The new trio set out from Trovita Island aboard Lapras, heading for Shamouti Island.
The crossing wasn't short. Trovita to Shamouti required multiple stops along the way, island-hopping through the archipelago to rest and resupply.
In theory, they could have challenged the Southern Cross along the route. For Ash, those battles wouldn't have taken much effort. But time was the problem. Finding Lugia Jr.'s parents, locating Lapras's clan, and tracking down Cynthia took priority over tournament victories he didn't need.
Ash told Serena about Lugia Jr. on the first day.
She was part of the team now. He'd operated the same way with Brock: once you were in, you were in. No secrets about the mission, no half-truths, no "I'll tell you when you need to know."
Serena had earned trust before she'd even joined. Standing between an injured Lapras and three thugs with nothing but a beginner's Fennekin wasn't the behaviour of someone who'd covet a Legendary Pokémon.
Serena's first reaction to hearing they were searching for Lugia was a blank stare. Not shock. Genuine ignorance. She didn't know what a Lugia was.
The shock arrived when Ash explained. A Legendary Pokémon on the same level as Kalos's Xerneas and Yveltal. The gods of Life and Death whose legends every child in Kalos grew up hearing.
This is what Ash's journey looks like?
He'd told her he'd show her the world. She'd thought he meant scenic islands and interesting Pokémon. He'd meant gods.
Serena's nervousness tripled on the spot. She was a beginner trainer with a single Fennekin. If she slowed Ash down, if her inexperience caused him to miss his goal, the guilt would follow her forever.
Ash and Misty shut that down in unison. Everyone starts as a rookie. Ash had been one six months ago. The gap between where he was then and where he was now looked impossible, but it had been crossed one step at a time. Fast steps, sure. But steps all the same.
"I'm still a rookie, Serena. Just a rookie who grew fast. No different from you."
The comfort was clumsy and probably would have landed better as silence, but it loosened the knot in Serena's chest enough for her to breathe.
Three days of island-hopping brought them to Mandarin Island.
The island was famous for one thing: crystal craftsmanship. Every street vendor displayed intricate crystal carvings, all modelled after Pokémon. The detail was extraordinary. Light caught in the facets and threw tiny rainbows across the stalls.
Misty and Serena stopped walking the moment they saw the first display. Then the second. Then the third. Their pace dropped to approximately zero.
Girls and shiny things. A universal constant that transcended regions.
Since they were stopping to resupply anyway, buying a few carvings to send home as souvenirs wasn't unreasonable. Local specialties didn't have to be edible to count.
"Serena, look at this Poliwag! The spiral on its belly is perfect!"
"It's gorgeous. Misty, you really do love Water-types."
"Of course I do. I'm going to be a Water-type Pokémon Master." Misty held the crystal Poliwag up to the light, absolute conviction on her face.
"It must be nice..." Something quiet moved behind Serena's eyes. "Having your own goal like that."
She envied it. Misty knew what she wanted. Ash knew what he wanted. Serena didn't. She'd come to Kanto chasing a person, not a dream. Now that she'd found the person, the question of what she wanted to become sat unanswered in the space where a goal should have been.
The three days at sea hadn't been idle.
Each transit island was uninhabited, which made them perfect for training. Ash and Misty ran their Pokémon through drills every evening, and Ash trained alongside his team the way he always did, matching their pace, mirroring their exercises, pushing his own body through movements that no normal human should have been able to perform.
Serena watched with her mouth open for the first two sessions. Television coverage of Ash focused on his tactical genius and his Pokémon's strength. Nobody had ever mentioned that the trainer himself trained like a Machamp. The boy she'd known at ten had been strong for his age. The fifteen-year-old version was something else entirely.
The one time Ash's physical capabilities had been visible to the public, during the Indigo Plateau Conference when he'd sprinted onto the field to catch Infernape, the moment had been eclipsed by the battle itself. Nobody had thought to ask how a human moved that fast.
Serena couldn't match their training intensity. She couldn't come close. But Ash didn't expect her to. He designed a separate regimen for Fennekin, tailored to Fire-type development principles, and paired it with meals he cooked using recipes optimised for boosting fire energy.
Three days of that, and Fennekin was a different Pokémon. Level up from Low High to Mid low. More important than the number, though, was the combat literacy.
Before Ash's training, Fennekin and Serena had fought like what they were: a brand-new team with no experience and no instincts. At equivalent levels, Ash commanding Pikachu could have beaten ten of their Fennekins without breaking a sweat.
