Sun spent the remainder of his evening cooking dinner and waiting to see whether or not the girl would awaken before the professor arrived home. He certainly hoped she would, but at around eight, as he languished at the dining table, nursing a bowl of fried rice he had no appetite for, his hopes were dashed.

  "Alola, Sun!"

  "Alola, Professor," Sun said, his face contorting into a strained smile as Kukui came through the door. From the tattered lab coat he donned and the Rockruff at his feet, Sun could guess exactly where he'd been. "Out training again?"

  "I was for a little while," Kukui said, scratching his bearded chin, "but the kahuna needed to discuss something important with me. I would have liked to have been home sooner, but..."

  The man trailed off as he saw their new guest out cold on the couch. Sun rose from his seat at the table, preemptively moving to explain: "Um, this is, uh, someone I found out on the beach. I was playing volleyball with the gang when I spotted her. She was dehydrated - well, we think she was dehydrated - so I gave her some water."

  Kukui's Rockruff ran over to leap onto the sofa and sniff the new arrival, his tongue lolling out. Sun continued. "When she woke up, she told me she needed to see Professor Burnet."

  At this, Kukui raised his eyebrows. "Burnet? Why?"

  "She didn't tell me," Sun said. Any speculation he might have had on the subject would inevitably be informed by The Incident, and he certainly wasn't going to let Kukui in on that. He looked down into his bowl, picking at his rice again and mumbling, "I let her come here to take a shower and gave her some of my clothes, but she fell asleep before I could get her to tell her anything about herself. Even her name."

  "Burnet's work is a bit, er, esoteric," Kukui said, lowering his voice as he came to take a closer look at the girl. "I can't imagine what she could need her for."

  "That's what I said, too," Sun said. If he were being honest with himself, he'd admit he'd been assuming this entire time she had some variety of mental disability. But he didn't dare consider the implications of such. "She seemed to be having a bit of trouble communicating with me, sir."

  Kukui shook his head. "Cousin, I told you, you've gotta stop calling me 'sir'."

  Sun went red. "Uh, right, sorry."

  His mother had taught him to treat adults with the utmost respect and formality, and even after five months, he still found it hard not to keep the professors at arm's length. They were so human, and all too often he felt as if he were merely pretending to be.

  "It's all right," Kukui said as he examined the girl for injuries. "Thanks for the dinner, by the way. I can smell it from all the way over here."

  "It's no trouble," Sun responded mechanically.

  As he sat down to partake in Sun's meal, Kukui praised him further - how delicious it was! He'd truly gotten the hang of cooking, and so quickly, too. That sort of self-reliance, Kukui insisted, would go far when he became a Trainer. Sun told him exactly what he wanted to hear - that he was happy, that he loved cooking, that he was so excited to go off on his own - but his mind was elsewhere.

  Once the professor had calmed, he stared down at himself, turning his fork over and over in his fingers. "I'm tired. It's been a long day."

  "I'm sure it has," Kukui said. "Go get some rest, kid. You've got an even longer day ahead of you tomorrow. I'll call Burnet first thing in the morning, and we can get things straightened out right away with our new guest."

  Sun nodded. He slouched as he made his way to the ladder; as he passed by the girl, his eyes wandered, and he paused, frowning. "Should we really just let her sleep through the night here on the couch?"

  Kukui shrugged. "She seems fine there, and we don't have anywhere better for her to sleep - unless you want to give up your loft."

  Not a chance.

  But Sun could extend a smaller kindness to her. In the wake of the deal, he'd been wondering if she'd made a similar pact, and if so, what sort of desperation had driven her to agree to be a demon's puppet. If she even had the mental faculties to know she had agreed to such a thing.

  A cotton blanket would protect her from the harsh chill of night. This one, retrieved from one of Sun's dresser drawers, was eggshell white and dotted with crimson hearts. He draped it over her, calling out, "Good night, Kukui. Good night, Rockruff." And quieter: "Good night, new friend."

  "Good night, Sun," Kukui said in between sips from a mug of herbal tea.

  As tired as he was, Sun knew sleep would not stick with him easily. Nearly every night since the funeral, he'd awakened to a silent house and a sunless sky. Sometimes, when he knew there was nothing else for him, he'd sneak out onto the beach and watch the resolute waves crashing down, one after another. On nights like those, he was glad Kukui was such a heavy sleeper.

  "Good night, Murkrow," he murmured as he settled onto his cot, pulling his comforter over himself. The Pokemon hardly seemed to notice as it preened its dark feathers, and it was only then Sun realized how stupid it was to say good night to a nocturnal Pokemon. Soon it would take off to meet with its family and conspire with its boss Honchkrow, and return in the early morning for food and a safe place to rest. Over time, the professors' house had become a haven for the outcasts, the lost ones, the unwanted. Kindness cost nothing and yet was worth the world entire.

