“These batches of glass have been lower quality than usual,” an apprentice remarked dubiously.
The glass blowery was a large building, the tall smokestacks billowing out heat. Large panes of glass sat cooling on tables outside, the sun’s scorching ray positively freezing to the glass.
The master sighed, exhaling more fire into the glass furnace. “I am aware. This latest shipment of sand seems to have had improper sand mixed into it.” He was not happy with the quality of the glass, either. “But we must persevere. This shipment was more expensive than all the others combined. If the glass quality suffers, then so be it.”
Another apprentice resumed carefully pouring glass. “This one is one of those weird lenses, right?”
“Correct,” the master replied. “Remember to temper the glass properly.
The apprentice sighed dramatically. He tempered the glass begrudgingly, the glass creating ripples that reflected the light around it as it cooled. He glanced up at the master, who had his attention focused elsewhere, and quietly left off tempering the glass.
Shaun sighed in immense relief as Chansey cut his cast off.
It was the next day. Ampharos had gone down to the clinic earlier that morning and returned with the news that Shaun was to get checked up at the clinic. Both Buizel and Shaun had been nervous, but after a thorough survey, Chansey had pronounced his leg fixed.
“There we go,” she said confidently as she removed the plaster. “Your leg as a whole is still healing, so don’t do anything too strenuous.”
“Is walking strenuous?” Shaun joked. He was very happy to finally have the cast off. “I’ll try, but I have the worst luck in the world regarding that.”
Chansey rolled her eyes. “Maybe if you rested instead of always pushing yourself…”
“Hey, I rest!” Said Shaun defensively. “I get at least five hours of sleep every night!”
“When you should be getting eight to nine hours,” remarked Chansey dryly.
Shaun shut up, looking to Buizel for help. Buizel just shrugged, grinning at the exchange.
They walked out of the clinic, Shaun actually able to keep pace with him again. “Wow, I haven’t been able to properly walk with you in- like, what, a week?” he asked.
“Thereabouts,” Buizel replied. He was just as excited as Shaun to see his cast off. “We can do things again!”
“Yeah, until it rains,” replied Shaun. “It would be really nice if it just… didn’t rain for a week.”
Buizel rubbed the back of his neck. “Yeah. When it rains, Dad has to engage the backup lantern which doesn’t shine as brightly. He’s a lot more on edge whenever it’s active. Trusts himself more than the machine, I think.”
Shaun blinked up at him. “Really? I didn’t notice when it rained last time.”
Buizel laughed a little. “You probably didn’t pay close enough attention, honestly.”
They had been walking up towards the lighthouse, taking the long way around while talking about nothing important. Buizel reveled in how easy it was to talk to Shaun about anything, even things he wouldn’t normally share with his parents.
They paused as they saw Ampharos walking down the path towards them. “Gosh, Ampharos is great, but I always feel like I’m in trouble when he approaches like this,” Shaun muttered to Buizel.
“Hello, Buizel. Shaun,” Ampharos said as he got close, nodding to each of them. “I take it that Shaun is healthy now?”
“Not quite,” Shaun admitted. “I’m supposed to not do anything too crazy.”
Ampharos tilted his head in approval. “Are you two up for a walk?” he asked.
They perked up at this. “Sure!” Shaun replied brightly. “I feel like I could walk forever, now.”
“That feeling might wear off soon,” Ampharos said, walking past them. They fell into step beside him, walking back into town.
“So, did you…” Buizel rolled a paw. “…come to a consensus with Mom?”
Ampharos nodded. “That’s why I’m out here on business.”
They turned into the residential street. “Oh, wait, are we seeing Cinccino?” Buizel asked.
“Yes,” Ampharos replied. “He’s the one who knows where to find the inventor.”
They walked up the stairs to a house that Buizel vaguely recognized, Ampharos knocking on the door. After a moment where Buizel and Shaun awkwardly fidgeted, Cinccino opened the door and glanced at all three of them in surprise. “Oh! I didn’t expect to see you here so early.”
“Business,” Ampharos said. “I need to see the inventor about a possible new project.”
Cinccino nodded. “Ah. This is about that. Alright then, give me a second.” He shut the door and reappeared after a moment carrying a bag of some sort. “Alright, let’s go.”
They followed Cinccino further down the residential district’s road, the buildings growing less colorful and tall as they went. Cinccino glanced around at the buildings regretfully as they went, but he didn’t say anything.
