Pokémon: Exodus (G)

[Kentucky Fried Torchic]

Chapter Six
Being on a train was a new experience for Katarina and she was eager to explore the locomotive rattling along the tracks laid for it. But before she could do so, Marion insisted on taking them to their seats. Although there were plenty of open seats and privacy if they wanted it, Marion was clearly disappointed to find that her family name had not procured for her and her entourage a private train car. "This is an outrage," Marion fumed to herself as she struggled to maneuver her over-sized trunk into the space between two rows of stiff, uncomfortable seats, "an utter outrage."

In-between her grumbling, Spencer and Ace offered conflicting pieces of advice for how Marion could fit her trunk into the narrow confines afforded by the train's design. From the way that the two were hiding their snickers every time that the girl's luggage banged against an obstacle and got stuck, Katarina knew that they weren't counseling Marion out of any actual desire to help her. She thought about offering her assistance, but Katarina's curiosity about the train overcame her, and, besides, as Marion's frustration mounted, it was likely that the last thing she would want was another voice offering guidance. So, Katarina started toward the door leading to the front of the train. "Come on, Exo," she said, and the cubone followed her wordlessly past the napping conductor and his watchful growlithe.

Despite its flimsy appearance, the door was stuck, and it took Katarina three tries to pull it loose and step outside. She was greeted by the wind whipping wildly at her clothes and her hair flying all over her face, and that was even with the body of the train car in front of her blocking her from the brunt of the wind. Katarina's feet were unsteady as the train shook and swayed on the tracks, and she gratefully clung to the railings for support. It was a terrifying yet exhilarating feeling and Katarina closed her eyes and took in a deep breath of the turbulent air that rushed in to fill her lungs.

When she opened them, Katarina saw that her companion was not taking the new experience nearly so well. Exo was holding onto the railing for dear life and, even then, his feet were constantly shifting to try and find solid footing on a surface that would not allow it. Worst of all, the skin around Exo's eyes, which was all that Katarina could see of his face behind his mask, were pale. Exo's silence was not his usual stoicism, but sheer discomfort, maybe even fear, as he stared at the ground rushing by at tremendous speed. Fortunately for the diminutive pokémon, the next door was not as stubborn as that of the train car that the others had set up shop in, and Katarina was able to pull it open and usher Exo inside without much trouble. Certainly, there was no resistance on Exo's part as Katarina guided by the arm him through the door.

Once they were inside again, the cubone seemed to recover some of his confidence, but Exo still looked very shaken from the experience and, as he caught his breath, he was clutching to the armrest of his chair like a drowning man would cling to a piece of driftwood. Katarina stood next to him and waited for him to recuperate and took the time to look around at their new surroundings. This train car was largely identical to the one they had just left, and none of the passengers there paid any mind to the new arrivals. That was fine with Katarina, as she was content to be ignored and observe. There was a wide array of pokémon and people who appeared to be from all sections of Tinko's geography and society.

A well-dressed man was sitting a row in front of them with his hand resting on the head of his persian. The persian opened one of its piercing eyes to study Katarina and Exo, but it dismissed them as unimportant and went back to its nap. Further up, there was a family of five without any pokémon among them. The three boys, all younger than Katarina, were running up and down the aisles and roughhousing while their mother and father did their best to try and get them back under control. Their shrieks and laughter echoed throughout the confined space of the train car and the din accentuated Exo's discomfort.

"Can we sit down, Katarina?" he asked, and she helped him up into one of the seats opposite the man with the persian and out of the path of the running children.

"Are you okay?" asked Katarina and she pulled herself into the chair across from Exo so that she could look at him.

Exo did not say anything at first, then he looked away from the window showing the outside world through dirty and coal-smudged glass and back to Katarina. "I'm fine." Then, he added, insistently, "Honestly, I am fine, just a little unwell."

Katarina didn't look convinced, but she put a brave face on it and said with a smile, "Okay, I believe you. I don't understand why you were so affected by it though. You were okay on the wagon ride from Marion's house."

"That was different. The speed of rapidash is natural, but no one was supposed to travel this fast, pokémon or human."

A shrug was all that Katarina offered her companion by the way of sympathy. "I think it's great! We can get to Tinko City and Professor Oak in no time at all, and maybe I can even get home the same way if there are any tracks close enough to the farm. I need to ask Marion about that." Katarina started to stand up, but Exo weakly grasped at her arm and she let herself be stopped.

