The storm over Dahara City gradually subsided. The ice-blue that had covered the sky faded, and the ordinary dark of night returned, the wind moving again through streets that were still and cold but no longer dangerous.
Only a faint chill lingered in the air.
Kyurem descended to the ground without a sound, its massive body settling with complete control, not so much as a ripple of dust disturbed.
It lowered itself calmly, and Lucien stepped down from its back. The aura around it pulled inward, the earlier ferocity gone, leaving only the quiet, settled presence of something that was very powerful and had nothing left to prove.
The small Hoopa, unable to contain itself any longer, wriggled free from Ash's arms and flew directly to Kyurem's side. It raised its small, curious face and looked up at the Ice Dragon, then reached out one hand and cautiously touched Kyurem's leg. It pulled the hand back, blinked its wide eyes, and whispered: "Kyurem is so gentle now. Not like before."
Kyurem looked down at the small creature. No hostility, no particular interest either. It simply returned its gaze to its position beside Lucien and held it there.
Clemont stepped forward, pushing his glasses up, his expression still carrying the residue of shock but reorganizing itself into something more analytical. "Mr. Lucien, you said you came from a parallel world in the past. How different is your world from ours?"
"Quite different," Lucien said. He looked at the group around him and answered in a straightforward tone. "In my Unova Region, the timeline is several thousand years behind yours. The geography is different, the Pokémon distribution is different, the people and events are all different." He paused.
"I no longer think I simply traveled forward in time. I think the dimensional turbulence brought me into a parallel world entirely. A different version of the same world."
Hoopa's unfamiliar eyes when it looked at him had confirmed it. In his own timeline, Hoopa knew him. This one had not.
Ash scratched the back of his head, still flushed with the mixture of adrenaline and admiration that had been building since Kyurem first opened its wings above the lake. "Whatever world you're from, Mr. Lucien, it's a good thing you and Kyurem were here. If you hadn't been, Dahara City would have been finished. I mean it. Thank you."
Serena nodded, her voice quieter but just as sincere. "We thought there was no way to stop it. You were both incredible."
The ground trembled slightly.
Lucien turned. The ice encasing Dialga and the others had begun to crack, fine lines spreading across the surface, faint light leaking through.
"Hoopa's resentment has been beaten back," he said. "They're waking up."
The ice around Dialga shattered first, pieces falling away in a cascade of blue-white shards. Dialga shook itself, the temporal energy around its body briefly chaotic, and looked down at Lucien and Kyurem from its considerable height.
The arrogance from before was gone. What replaced it was something closer to apprehension, and perhaps the beginnings of acknowledgment. It let out a low sound, spread its wings, and dissolved into light that faded on the horizon.
One by one, Palkia, Giratina, Groudon, and Kyogre broke free in the same way, each one pausing briefly to look at Lucien before departing. Within moments, the sky above Dahara City was clear.
Lucien watched Groudon go and found himself briefly wondering, with genuine curiosity, whether it was actually going to walk back to the Hoenn Region. He had heard the theory. He did not have time to investigate it.
The danger was over. Around the collapsed building at the lake's edge, the evacuated citizens of Dahara City were gathering again, the sound of their voices rising from frightened whispers into something warmer.
Applause. Gratitude. People calling out toward the figure standing beside Kyurem, naming him the hero who had saved the city, and Lucien received all of it with quiet composure and a small nod.
Bonnie clapped her hands together, her face bright. "Everyone's safe! Dahara City is safe!"
Not far away, the three members of Team Rocket stood in a cluster, staring.
"Who is that guy, exactly?" Meowth managed.
"I have no idea," Jessie said, looking genuinely unsettled for once. "But that Kyurem defeated all of those Legendary Pokémon by itself. All of them."
"If we could catch something like that..." Meowth began, his eyes going distant.
"Don't even think about it," Jessie said flatly. "That is completely beyond us."
Meowth sighed with feeling.
In the dining room of an undamaged house in Dahara City, the group had gathered around the table.
Lucien recalled Kyurem into its Poké Ball and sat with Ash, Serena, Clemont, Bonnie, Baraz, and Meray. The small Hoopa drifted near the table, occasionally glancing at the Prison Bottle that Baraz had repaired and placed nearby, inside which Hoopa Unbound had been resealed.
Meray finished explaining the background. A hundred years ago, an ancestor named Ghris had used a power called the Imprisoning Force to seal a portion of Hoopa's destructive capacity into the Prison Bottle, containing it.
Their purpose in coming to Dahara City had been to find a way to help Hoopa recover that sealed power safely.
Lucien listened, his gaze resting on the Prison Bottle.
He already knew this story. In the version he remembered, Hoopa had been unable to use its ring to escape, and facing that danger, had made the choice to put others first, and that choice, combined with Ash's support, had broken through the restriction.
After that, Hoopa had been able to use both its contained and unbound power freely, and had helped rebuild the city it had contributed to destroying.
So the meaning of the so-called punishment was not simply the imprisonment of power, nor was it about suppressing Hoopa's strength. It was something else.
Lucien's eyes settled on the small Hoopa sitting beside the table, absently rubbing the Prison Bottle with one hand, its expression somewhere between confused and thoughtful.
"I think," Lucien said slowly, "that what Ghris did when he sealed Hoopa's power wasn't meant to confine it. It was meant to teach Hoopa something."
Meray looked at him. "Teach it what?"
"To control its own mind." He paused. "Hoopa has extraordinary power. It can summon and command Legendary Pokémon, traverse space, reshape circumstances entirely through its rings alone. That kind of power, when driven by resentment, selfishness, or pure caprice, becomes catastrophic. What we saw tonight was exactly that: power without restraint, a hundred years of sealed resentment given form and direction."
