.

“ And so that’s why you let her stay at our house for so long …” Lisa murmured.

Mum looked vaguely offended. “ Well, I don’t need a reason to be hospitable!” she muttered, smoothing Lisa’s sheets rather violently. “ After all, I let Gavin stay too, and for no reason … honestly …”

She trailed off, though it was plain that she was continuing the rant in her head. Lisa deigned a fleeting smile.

“ Right,” said Dad. “ And imagine our shock, then, when shortly after you told us about this boy named Darius you met when you went to the Indigo Plateau to see your friend – um – Harry?”

“ Hiro,” corrected Lisa.

“ Right – see him battle at the Championships. We couldn’t believe you had met both Darius and Marina completely of your own accord. We’d always expected to have to do those introductions ourselves. It was a bit strange that all three of you might be united so soon. But, as it turned out, Lance prevented that from happening.”

It took Lisa a second to understand what he meant by this; she fixed him with her most accusatory gaze before her mum broke in instead.

“ Lance wanted to train Darius,” she explained. “ Darius wanted to come to Ecruteak and see you –” She did not manage to keep the motherly suspicion out of her voice. “ – but Lance was already reading the signs. The Union were scouring the country already. The Legendary dogs were out of sorts – Entei had broken away from the others – it was clear that things were developing more quickly. He told Darius about the Legend and began instructing him on how to best train himself up for the challenge …”

Mum cut herself short suddenly, reading Lisa’s blank look of incomprehension. “ Ryan, shouldn’t you get back to explaining your story to her?” she said sharply, as though it was his fault that Lisa was staring obtusely at her.

“ Lisa – you’ll understand in a minute,” began Dad. “ Back to where I was – it was a Saturday in ’84. Lance and his dad had been down at the dig all morning. Just before noon, Azura and I each received a phone call from the professor. He said they’d finally found something important. Of course, we went to join them at once. By this stage we’d excavated a fair way down and we actually had a few underground tunnels in operation. We found Lance and the professor right at the end of the longest, deepest tunnel, and for the first time in months and months, they were actually excited: they’d found something.

“ It was a stone tablet, covered in these ancient glyphs which none of us knew how to read but the professor. He was chipping away at the dirt that covered it up, brushing away and reading in this strange language, but he wouldn’t tell us what it said, just kept working. Lance, Azura and I joined in, because it was obvious that this was the reason the professor had started the dig – this was apparently what he had hoped to find in the first place.

“ Lance chipped through first. I remember that like it happened five seconds ago. All of us digging carefully at the wall of the tunnel. Just a flat, scraping kind of sound and then Lance whooping like a maniac. He’d been chipping to the right of the tablet and suddenly uncovered an opening. I’ve never seen the professor take over something so quickly. He was there like lightning and before ten minutes had gone by we’d gone far enough to make a whole section of the side of the tunnel collapse to the ground. When the dust settled, we shone our torches into the opening and found a long stone tunnel leading down to some steps – man-made steps. We’d discovered a lost world. A forgotten world.”

Lisa had never seen her father’s eyes shine like they did now; he seemed completely taken in his memory.

“ It was the reward we’d been waiting more than a year for. All the days spent on the dig suddenly seemed worth it. We went in straight away, just the four of us. The professor didn’t want to tell anyone else. He led the way. He was almost shaking with excitement – and to be honest, I was, too. We could only imagine what we’d stumbled on. And it was breathtaking. Tunnel after tunnel. Stone staircase after stone staircase. Pictures and hieroglyphics all over the walls, it felt like we’d been transported a dozen millennia in the past, yet the professor said the place looked only ‘about a thousand years old, if that’.” He laughed. “ Eventually we got to another stone tablet like the first one we found, only this time the door beside it wasn’t covered in the dirt and decay of the last millennium. Actually, aside from some dust, the place was spotless.