They turned another corner, and Cinccino immediately walked up to a seemingly random door and knocked.
As the other three Pokemon walked up, they heard faint metallic crashing noises, like someone had roughly shoved something off of a table. Shaun and Buizel shared confused glances until the door opened.
A Sobble stood there, looking at them with an unimpressed expression. A pair of worn goggles were strapped to his forehead and the curved hand unoccupied with the door was holding a wrench. “What?” he asked tersely.
Cinccino cleared his throat. “Good afternoon, Sobble. We may have an intense new project for you.”
Sobble took interest in this. “Really,” he said, a slight edge of disbelief in his voice. He eyed the other three Pokemon distrustfully. “And who are these?”
“The Keeper of the lighthouse and-“ Cinccino glanced at Buizel and Shaun appraisingly. “His two sons,” he finished.
Shaun stared at Cinccino in confusion as the Sobble looked Ampharos up and down. “Oh, you’re the one running that thing. Okay, whatever, come in.”
They walked into the house, which was also a workshop. Sobble pointed at several random collections of metal. with his wrench in quick succession. “Don’t touch that, that, that, that, that, or that, and especially not that.”
Shaun looked around the room curiously as the Sobble walked over to a workbench that seemed like it was built for it. “Not sure if anything could be more difficult than this thing,” Sobble muttered, glaring at another loose collection of metal plates that were sitting on the workbench.
Cinccino pulled a chair seemingly out of nowhere and brushed it off before sitting in it. “Do you think you could make something to shoot a meteor out of the sky?”
Sobble considered the question for a long time. “Yesss,” he said, drawing the word out. “Maybe. Possibly. Doesn’t Rayquaza deal with those things, though?”
“He missed this one, apparently,” Buizel muttered under his breath.
“Yes, but this one is a special case,” Cinccino said, stating it more diplomatically.
Sobble walked from the workbench to a large bookshelf that was seemingly full of half-finished blueprints. Near the top was a far emptier shelf that held less than ten blueprints, one of which Sobble grabbed by nimbly climbing the shelf. He walked back over to the workbench and spread it out, staring at it.
Ampharos peered over at it with his long neck. “Reflector cannon, mark five,” he read aloud.
Sobble glared at him. “Hasn’t anymon ever told you that reading over somemon’s shoulder is rude? But, yes, this is about all I can think of.”
Cinccino sat up and looked closer at the blueprint. “Sixteen convex lenses,” he breathed. “Even if I had infinite money, I don’t think I could get them here on time.”
“Right, deadlines.” Sobble put the wrench down on the blueprint. “How much time do I get?”
Cinccino and Ampharos turned to Shaun expectantly. “Oh.” Shaun was, unsurprisingly, caught off-guard. “Um, a little less than a week and a half? I think?”
Sobble grunted. “I’ve had less.” He stared at the blueprint again, seemingly running calculations through his head. “I have most of these materials already, but the power source eludes me. Nothing in the world is powerful enough to fire this thing, except a Legendary.”
Shaun walked over and stared at it. “Couldn’t you just shine a really powerful light through this and then focus it into a crystal to make a laser?”
“I don’t recall asking,” Sobble retorted out of habit. He stared at the blueprint again for a moment. “That would solve the power problem though, yes,” he muttered.
Buizel walked over to the blueprint, getting curious. It was a bunch of white lines that vaguely drew the outline of what looked like a telescope with notes so messy that it made Buizel’s head spin.
Shaun was still looking at the blueprint. “There’s a lot of lost energy as it goes through this.”
“That is the one flaw in this design,” Sobble replied. “I haven’t figured out how to fix it, either. It vexes me to no end.”
“What am I even looking at?” Buizel whispered to Shaun.
Shaun tapped the larger end of the telescope. “You shine something in here,” he muttered, “and it comes out as a concentrated beam here.” He tapped the small end of the telescope.
“The lenses will be a problem,” Sobble mused. “If we’re working on a tight deadline, there is no possible method to get the correctly sized lenses.”
“Where else would you get them, though?” Shaun asked. “This design really relies on how convex lenses focus energy into a single point. Not to mention how it wouldn’t reach that far,” he added.
