“He’s been in there for almost an hour.”

“Mmm.”

“Should we go in, Dad?”

“Interfering with a Host’s gym battle would violate the Upstream Clause. Revo would appear, wave his banhammer, and banish us all to Ultra Space.”

“Ultra Space? I thought it was the Distortion World.”

“For most people. The banishment is intended as a punishment. Some of my best friends are in the Distortion World. The Panthemon knows this. Revo knows this. If Revo intended to punish me --”

“Whoa, Dad,” Doyle said, putting his hands up defensively. “I get it! There’s no need to get started on that one again.”

A tactical move on the kid’s part. Nobody wanted to get Ronin started on Eldritch dimensions, or specifically the kinds of things that lived there. Some of which still remembered what he tasted like.

But it was a moot point anyway, because at that precise moment, Paul came barreling out of the Moraga City Gym, holding a Bellsprout-head-shaped badge up triumphantly. “Hey! Guess who just won a -- HELIXDOMEIT GET THAT THING AWAY FROM ME RONIN! It’s just me, Paul!”

Never startle a ninja with PTSD. A rather sheepish Honedge carefully backed its point away from Paul’s eyes. “Sorry. Force of habit. Cress gets uneasy around places with too much purple.”

“Don’t call me that,” Ronin shot back, motioning for the Honedge to return to its sheath. “You know how I feel about that name.”

“I think that’s why he does it,” Paul pointed out, only to get looks from Ronin and Doyle that clearly said that they both knew that and he didn’t need to bother them about it any further. “Um, that’s a he, right? Shonedge? The dagger from the --”

“Sssh!” Ronin hissed. There were some things that you just didn’t talk about in public, especially if you were supposed to be a ninja.

Surprisingly, nobody was around to watch that little fiasco. Nobody visible, anyway. Probably because the entire place reeked of Max Repel and the broken dreams of a million male badge-seekers. Sexism went both ways, unless you were Lois, in which case it goes whichever way you want it to.

Which was something Ronin and Doyle were not unaware of.

“So…” Doyle said uncomfortably, “how’d the gym battle go?”

“Well,” Paul went on, “Lois has some pretty capable female trainers in her gym.”

Doyle and Ronin nodded politely.

“Probably to hide the fact that she’s a total pushover.”

Doyle and Ronin did not nod politely.

Not that Paul was paying attention. “This is how the gym battle basically went: ‘Fly. Fly. Fly.’ PK wrecked her in three shots! Speaking of which, guess who evolved in the gym?”

The Host’s bat Pokemon popped out of his ball to wave hello. Now no longer a Zubat, its bright eyes gleamed, and it grinned with a mouthful of fangs that Paul was relieved to see didn’t actually make Ronin twitch. “Hey all. Nice to see ya, finally. Oh, yeesh, man, what is with your HAIR? It grow like that, or you just never wash it?”

Paul quickly recalled the Golbat into his ball. “Trollbat, that’s Ronin Fields, Acolyte of Cover, patron of life, nature, ninjas, and musicals. We do not insult an acolyte’s hair!”

“It’s not a problem.” Ronin actually smiled a little. “My dreadlocks do take work to maintain. They also require washing as much as any other hairstyle.”

There was an awkward silence.

“So, uh, Mr. Ronin, sir…” Paul stumbled on the words, not quite sure how to address an immortal acolyte. “How about we grab a victory dinner at Nations Burgers?”

Ronin twitched.

Paul gulped, realizing the faux paus he’d just committed. “...right. You’re vegetarian.”

Most servants of Cover were vegetarian, or at least had limited meat intake. In Ronin’s case, he’d lost his appetite for meat after realizing he was made of it.

“Or,” Doyle suggested, trying to diffuse the tension, “we could head over to the local Church of Cover and Dad could cook us something.”

Paul perked up at this. Fast food was well and good, but a chance to have a gourmet meal cooked by an accomplished chef in his own right wasn’t something a poor boy like him got offered every day. “Really?”

Ronin sighed. “You want me to bring a Host to a Church of Cover. Our church locations are secret. Hosts are not known for their subtlety. Also, Revo will banish my head to Ultra Space if Streamer thinks I’m interfering with the experiment. If I’m lucky, he’ll banish the rest of me with it.”