“ The door – a stone door, a clever ancient piece of architecture – opened easily, and inside was another tunnel, but this one wasn’t bare like the previous ones. It was filled – I mean filled – with … treasures. Golden statues and chests of coins and marble sculptures and all kinds of the greatest jewellery I’ve ever seen. Lisa, you couldn’t imagine, you really couldn’t,” he said earnestly. “ There were hallways and chambers filled with these things, from all the places in the world. There were old vases, empty pitchers that still reeked of strong perfumes, swords and battle armour, rich tapestries and silks of colours that practically glowed in the torchlight. Everything you could possibly imagine that might have had value in the ancient world was there, in that place …”

Whether consciously or not, he had closed his eyes during this recount. He now opened them, a fond smile across his stubbled face, and continued.

“ We spent a hours there, weaving our way through the galleries of treasures. We were stunned because we knew this had to be the greatest find in archaeological history, certainly in Johto anyway. Our thoughts were divided between how rich and famous we were going to be and simply how amazing the find was. It had a feeling of – I dunno – greatness. Like the things in these chambers really meant something … I don’t know how to explain it.

“ Eventually, though, we reached a chamber with nothing in it, save for a third stone tablet on the far wall, and beside it, an absolutely massive door, taller than three men, encrusted with rubies and sapphires and all kinds of gems. It was the most mindblowing thing I’d ever seen. The door itself looked like it was made of marble and an alloy of hard metals.

“ We must’ve stared at that door for fifteen, twenty minutes. The professor was reading all kinds of inscriptions on it again, he sounded euphoric, but he wouldn’t translate into English for us, not even for Lance. The rest of us just looked at it, wondering where it could lead if it were ever unlocked, what could possibly be behind this door that was greater than what we’d already seen.

“ Then the professor spoke. He said just two words at first, still looking at the glyphs all over the door. He said, ‘ It’s perfect.’ He was so quiet we normally wouldn’t’ve heard him – but it was silent in that chamber, absolutely silent. Just when we were wondering what he meant by ‘perfect’, he raised his voice and said to us all, still not looking at any one of us, ‘ You three have to go in.’”

His naturally dark eyes glowed brightly.

“ The professor told us there was a chamber beyond that could only be entered by three people at once. He said we should go, seeing as we were young. Of course, as eager as we were to go deeper into the chambers, there was the obvious stumbling block – the huge door was ostensibly locked, and there was no way we could get through it by force, it was gigantic. The professor shocked us again by saying, as if he was completely certain, ‘ It isn’t locked yet.’ He just told us to all put our hands on the door. It was … strange … how we obeyed him. But he knew what he was doing – he had read the inscriptions on the door. Lance, Azura and I all placed our hands against the door. And then it opened.”

Lisa furrowed her brow. “ Just like that?” she said sceptically.

“ Like magic,” said Dad. “ That was the first time we realised we were dealing with something otherworldly, something supernatural. This massive door just slid open for us, slowly but steadily, until it revealed an enormous cavern beyond. Unlike every other chamber we’d found before, this one was lit up. There were fires burning from marble dishes placed around the cavern on pedestals, illuminating the whole cave and it’s contents … that is, it’s inhabitants.” He hung on the threshold before saying, “ Inside were the three legendary dogs: Suicune, Raikou and Entei.”

Lisa was not shocked at this information; she had almost pre-empted it, but nonetheless, she was enthralled by the unfolding of her father’s tale – for she could not pre-empt what was going to happen next.

“ They were sleeping,” said Dad. “ As if they didn’t even know we were there. The professor told us to enter the cavern and we did, we walked down some steps into what seemed to be the home of the legendary dogs. I honestly don’t remember much of it. I know there was some kind of altar on a platform on the far side of the hollow and behind that there was another massive door, like the one we'd just gone through, except that door was encrusted with a lock, a huge silver lock, with seven keyholes. It needed seven keys to be unlocked and opened.”

Lisa listened even more intently.