Sobble glanced at him curiously before hopping back over to the bookshelf and pulling down another set of blueprints. As he spread them out on the table, Buizel realized with a shock that he was looking at the lighthouse. “Wait, isn’t that-?”
“The lighthouse,” Sobble said, cutting him off. “Biggest project of my career. Never topped it. Never properly finished it, either. That elevator has been the bane of my dreams,” he finished in a growl.
“Wait, you were the one who built the elevator?” Buizel stared at him. “The one that breaks down every few days?”
Sobble chuckled darkly. “Everything I build has one fatal flaw. That was the elevator’s.”
Buizel continued staring at him as his brain reconciled this. “You owe me several apologies.”
Sobble, to his chagrin, laughed. “Ah, right, you probably are the family’s mechanic, ain’tcha? Perhaps I do,” he said, shaking his head.
“Why did you pull down the lighthouse blueprint, anyway?” Shaun asked.
Sobble tapped the lantern room. “These, as far as I’m aware, are the only lenses on the island as of current. We could repurpose them for the cannon.”
“Would it destroy the lenses?” Ampharos asked.
Sobble tilted his head. “Everything’s possible. I doubt it. Though I will have to completely redesign the cannon to work around the lighthouse’s lenses instead.” He opened a drawer in the workbench, pulled out a blank blueprint, and spread it out on the table in one smooth motion. He grabbed a white pencil and immediately started sketching something that looked like a large tube. “How many lenses are in the lighthouse?” he asked offhandedly.
“Twelve,” Buizel replied instantly.
“Hmm.” He continued sketching for five minutes, drawing out a new cannon. This design implemented concave lenses and Shaun’s crystal suggestion, using a Shiny Stone as the focal point.
Shaun watched this in interest. “A lot of light is lost unless the inside is reflective.”
“Metal is reflective,” Sobble said by way of dismissal. He continued to draw lines that were incomprehensible to Buizel.
“Wouldn’t the light bounce back out?” Ampharos asked, causing Buizel to jump. He had forgotten he was there.
Sobble paused mid-line. “He’s right,” he muttered.
“One-way glass?” Shaun suggested. “If light goes in but can’t get out, then-“
“One-way glass requires one side to be light and the other side to be dark,” Sobble interrupted. “That won’t work.”
Buizel stared at the cannon on the paper. “Hey, wait, something’s wrong.”
“What is it?” Sobble asked irritably.
“The lenses don’t shine light outward like that,” Buizel said, pointing to a theoretical beam of light which left the lenses at an outward angle. “They shine straight out. That’s why they’re so expensive to replace, right?” he asked Ampharos. “These lenses have to be specially made.”
Ampharos nodded and folded his arms. “I didn’t think about that,” he admitted.
Sobble stared at the blueprint for a minute. He erased about half of the drawing and started over, accounting for this. After a few minutes, Sobble paused. “There would need to be a lot more power in this to destroy a meteor,” he muttered. He whirled to Buizel, who jumped. “Hey, kid. How big is the meteor?”
Buizel exchanged glances with Shaun. “Well, uh… Big. Very, very, very big.”
“From where we were standing, it looked wider than the island,” Shaun added helpfully.
Sobble returned to staring at his blueprint again. He added a bunch of notes that Buizel still couldn’t read, muttering incomprehensibly.
“Unless we get the sun into this, it won’t work,” he said finally.
Buizel’s heart sank. “You’re sure?”
“More than positive,” Sobble said, twirling the pencil. “Light can only do so much damage to rocks. Even with a focus, the resulting beam still wouldn’t be powerful enough.”
“Something I’ve also been worrying about is what happens when the meteor is destroyed,” Cinccino added from his chair. “Would it just… turn into dust? Multiple, large, still falling chunks?”
Sobble pointed at him with his pencil without looking. “He also makes a good point. Unless we can also redirect the meteor, that would be an issue.”
Shaun was still staring at the blueprint. “Ampharos, what can a Time Gear even do?”
This question gained him the attention of all the other Pokemon in the room. “We don’t really know,” Ampharos answered. “We know they keep time flowing, of course, but-“
“How much power do you think a thing like that would have to have to keep time itself moving?” Shaun asked.
Buizel glared at him. “If this is a self-sacrifice thing-“
“No no no no, I’m not suggesting that at all,” Shaun hurriedly clarified. “But would there be a way to siphon power from a Time Gear? Hypothetically.”
