The Quest for the Legends

• Thunderyu style
• Volcaryu style
• Polaryu style

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The Quest for the Legends (ILCOE)

Chapter 36: The Crater

It was a gloomy group that walked quietly back to Cleanwater City that night.

They were not met with any suspicion when they entered the Pokémon Center and left their Pokémon and they heard no one there talk about a battle taking place at the Lake. Apparently it had gone by unnoticed, but they didn’t feel much relief.

“Where do we go now?” Mark finally muttered as they exited, breaking the silence that had lasted since they had left the lake.

“Well,” Chaletwo sighed, “I think you should just let your Pokémon rest for now. Just… go to the hotel and get a good night’s sleep, and then… well, maybe you should just take it easy tomorrow. Two legendary battles in one day really isn’t working out.”

Everybody seemed content with this conclusion, and nobody talked while they walked the short distance to the hotel and went up the stairs.

“I think I’m just going to bed,” Mark said emptily.

“Me too,” Alan muttered. May just shrugged.

“Good night, then,” Mark said and went into his room, throwing himself down on his bed.

Suicune is dead.

A nightmarish memory of pulling a limp paw while dragging Suicune into a bush flashed across his mind and made him feel a little nauseous.

“What does this all mean?” he muttered, thinking of the sparkles that had enveloped Gyarados. Maybe it has to do with Gyarados attacking Suicune with the power that Suicune himself gave him, he speculated to himself.

“Well,” Chaletwo replied, “I don’t know, but we might get to the bottom of this if we can talk to Entei before we…”

“Who asked you?” Mark snapped.

He waited for a few seconds. No reply.

He thought of himself standing there, watching while Gyarados fired the fatal Dragon Beam, and shuddered.

I let him do it. I let Gyarados kill Suicune.

A little voice in his head disagreed. Why are you taking the blame? You were going to recall him. It was Chaletwo who told you not to. It’s his fault.

Yeah, Mark thought grimly. It’s all Chaletwo’s fault.

“I wouldn’t say…”

“Go away!” Mark shouted at Chaletwo in exasperation. “Why don’t you just mind your own business instead of sitting here spying on my private thoughts?”

Again, there was no reply.

Chaletwo? he thought.

“Yes?”

Mark gritted his teeth. “You’re still there! Get out of my head for real or I’m not taking part in your stupid plan anymore!”

A few seconds of nothing passed.

I should resign anyway, he thought airily. May can do it all better than I can.

Again, there was no reply, but there was no way for him to tell if Chaletwo was really not reading his thoughts or if he was just resisting the urge to comment in order to make Mark think he wasn’t.

“Well,” he muttered, “if you really are listening, you’ll have to act like you never heard it for the rest of your life.”

He sighed, now fairly content that even if Chaletwo heard him, he’d at least not interrupt.

Suicune…

Did you mean for that to happen? What is so special about Gyarados, anyway? What is he chosen for? I don’t get it…

And anyway, how could he kill Suicune just like that? A legendary Pokémon? Just like…

He bolted upright. “Chaletwo!” he called at the air. “Couldn’t you have resurrected him? The body was in perfect shape aside from those little battle scratches we gave him!”

“Impossible,” Chaletwo replied shortly. “The body was whole, but the ghost was gone. I don’t know what Gyarados did to him or if Suicune did it to himself or what, but I felt around for his consciousness immediately and didn’t find it. Now, you don’t want me around – and for your information I was not reading your thoughts until you shouted, thank you very much – so I’ll just pretend I don’t exist until tomorrow. Good night.”

For a moment Mark wondered if it had really been a good idea to get him that worked up.

Yes, a voice in his head answered, and that was the end of that.

-------

It felt great the next morning to be able to finally relax and not worry about travelling to the next destination yet. Even though Suicune’s death still loomed over them, it somehow seemed a little less horrible when they weren’t out to find whatever legendary was next on Chaletwo’s list – Mark could even imagine that Chaletwo actually cared that they had killed Suicune and that that was the reason he didn’t want them to go on yet, which made him feel a little better. They took their time eating a good breakfast at the hotel and then retrieved their Pokémon from the Pokémon Center.

“Well,” Alan said once they were back at the hotel, “shouldn’t we fill them in?”

Mark nodded quietly.