"Can we just rest for a few minutes? Please?"

Katarina sat back down and said, "Okay." Then, "You really didn't like it out there, did you?"

Exo shook his head. "No, it was too fast, much too fast." He looked back out the window for a second and then away again. His voice held a wistful quality to it when Exo said, "I have traveled across Tinko my entire life. I have seen the mountains in the west and walked the shores on the coast. I have been around for many years, Katarina, and I have seen many things. I have seen war scar this land and I have seen the pokémon and the people of Tinko struggle to heal those wounds and learn from them. But there have been many changes."

"That's right," Katarina agreed. She had not even been alive, but the young girl had acquired her memories of the fighting second-hand from her parents, in their stories and the conversations that had passed between them when they thought that Katarina could not hear, or understand. She had joined her mother in lighting a candle in prayer for the uncles that she had never met and seen her father's old uniform hanging limply in the closet. These were only faint echoes of the war, but also the closest things that Katarina had of it, and so she had held onto them. Katarina had learned how to do that from her parents too.

"Pokémon and people do not always see eye-to-eye," continued Exo in his same far-off tone of voice. "The nidorino from the woods was eager to prey upon you and thought little of me when he believed that I was your pokémon, but he still recognized that you had food and he did not." The cubone glanced over at Katarina. "Were you afraid of the nidorino?"

"Yes," said Katarina. "He was mean and scary and, and dangerous." She shook her head in a flurry of blonde hair. "I'm sorry."

Exo held up one of his paws and said, "Don't be. You knew that you were in his territory as an intruder. Your fear was a form of respect. Pokémon and people can keep their distance, but both sides can also work together. Ace and Spencer are a team, even if what they do is deceitful, and the humans who train their pokémon to compete in battles or to help with farm work are partners too." His monologue stopped abruptly as Exo noticed Katarina staring at him with her soft brown eyes.

"I don't think I've ever heard you talk this much," said Katarina with an infectious smile.

"Well," Exo said while he shifted in his seat to get more comfortable, "it helps me not to think about how fast we are going."

"Please, keep talking."

Exo looked out the window again and watched the landscape fly by as much as he could stand before he turned his attention back to Katarina. "These trains are what happens when humans try to control the environment instead of live with it. No matter how many machop and machoke they employ to lay down the tracks crisscrossing this land, it does not change the fact that those who lost their homes were not considered. I have met them, pokémon and people alike, and heard their stories. It seems that the lesson that many took from the war was that they need to imitate their conquerors and replace grass and wood with metal and stone.

"I have been to Tinko City before. I fear that I have seen what the future holds. You will see it too."

Katarina did not say anything for a few minutes. She did not know what to say. She tried to look outside and see the beauty of Tinko, sights that she might have never witnessed if it was not for her going on this journey, but after Exo's lecture her eyes could not help but focus on the smudged window instead of the beauty that lay beyond it.

Fortunately, Exo soon looked up at her and he said, "I'm feeling better now. We can go back to the others," and Katarina helped him down to the floor. The two of them walked back to the train car that held the rest of their group. The cubone braced himself before Katarina threw open the door to the outside, and he crossed the threshold between the two sections of the train and got back inside, all without looking down at the ground passing violently underneath them.

Katarina followed Exo through the door and closed it behind her. Whatever lethargy had been imparted to her by Exo's dire words and the stuffy heat of the train car had been undone as soon as she had felt the first licks of cold wind whip across her bare arms, legs, and face. The others had solved the problem of the air growing too hot and musty in the enclosed train car by opening the window by their seats. Marion and Spencer were in the middle of some kind of game set up on a simple metal tray on Spencer's lap when Katarina and Exo had returned, and Katarina asked what they were doing.

"It's a simple game of chance," said Spencer in the same friendly patter that Katarina had heard enough times to know that it was nothing of the sort. "I put the ball under one of these three cups, try to mix it up, and then Red here has to guess where it is. If she's right, I give her some money. If she's wrong, she gives me some money."

"It's not about chance," Marion said curtly without looking away from the trio of small wooden cups arrayed in front of her, "it's about observation. I just have to pay very close attention and I can figure out where he put it."

It didn't sound like a particularly interesting or fun game, but Katarina did not have a lot of alternatives for entertainment, so she took a seat across the aisle from the others and watched them play. Marion's hand hovered over one of the cups but Wanda, her dratini, said in a whisper, "Not that one," and the girl's hand drifted over to another one of the identical wooden cups.

