FLOOD [Pokémon]

Chapter 13: Down to Delphirius

NERO

Saturday, March 17, 2018

"Can you see it?" Cora pointed. "Over by that shadow, a bit beneath."

All I could see was kelp. A sprawling forest of it lay below, and it all but obscured what Cora had described as a meandering range of cliffs and seamounts bedded in white sand. One mountain in particular stretched up towards us, its peak jutting out from a long wall of wave-worn stone bearded with fern and reef. Beyond it, in the shadow that Cora had indicated, I couldn't see a thing; if she hadn't told me, I wouldn't have assumed there was space there to house anything, much less an actual community of merfolk.

A community of merfolk. I still found it hard to believe. It wasn't like they didn't exist, but mer villages and cities were so rare these days they may as well have gone extinct. For good reason, too – bigger groups made for greater visibility and a greater risk of being discovered by humans.

Yet according to Cora, Hoenn had supergroups of merfolk in abundance: Brira and Triteloch to the east, she'd said, in the temperate waters of Hoenn's larger islands; Silin to the north, half a day from a massive dumping ground called Litter's Seamount; Coralora, the smallest of the Hoenn communities, in a sunlit valley along one of the region's biggest islands, the Evergrande Isle; and this place, Delphirius, Cora's home, an hour and a half from the southern Slateport City.

"And maybe more," she'd told me. "Those are the big ones, but there've been smaller hamlets popping up all over lately. Last summer when my brother-in-law took me to Brira, the hierarch talked about sending his son prospecting further north, past the island the humans call Mossdeep, for space for another settlement. Though I don't know who'd dare live up there, except the Dewgongas — it'd be too cold for your kind, Milotica." She'd given my colorful fluke an amused look at that.

And she was right, we Miloticas didn't like the cold, but the thought that there were things like hierarchs, and people prospecting for settlements and social structure and travel between these villages... Cora made it sound like the Hoenn ocean was full to bursting with merfolk, and yet the seascape before me was as empty and blue and barren as I'd ever seen it. That wasn't a bad thing, though: these Hoenn mer had something going for them if there were as many as Cora described and they were deft at hiding it.

"Well?" I turned to see her looking at me expectantly.

"I don't see anything," I said. No merfolk, no homes, no walls...and certainly no Jude.

To her credit, she was unruffled by my terse reply. "Take it in," she told me. "We'll go in a moment, but I want you to have a good lay of the land if you ever need to find your way back here."

A vein pulsed in my temple. Presumptuous. I didn't like staying in one place for too long, and I didn't like staying with people I didn't know, facts that made this overlook pointless. I also didn't like people slow-walking me: "Please just take me to my brother."

Cora twisted her lips, but said nothing as she kicked down, leading the way. I followed at a tail's length — at her pace, and with my longer fluke, I'd quickly overtake her.

We kept above the forest of kelp, and soon reached the rock wall onto which it was moored. The peak of the Delphiri Seamount, as Cora called it, passed beneath us, a sleeping behemoth — it cast a sweeping shadow into the east, leaving its sloping backside illuminated by the sun. It was short, this slope, dipping into a bowl-shaped valley where the kelp grew thickest, and then rising up into a smaller mountain where the green finally began to grade out, yielding to rugged stone striated with veins of yellow algae and clumps of fern and sea flora.