With Hylda's speed, Lars wouldn't have to run for long before the two met in the middle. The equine grew icicles on the bottoms of her hooves to come to a quick stop, rearing and making Josh happy there was a guard on her saddle to keep him from being speared by the back of her mane. "Hylda might be the fastest Glastrier in Hoenn, but I don't know this place like you do!" he pleaded, trying to convince Lars to keep a swift pace, but one he could keep up with.

Josh, the Master of Faster, not wanting to go at breakneck speeds? What was this?

Once all was settled, Hylda would closely trail Lars and Hengroen to the uncharted depths of the ice prison beneath Shoal Cave...

Josh hadn't bonded with Hylda for terribly long. If he was being honest, it had been just long enough for him to exert as close as he was going to get to full control over the shard of the legendary horse. The cold was starting to get to the Mauville Leader, too. He had been fairly deep in the cave before, but nothing like this. They were below the ice prison level, in an area he had no idea existed. The cold was numbing; frost started to form on the Leader's nose.

"L-l-l-lead the way," Josh answered with a shiver. "Hyl-d-d-d-da, k-k-k-keep pace with Lars-s-s-s-s." There was little wonder Articuno was so deep in the cave; was it true that only Avatars of ice Patrons could survive for long periods at such depths?

Slipping into Lars' Overcoat, Josh thanked Lars for taking care of him in an environment he could not withstand alone. It was so cold that his fire Pokémon would have to take turns keeping Josh warm; even they would freeze in such an inhospitable environment.

Josh gasped at the iced-over tunnel. It looked almost exactly like the one from Shalin's route on that phone game that was once all the rage. Little did he know how occupied it would keep him after the injuries he would suffer in Dewford. "Why does this look all too... familiar?" he asked, the words out of his mouth nearby visible in his breath that crawled through the frigid air. Who would have known that one of the coldest places on the planet was beneath the tropics?

"Remember that phone game?" Josh quickly answered, the overcoat working wonders at keeping him warm in the subzero environment. "When I was at the airport, I played Shalin's route. Its third level looked just like this." The level of detail and the level of truth between what Macro Cosmos came up with and what was in front of him was unreal.

"Vaguely," the Gym Leader answered. "I didn't hear them at all when we raced one another. Something's really wrong with them, isn't it?" That brought another thought to the forefront of Josh's mind. "Legendary Pokémon truly do operate by different rules, don't they? Perhaps that's yet another reason it might be a good idea that I put my pursuit of Raikou on the backburner after all..." At least until he had another solid idea. The gods very much operated on their own timetable, with almost all of them outliving humans. He wondered how old Raikou was. According to what he remembered from his childhood, Ho-oh and her Beasts were centuries old, but there was no way to know how much of it was truth and how much was tale.

Hylda lowered her head, preparing to ICICLE CRASH into the ice wall, but Josh pulled back on her sharply to get her to stop. "They're beyond that tunnel, aren't they?"

Though it had been pulled, Josh kept the app on his phone, and there were still private servers to play on. He didn't play as often as he used to, but it was nice to have when he was at an airport or otherwise in a long line. It was addicting, to say the least.

"Wait, Glastrier is a legendary Pokémon? A god?" he asked Lars, Hylda whinnying and shaking her head. "I thought they were just really rare. Yours and mine aren't the only two I've seen before." If what Lars said was true, Josh wasn't treating Hylda with enough respect. He truly believed that shards of the gods, at their core, were no different than normal Pokémon. They were just rare. The more and more Avatarships he witnessed, Josh saw fewer symbiotic relationships between Patron and Avatar. Lugia, then Wo-Chien, and now, Articuno.

"If the cost of Avatarship is to largely give up my freedom as a human being, I wouldn't want to do it." With no one around, Josh could speak his mind to Lars. "The whole reason I wanted to be an Avatar from the beginning was never about divine power, recognition, or getting on AQUA to begin with." The Gym Leader wiped his face before his tears froze.

"I just want to have a Raikou at my side. Not the Raikou. A Raikou."

Perhaps Glastrier was not a god after all. Was Hylda just a rare Pokémon? Lars certainly made it seem that way. Either way, he was happy to have her at his side. Though the ice horse was not the fastest of Josh's Pokémon, the specialized training they had completed together made her among the swiftest of her kind.

Lars' worry did not go unnoticed. Josh had spent enough time talking to people on the AQUA Initiative to understand the commitment it was bonding with such a creature. "As a Gym Leader, I'm already a puppet of the League's whims. We were all hands on deck for Meteno, for Dewford One, and for Dewford Two. What's so different? It sounds like being an Avatar involves many of the same responsibilities I'm already performing. The League hasn't been on my ass since... what's it been, a year now? They must think I'm doing a good job."