  As he'd predicted, sleep abandoned Sun sometime after midnight, off to give its gift to those it deemed more worthy. So he stared at the ceiling, numb to it all, until his consciousness caught up to him and he could think clearly again. The light was off downstairs, giving him the feeling his cot was a lifeboat adrift on an ocean of shadow.

  He leaned over to catch a glimpse of the digital clock he kept on his desk. Its bright red LED display seared into his eyes: "12:44 AM".

  Slumping back, he let out a muted sigh. Damn insomnia: he hadn't even gotten four hours in. He closed his weary eyes and conjured up a familiar scene: a ranch, fashioned in the image of one he'd seen on television. A nice open-air pasture, packed to the brim with fluffy, guileless Mareep. The grass which grew there was the greenest, most delectable grass a Pokemon could ever taste, and every Mareep who lived in the pasture was fully content with their life.

  (If Sun was going to imagine himself a shepherd, he’d like his fictional charges to at least be happy.)

  There was but one issue: because the grass was of such high quality, the Mareep who consumed it ended up tasting exceptionally delicious as well. At least, that was the opinion of the packs of Lycanroc roaming this area. They knew exactly how to take advantage of a guardian's turned back, and if Sun was to keep his Mareep safe, he must be endlessly vigilant.

  So the counting began: one, two, three, four...

  (A slight creak from the downstairs sofa.)

  ...fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty...

  (The tap of footsteps on unlaminated wood.)

  ...one hundred twenty-four, one hundred twenty-five, one hundred twenty-six...

  The light flicked on, and the idyll dissolved in an instant as Sun snapped his eyes open. Although his muscles were every bit as tired as his mind, he forced himself to sit up and weigh his options.

  Knew she wouldn't sleep through the night.

  Now did he have a million questions for her.

  The pitter-patter of her footsteps didn't slow. She was pacing. Anxious. Even with only the brief glimpse of her he caught as he crept towards the ladder, he could see her movements were far more fluid and effortless than the night before.

  He descended, raising a hand to catch her attention. "Um, hi," he greeted, keeping his voice hushed - after all, they wouldn't want to be inconsiderate and awaken the professor at this hour, would they?

  "WHERE AM I?! WHO ARE YOU?! WHAT HAPPENED TO MY CLOTHES?!"

  The girl had stopped pacing and now held fast onto the edge of the couch. Her bloodshot eyes only added to her Deerling-in-headlights effect. Sun tensed and put his finger to his lips to shush her in a wildly overexaggerated manner. "Quiet down. Do you want to wake the whole island?"

  She clammed up; took one last long inhale - and then scooped up her drum bag and dashed out the front door.

  The hell's her problem?

  Maybe he should let her go and simmer down, he thought. After all, she seemed to be a tad… unstable. She could probably use some time alone.

  But she needs my help. We're kindred spirits now, I guess...

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  He sighed, flicked off the light she'd left on, and tip-toed his way out the door.

  The silvery light overhead illuminated their surroundings, and he spotted her at once. She hadn't gone very far. She'd stopped at the edge of the water, head cocked to the right, staring down the seemingly endless stretch of jagged coastline. As Sun made his approach, she turned back to him, holding her hands up in despair like a thief caught at the end of an alleyway. "Please, don't..."

  "I'm not going to hurt you," he reassured her. "Don't you remember me from yesterday?"

  "I've never seen you before in my life," the girl said, taking a step backwards.

  "I found you passed out on this very beach yesterday," he reminded her. "You woke up and talked to me, and you chose to come back here with me. You were the one who changed into those clothes - I loaned them to you. Did the heat do something to your brain?"

  The girl shook her head. "I wouldn't have changed into these clothes." She looked down at herself, and her lip curled. "You must have... You must have done it yourself, then. You must have touched me."

  "What? No!" Sun reddened at the accusation; at the awful way she'd worded it. How could she not remember? "I wouldn't do that to a girl; I promise!"

  And then the pieces fit together - the amnesia, the drastic shift in her movements and speech patterns, the demon's claim the night before - perhaps it was only the chill of the night, but Sun shivered.

  Hot bile rose in his throat, and he swallowed it back, disgusted with himself. "Um, I mean, your clothes were wet, so I gave you some of mine. I thought you might have been uncomfortable in your old ones. You know," he added, ready to pull her into the delusion, "I thought you might have had a head injury or something - you were acting a little, um, uh, drowsy, so that's probably why you don't remember. I guess it was the heat after all." A nervous chuckle escaped his lips, and he gave a simple shrug: ‘what can you do?’