"But apart from that, I don't remember much, other than that it was a massive cave. But that's all: we could hardly take our eyes off the dogs, almost never seen by humans since ancient times. We weren’t even thinking about the dig anymore; we were just completely mindblown.

“ It seems strange now, but we left that cave after about five minutes, maybe even less. The professor told us we needed to leave and we did. None of the legendaries even woke up. The door closed itself behind us. It was as if we’d never been in there.”

Lisa regarded her father curiously. She had expected something more astonishing to have happened, and this fell far short of her grand expectations.

Dad seemed to read her expression perfectly. “ You’re disappointed?” he grinned.

“ I just thought something else might have happened.”

Mum gave an impatient groan. “ It did, Lisa, don’t worry,” she said. “ Don’t toy with her Ryan, just keep going.”

Lisa’s father looked slightly indignant but he continued nonetheless. “ Well, after that we went back through the tunnels and chambers toward the surface. Professor Hudson wrote everything down in his logbook and even drew a basic mud map of where we’d been. We didn’t touch or take anything. We were all so astonished still.

“ When we got to the surface it was mid-afternoon. Professor Hudson swore us to secrecy about what we’d found. He said he needed some more equipment – some photographic materials, especially – to properly document the findings before we announced it to the rest of the team. We arranged to meet at six o’clock the next morning and return to the chambers below, because the next day was a Sunday and there wouldn’t be anyone else at the dig that day …

“ And that was the day when everything got stuffed up to buggery.”

Lisa blinked; Mum said, “ Ryan, language, really!” but her heart wasn’t in it.

“ What happened?” Lisa asked in a small voice.

“ We met at six as planned and went straight down the tunnels into the treasure chambers. We recorded everything as thoroughly as possible, writing down and describing everything we could. It was painstaking – it took hours and hours – but the professor promised us that after we’d recorded the contents of the chambers he would take us back down to where we had seen the legendaries the previous day, and it was that prospect that got us through the day.

“ After a long day we finally went down to the ancient door with the seven locks. As with the previous day, we put our hands on the door at the professor’s instruction. It opened once again. Inside were the legendaries, asleep again, though in different positions than we had seen them in the previous day. Azura, Lance and I each took, oh, maybe one step into the chamber before we heard the professor cry out. We turned around too late … we’d already been surrounded by Joseph Sterling and his gang.”

Lisa gasped.

“ Except we didn’t know who Joseph Sterling was at that stage,” elucidated her father, speaking faster now, as though he were totally immersed in his memory. “ Or rather, we knew him, but we didn't know what kind of person he would become. This was before he had any direct association with Team Rocket. It turns out he was leader of a fairly big criminal gang around Johto – a gang bent on underworld domination and control; they had a certain thirst for power, especially Sterling. By all accounts they were worse than the Rockets were at that time – kidnapping and murdering their underworld enemies. In any case, Sterling was resourceful and powerful enough to have heard about the dig – although,” he added, “ we’re still not precisely sure how he knew we had found something worth taking for himself. He was an associate researcher on the project at the time, but he wasn't directly involved. Probably he had a spy planted in our project team who was posted on constant sentry at the dig, or maybe who had bugging devices floating around there, though we still don’t know who might have turned spy on us. Whatever the case, Sterling and his twenty gangmates tracked us down that Sunday and we were at their mercy.

“ I’ll never forget turning around to see them all standing there, blocking the entrance to the chamber – our only way out. Sterling was at the front, holding a gun right at me, actually; others had their weapons trained on Lance and Azura; Professor Hudson was already being held by two big thugs with pistols.

“ The weirdest thing was, they didn’t talk to us, didn’t bark out any orders or requests to us. Joseph Sterling just looked out at the three legendaries, still sleeping in the cave, and I suddenly understood what he came for – not for us humans, but for the dogs. He wanted them for himself. When I think now about twenty men surrounding one of the legendaries and trying to take it for themselves, it makes me laugh – but back then we didn’t realise how strong the legendary dogs were. They were relative unknowns to science. It was rumoured that they were strong, mystic, but essentially flawed. Well, let me tell you, you haven’t seen power until you’ve seen Suicune, Raikou or Entei. They weren’t just powerful, they were damned near immortal.