Paul snorted. “Some acolyte of Cover you are, then. Couldn’t you just do what Evan did with Yugi and send a substitute Host? I’ve got an accomplished actor on my team! Quartz and I could pull that off!”

Ronin thought this over. “And how would you transfer the Voices from one Host to another without a reality reset?”

“Evan could do that. And wasn’t he an acolyte of Amber?” An Amber, anyway, at least before the OLDEN event.

“Evan was a supernatural entity created by the Amber of the old Pokearth-3 for the purposes of preventing OLDEN from having its way with reality. Which, I might add, failed miserably. I,” Ronin went on, “am a human acolyte of Cover, the god of fair play, and I am also losing my patience. If you want to cheat the system, talk to Plume.”

Paul couldn’t have looked any more hurt if Ronin had slapped him right in the face.

“Hey, hey, hey!” Doyle interjected, getting between the two. “Dad’s not saying it’s impossible! Just that he’s not the guy to ask about it!” He glanced at his father. “I mean, after the whole S.S. Anne incident when Revo got mad at him for losing a Host--”

“I was not the one that lost the Host,” Ronin pointed out. “I am loath to admit this, but I spent most of that incident requiring rescue. I was never anywhere near Yugi and Evan at that time.”

“I’m just saying,” Doyle said apologetically, “we think Revo probably kind of still hates our guts over this. It was a LOT of trouble trying to figure out a way to continue the experiment without putting Yugi through any more harm, and Dad’s not the one that actually did the transfer. So sorry, but you’ll have to think of something else.”

Paul took a deep breath. “Yugi. Yugi F. Moto. Host to the Voices, an ancient Ranseian claiming to be Nobunaga but actually some demented Tombkeeper called Mark or Marik, and an extradimensional entity called Evan Nescent. Just not all at once. Correct?”

Ronin was officially impressed. “...yes.”

“And I’m guessing that Honedge you threw at me is the Sorcerer Sho that got imprisoned in that OLDEN dagger that Marik had on him. The one that’s…” Paul couldn’t really bring himself to point out the Sorcerer’s origin story, as it was pretty painful to all involved.

“I didn’t throw him.” Ronin really didn’t like having knives on himself anyway. “Sho does what Sho does.”

An idea came to Paul’s mind. It was a wonderful, awful idea. “Maybe you can’t transfer the Voices into a doppelganger of me,” he said softly. Cunningly. “But I think the Sorcerer could.”

Ronin’s look of alarm reached an 8.10 on the richter scale. “You, the Host of the Voices, want… the dagger. OLDEN’s dagger. The dagger belonging to the ultimate Eldritch deity, whose power fused countless universes into a single timeline, resulting in the destruction of countless trillions of lives. The dagger that, once stabbed into a body, can only be removed by the wielder. The dagger that, for that very reason, contains my amoral, chaotic neutral, and psychologically unstable randomized personality, which under any other circumstances would be able to jump from host to host like…”

The realization hit Ronin. “Dear gods. The Sorcerer could actually do it.”

Paul nodded smugly.

Ronin massaged his temples. “That... is either brilliant, or universe-scale suicidal.”

“Hey,” Sho’s voice came from its sheath. “What’s the matter? Don’t trust yourself with that much power? You know I don’t like the OLDEN and its cultists any more than you do. If they try to wield ME, I’ll do things to them that give your nightmares nightmares. And knowing your nightmares, I’m still not exaggerating.”

“And that is precisely what terrifies me.”

Paul twitched. He’d been trying to suppress the Voices’ insistence that he move forward, or sideways, or backwards -- the Voices seemed unable to decide on the right direction. “Will you lend me the dagger or not? Or should I be asking the Honedge itself that?”

“Watch who you call an ‘it,’ buddy,” Shonedge warned. “So you wanna shrug off the Voices for a few hours and go out for artisan pizza?”

Doyle had been quiet for a while, but now he spoke up. “If you want to avoid catching Revo’s attention, you might want to find a suitable replacement for your Porygon. Something that looks somewhat similar. Something… ducklike.”

Paul thought a bit. “Hmm… not much really looks like a Porygon, but then my Porygon doesn’t look much like a Porygon all the time either. A Magby, perhaps, if I could find one?”

“Well, if you’re doing the gym badge challenge,” Sho put in, “at some point you’ll need a surfer. And according to Cress’s contacts, the Actor’s Union has a former Alfac Psyduck between careers at the moment...”