Now Fennekin had foundations. Basic positioning. Attack timing. The beginning of the understanding that a Pokémon battle wasn't about throwing moves but about reading the opponent and responding with purpose.
Serena and Fennekin were still raw. The bond between them was young, more potential than substance.
Misty picked out a Poliwag carving. Serena wanted a Fennekin.
The problem was obvious. Fennekin was a Kalos Pokémon. Nobody in the Orange Islands had a reason to sculpt one. The display shelves were packed with regional species: Lapras, Slowpoke, Tentacool, Staryu. No fire foxes from a continent away.
Not a dealbreaker, though. The shops offered custom commissions based on a live Pokémon template. It just cost more. Misty's Poliwag had been fifteen hundred. A custom piece would start above two thousand and climb with the level of detail.
The sculptures were called crystal, but they were glass. Real crystal at that size would run past fifty thousand, and the price scaled exponentially with volume. What people were paying for wasn't material. Seventy percent of the cost was craftsmanship, twenty-nine percent was the appeal of the Pokémon design, and the remaining one percent was the glass itself.
For Ash, the money was irrelevant. The Potion he'd invented for Pokémon training had generated enough revenue that he'd handed the collection card to Delia and stopped checking the balance. He'd offered to pay for Serena's custom piece without thinking twice.
Serena refused. Polite but firm. She'd been travelling with Ash for a matter of days. Letting him spend two thousand or more on her at this stage wasn't something she could accept. She wasn't the type to spend someone else's money, and she especially wasn't the type to spend Ash's money. Not yet. The dynamic between them wasn't Misty's dynamic. She knew the line and she stayed behind it.
Ash was mildly frustrated by her stubbornness but understood the logic. Two thousand wasn't two dollars. A girl with self-respect wasn't going to accept an expensive gift from a boy she'd just reunited with, no matter how casually he offered.
He dropped it.
The three of them wandered through town, browsing shops, comparing craftsmanship, looking for the right place to commission their pieces. Ash wanted a Pikachu. Pikachu, sitting on his shoulder, seemed very interested in the concept of a glass version of itself and kept tilting its head at the displays.
They were mid-stroll when shouting broke out ahead.
"Why is your shop even open?! You don't sell anything! You're just taking up space and driving customers away from my side! How unlucky can I get?"
A middle-aged man was berating a girl who couldn't have been older than nine or ten. She stood behind a stall that held a handful of simple glass items: bottles, bowls, plain functional pieces. No Pokémon designs. In a town where every shop sold crystal Pokémon sculptures, her inventory looked like it belonged in a different market.
The street was empty. Not a single customer anywhere. Just the man's anger echoing off the storefronts.
Ash crossed the distance in three strides and put himself between the man and the girl.
"Talk like an adult. What did she do to you? Did she steal your customers? Did she block your shop entrance?"
The man sized Ash up. The boy's face was ordinary, but something in the way he carried himself made the man's bluster drop by a third. "You know this kid?"
"Never met her. But I don't need to know someone to step in when an adult is bullying a child."
"Bullying? Look at their so-called shop!" The man jabbed a finger at the girl's stall. "A handful of empty glass bottles. No Pokémon designs, no art, nothing anyone would buy. Having a dead shop next to mine makes people think this whole row is garbage. It's killing my business!"
Ash stared at him.
"I've heard of a shop losing business because the place next door is too popular and stealing foot traffic. But losing business because the shop next door is doing badly? That's a first."
Misty and Serena caught up in time to hear the man's logic. Both of them stopped walking and stared with identical expressions of disbelief.
"I sell glass repairs and decorations," the man pressed on, his voice defensive now. "If their shop doesn't have any real glass products, nobody comes down this row. No customers browsing means no customers for me either. How is that hard to understand?"
Ash looked at him. Pikachu, on his shoulder, looked at him too. Neither spoke. The combined weight of their stares, one from a boy who'd fought gods and one from a mouse that could level buildings, settled over the man like a physical force.
He felt it. His argument, shaky to begin with, collapsed under the silence. The truth was simpler and uglier than the logic he'd constructed: business had been bad, the pressure was real, and he'd aimed his frustration at the easiest target available. A child who couldn't fight back.
He couldn't bring himself to apologise. Instead, he muttered "You'd better move out soon" at the girl and retreated into his own shop.
"Th-thank you..." The girl's voice was small, hands clasped behind her back.
Serena crouched to her eye level and rested a hand on her head. "You don't need to thank us. He was the one in the wrong." A warm smile. "But I'm curious, why are there so few things in your shop? Did you make these yourself?"
The girl shook her head.
"No. These were all made by my brother, Mateo."