They sent out all the Pokémon except Lapras, Diamond and Gyarados in Mark’s room, and he realized as they all began to feverishly ask questions that some of them had missed the outcome of not one, but two legendary battles.

“Okay, just settle down,” Alan shouted over the cacophony of Pokémon speech. “You need to catch up.”

The Pokémon eventually stopped talking to listen to Alan. He looked nervously around, realizing he had been silently elected as the one to explain.

“All right,” he said, biting his lip. “Um. Better start at the beginning. Well, thanks to Lapras’s step-in at the last moment, we succeeded in defeating and capturing Thunderyu.”

Charlie, at the moment in his Charmander form, smiled in relief along with Mist the Vaporeon, who was standing beside him.

“Figured,” Scyther said indifferently. Butterfree looked at him and at Mark, but didn’t say anything.

“So, well, then we went on to Cleanwater City, where we obviously are now, to battle Suicune…”

“And did you catch him?” Charlie asked with worry in his voice.

Alan smiled awkwardly. “Eh. Not exactly.”

“We lost,” Jolteon muttered emptily. “We’ll have to go battle him again tonight.”

All the Pokémon looked up at Alan for confirmation. He took a deep breath, but Mark beat him to it.

“No,” he said bitterly. “Suicune is dead.”

Every single one of them stared at him for a moment, and then the room exploded in chaos.

“What?”

“How?”

“Can legendary Pokémon die?”

Jolteon and Sandslash stared at him in disbelief. Racko tilted his reptilian head and blinked questioningly up at Alan, and Mist just looked devastated.

“After we lost… Gyarados came out of his Pokéball,” Mark said, sounding more spiteful than he intended. “And he killed Suicune. With Dragon Beam. And when Suicune died, he got marked with that… that symbol on Spirit’s necklace, except blue.” He pointed at the Ninetales.

“That can’t be right,” Spirit said, shaking her head. “I have long since concluded that the symbol is the legendary Pokémon’s ultimate mark of approval and…”

“Well, either Suicune approved of being dead or your conclusion is wrong,” Mark said rudely. Somehow this conversation was all making him a great deal more upset, as cheerful as he had been to be able to relax that morning. Spirit shook her white mane with a slightly offended expression, but didn’t reply.

There were a few seconds of silence. Mist seemed to be taking the news the worst; Mark figured a Water Pokémon would be more upset about the death of one of its own protector deities, so to speak. She stared emptily into space, ignoring entirely when Charlie came up to give her a reassuring hug.

“I’m sorry,” Mark muttered. “But it happened. There’s nothing we can do about it now.”

“What about Gyarados?” Mist asked shakily. “What are you going to do with him?”

Mark looked blankly at her. What, indeed? Part of him suddenly screamed vengeance; Gyarados surely shouldn’t just get away with this. He got all sorts of ideas he immediately wished he hadn’t gotten and for a moment seriously considered just dumping him off at the Lake of Purity, since he hated the place so much. Then reason sank in.

“We need him,” he told her. “Gyarados may be the most powerful Pokémon we have. We need all the power we can get if we’re going to defeat all the other legendaries.”

Mist looked down at the floor, saying nothing. There was an awkward silence.

“What do we do now, then?” Jolteon asked quietly.

Mark looked at him. “Well, Chaletwo says we have the day off, at least.”

“I say we should eat before we do anything else,” May said, and everybody liked the idea.

-------

They ate lunch, and eventually, at a loss for what to do in the afternoon, decided to go out to the Lake of Purity again, both to subtly try to make sure that nobody wandered too far into the forest in the direction where they had left Suicune’s body and to just spend some time trying to think about something else than their quest.

Chaletwo, Mark had noticed by the time they were on their way to the lake, had not said anything at all since yesterday evening. He wasn’t quite sure if it was because he was offended or he just hadn’t felt the need to say anything, but it caused him to start musing about what Chaletwo did during the night, anyway. Was he just sitting in Mark’s head getting bored to death? Or maybe watching his dreams to relieve the boredom? (This thought brought up the priceless image of Chaletwo sitting alone in an otherwise empty movie theatre with a bag of popcorn trying to figure out why the May on the screen was wearing a fake mustache.) Or did he maybe sleep in some sense – submit to the ordinary unconsciousness of being contained in a Pokéball? But then how did he know when to wake up? He got as far as psychic alarm clocks before he realized that May was starting to look oddly at him out of the corner of his eye while he was snickering to himself.