Sobble was staring at him. “You have odd ideas,” he said finally, returning to the blueprint. He continued staring at it before penciling in a square with a gear shape inside and drawing lines extending from the panel into the cannon interior. “No idea where you’d find a Time Gear, though,” he said gruffly. “Their locations are secret, and for good reason.”
Everyone else in the room shared glances. “We’ll, uh, think of something,” said Cinccino, faint amusement in his voice.
Sobble drew more notes in the corner of the blueprint. Buizel vaguely made them out as math equations, but they were formulas he had no hope of understanding. “That’s still not powerful enough,” he announced, to the chagrin of everyone else. “Even with a Time Gear, that’s not enough power to destroy a meteor the size of the island.”
“It’s still worth a shot,” Buizel said. “It could be smaller than we thought it was, we were directly beneath the point of impact.”
Sobble side-eyed him. “Uh huh. Regardless, unless there’s a backup sun somewhere, there’s not enough power in this thing. Enough to crack the thing, sure, but not completely destroy it.”
“Do we need to completely destroy it?” Shaun asked. “Why not just… break it into manageable chunks and then dunk them in the ocean?”
This idea hadn’t occurred to anyone else in the room. They all stared blankly at Shaun until he was visibly uncomfortable. “What, did I say something wrong?”
“That idea is so stupid, it just might work,” Sobble said. He eyed the blueprint critically for a moment before adding more notes and moving a few components around. “This would be fantastic for mining operations,” he muttered. “Shame about the Time Gear cost.”
“Can you build it?” Cinccino asked.
Sobble stared at him like he thought he was stupid. “What? No. One, we haven’t even started talking about payment. Two, it’d be missing several vital components.” He tapped the Time Gear plate to make his point. “And three, I don’t have easy access to the lenses of the lighthouse. I’d have to get explicit permission for that.”
“From whom?” Ampharos asked, raising an eyebrow.
“The person running the thing, probably,” he replied offhandedly. He paused, looking at Ampharos. “Ah. Well.”
Ampharos shrugged. “If you need the permission in writing, I’m more than happy to get that sorted.”
Sobble squinted at him. “You’re going along with this.”
Cinccino chucked the bag he had been holding onto the table with a heavy rattle of money. “Here’s the payment. Down half, as usual.”
Sobble stared around at the rest of the Pokemon in the room, speechless. “You’re all going along with this,” he said faintly.
He broke the pencil over his leg and threw it against the wall, where it fell to the floor with a clatter. “Thank Arceus somemon remembers!” he practically screamed, causing Buizel and Shaun to back away hastily. “Just about no one else remembers that damned meteor! Anymon I talk to thinks I’ve gone raving mad!” He flipped the workbench in frustration, sending the blueprints and bag of Poke flying across the room. “And I haven’t been able to figure out how I’d even start to prevent it!”
Cinccino seemed the least shocked out of all of them. “You remember it, too?”
“Yes!” Sobble yelled. “I see that red star in my dreams! Why do you think I went along with this so easily?!” To Buizel’s immense embarrassment, Sobble burst into tears.
Cinccino stood up and put an arm around him comfortingly. “Calm down,” he said softly. “You need to stop getting so worked up.”
“I’ve tried!” Sobble gasped, tears pouring down his face. “I’ve tried, Cinccino! Do you have any idea how frustrating it is to work on a project for five weeks and then have it collapse into nothing? It drives me to tears!”
“I know,” Cinccino said soothingly, a tinge of amusement behind his voice. “I’ve been there.”
Sobble’s sobbing began to subside. “I don’t- I don’t usually have breakdowns like tha- this, anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve worked on it. My utter frustration with the situation just… came to a head.” He glanced regretfully at the broken pencil lying on the floor. “Down another pencil,” he said sadly.
Ampharos had become very invested in a collection of scrap metal. “Well, do you think you’ll be able to make it?” he asked.
“Yes,” Sobble replied. He had mostly calmed down. “It might fail spectacularly, since I don’t have the time to make a prototype, but I can start on the chassis tonight.”
“Excellent.” Ampharos turned to him and nodded. “I’m afraid that I won’t be able to give you the lenses until the day of, unfortunately. Lighthouse business and all.”
Sobble nodded while righting his overturned workbench. “Makes sense. That does raise the chance of catastrophic failure.”