"This one," she said solemnly and tapped insistently on the top of the cup with her pointer finger.

Spencer said, "Let's see how observant you are," and he lifted up the cup with a flourish only to reveal the empty space of the tray. "Not this time, Red. Wanna go again?"

"Yes," said Marion instantly and she handed over a bill of paper money to Spencer's greedy grasp. After he had been paid, the boy gave an indulgent smile, picked up the cups, and theatrically produced a small red ball in his hand and slipped it underneath one of the cups and then started shuffling them around. Katarina tried to keep an eye on the cup that she thought contained the ball, but in Spencer's capable hands the individual cups were lost in a flurry of motion. Marion and her pokémon looked thoroughly engrossed in the game, but Katarina just could not stay interested in it.

She stood up without saying a word, but then the train gave a lurch over a particularly treacherous stretch of track and Katarina yelped and grabbed for the nearest thing to steady herself, which happened to be Ace. The spearow let out a startled squawk followed by a harsh cough, and then Ace spat out something that bounced off of the metal tray and into Marion's lap. The girl looked disgusted, but then her mouth tightened into a small thin line and she picked up the little red ball that Ace had coughed up.

"What's this?" Marion asked in a deceptively calm tone of voice.

"Ace!" gasped Spencer. "How did you get that in your mouth? Say, thanks, Katarina! He could have choked on that! You saved his life!" No one was buying what that Spencer was trying to sell, however, and he quickly trailed off into guilty silence.

If he was worried about being chastised, Spencer was instead pleasantly surprised. Rather than harsh words, Marion only said, in a cloyingly sweet voice, "You'll be giving me all of my money back now."

"Hey now, Red, don't kid yourself. I didn't break any of the rules. I just said that you had to find out where the ball was. You were the one who assumed it was under one of the cups."

Marion's smile didn't falter, if anything it grew wider, and she said in that same pleasant voice, "Give me my money back or I'll have you thrown off this train. And I don't mean at the next stop."

"You're bluffing, there's no way-"

Marion whistled sharply at the conductor who was dozing at the front of the train car with his growlithe. The mustached man awoke with a start and looked around the car with bleary, sleep-encrusted eyes before alighting on Marion and the others. He started to his feet and Spencer quickly turned away from watching him and back to Marion. "Fine, fine," he hissed. "I'll give you your money back."

"Now."

The conductor was only two aisles away now, and Spencer begrudgingly but quickly stuffed his hands into the pockets of his heavy gray coat and pulled out a fistful of crumpled up bills and handed them over to Marion.

"Is there a problem here, children?" asked the conductor.

"No problem here, sir," said Spencer and Ace was quick to nod in agreement.

The conductor didn't say anything to either of them, but instead looked to Marion for confirmation. The red-haired girl did not look up from the stack of money that she was sorting through and said, "I thought that I saw a rattata on the train, but it must have only been my imagination."

It was not the best of explanations, but Marion delivered it with such nonchalance that the conductor could only scratch his head and return to his seat muttering his confusion under his breath.

"That was actually pretty good, huh, Spence?" remarked Ace, which earned the bird a smile from Marion and a knock on the head from Spencer.

"Yeah, yeah, very impressive," grumbled Spencer. But then a familiar gleam came to his eyes and he added, "Since you have all the money, Red, I think that you ought to pay for lunch, don't you?"

Marion snorted. "Didn't you get enough to eat at breakfast? You certainly weren't shy about doing your best to empty out my father's larder."

"What can I say? Dealing with you is hard work!"

Both Marion and Spencer looked to Katarina for support, and the young girl shied away and tried to look anywhere else. In the end, though, her stomach overruled her reluctance to get involved, and she admitted, "I'm fairly hungry as well."

Marion threw her hair over her shoulder and thrust her nose into the air. "Fine. I'll go and find some food for you lot, but don't you go growing accustomed to it." Then she rose out of her seat and strode out of the train car with all of the bearing of her breeding while Wanda slithered dutifully after her.

"Have a seat, Katarina," said Spencer as he patted the space that Marion had just vacated. "Put up your feet for a while."

It sounded like a good idea, so Katarina took Spencer up on his offer and dropped into the stiff chair. "Why are you so mean to Marion?"

"I'm mean to her?"

"Yes, you are," said Katarina firmly. The exaggerated offense on Spencer's face was quickly replaced with a sour expression, but he let her continue, "You're always making fun of her and you tried to take her money even after she helped us by getting us onto this train."