But once they were at the lake, watching the crowd of people walking obliviously past the trees they had dragged Suicune’s body off between, he felt altogether differently and experienced that strange feeling of being angry at himself for being emotionally capable of fooling around when his sense of morality was telling him he should spend the rest of his life mourning and never laugh again. The silence in the group was awkward, and Mark kept thinking he was seeing somebody walking in just the right direction to find the body.

“So uh,” Alan said at last, “what are we going to do here besides stand around? Shouldn’t we use the time for something? Get the mind occupied with something else?”

May shrugged. “We could battle.”

Relieved at the idea of something to take his mind off Suicune again, Mark immediately said, “Yeah, I like that idea.”

Alan looked at him. “Well, I haven’t battled a person in a long while. I wouldn’t mind a friendly match.”

Mark smiled. Battling Alan sounded a lot better than battling May, mostly because he had a distinct feeling that he would lose to her no matter what he did.

“So May, do you mind…?”

She shook her head. “I can be the referee. And I’ll keep an eye on that place so you don’t have to worry about it.”

Sometimes Mark was amazed at how emotionally tough May could be. Alan at least seemed uncomfortable about Suicune’s death. May was just… there. Like she didn’t care.

“All right, then, we’ll make it a six on six match,” May announced formally as they walked over to a less occupied spot where they would additionally get in the way of anybody straying too close to where the body was. “Let’s allow switching for a change. No move restrictions, those are boring. Both battlers send out at the same time. Go!”

It took Mark a second to realize they were starting and he quickly reached for one of his Pokéballs to hurl it forward. The white shape from the ball materialized into Scyther while Alan’s ball released Mist the Vaporeon. Mark figured Alan had decided she was probably the one of his Pokémon that most needed to get her mind off Suicune.

“Okay, Scyther, um… X-Scissor!” Mark blurted out.

“Mist, use Aqua Ring!” Alan ordered.

Scyther zoomed forward with his scythes raised as they were enveloped in a faint green glow. The Vaporeon braced herself as he slashed at her body with both of them, forming red, crossed cuts on her back. As Scyther retreated back towards Mark, Mist breathed out a spray of water that began to orbit her, some of it dousing her wounds and slowly closing them.

“All right, um… try a Double Team?” Mark suggested. He wasn’t sure why he suddenly felt like using techniques he’d never really used before, but something made him want to do something new.

Two copies of the mantis split out of Scyther’s body on either side of him while Alan ordered Mist to use an Ice Beam. She crouched down and fired a beam of ice from her mouth at the Scyther in the middle, but the copy dissolved into the air.

“Scyther, Swords Dance!” Mark yelled, figuring that it would be best to boost Scyther’s attack power so the Aqua Ring wouldn’t heal too much of the damage in between. Both Scyther started spinning around on the spot while moving their scythes in elaborate patterns.

“Haze!” Alan shouted.

The Vaporeon breathed out a fine mist that quickly engulfed both Pokémon. Mark saw the two Scyther lose their concentration in the Swords Dance and one of them flickered out of existence while the haze faded.

Mark’s gaze quickly ran over to May; she shook her head, making it painfully obvious that Haze was something he ought to have expected. He gritted his teeth.

“Oh, fine, I won’t even try to pretend to know what I’m doing. Just slash away.”

The mantis was all too happy to obey and zoomed at Mist with his scythes aloft.

“Acid Armor!” Alan quickly retaliated. The Vaporeon’s flesh dissolved into liquid water just before Scyther’s scythe touched her, and it easily chopped through her watery form, lodging into the ground instead. Scyther jerked it out and growled in annoyance, staying just next to Mist while keeping tense, waiting for her to turn back into solid form. Alan shifted on his feet, not daring to make an order; Mist waited, turning her head toward him.

Finally Scyther just lost his patience and started to hack madly away at the Vaporeon-shaped blob of water, and to his astonishment, Mark realized that in fact it was working to some degree. While she obviously wasn’t chopped to pieces as she otherwise would have been, Mist flinched under it and tried to get away, and finally the water turned back into her solid form while Alan watched with a worried expression. She looked more like she had just been bludgeoned by something heavy than cut up with scythes.