“ In the cave that day, Sterling was top dog for about one, maybe two minutes: from when he made us put our hands up and surrender until he gave the command to his men to ‘ Open fire!’ on the first of the legendary dogs, Suicune, it was. He didn’t get far. Suicune woke up as if it had been waiting for this attack its entire life. The blast of energy we saw … it had to be seen to be truly believed, Lisa. Blinding icy blue light – blinding – erupted everywhere. That’s all anyone could see for a minute after the gang started shooting; and all we could hear were the screams of the others. I was sure I was going to die – and yet I soon realised that nothing was happening to me, that this energy was all around me but not even touching me.

“ Suicune’s counterattack lasted maybe one minute. When the light faded, there was nothing, not a single trace remaining to show that Sterling and his gang had ever been there. And there we all were – the professor, Lance, Azura and me – still on our feet, wondering what the hell had just happened and what the hell was about to happen.

“ The first thing I noticed was that Entei and Raikou had both awoken. They stood up proudly, each of them looking surprisingly smaller than I had always imagined them, though they were still imposing. Then Suicune walked right up to me, about a metre away, if that; and I saw out of the corner of my eye that Raikou had approached Azura in the same way; and Entei had followed suit with Lance. Suicune breathed out a stream of blue – energy, for want of a better word – and it surrounded me completely. For a minute all I could see was Suicune and blue light …

“ And then, suddenly, I was back in the chamber on the other side of the great door, standing beside Lance, Azura and Professor Hudson. It was silent … the door was closed … it was sealed, locked … it was as if we’d never been in there, except we had …” Dad shook his head, looking a little dazed. “ That wasn’t eloquent, but you get my drift, Lisa … we had no concrete evidence of anything, just the memory and the knowledge that the legendary dogs had just made some kind of contact with us, had done something to us … it was the strangest feeling …”

He trailed off once again, however, this time he did not seem in a hurry to return to his tale; he merely stared out the large, white-framed window at the far end of the makeshift ward, apparently lost in thought. Although Lisa’s mind was still reeling from all this unexpected information, she was still eager to hear the rest of what her father had to say. She allowed him a minute of reflection before she said, “ What happened then?”

Still looking resolutely away from Lisa, Dad said, “ Everything changed.”

Lisa gaped, and even Mum turned to look at him, because his voice was unlike they had ever heard it – hoarse and vulnerable.

“ The professor confirmed it,” he continued, though very slowly, as though he was suddenly having difficulties speaking; his voice seemed to have become lifeless. “ He’d heard of the legend. He already understood what had happened. We didn’t.”

Lisa blinked at the man before her; he was clearly fighting to keep the emotion out of his voice.

Finally, he turned and made direct eye contact with Lisa; she felt as though she was melting under his fiery gaze, but she held it boldly.

Her father spoke gravely, deliberately, as though he had planned every word years in advance. “ Professor Hudson had studied the legendary pokémon for decades, alongside his archaeological pursuits. He was mainly interested in Suicune, Entei and Raikou, whose existence was fabled rather than scientifically confirmed. He dedicated his life to investigating the truth behind these three legendary dogs. His search led him to Ecruteak, where he investigated various ancient ruins and gradually uncovered a lost, ancient language, which, once he mastered it, enabled him to read a forgotten legend inscribed on the walls of the Ruins of Alph.

“ The Legend described the existence of the three Legendary Dogs, and told stories of the ancient peoples not only knowing of their existence, but actually interacting with them. These people built shrines to celebrate the eternal bond between humans and pokémon – two shrines, in fact. They were the Tin Tower and the Brass Tower. The Tin Tower was to be a holy, sacred place solely for the legendary pokémon of the world. The Brass Tower was made as a haven to the three legendary dogs, and a shrine for humans to give their thanks and praise to the creatures.