“It’s a risk I’m willing to take,” Ampharos replied. “Better to try something than nothing at all.”
Sobble nodded again. “I’ll try my damnedest to make sure that it works,” he said with conviction.
The finished lens was sent to a warehouse, where it sat in the heat for months.
After a while, it was sent to the docks where it was loaded onto a large raft behind a Lapras.
“Rough seas out there,” the Lapras said conversationally.
“Well, you got fragile cargo,” the dockworker loading his shipment replied. “Bound for Fifty Island, it looks like.”
The Lapras nodded. “Slow and steady, got it.”
The next week passed slowly, with Buizel growing more and more antsy with each passing day.
Buizel glanced at Shaun, who was listening attentively to Breloom teach. Shaun had followed Buizel to school every day for the last week, something Buizel was simultaneously glad and worried about.
“You scare me,” Buizel told him as they were walking home one day. Predictably, it rained through almost the entire week, a fact Shaun wasn’t too happy about. “You’re learning this stuff insanely fast. It’s almost freaky.”
Shaun considered this thoughtfully, staying close to Buizel in an attempt to stay dry. “Really? It’s felt pretty slow to me. I’d probably learn more from hands-on experience.”
That was how they started sparring at the dojo almost daily after school. Buizel didn’t have to beg very hard for Ampharos to subsidize this, Ampharos saying, “You both need the practice.”
After one particularly eventful match, Shaun flopped onto his back, panting exhaustedly. “Wow, I am wiped.”
“As you should be,” Lucario said with a smile. “Going from no training to a match every day isn’t exactly the wisest move.”
Buizel flopped down next to Shaun on the wooden floor. “Yeah,” he panted, “That one was closer than usual.”
“You’ve both been improving exponentially,” Espeon remarked. Espeon had moved back in with Lucario, seemingly returning to an old arrangement. “It’s no surprise that you would be exhausted after a solid week of practice.”
“If I’m staying here, I might as well make up for lost time,” Shaun had said. “I’ve been here a month and still barely know anything.”
Progress on the cannon was slower than anyone would’ve liked. Ampharos checked in every afternoon and returned with increasingly sober reports.
“He’s already running low on materials for the weapon,” he had told them the night prior. “And the supply Lapras most likely won’t have all the things he needs.”
Buizel had sighed fretfully. “I wish there was more that we could do,” he said. “Sitting on my paws doing nothing isn’t the best feeling.”
Shaun patted him on the back affectionately. “At least there’s something being done,” he had said.
Buizel snapped back to the present when Shaun poked him in the side with a paw. “Hey, goofball, school’s over.”
He stared at him. “Goofball?” he asked incredulously.
Shaun grinned at him. “You heard me. Come on, let’s go.”
They walked down the sunny forest path, talking about nothing important. Buizel kept almost forgetting that the meteor was falling, which seemed to be Shaun’s intention.
Sneasel had started to join them on their walks sometimes. Buizel glanced around as they walked, faintly disappointed.
“You’re looking for her too, huh?” Shaun asked ruefully.
Buizel nodded. “She has, just- a refreshing view about how the world works.”
Shaun laughed. “I’d personally call it a ‘jaded’ view, but yeah, it’s certainly refreshing.”
They emerged from the forest path and stared. Over the heads of a curious crowd, they made out Sobble sitting on a large, square piece of metal that looked like it had been bolted together with no care for aesthetics. As Buizel and Shaun walked further into town, they realized Ampharos and Lucario were carrying the square chassis, making their way towards the lighthouse.
“This feels early,” Shaun muttered.
“They’re probably just making sure that more parts fit on site,” Buizel said, even as his heart dropped. “Probably.”
Shaun glanced up at the red star in the sky, which was beginning to look less like a star and more like a distant light. “I wish that we weren’t even worrying about this.”
Outside the lighthouse, they had run into a problem. Sobble was surveying the house’s door critically through his goggles, the chassis more than twice its width. “…Unless we cut a larger gap, this won’t fit,” he was saying as they walked up.
“An issue, indeed,” Lucario said, investigating the chassis they had rested on the grass. “This is incredible work for only a week with no prior notice.”
Sobble waved a dismissing hand at him. “It is absolutely not ‘incredible work’; it’s probably barely going to work.”