“Mist, another Ice Beam!” Alan called, and the Vaporeon quickly shot a thin beam of ice up at the mantis, who had only gotten an opportunity to step slightly back. He was hit squarely in the chest and staggered backwards, but quickly regained his balance and countered with yet another swipe of his scythe, hitting Mist’s shoulder and leaving a deep, bleeding cut.

Alan shuddered. “Mist, come back,” he said and recalled the Vaporeon to her Pokéball. He hesitated only a moment before picking the next ball. “Charlie, do it!”

The Charmander emerged from the ball and immediately began to glow in evolution. Mark realized that it would be wisest to switch, and his hand travelled down to his Pokéballs.

“Eh…” came Chaletwo’s voice suddenly, sounding notably awkward. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I think… I really think you should get going.”

What? Again? Mark thought, pausing. Why?

“Remember when I told you about Thunderyu? The next dragon, Volcaryu – he’s sealed inside Mount Fever… and it’s so close by, I think he sensed it through his sleep when we woke Thunderyu. Since then he’s been struggling pretty fiercely against the sleep, and… I’m not sure how much longer I can hold him back. I may lose my grip on him as early as tomorrow.”

Well, Mount Fever isn’t that far away, is it? Mark argued. It would be easy to reach the roots of the mountain before that time. We deserve to take it easy for a little while, right?

“Well, sure, you do,” Chaletwo replied coldly. “I was just thinking, you know, since some human idiot got the brilliant idea of building a town in the middle of the crater of a dormant volcano and Volcaryu’s release would cause it to erupt…” Mark’s stomach churned uncomfortably at this point. “Well, I figured that, you know, you wouldn’t want all those people to get fried. Sorry I got that impression. I’ll leave you to your happy fun battle now.”

Mark stared at May, Alan, Scyther and Charlie, who were all clearly confused as to why he was standing there still with a horrified expression in the middle of the battle.

“Okay, this is bad,” he muttered. “Really bad.”

-------

There wasn’t really anything for them to do, once Mark had briefly explained the situation, other than cancelling the battle, heading gloomily back to Cleanwater City, signing out of the hotel and heading out into Rainbow Woods again.

Mount Fever was a very large and prominent volcanic cone that could easily be seen all the way from Cleanwater city. It had been dormant for the past thousand years or so, but about a hundred years ago, a man known as ‘Pyromaniac Paul’ had gotten the insane idea of locating the unofficial Pokémon Gym he had been planning to found on the inside of the crater, and after getting a few friends into it with him, they had built a platform into the side of the crater of sufficient area and strength to hold Paul’s Gym building and home, and eventually they had created a wide walkway going around the entire crater on its inside. The Gym became famous and extremely popular as a tourist attraction thanks to the unique location, and somehow, eventually, a town had started to spring up around it while the walkways were gradually broadened. Now Crater Town, as it had come to be known, had gotten its Gym official thanks to its current leader Carl, and consisted of a roughly circular wooden floor with houses scattered around it and a hole, perhaps five meters across, surrounded by a fence in the very middle of it, allowing travellers and inhabitants alike to gaze into the still fiery depths of the volcano beneath.

But the journey towards the volcano was slower than it had sounded like it would be. After going through the Pokémonless part of Rainbow Woods again and climbing up the mountainside there, sunset was growing dangerously close, and they weren’t even close to the roots of Mount Fever yet.

“You’re not going to make it,” Chaletwo told them with strained panic in his telepathic voice. “Well, you’re going to make it, but never in time to convince them to evacuate the place and get it done. I should have said something sooner…”

“Yes, you definitely should have,” Mark agreed. He wasn’t really sure how he felt. Part of him was screaming about all the people who might get killed, and another part insisted that it didn’t matter anymore because Suicune was dead. He really hated his emotions today.

It’s all Chaletwo’s fault, the third part said confidently, and it was the one he felt most inclined to agree with.

“Well, how about you speed us up, then?” May sighed. “Can’t you, like, teleport or something?”

“I can’t just…” Chaletwo began, but then trailed off. “Well, it is an emergency… I suppose it would be possible to…”

“Then do it already, for God’s sake!” Alan said angrily. “Why have you been making us walk?”

“I need to use as much as possible of the power I have left to keep Volcaryu asleep, don’t I? I think it would be too risky to try to teleport with three people. I’ll take Mark, and you two will catch up, all right?”

Alan rolled his eyes, but didn’t say anything.