“ The Legend claims that the people of this time were closely connected to the legendaries, even supposedly Ho-oh and Lugia, who frequently visited the Tin Tower, according to written accounts over the centuries. The Legend says that these ancient people were of a higher intellect, a higher cognition, a higher level of spirituality; they knew of a great secret, a secret that Suicune, Entei and Raikou had been tasked to protect from other pokémon. While the Legend doesn’t reveal what this secret was, it says that it involved a hidden source of unlimited power, an undescribed power. It also tells us that each legendary beast also had a human counterpart to help protect the secret from humans. Apparently the legendary dogs used their own kind of magic to bind a worthy human’s soul to their own. Those humans made the shrine impenetrable to invaders, devising a whole array of systems to keep the place secure, ultimately resulting in what is referred to in the Legend as the ‘Iron Lock’. It required seven keys to ever be opened again. The humans then took each of the keys and hid them, hid them far away from each other in all kinds of unlikely places throughout the continents, so that they could never be found, thus protecting the secret hidden deep within the shrine.”

He paused for breath; Lisa’s heart was hammering in her throat as she realised with a shiver that she was hearing the Legend she had heard people refer to so many times.

“ Historical records of the shrines and the legendaries simply disappear about seven hundred years ago. It’s as if the ancient people suddenly forgot the Legend and abandoned telling the story for future generations. The locations of the seven keys were never recorded. All concrete information was lost as the ancient civilisation died out. Eventually even the word-of-mouth stories disappeared from circulation … and not one of the ancient people ever revealed the secret they had worked so hard to protect.

“ It was Professor Hudson who rediscovered the Legend and set about discovering the truth about it. He knew the shrine was near the Burned Tower and Ecru Lake – it was the whole purpose of his dig in 1982. He fully intended to find the legendaries. And if I’m not mistaken, he fully intended for Lance, Azura and I to be there when he entered the shrine … he intended for us to be the ones to revive the Legend …”

Dad hesitated, apparently steeling himself. “ Lisa – I’ve told you all this so that you’ll be able to understand what – what I’m about to tell you now. The day Lance, Azura and I entered the shrine for the second time – the day Sterling attacked us – was the day when the Legend was reborn. When Sterling attacked us, the secret within the shrine was threatened for the first time in centuries. The legendary dogs had to protect their great secret, their hidden power. They did as they had done in ancient times – they found three humans whose souls they deemed pure and bound themselves to us. Entei to Lance, Raikou to Azura, Suicune to me. We were suddenly a part of the Legend – we were now forced to protect the great secret … but unlike the ancient civilisation, we didn’t even know what the secret was.”

Lisa felt as though her mind was spinning; it was too much to take in, she couldn’t process the enormity of what her father was telling her. What he was telling her as fact, as a true recount, she could only interpret as fiction, as a bizarre story – it didn’t seem real, even after all she had been through. It couldn’t be real.

She regarded her father critically and felt her stomach grow cold. His hands were actually trembling, his face pale and his mouth set firmly in a rigid line so as not to betray his emotions. She knew he was telling the truth. But it was just too difficult, too far removed from what Lisa wanted to believe was reality, for her to accept.

“ The moment we emerged from the shrine, the professor told us everything,” her father continued. “ About the Legend, about what he had discovered about it, about what had just happened to us in the shrine. He said our souls were bound to the legendary beasts. He said it was now our duty to protect the secret from Joseph Sterling, from anyone who sought to reopen the shrine. There and then, we became the Guard. Just the four of us, then. Bound by the Legend to protect whatever was being guarded by Suicune, Entei and Raikou. Suddenly that became the purpose of our whole lives.”