Baraz and Meray exchanged a glance. They knew, in some part of them, that what Ghris had left behind had never been intended to strip Hoopa of what it was, only to give it room to become something different.
Lucien looked at Hoopa. It tilted its head, listening, its round eyes moving between confusion and something more open.
"The punishment was never about limitation," he said. "It was about learning to hold immense power gently. To protect the people and things you care about instead of chasing whatever you want in the moment. To understand that strength is most powerful when it serves others."
Serena nodded quietly, something settling in her expression. "Like how Hoopa stayed beside Ash even though it was frightened. It didn't run. That was it, wasn't it? Caring for someone else even when it's difficult."
"Yes," Lucien said. "And I think that's why Ghris entrusted Hoopa to his descendants rather than simply sealing it away permanently. He wanted Hoopa to form a genuine bond with people. To learn through that bond what the power is actually for."
Hoopa blinked. It looked at its other self in the Prison Bottle for a long moment. Then it looked at Ash, at Serena, at the quiet presence of Lucien beside it, and its small face did something complicated.
"Hoopa doesn't want to destroy things," it said softly, touching the bottle with one hand. "Hoopa just wants to be with everyone."
Meray's eyes went bright. She reached out and stroked Hoopa's head without a word.
Clemont adjusted his glasses, his analytical mind already working. "If that's the case, then technically, forcing a merger between the two sides of Hoopa's power isn't the right approach at all."
"The point is for Hoopa to genuinely understand what protection means, and what its responsibilities are, so it can completely move past the resentment. That's what actually needs to happen."
"Exactly," Lucien said. He picked up his glass and took a small sip. "I need to use Hoopa's ring to return to my own world. But for that to work, Hoopa needs to have truly mastered its own power, both sides of it, stably enough to open a dimensional portal without the resentment interfering."
Ash's hand closed into a fist, the familiar resolve settling across his face. "Then we help Hoopa get there. All of us, together. We help it understand what protection means, what it's responsible for, and we help it master what it can do."
"Yes!" Bonnie's hand shot up in agreement.
The small Hoopa circled the group happily, its face bright with uncomplicated joy.
After the meal, everyone made their way to the Dahara City Sand Travel Inn. The innkeeper, in gratitude for what had been done for the city, waived the room fees without being asked. Ash and the others thanked him sincerely.
That evening, on the inn's ground floor, Ash used the video call terminal to contact Professor Oak in Kanto. He told him everything, from the beginning.
Professor Oak's face went through several rapid expressions. "What?! An ancient trainer riding Kyurem defeated six Legendary Pokémon?!"
"Yes!"
"That's... that shouldn't be possible." Professor Oak muttered to himself, working through it. Dialga governed time. Palkia governed space. Those two alone would be considered beyond virtually any other Pokémon. Add Giratina, Groudon, and Kyogre to that equation, plus Hoopa Unbound at full power, and the numbers simply did not work. "Kyurem's power couldn't extend that far."
Ash thought for a moment. "Professor Oak, this Kyurem was different from the one I encountered in Unova. That Kyurem was blue and could become White Kyurem or Black Kyurem. But Mr. Lucien's Kyurem seemed to have all three forms combined at once."
Professor Oak went very still.
Something surfaced in his memory, a legend from the Unova Region that he had read in old texts years ago and filed away as mythology.
In ancient times, according to those records, a being called the Dragon of Truth had descended upon the land of Unova in the form of a Dragon Stone. When conflict arose between two princes with different ideals, the kingdom fractured, and the Dragon Stone fractured with it.
The physical truth became Kyurem. The truth of ideals became Zekrom. The truth of principles became Reshiram. Three Pokémon from one original being, separated by the divergence of what humanity valued.
But if that being had never divided...
"Ash," Professor Oak said, with more urgency than usual, "where is this Mr. Lucien right now? I need to speak with him."
Ash blinked. "He's resting in his room."
"Dahara City. You're in Dahara City right now?"
"That's right."
"Stay there. I'm coming."
On the second floor of the inn, Lucien was doing something he had not been able to do in a very long time.
He was looking at modern technology.
The room had a television, a phone, a computer, an air conditioning unit, and a refrigerator, and he had been working his way through all of them with the thoughtful attention of an engineer examining something he already understood in principle but had never seen implemented. Dragonite, Volcarona, and Serperior stood nearby, watching him with matching expressions of curious attentiveness.
Dragonite made an inquiring sound.
"This is a refrigerator," Lucien said. "If you put food inside, it stays cold and doesn't spoil."
Dragonite's eyes went wide. It looked at the refrigerator. Then it looked at Kyurem. Then back at the refrigerator.
Lucien noticed the comparison being made and felt a moment of mild awkwardness. It was true that in Lucien City Castle, he had developed a habit of asking Kyurem to chill watermelon, black tea, and snacks when the weather was warm. A Legendary Dragon-type Ice Pokémon, effectively being used as a cooling device for afternoon refreshments.
"A refrigerator is more convenient," Lucien said, to no one in particular. "And it means every household in Unova could have one without needing to involve Kyurem."
Dragonite's face lit up with the expression of something that had just understood a genuinely useful thing.
Lucien looked around the room at the other appliances. His mind moved to practical questions. Could he bring anything back? Some of the more complex technology would require considerable resources to reproduce, but the underlying principles were things he could work with. A computer in particular would be useful. When he eventually had downtime in the castle, being able to access novels and films would be considerably better than staring at the ceiling.
He could already picture Dragonite watching something on a screen and being utterly transfixed by it.
There was one practical obstacle, however.
He had no money.
..
STONES PLZZ
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