“Right… nobody’s watching…”

Chaletwo’s body materialized by Mark’s side and he bemusedly realized that despite Chaletwo having been a nuisance in his head for so long he’d gotten entirely used to it, this was only the second time he had actually seen him.

“Come on,” Chaletwo just said, placing one of his pale, bulbous fingers on Mark’s shoulder. The next moment, he found himself standing alone on reddish rock and looked around to realize that he was near the end of the path going up to the crater of Mount Fever.

He carefully took the final few steps up to the very edge of the crater and marvelled at the sight of Crater Town: disorganized houses were scattered around the huge wooden platform, the prominent white Gym building with the red dome roof was just about right underneath him, and in the middle of it all was a large hole emitting clouds of steam, in the middle of which he could just barely make out a faint orangeish glow.

He took a deep breath and walked down the steep steps in the side of the crater wall onto the platform. He looked around. He hadn’t seen any people at all. Granted, it wasn’t a large town, but it still struck him as odd there wouldn’t be anyone around.

“Hello?” he shouted. Nobody answered. He figured there had to be something going on in town since nobody was around, and the first place he thought to look was the Gym, but when he came to the door, there was a piece of paper taped to it that said ‘Away for Town Community Meeting’.

Well, he thought. If I were running things in this town, where would I hold town community meetings?

He looked around and noticed a building larger than most of the others a short distance away to the left, with faded lettering above the door saying ‘COMMUNITY CENTER’. Duh.

He walked up to the building and knocked on the door.

“Come in,” came a cheerful voice from inside. Mark opened the door carefully to come into a large hall that was apparently now being used as a meeting room – there was a round, red table in the middle of it with something more than a dozen people sitting by it, and the rest of town seemed to be standing somewhere by the walls, listening. Everybody looked at him.

“Ah, a traveller,” a chubby, friendly-looking man by the far end of the table said; he recognized his voice as the cheerful one that had invited him in. “I am Mayor Daniels of Crater Town. I’m glad you found the people; we always have community meetings on Thursdays and we were just getting started. Now why don’t you…”

The sight of all those people somehow kicked the danger their lives were in properly into Mark’s head. Stupidly, all he could think of expressing this in for the moment was interrupting the Mayor’s speech with a frantic shout of, “Evacuate the town!”

Mayor Daniels blinked at him. “I’m sorry?”

“You must evacuate the town,” Mark repeated, realizing how dumb he sounded but figuring it couldn’t get a lot worse than it already was. “The volcano is going to erupt.”

The Mayor blinked at him again, but then laughed. “Now, you cannot honestly think we would live in this town if we didn’t have the volcano constantly monitored for any signs of revived activity…”

Everybody was staring at him and Mark was beginning to feel decidedly like just getting out of there instead of pointlessly making himself look even more ridiculous when somebody at the table cleared his throat. It was a short, brown-haired man with glasses.

“Actually,” he said, glancing nervously at Mark, “don’t ask me how he could possibly know this, but the volcano did make a slight twitch yesterday morning – no definite sign of an upcoming eruption, of course, but still more than it’s been for a while. I was going to bring it up.”

The Mayor looked visibly unsettled by this, but still maintained his composition. “Now, exactly where does your information come from, young man? We have a team of expert scientists in the field such as Mr. Adams here watching the volcano for us. Why would you feel so certain that it is going to erupt?”

He was trying to figure out how to answer this when an aloof-looking old woman seated on the Mayor’s right side suddenly let out a gasp. “Oh! You’re in the paper!” she said happily, prodding a page of the newspaper she had been reading under the table and beaming up at him. Now it was Mark’s turn to blink.

“What? Give me that,” the Mayor said quickly, tearing the paper out of her hands and holding it up to read the page she had been pointing at so that the front page was in plain view from Mark’s location.

It contained a blurry photograph of a young, thin, dark-haired boy twitching in agony as he was about to fall over backwards. His mouth was open in a silent scream, his eyes wide and staring straight towards the Pokémon on the left side of the photo.

And despite the blurriness, it was unmistakably Mark himself.

The Mayor lowered the newspaper slowly onto the table, his face white as a sheet of paper, staring at Mark in pure terror. The pages he had been looking at were now visible on the table, showing a few more, clearer photos of him and of Chaletwo.

He heard Chaletwo swear loudly in his head. “Why the hell was that woman reading a two-week-old newspaper?”