Shaun walked over to the chassis curiously. Bolts stuck through the metal at odd angles, and it looked like it would fall apart if he even so much as thought about Tackling it. He rapped it with a paw experimentally, the chassis staying together despite its appearance. “Pretty well built regardless,” he remarked.
Sobble whirled to face him. “You! You have good ideas. How do we get this thing up to the lantern room?”
Shaun took an involuntary step back, looking at him blankly. “Um. Tie a rope around it and pull it up from the top of the lighthouse?”
Ampharos tapped his chin thoughtfully. “We do need to remove a lens for fitting, anyway. Worth a shot.”
“It wouldn’t be a big enough gap, still,” Sobble replied. But he looked at the top of the lighthouse, considering the option. “We would need a hundred and fifty feet of rope.”
Buizel blinked. “Do they even make ropes that long?”
“Not usually.” Sobble hopped onto the top of the chassis, landing with a sound that reverberated through the metal. “We can achieve the same effect by tying several ropes together.”
Lucario stood up from where he had been kneeling in the grass. “I will source the rope. I will be back shortly.”
He started off down the hill, everyone else watching him. “I swear, Cinccino knows the weirdest ‘mons,” Sobble muttered under his breath, taking his goggles off and letting them rest on his forehead.
After a few minutes of awkward silence, filled only by the sea breeze, they sighted Lucario climbing the hill, carrying several bundles of rope on his shoulder. Sobble hopped to the ground as Lucario dropped the rope onto the grass, Sobble picking up a rope coil and looking closely at it. “Not the highest quality rope, but it’ll get us there,” he said, beginning to tie the rope around the chassis. “Go up there and knock out a lens so we can get the thing inside.”
“Why do you want it inside the lantern room?” Buizel asked, confused.
“Highest point on the island that I can easily reach,” Sobble replied, as if he should’ve known the answer already. “One, makes it more accurate to fire; two, it’ll hit the meteor sooner so that there’s less room for error.”
“Oh.” Buizel still felt confused as Ampharos waved him inside.
They rode the elevator to the top of the lighthouse, Buizel walking over to the one lens that they used as a door to the tiny balcony surrounding the lantern room. “Are you sure there’s enough room for the thing?” Buizel asked dubiously.
Ampharos pushed against the frame that kept the lenses in place. “Theoretically, this can be unbolted. Sobble built the lantern room, he should know how to take it apart.”
They unbolted the lens with ease and gently, gently laid it across the floor, on the side of the room that faced the ocean. “The meteor is over the island,” Ampharos explained. “We’re going to need to aim the cannon that way.”
Buizel went outside and looked down again. The Pokemon on the ground had finished tying the ropes together and around the square chassis. He waved to let them know that they were ready before pausing and turning to Ampharos. “Hey, Dad, how are we going to get the rope up here?”
“They’ll attempt to throw it up, probably,” Ampharos said with amusement. “Don’t try to pull it up once you do have the rope, that metal is deceptively heavy.”
Buizel looked back down and saw the end of the rope floating up to him, seemingly of its own accord. He caught it and tied it to the balcony railing before processing what just happened and staring down at the Pokemon on the ground again.
Espeon was there, his tails waving genially as he talked with the other three Pokemon. He glanced up at Buizel and nodded.
Buizel turned and walked into the lantern room. “Rope’s sorted,” he stated simply.
Ampharos glanced at him with surprise. “That was quick. Let’s go collect the others.”
They rode the elevator down, Buizel praying that it wouldn’t fail. “I don’t trust this thing as far as I can throw it,” he told Ampharos over the clacking noise it made.
“Considering it’s built into the floor, you’d have a very hard time throwing it indeed,” Ampharos replied.
On the ground floor, Shaun watched them step off the elevator from the kitchen. “Hey, welcome back to planet Earth,” he joked. “How was the weather up there?”
Buizel grinned a little, even if he didn’t understand the joke. “About the same. Slightly colder, I guess.”
Shaun snorted. “You take things too literally.” He glanced towards the open door fretfully. “I wish I was able to help with- anything, really.”
“You’ll need your strength to help fire the weapon,” Ampharos replied. “Patience, Shaun.”
“Patience is boring,” Shaun replied as they walked out the door.
Outside, Espeon and Lucario were chatting amicably. “We’re set,” Ampharos said, interrupting them.
Lucario nodded in approval. “Sobble went to fetch something. He made it very clear to wait for him first.”
