This Cryptid Plays Pokémon?

*The thing about the second-floor vending machines is that they are worth it. You stand by this. The selection is better, the prices are the same, and nobody from the first-floor cluster comes up here except during lunch rush. It is, by any reasonable metric, the superior vending machine experience.

What it is not is a defensible position.

You became aware of this approximately four minutes ago when* Sakurai Momo* rounded the far end of the corridor with the cheerful inevitability of a weather event. Yami wasn't with her — Yami is never the first one visible, which is a tactical decision you have come to respect professionally even while dreading it personally — but Kuroki Reiko was two steps behind, phone out, dark eyes doing that specific thing they do when she's already filming. This is never a good sign. Reiko documents. Reiko has been documenting your situation for the better part of a year and has what you can only assume is an extensive archive.

You made a decision.

You are currently living with that decision.

The thing about Kuroda Yami is that she doesn't chase. She redirects. The pack moves with the unhurried confidence of people who know the building better than you do, which they do, because Yami memorized the floor plan in first year and has been running informal traffic control ever since. They don't run. They don't need to run. They simply appear at the places you were planning to go, already there, already waiting, Momo laughing at something and Reiko not looking up and Yami standing slightly ahead of both of them with her arms crossed and the expression of someone who has decided that today is a day for this.

You have been redirected once past the east stairwell and once away from the courtyard exit.

You are not running. You are walking with great purpose and excellent navigation instincts toward a destination you are still selecting.

The library annex corridor is quiet. It is always quiet — the annex connects the main library to the old reference wing, and nobody uses the old reference wing except for students who specifically need to be somewhere with no witnesses. You have never needed this corridor before. You need it now. You round the corner at a speed that is technically still walking, and you nearly clear it before you stop.

There is someone sitting on the floor.*

*Back against the wall beneath the window, knees drawn up, a handheld console balanced on one knee with the specific unconscious ease of someone who has been holding one since childhood. Silver-white hair loose around her shoulders. Grey spotted ears, relaxed and slightly angled — not alert, not scanning, just present in the way of someone completely absorbed. The afternoon light comes through the window behind her and she doesn't notice because she is staring at her screen with an expression that is cycling, very slowly, through several distinct stages of internal conflict.

Shirayuki Ren.

Third Year, class 3B. The student that hallways part around. The name spoken in a particular tone — not quite reverence, not quite awe, something that sits in the space between reputation and myth. You have seen her in corridors, in assemblies, at a distance that everyone seems to maintain without discussing. Cold, they say. Lofty. The Ice Queen. The kind of person who exists at a slight remove from ordinary social physics.

She is currently muttering something under her breath that sounds like *no, Dachsbun doesn't have the coverage, but if I swap Garganacl then Larry just walls me with Staraptor again—

*She looks up.

You are in the doorway. You are breathing harder than you intended. Your hair is doing something from the sprint that wasn't a sprint.

She looks at you with pale eyes that take in the full situation — the breathing, the positioning, the angle you came from — in about two seconds.

She looks back at her screen.*

"Larry?" you say, because your mouth has made a decision without consulting you.

"Elite Four rematch," *she says, in the tone of someone who does not find this conversation strange. *"He uses Staraptor in the second fight. Everyone says Annihilape but Annihilape misses the speed tier by four points and you lose the priority trade." *She tilts the screen slightly, whether to show you or simply because the angle is better is unclear. *"I've been running Dachsbun for the Fairy coverage but the EVs aren't landing the way I want and I have seventeen different opinions about it."

*From somewhere around the far corner — getting closer — the sound of platform boots on tile.

Ren's ear rotates toward the sound. Back toward you. The calculation takes approximately one second.*

"There's a gap behind the reference shelf," she says, already looking back at her screen. "Second row from the back. They never check it. The dust hasn't been disturbed in at least a month so mind your uniform."

She selects a move. Her expression does something small and dissatisfied.

"Staraptor used Close Combat," *she says, to no one.

A pause.*

"I'm switching to Annihilape."

*The boots are close now.

You make a decision.*

You clock it about thirty seconds too late: they're not chasing you. They're funneling you.

Momo peels off from the vending machines the second you pass the stairwell, falling into step beside you with the easy, unhurried pace of someone who already knows exactly where this hallway leads and has no intention of running to find out. Reiko materializes from the other direction a few seconds later — not fast, just already there, the way she always seems to be already wherever she's going before you've registered her leaving anywhere.

You are being walked toward the East Yard gate. You are fairly sure neither of them has said this out loud. You are fairly sure it's true anyway.

"You know," Momo says, conversationally, tail giving one lazy sweep behind her, "for a guy who runs this much, you'd think you'd have better cardio. I've clocked your mile time. It's not good."

"You've clocked my mile time."

"I've clocked a lot of things." She says this with the specific cheer of someone daring you to ask what "a lot of things" means. You do not ask. She looks faintly disappointed, then recovers instantly, because disappointment has never once slowed Momo down. "Anyway. You know where this ends, right? You always end up at the gate. It's very consistent. I could set a clock by it, if I didn't already have a spreadsheet."

"The Document," you say, before you can stop yourself.

Momo's ears do something delighted. "You know about the Document?"

"I know it exists. Nobody's ever shown me the Document."

"Nobody's supposed to know it exists," Reiko says, from your other side, not looking over, tone flat enough to be reporting the weather.

"You told him?" Momo, scandalized, entirely delighted regardless.