Recognition had dawned upon the faces of everybody in the room who had managed to take a peek at the newspaper by now. The memory modification had been enough to make them fail to associate his face with anything when they had initially seen him, but a direct comparison just made it undeniable.

I’m in a room full of people who know I was murdered a couple of weeks ago, he realized, dumbfounded, not sure what to do. He blinked and looked around.

“Are… are you dead…?” the Mayor whispered.

“Just tell them they’re mistaken, that it’s just somebody who looks like you, that everybody wears those clothes over where you live, that your name is really John Smith…”

He was going to. He was definitely going to. But something made his lips decide otherwise.

“Yes,” he heard himself saying. “I’m dead. I returned because… I had to warn you.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Chaletwo hissed. “Nobody must know about…”

“Warn us?” Mayor Daniels stammered.

“Yes,” Mark improvised. “Chaletwo killed me, and he is going to kill all of you. There is a dragon Pokémon called Volcaryu sleeping inside this volcano, and Chaletwo’s going to wake it up, which will make the volcano erupt and destroy Crater Town.” He really had no idea what he was saying, but it just came out of his mouth. Miraculously, he kept a straight face saying it, and somehow, he was enjoying the moment immensely. “The only way to stop him is to be prepared when he wakes Volcaryu. And it will try to fly off to join him so he can take over the world, so we have to capture Volcaryu to prevent that from happening.”

He may have had no idea what he was saying, but damn, it was the best lie he had ever told. He watched the Mayor nod with a horrified expression on his face, buying every word of it. Priceless.

“But he mustn’t know that we know about his takeover plan,” he went on, starting to get excited. “He mustn’t know that I’ve returned, or he will take precautions. So you can’t tell anybody about this, in case he ever catches wind of it, all right? You just claim that you’re evacuating because of what your scientists were picking up from the volcano, and…”

“Now, wait a minute,” some sensible person in the audience objected. “How do we know you don’t just look like that kid who died and aren’t trying to exploit us somehow?”

“Well…”

He paused, not sure how he’d convince them. His hand wandered down to his Pokéballs as he considered the possibility that the newspaper mentioned what Pokémon he owned. But they found his Pokédex first.

He grinned. “Watch this.”

Mark turned the Pokédex on and held it up to his eye, allowing it to scan his iris. There was a little beep, and he put the device down on the table, showing his trainer profile on the screen with his name and even the old school photo which, to Mark’s dismay, had also been printed in the newspaper that still lay open on the table.

He looked over it along with everybody else who was close. He shuddered when he saw the word ‘DECEASED’ written in large red letters by the label ‘Status’ – the League didn’t delete trainer profiles after their deaths. It was unsettling to see his death written out so bluntly.

“I’m not convinced,” somebody mumbled.

“Well, either it’s him or he switched eyes with that kid,” somebody else countered.

“A Ditto?”

“Pokédexes can recognize Ditto.”

“But how could he just come back from the dead?”

People looked at him. And more people looked at him.

“Well,” he said, his mind racing, “I was resurrected… by Mew. Mew is trying to stop Chaletwo’s plan, and he told me all that.” Mew was definitely the best source he could claim, he figured – after all, Mew had always had a reputation of goodness and purity. Sometimes he really loved being knowledgeable about legendary Pokémon.

“Well, I still say we’d need more evidence…”

A man in maybe his fifties or sixties with short, graying hair stood up from the Mayor’s left side. “Enough is enough,” he said loudly. “Let’s be reasonable about this. When do you say Chaletwo will release this Volcaryu you speak of?”

“Tomorrow,” Mark said firmly. “In the morning. We need to have the town evacuated before then.”

The man smiled. “Well, then it is easy enough to find out whether you are telling the truth. We evacuate the town – I think we would all agree that if there is any chance of an eruption, it is wiser to do so than not, and even our representative of the scientific community claims there is something fishy going on with the volcano – and tomorrow morning, I will go with Mark here and see if this Volcaryu really does burst out of the mountain. Sound all right to you?”

The man looked around the room. It was obvious he had a lot of respect in the community because everyone stopped talking and nobody objected. Mark had already guessed who he was when the man turned back towards him, shook his hand and said, “Welcome to Crater Town, Mark. My name is Carl, and I think I’ll keep an eye on you until tomorrow when we can test your claims. I will miss my Gym if you are right, but you will be very sorry if you’re wrong.”

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