“Odd Pokemon,” Espeon said, glancing down the road. “Good, but odd.”
“Why are we doing this today?” Buizel asked.
“The supply Lapras arrives tomorrow,” Ampharos said offhandedly, watching for Sobble. “He’s depending on new parts, and he wants to make sure that the lenses fit properly.”
Buizel’s stomach fell through the ground. “T-tomorrow. The supply Lapras is… tomorrow.”
Ampharos glanced at his son in sudden worry. “Are you alright?”
“The meteor hits tonight,” Buizel explained. “There won’t- be an island tomorrow.”
There was a sober silence. Buizel glanced up at the sky again, the red star glowing ominously through the bright sky. He didn’t want to relive that experience again.
Sobble walked into view, carrying a satchel. He glanced around at the others for a minute. “Something wrong?”
Ampharos cleared his throat, making Buizel jump. “The meteor hits tonight.”
Sobble looked directly up into the sky, knowing exactly what to look for. He silently walked behind the house, where they heard an incoherent shout of frustration, followed by a torrent of exotic sounding swears. He walked back around the house calmly as if nothing had happened. “Needed to get that out of my system,” he said tersely as he saw their faces. “Let’s head up to the lantern room.”
They all bundled into the house. Sobble glanced at the furnished house appreciatively as they all stepped onto the elevator.
Almost predictably, as Ampharos pushed the button to make the elevator go up, it stalled and remained on the floor with a shudder. Buizel groaned, stepping off of the elevator. “Broken again. Here, I’ll-“
Before Buizel could even react, Sobble disappeared under the elevator, barely letting the other Pokemon step off of the platform first. A loud WHAM emanated from below, followed by more exotic sounding curses.
Shaun blinked from his place at the kitchen table. “Whoa, that guy’s got quite a mouth.”
“I’ll say,” Ampharos muttered disapprovingly.
After a few minutes of random noises, Sobble climbed out from underneath the platform, panting, with a triumphant gleam in his eye. “Fixed it,” he proclaimed. “Fixed it for good, I should wager.”
“Really?” Buizel asked, unable to keep the skepticism out of his voice. “Every time I’ve fixed it, it breaks less than a week later.”
“One tiny, exploitable fault,” Sobble said. “One. That’s gone, now.”
They stepped onto the elevator again. This time, it worked like a dream, carrying all five of them to the antechamber.
They climbed up into the lantern room proper, Espeon looking around in wonder. “I’ve wondered what it’s like up here,” he said conversationally. “So much has changed since I left.”
“For better or worse,” Lucario muttered.
Sobble dragged the lens across the floor with a grinding sound, causing both Ampharos and Buizel to wince. “Careful with that,” Ampharos said.
Sobble expertly darted around the chassis, unbolting plates until there was an opening large enough to fit the lens. He slotted it inside, the lens almost too big to fit properly.
“Well,” he said, after jumping down and viewing the lens from the inside. “It’ll work. Barely.”
“Barely?” Buizel asked.
“If any of these lenses have a flaw— or a crack— when it’s fired, the entire thing explodes.” Sobble tightened the bolts again, both the glass and the metal complaining about this. “From what I can tell, all of your lenses are perfectly fine.”
The lens was carried over the water, miles upon miles of water.
After what seemed like an eternity, it finally arrived at Fifty Island.
It was unloaded by a particularly surly dockworker, who placed it roughly against the ground. “Bound for the lighthouse, most likely,” the worker muttered.
After a while, Ampharos wandered down to the dock. He inspected the lens, as was his due diligence, and carried it up to the lighthouse. The old lens was lying on the floor already, a large crack across the middle.
Ampharos carefully slotted it into the frame, and left to dispose of the other, cracked lens. As the glass settled into its new home, the lower quality glass fractured.
Barely detectable with the naked eye, inside the glass itself, the sand’s structure was compromised, a crack forming between two ripples.
Three days later, Buizel had been sent to clean the lenses of the lighthouse as punishment for venturing into the forest without permission. The morning sun had gleamed off of the crack, exposing its flaw for what it was. Buizel had noticed it, but before he could say anything—
“Alright, Buizel! That’s enough for today!”
He had glanced up at the sky, confused by how early he was being let off. He scampered down the ladder gratefully, the forgotten crack in the lens glimmering brightly.