"He guessed. You're loud about it."

Momo puts a hand to her chest like she's been shot, and recovers from that in about the same time it took her to recover from the disappointment, which is to say immediately.

The hallway narrows toward the gate. You could, theoretically, turn around. You do not turn around. You've noticed, distantly, that you haven't tried to lose them since the stairwell — that somewhere in the last minute this stopped being an escape and started being a walk you're taking with company you didn't ask for and can't quite justify wanting to shake.

"Can I ask you something," you say, mostly to Reiko, because asking Momo a direct question tends to produce several answers to questions you didn't ask.

"You can ask."

"Is this about Yami?"

Reiko's tail doesn't move. Her ears don't move. Nothing about her moves, which you're starting to understand is itself an answer, the same way Ren's stillness apparently means something you haven't fully worked out yet.

"Everything's about Yami," she says. Not unkind. Just accurate, the way she says everything.

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I'm giving you today."

Momo, delighted by the exchange in a way that suggests she's already mentally filing it somewhere, loops back in. "Okay, but, for the record, nobody told you to go to the gate. You're just going. That's the part I find fascinating, personally. You could go literally anywhere else in this building and you keep ending up exactly where she is."

"I don't even know where she is right now."

"Sure," Momo says, in the tone of someone humoring a small child's theory about Santa.

The gate is close now — close enough that you can see the usual after-school crowd thinning toward it, the particular gravity a school exerts at the end of the day, everyone pulled toward the same exit whether they mean to be or not. You don't know if Yami's actually on the other side of it. You don't know if that's even the point.

"You're doing this on purpose," you say. "Both of you. Right now."

"Obviously," Reiko says.

"Extremely," Momo agrees, entirely without shame.

Neither of them slows down. Neither of them speeds up either. You keep walking, and somewhere behind your ribs you register that you have stopped resenting the direction, which is its own small, inconvenient piece of information you are choosing not to examine yet.

The gate is right there.

You have no idea what's waiting on the other side of it. You're going to find out anyway.

You're the last one out of Class 2A, which is normal enough — you'd stayed to finish the reading you should have finished last night, the room going gold and then grey as the afternoon burned off, and by the time you're shouldering your bag the hallway outside has that after-school quiet that means everyone worth avoiding has already gone home.

Except Yami is standing in the doorway.

Not leaning against it. Standing in it, arms crossed, blocking roughly sixty percent of your only exit, with the stillness of someone who has been there for a while and has no intention of explaining why.

"You're slow," she says, which is not hello.

"I didn't know I was on a schedule."

"You're always on a schedule. You just don't know whose." She pushes off the doorframe, and you have approximately one second to decide whether "slow" was a complaint about right now or about your entire personality before she's already walking, which means you're already following, which means this decision apparently made itself.

This is, as far as you can tell, just how it works with Yami. She doesn't ask. She states a direction and you find out whether you're going in it by whether your feet have already started moving.

"You smell like you skipped lunch," she says, not looking back, like this is a normal thing to open with.

"I didn't skip lunch."

"You skipped lunch." Not a question. She says it the way you'd correct a math error — flatly, with zero interest in debate, because the debate already happened and you lost it before you knew you were in one. "There's a place by the east gate. You're buying me something and you're going to eat while you're at it."

"I'm buying you something."

"That's the deal."

"There's a deal? When did we agree to a deal?"

"Just now." She glances back at this point, and there's something in it — not quite a smile, more the ghost of the idea of one, gone before you can be sure you saw it. "Keep up."

You keep up. You tell yourself this is about the fastest route to the gate happening to be the same direction she's walking, and not about anything else, and you almost believe it.

Near the stairwell, a second-year you don't recognize starts to say something to you — something about borrowing notes, probably, it's that time of the semester — and doesn't get three words out before Yami's attention swings onto him like a searchlight.

"He's busy."

The second-year takes one look at her expression and decides, wisely, that his notes can wait for a version of you that isn't currently being escorted somewhere by Kuroda Yami. He's gone before you can tell him it's fine, actually, you had time.

"I had time," you say.

"You didn't need to spend it on him." She says this like it settles something. You're not sure what.

At the konbini, she doesn't ask what you want. She hands you a drink — the same brand you always get, which you've never once mentioned to her, which means either she's guessed correctly by pure coincidence four separate times or she's been paying an amount of attention that doesn't match anything she's ever said out loud — and takes one for herself, and doesn't wait for you to pay before she's already walking back out.

"You're covering this."

"You said that already."

"I'm saying it again so you don't forget." A pause, while she cracks open her own drink one-handed, entirely unbothered. "You never argue about it."

"Would it work if I did?"

"No." She considers this, actually considers it, which surprises you more than the answer does. "But you could try. Most people would've tried by now."

You don't have a response to that. You're not sure it wanted one. Her tail, which has been doing absolutely nothing this entire walk, gives one small, involuntary flick — there and gone, stilled almost before it starts — and if you'd blinked you'd have missed it entirely.

You didn't blink.

You don't know what to do with that either.

She finishes her drink before you've opened yours, tosses the can with the easy precision of someone who's never once missed a bin, and peels open a tuna mayo onigiri — you don't even remember seeing her grab one — taking a bite before nodding at your bag, still empty-handed.

"What food are you buying?"

You don't say anything, just look at her perplexed.

She seems, faintly, like she was expecting that. You can't tell if she's relieved or disappointed. You're starting to suspect she can't either.