"I don't remember asking her to tag along," countered Spencer.

Katarina sighed and asked, "Could you at least try to be nicer to her?"

One of his hands took off his cap and the other raked through his dark hair, but Spencer said, "Fine. You know what, I'm going to apologize to her as soon as she comes back with our food."

No sooner had the words left his mouth that the door to the train car opened with a rushing of wind and slammed close again with a resounding bang. The travelers craned their necks, but instead of Marion and her dratini, they saw a harried-looking man in a conductor's uniform. He shook his coworker awake and then announced to the drowsy man and the passengers, "We have a koffing outbreak up ahead. Anyone with pokémon is asked to keep an eye out for any of those toxic creatures. Thank you for remaining calm." Then the man sprinted down the aisle of the car to pass on his warning to the rest of the train.

Once he was gone, Katarina turned to Spencer and the pokémon and asked, "What's a koffing?"

"It's a poisonous pokémon that gets made by trains and the coal that they burn," was Spencer's answer.

"They're no big deal, just a part of traveling by rail," added Ace with a dismissive wave of his wing.

Exo appeared as though he wanted to argue with that, but he did not speak. Instead, the cubone was content to look meaningfully at Katarina.

There was no time to linger on it, however. One of the other passengers, Katarina did not know who, said, "Here they come," and everyone's eyes went to the windows.

The train went around a bend and everyone struggled to keep their balance as the car was suddenly blanketed in a stream of black smoke. There was movement in the smoke, and Katarina screamed when she saw a face on a round limbless body that was a noxious shade of purple slam into one of the windows with a heavy thump. She was not the only one. It was only for a split second, but then the strange creature smiled and then bounced off of the surface of the glass to disappear back into the smoke and, from there, no one could say for sure where it would end up.

Just when the panicked screams stopped, there was the sound of a muffled explosion that set off a fresh round of confusion. The mustached conductor had opened the window nearest him just a crack and was lifting up his growlithe to the open space. The furry pokémon was emitting small blasts of fire from his mouth at the koffing that were passing by, and one of those attacks had connected. Katarina and the others were watching when another burst connected with a koffing flying by and the spherical pokémon did not even have enough time to register that it was under attack before it detonated with a boom that rattled the train car.

"Nothing to worry about, folks!" the conductor bellowed over the din as his growlithe took shots at more of the dozens of koffing that were streaming past. "Just Sparky and I trying to clean up after ourselves."

Nobody was completely reassured, not even Spencer and Ace, who had both been so flippant about the koffing just minutes before. The air inside of the train car grew smoky and soot blackened the walls and the chairs, as well as the people and pokémon aboard it. There was too much of the thick black smoke filling up the space for it to only be coming from the opening made by the conductor. This occurred to Katarina only a split second before a koffing bounded into the train car's interior through the open window by where Katarina and Spencer were sitting.

The round koffing floated through the train car to the choked surprise and horror of the passengers. Every time that the koffing made contact with a surface whether it be wall or ceiling, its round body gave way a tiny bit and then it launched off in the opposite direction. It was so near to her when it passed over Katarina's head that Katarina could see that its purple body was partially translucent and inside of it was a swirling maelstrom of gases. She could also smell the foul stench that it was giving off through the craterous pores all over its body.

The growlithe in the conductor's arms barked at the intruder and made to attack the koffing with its fiery breath. Before it could do so, Ace flapped his wings mightily and sent a column of smoke into the eyes and down the throat of the growlithe, making the little pokémon's violent barks turn to strangled, hacking coughs.

"Are you crazy?" Ace shouted at the other pokémon. "If you blast that koffing, you'll blow us all up!"

"Then what do we do?" Katarina asked.

It was Spencer's turn to join the yelling. "We'll have to push it back out the window!"

But that was easier said than done with the koffing still arcing around the train car without any sense of rhyme or reason. None of the other passengers were inclined to help. Instead, they did their best to shy away from the koffing and hope that someone else would solve the problem.

Exo's silence did not mean that he was averse to action, and the cubone landed the first blow against the trespassing koffing with a mighty throw of his bone club. The weapon bashed into the koffing's round body and interrupted its path through the air by sending the poisonous pokémon towards the back of the train car. Its beady little eyes narrowed in anger, but there was no intelligence behind them and the only thing it said in response to the assault was a deep bellowing, "Koffing!" It was still incapable of controlling its movements in the air, and so it was an easy target for a repeat of Exo's previous attack.