A dry sob rent the air suddenly; Lisa’s eyes fell on her mother, who was slumped weakly in the wooden chair at the bedside. She held her hands over her face and looked away from both Lisa and Dad. Lisa winced and put her hand on her mum’s shoulder comfortingly, but this served only to intensify her unexplained sobs.

Dad clenched his teeth abruptly, as though trying to keep himself under control, before he continued. “ I have to be careful how I phrase myself here, Lisa, because there’s sensitive information intertwined here that isn’t yours to hear. Put simply, we recruited some of our closest confidantes – our partners –” He gesticulated to his wife. “ – and other archaeologists from the dig, and the like – to join us. The Guard faced a few attacks from Sterling and his gang over the next years, but we staved him off every time. He knew we held a secret, but of course he didn’t know what it was; nonetheless, he was hell bent on finding what it was that we found in the shrine – which, after that fateful day in 1984, remained locked even to us. We closed the dig and filled it in, as an added precaution.

“ Mostly during these years, Lisa, our lives were somewhat normal. I married your mother and we bought our house in Ecruteak. I found a job in the National Museum while your mum stayed home to raise first Tom and then you. It was almost ten years later, in 1992, when the problems with Joseph Sterling came back to haunt us.” He paused deliberately, clearly choosing his words; Mum still had her hands over her face. “ Suffice it to say – we came very close to being defeated by Sterling. Shortly after, he became aware of the Legend, and the fact that, to enter the shrine and have a second shot at finding it’s treasures and secrets, he needed to locate seven ancient keys, seven hidden keys. Worst of all, he knew about Lance, Azura and I being bound to the legendary dogs.”

Lisa was listening, enthralled and alarmed, but she could not take her eyes from her mother, whose knuckles were white now as she buried her face deeper in her hands, slowly rocking herself back and forth.

“ Something else happened at the same time as this, though,” said Dad slowly. His face was ashen; he looked rather ill. “ Suicune, Raikou and Entei realised the threat they were under again, and c-consequently …” He paused abruptly, quite clearly struggling. “ … they made some … changes …” Lisa nodded along to show her father he was doing alright, but this seemed to make no difference. “ … to what they d-did … back in 1984 …”

Alarm and apprehension rose in the pit of Lisa’s stomach; nonetheless, she was concerned about her parents – they both looked quite unwell. “ Are you alright, Dad?”

He nodded, once, resolutely, but otherwise made no signal that he’d heard her; he pressed on. “ They changed who they’d bound their souls to … it was no longer Lance and Azura … and me …” He closed his eyes as he finished. “ They bound themselves … to our ch-children instead …”

There was a sudden buzzing in Lisa’s ears, like radio static; it was like her ears were revolted by what they had heard; yet over the warped noise she heard her own, weak voice say, “ You mean me, don’t you?”

And as her mother gave an enormous, choking wail, her father looked at her sombrely and said in his toughest voice, “ Yeah.”

It seemed to Lisa as the world simply blurred before her eyes and she fell down onto her pillows. To think, just a few hours ago, she had felt so alive, so elated and complete, when Professor Oak had told her the Legend involved her; now, with her new knowledge of the Legend, the truth bore down on her; she had never felt more detached from herself. The reality hit her before her father elaborated; exhausted though she was, she had heard enough now, been given enough disclosure, to understand the enormity of what she had just been told.

Her father was still speaking, but Lisa heard his voice as if he were calling to her down a cold, dark well. “ When you were four years old, Suicune bound itself to you, Lisa. I was there … I saw too late what happened … there was nothing I could do … And so the same thing happened to Lance and Azura … Darius became bound to Entei, and Marina to Raikou … everything changed … by the Legend, it means you kids … the three of you … are now the ones bound to protect the secret … guard the legendaries … you are the ones …”

The events of the past four months were finally pieced together, the reason the legendaries and the Union had pursued her now abundantly evident; yet Lisa had never imagined that discovering the truth would not spell the end of her ordeal. The hope had always lingered that her troubles would be over, resolved; that she could fall into her parents’ arms and everything would be all right, she would never be bothered again. Even though her mind was swirling, Lisa saw this precious illusion burst into flames before her eyes. The truth spelt nothing but despair; fate would not allow her to rest, to be free of those things which had plagued her since October. A fragile, wounded voice in her head told her the end of her anguish, the end of the nightmare, was going to be a long, long way away.

