"I'll be sure to let 'em know."

He laughs, too, grateful for the way his friend can distract from the fury that had threatened to overwhelm.

"That's the one. The Baths are really nice." Tourists often couldn't understand the appeal of taking a dip in the cold, but the heated pool of the Hero's Bath was an experience like no other. He chuckles at Mars' recollection. "Before we nearly got crushed by the avalanche? Yeah."

He misses the snow, more than he'd ever thought he would.

"Hoenn definitely wouldn't have been my choice of region." He'd have moved somewhere like Kalos, or Sinnoh, somewhere that cold wasn't a distant memory outside of strange fluctuations in natural weather. "And not because of the constant threat of Wormholes, Ultra Beasts, Necrozma, the end of the world..." He taps his fingers as he lists them off.

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"If my choices are snow and wormholes or neither, I think I know what I'm picking."

He laughs, too, but there's a weight behind it. He's submitted detailed reports on his experiences during the Three Day War and the Blackout of Slateport. How Giratina and the League's head scientist had both seemed out for blood. How Necrozma had killed so many Pokémon, including the Crobat and Lucario who'd seen him through Kanto.

He finally reels in his empty line to reset it.

"What do you miss?"

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Mars makes a grim yet valid point; after the wormholes had stopped being a too-regular occurrence, the Triad had become a problem. If they dealt with the Triad somehow, no doubt something else would rise to take their place. Hoenn was a magnet for chaos.

"I've always wanted to see Coronet." Or, more accurately, he'd like to ascend to its peak and test its slopes. Mountain climbing and snowboarding made most snow-capped mountains a source of great interest. "I get you on the food, though. Hard to find a place that serves a proper Galarian breakfast. They always leave something out."

The little hole-in-the-wall place Tempest Quinn had found in Sootopolis was close, though.

"The food," he agrees, chuckling, when the question is posed to him in turn. "The snow. The mountains being so close. Fallarbor with Chimney was nice, but the ash really compromised the view. And the lungs." Circhester's air felt clean and crisp, tasted like winter. "I miss the Stadiums, too. You don't get gym battles like that anywhere else."

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"I used to sneak out and get tickets from scalpers."

The adrenaline rush that he'd get as a result of deceiving his parents had led into the roaring excitement of the crowd. The way the whole stadium would shake with the raw power of a Dynamaxed Pokémon's moves. It had made the punishments that inevitably followed when he was caught worth enduring.

Those memories are made bittersweet by the knowledge that Necrozma was wreaking havoc in Galar and feeding off deposits of Dynergy from which those matches drew.

He's distracted by the mention of fanatics, nose wrinkling.

"Got a fair few of those in Galar, too. Parents paid lip service to the Church," that being the Church of Arceus, "but they kept up some with the old faith surrounding the birds, as well." Where religion for some was a source of comfort, Gavin knew only pain and punishment. "You remember Bill?" The Anderson patriarch had served brief on the Council. "He always unsettled me. Reminded me too much of my dad."

When Thomas was putting on the face of a good, Arceus-fearing man, and not the face of Father.

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It seemed they shared similar religious traumas; yet another similarity to draw them together.

"He definitely killed his wife."

It was, perhaps, an open secret among Rocket. Never talked about explicitly, but understood by those who knew.

Gavin can't imagine a world in which he'd bring an end to Tempest Quinn. Perhaps if the other were to betray Rocket, to betray him, but that idea alone is so unfathomable as to be shut down in its infancy. He'd never.

Reeling in his line, Gavin unhooks the Carvanha at the end of it and casts it back into the water, careful not to get cut up by its rough skin.

"Hard to wrap my head around the fact that we might've seen Arceus." The deity that had shadowed his childhood. "Never mind the fact that it apparently wants to kill us all. S'pose that tracks."

Arceus had never seemed kind in the framing of his parents' beliefs.

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