  The girl still narrowed her eyes. "...How much did I tell you about me?"

  "You told me you wanted to see Professor Burnet," Sun said, and a rush of satisfaction coursed through him as her eyes widened. Confirmation. It emboldened him, and he continued despite the risk: "And you told me about your Pokemon."

  "About..." The girl paused - then zipped open her bag to peek at the listless Pokemon. The veil of darkness accentuated the Pokemon's luminescence, and its brush painted her skin indigo. As her gaze came to rest on Sun once more, she bit her lip. "About Nebby?"

  "Yep, all about Nebby," Sun said, happy to finally have something to call it by. Not the sort of name he would have chosen, but...

  The girl closed up her bag, shutting her eyes; deep in thought. A wave came too far in, bathing her bare feet, ankles, and the edges of her pant legs in moon-stained water, and she hissed, her focus disturbed.

  "Come back over here," Sun advised, waving her over. He hopped up the steps leading to the lab and flicked on the light switch beside the door, illuminating the porch area. "You never told me your name," he said. "You can call me Sun."

  "I'm Lillie," the girl mumbled as she hesitantly took her place beside him on the steps. She hugged her knees close to her chest. "With an -ie."

  "That's a nice name," Sun said, and he rambled: "I've never heard it spelled like that before. But it sounds nice to me. Nicer than the normal way, I think."

  Lillie glanced up at him. "'Normal way'?"

  "Um, yeah? 'Cause it's usually spelled with a y."

  Lillie looked down again, brushing grains of sand and grit from between her toes. "Normal way," she repeated.

  He'd only said that to break the ice (and to distract himself from the lie he'd spun), but the maneuver appeared to have backfired. He hadn't intended to make her feel out of place. There wasn't much space for both of them on the steps, and despite the fact their shoulders were almost brushing, the distance between them had only expanded.

  Lillie held out her open palm in front of her, examining it, as if she weren't sure it was real. "I must have trusted you," she remarked, "to tell you about Nebby so soon. Or did they jump out of the bag and reveal themself to you?"

  Sun pursed his lips. "You could say that."

  She relaxed, even chuckling a little. "Ah. Yes, they don't really enjoy being cooped up in tight spaces. They're a free spirit, I believe."

  "Yeah," Sun said, hoping she wouldn't notice the waver in his voice. He shut his eyes; then blurted: "Are you a Trainer? You look like you're old enough to have started your island challenge. Or, or, the gym challenge, or whatever it is where you're from."

  Determining her age was difficult. Sun guessed she must have been older than him - she must have been at least five feet tall, and he was but a lowly 4'6" - but he was short for his age anyway, and she didn't have facial acne or any other of the various tells accompanying one's teen years.

  "Huh?" A sadness seemed to creep over her, and she tensed up again, clutching her bag strap. "No, I… I could never bear to do anything like that. I hate seeing Pokemon get hurt."

  The notion of not wanting to be a Trainer was foreign to him - he wasn't sure he'd ever met anyone without at least a little interest in the practice. For as long as he could remember, Pokemon battling had been the number one topic of discussion among his peers. If one asked any given Alolan child what they wanted to be when they grew up, there was about a fifty-fifty chance the answer would be "Pokemon Trainer". And Alola didn't even have an official League branch yet.

  Sun might not have pored over every Trainer strategy guide on the market the way Mizuki did, but there was no doubt in his mind Pokemon Training was the path he wanted to take in life. There never had been. So for this girl, this strange foreign girl, to be so dismissive about it, so dispassionate... it stupefied him. Offended him, even: he heard an embedded accusation of Trainers hurt their Pokemon.

  "But, I mean, they don't get that hurt," he said. "If you follow the League rules and don't push them past the point of fainting, they'll be totally fine. People wouldn’t want to do it if it were cruel to them."

  Lillie shook her head. "I'm not completely against the concept," she clarified. "I find some appeal in the strategic aspect of it, actually. I just wouldn't want to participate in it myself."

  "That's fair." Sun leaned back, staring at the neglected porch roof. The wood, as a consequence of Alola's abundant rain, had taken to hosting a colony of mold; the smattering of yellow-greenish patches reminded him of healing bruises on tanned skin. "I'm going to become one today," he said. "A Trainer, I mean. The kahuna's going to give me my first partner Pokémon."

  Lillie blinked. "Kahuna?"

  "Oh... that's what we call our, um..." Sun searched for the right word to describe them. Religious leaders? That was technically true, but it wasn't the best term - people like Tenshiro were religious leaders, but they weren't kahunas. "Our chosen."