Presently, she felt herself alight from her thoughts and became aware that her father was talking again, trying to elucidate the details of what he had just revealed.

“ This means that you, Marina and Darius are the ones who must protect the shrine. You, Lisa, hold the power to connect with Suicune and protect him; he has chosen you to be his Guardian. You have been his Guardian since you were four years old; it is only now, that the Union is directly threatening the legendaries’ secret, that you have become vitally important to the fight against the Union. Do you understand what I mean, Lisa?”

She didn’t. “ I don’t understand how,” she said. “ How are we supposed to protect the legendaries? Any more than any other person? What ‘power’ do we have exactly?” She couldn’t for the life of her work out how she was different from anyone else; she didn’t feel strange, she didn’t notice that she was bound to Suicune.

Dad furrowed his brow. “ This is where what happened tonight comes in,” he said. “ Centuries ago, the Legendaries added their own precaution to protect the Iron Lock. They found what we believe to have been the sixth key and split it into three. They each took a piece and placed it in their own hidden cave. The ancient worshippers of that day, who, you recall, were in on the secret, described these caves as Sepulchres … which still completely confuses us. Do you know what the word ‘sepulchre’ means, Lisa?”

She didn’t.

“ A sepulchre is a burial place, a tomb,” he explained. “ Which makes no logical sense, as all three of the legendaries are all quite clearly still alive and kicking. Why the Legend refers to these three places as the Sepulchres of Raikou, Entei and Suicune, we still don’t know.

“ Whatever the reason, though, these sepulchres were to be the holding places for each third of the sixth key. To ensure they were extremely secure, the Sepulchres could only be safely entered by the guardian bound to that respective legendary; if not, the place would go into utter revolt, and begin to destroy its invaders.” Lisa cast him an obtuse look. “ That is, Lisa, the Sepulchre of Entei, which you and a Union agent forced your way into tonight, can only be successfully entered by the person bound to Entei – that is, now, Darius.”

Images of the last night flashed through Lisa’s mind: the golden statue of Entei standing guard; the wave of lava surging through the opening of the Sepulchre; the roar of chaos within the chamber; Lance and Darius zooming down to what Lisa had thought was a volcano – but of course, they knew that they alone could safely enter the place …

“ So – when I went in –” Lisa mused.

“ The Sepulchre of Entei went into chaos; it would have utilised everything in its power to destroy you – and it would have succeeded, because the person entering it was not the person Entei had entrusted his soul to. This meant that the treasure within – the fragment of the sixth key – was endangered. Had Lance and Darius not arrived when they did, to calm the disaster below …” He shuddered. “ You might not have made it out alive …”

Lisa shivered, though she could still not quite get her head around the notion of a cave attacking its intruders.

“ So that’s why we’re important,” she said, beginning to understand.

“ Exactly. The only way anyone can take the fragment of key hidden within the Sepulchre of Suicune is to have you enter it, Lisa, as you are the guardian of Suicune. That’s why the Union tracked you down so vehemently over the past four months, Lisa; that’s why you’ve been the object of their attacks so many times. Once they possessed you, they could effectively force you into the Sepulchre of Suicune, once they found it, and lo and behold, they’d be a step closer to having all the keys and finally having access to the secret in the shrine of the legendaries.”

Finally, Lisa knew the truth: the reason behind everything that had happened. She was the guardian of Suicune. She was crucial to opening the Iron Lock. That was the reason why the Union had sought her so assiduously for four months, the true explanation at last.