The koffing flew backwards again, but it quickly ran out of space and hit the wall of the train car over its rear-facing door. Before it could bounce off of it more than a few inches, Exo threw his club again and the koffing slammed into the wall again. As soon as his weapon was back in his paw, Exo did it again, silently and furiously battering the unnatural pokémon into submission.

"Exo!" said Katarina, but she had to repeat his name twice more before Exo ceased his volley of attacks. Once he had stopped and the abused koffing started to weakly float back up the aisle, she said, "We need to push it back out the window!"

That made Exo stop and he reluctantly let the koffing drift away from the wall that it had been battered against. When it moved too slowly for his tastes, the cubone ducked underneath it and batted at it with the top of his bone club to help it along. Now that its trajectory was not random, people were not as afraid of the strange pokémon. They shrank back from it and glared at it, but there was not the same level of panic as before. The koffing boomed at them with the only word that it seemed to know, but it was an empty threat. When the koffing was parallel with the window, Ace flapped off of the chair where he had been perched and rammed the unnatural pokémon to readjust its trajectory and send it toward the still-open window. It took a few more violent adjustments, but eventually Ace pushed the koffing back outside into the dissipating fog of black smoke.

Katarina and Spencer were on hand to quickly close the window, and once it was sealed everyone in the train car breathed a sigh of relief. "Thanks, kids," said the conductor and he quickly went back to his seat and promptly closed his eyes and began to doze again.

"That happens every time that this train goes from town to town?" asked Katarina incredulously.

Spencer opened his mouth to say something, but his mind quickly changed tack when he heard the door to the train car open and he saw Marion and Wanda come inside. "Oh, look, Red's back!"

He went up to her, but Marion pulled the bag of sandwiches that she was carrying decisively out of reach. "What happened here?" she demanded, unkindly but not consciously so.

Katarina noticed that, even with the smoke mostly dissipated through the open door, everything, and everyone, was covered with a layer of black soot. Spencer looked down at his filthy hands and shrugged. "Things got a little hairy in here. We had a little bit of a koffing problem to deal with." Before Marion could react, Spencer lunged for the bag and swiped it from her and pulled out a sandwich for him. He tossed one to Katarina as well and another to Exo. "Catch!"

"Ugh, you're getting the food all dirty," said Marion and she took the sack of food back. Spencer did not seem to care, though, and took a bite of mingled meat, bread, cheese, and coal dust. "In fact," Marion said as she looked inside of the bag and saw all of the damage that he had done to the rest of the sandwiches, "take the rest of them too."

"Thanks!" said Spencer around his mouthful of food. He caught Katarina's eye and winked at her. Then he swallowed and said, loud enough for Katarina to hear every ounce of forced sincerity in his voice, "Red, I mean, Marion, uh, sorry about, you know, everything. My making fun of you was totally uncalled for, way out of line."

Marion blinked her big blue eyes at him and only then did his words register. But her mind was still distracted by Spencer's layer of grime and filth so she only said, "Don't mention it, please," and went to look for the closest thing to a clean chair that she could find in the train car.

"That wasn't so hard, was it?" asked Katarina when Spencer rejoined her and the pokémon.

"No, I guess it wasn't," Spencer admitted as he held a piece of bread out to Ace and let the bird nibble on it. "She'd better start acting a lot nicer to me though, maybe even apologize."

Katarina shook her head. "Apologize for what?"

"Well, there's the whole way that she thinks that she's better than other people." Katarina waited, and Spencer couldn't resist flashing his trademark grin and adding, "Plus she cost me a lot of money today."

"Money that you practically stole from her!"

Ace finished his piece of bread and piped up, "Now that you mention it, Spence, it was Katarina here who grabbed me and blew our scam, er, game."

"That is a good point," Spencer said as he stroked his chin. "Maybe you're the one who owes me an apology."

"What?"

"Or you could repay the money that I lost," offered Spencer, "whichever one comes easier to you."

"You said that I saved Ace's life! Doesn't that make up for it?"

Katarina kept eating and arguing with Spencer and Ace and enjoying herself. She failed to notice that Exo had slinked away from the rest of the group and found a seat on the floor between two rows of chairs and was struggling in vain to clean his bone club. But no matter how hard he worked on it, the cubone only managed to smear the soot around without coming close to restoring his weapon, his heirloom, back to its previous off-white color.