  "Cho-sen," Lillie repeated, enunciating each syllable.

  "Yeah. But not who we choose - not us regular people. It's the Tapu - the island guardians, our deities - who choose them." A bit of bitterness welled up in Sun again. "But they don't really make the best choices, I think."

  "You don't like who they chose?"

  "No, no - Kahuna Hala's great. I mean, he's been kahuna since like, before most of the people on Melemele were even born. He's actually my friend Hau's grandfather, so we get to see each other a lot. Do you - I guess you wouldn't remember Hau. He was with me when we found you."

  Lillie locked eyes with Sun, and stared, and stared, and stared, until he felt like a bacterium under a microscope, trapped and squirming beneath a glass slide.

  "You have friends?"

  He could tell by the way she said it that she didn't mean the way the question sounded - her tone was almost… reverent. It caught him by surprise, and he stared back in silence for a few moments, his mouth agape like a Magikarp's.

  "Um, yeah," he forced out at last. "Of course I do. Don't you?"

  It was funny how things always seemed to turn out: it was only as soon as the words left his mouth that he grasped how wrong it was to say them. Lillie developed the same Deerling-in-headlights look she had when he'd first confronted her, and her eyes misted over.

  "Um," she whispered, her bottom lip trembling, "no, actually."

  Sun wasn't socially adept enough to comfort her before the tears came. Just his luck - he was no stranger to the pain of social alienation, of ostracism, and to inflict that pain on another was, to him, one of the worst crimes one could commit.

  "Suh... sorry," he mumbled, watching her take her face into her hands. Something had come to click for him, however - no friends, no family, no place to go. Completely vulnerable. The perfect prey for some amoral predator to take full advantage of.

  And that boiled his blood - the image of her in her disturbed sleep, with that vulturous smirk on her face. A haze had already descended over the memory, both due to his lack of sleep and his brain's attempt to shove it into the darker crevices of his mind. But he could not imagine it ever escaping him.

  "It's all right," Lillie reassured him, but he still flinched at the cracking of her voice. She didn't sound as if she believed herself.

  "You know," he said, "you should come with me tomorrow to meet my friends. Professor Kukui - he lives here with me; he's asleep right now - said he was going to call Professor Burnet and tell her about you, so you don't have to worry about that for now. We can hang out together after my promotion ceremony. But it starts at nine, so we'd have to get up pretty early."

  "I can get up early," Lillie said. The edges of her eyelids were still red and puffy. "But... would you really want me there?"

  "Yeah. My friends are both super cool. I already told you about Hau. He's for sure the most energetic kid I know. I promised him I'd take him to the malasada shop in Hau'oli after we get our Pokémon, so I guess that's what we'll be doing tomorrow." (He knew he'd end up being the one to pay for it - somehow Hau, without fail, always forgot his wallet at home and had to bum change off Sun.) "And then there's Mizuki. She's, uh..." He deliberated on how to phrase it without disparaging his friend. "She can be kind of abrasive at times, but she's really awesome when you get to know her. They're probably both worried about you."

  Lillie shrunk away, evidently disturbed. "I don't want them to worry over me," she whispered.

  "Well, that's why you have to come with me. So they can see that you're fine," Sun reasoned.

  There was an ulterior motive behind this - he couldn't allow her or her companion out of sight. Who knew what sort of damage Nebby could do if left unchecked? Sure, it was a risk bringing the two out in public, but... he let out a drawn-out sigh.

  Lillie fixed her attention on the overhead porch light, which had attracted a swarm of tiny Bug-Types Sun recognized as Cutiefly. How strange. It wasn't usual for Cutiefly to venture this far out, as they preferred to buzz around the pollen-rich meadows dotting the northern side of the island. Perhaps they'd established a nest around here.

  He smiled. He'd always been fascinated by the Bee Fly Pokemon, and he couldn't wait to have one of his very own. If the cluster stuck around here the next few days, he'd certainly make one his ally.

  The flitting of their wings stilled momentarily, clearing his mind enough for him to rebuke himself. No, he hadn't even gotten his first Pokemon yet, and here he was already thinking about his second. He couldn't let himself be prideful enough to assume the future was certain. Not anymore.

  "I think we should get back inside," Lillie said at last, before a large yawn overtook her. "I suppose," she continued, turning to make eye contact, "if it'll make you happy, I'll come with you."

  "Perfect," Sun said. His jaws twitched as he resisted his own compulsion to yawn. "Just perfect."

  The pasture called to him as he returned to his bed. It seemed the Lycanroc had taken advantage of his momentary distraction - there was a fresh spot of red on the corral's perimeter, and the poor flock of Mareep hardly seemed to notice.