“ I should say, too, that I have the utmost respect for you, Lisa,” said Dad suddenly, taking Lisa completely by surprise. His face was serious. “ You managed to escape the Union not once, not twice, but a whole host of times! Frankly, that’s something you’d hardly expect of one of the most highly trained members of the Guard. I think you’re incredibly talented, Lisa, and very, very brave.”

Her mother nodded weakly, still not looking up.

Lisa actually felt herself blush, extremely uncomfortable with the praise that, deep down, she knew she probably deserved. Deflecting her father’s statement unsubtlely, she said, “ So what happens now? After today?”

Dad seemed to understand her discomfort; a fleeting smirk flashed across his face. “ That’s what we still don’t know for sure,” he said. “ Until tonight, Lisa, the Guard was made up of four separate divisions, for want of a better word. These divisions had their own leaders, and none of the divisions knew of the other; almost no one knew the entire organisation was being run by Lance, of all people. A lot of these members are still coming to terms with this; Lance has a lot to explain to everyone. We’re meeting at twelve –” he glanced at his watch. “ – in about fifteen minutes, actually, to decide exactly what our next steps are going to be.

“ But it’s pretty much certain what’s going to happen. Lisa, about an hour ago Joseph Sterling made a video-link speech to the global media, taking responsibility of the siege last night and announcing that his group was called the Union. Lance is going to publicly announce that we, the Guard, are declaring war on the Union. That’s what it comes down to, that’s what’s been brewing for the last twenty years.

“ You see, Lisa, this is what Sterling ultimately wants: power. Not enlightenment or wisdom; not happiness or love. He seeks the seven keys for the Iron Lock because he wants to find the secret of the shrine; he wants to take possession of the hidden power referred to in the Legend. Lisa, he wants unlimited power and control. He is not really interested in the Legendaries, nor in you three Guardians; you are merely means to an end. Sterling has begun a vicious quest, a war for power, by the most effective means he knows.

“ Do you understand what I mean? Sterling is going for all seven keys. If and when he gets them, he’ll have access to whatever the hell it is inside that shrine, that thing that the Legend says is a great secret, a ‘hidden power’. We, as the Guard, have two choices. We can spend the next months, years maybe, waiting until we get a tip that the Union have found the location of the next key. We could play the defensive forever but we’d never get anywhere; we’d never win. Our other choice is to play their game. Fight fire with fire. We engage them in outright war. We search for the keys just like they are, and if we get there first, they’ll be the ones playing the defensive. If we play the game like that, we have an enormous advantage over the Union from the outset. Do you see it, Lisa?”

She shook her head.

Dad answered his own question: “ The Union wants to break into the shrine. To succeed they’re going to need all seven keys. But what we want to do is protect the shrine, prevent the Union getting in. And to do that we need only to deprive the Union of one single key, one single fragment, even, to succeed.”

Comprehension dawned on Lisa; and for the first time, happiness, too. “ And we already have it!” she declared hopefully. “ I mean, Darius and Lance went into the Sepulchre last night … so we have our fragment, right?”

But her father did not look as jubilant as she felt.

“ No, we don’t,” he said stiffly.

Lisa’s heart sank. “ The Union didn’t –”

“ No, they didn’t,” Dad interrupted, suddenly edgy. “ Lance made a judgment call regarding the key that I don’t really agree with …” He shook his head, unnaturally violently. “ We’ll talk about that later, Lisa, Lance and I need to have some words …” He trailed off ominously and it was a moment before he shook himself again and went on. “ Anyway Lisa, what it boils down to is a quest and a war. We’ll be searching everywhere for the keys in order to get just one of them safely out of the Union’s grasp. And we’ll be fighting the Union every step of the way until we’ve got them pinned.

“ As for today, the Matron here said you need surgery, Lisa, to remove the bullet from your back. It’s a simple procedure but they can’t do it here, they don’t have a surgeon. You’re going to be flown with some other patients by chopper to Redwood Hospital, it’s about a hundred k’s away.”

“ And after that? Our house …” she muttered.