Chapter 11: Pokémon Master (Part 1) (Patreon)

Faced with the silver tabby cat ears on Professor McGonagall's head, standing straight up in fury, the air in the bathroom seemed to drop several degrees.

Harriet and Ron instinctively hunched their necks.

While the two stood tongue-tied, with no idea how to explain, Hermione, who had been slumped on the floor beneath the burst pipe, suddenly bit her lip, pushed herself up and rose to her feet, swaying.

"…Please don't blame them, Professor McGonagall. This is all my fault."

Hermione kept her bushy brown head lowered, her hands clenching the wet hem of her robes. "I was too full of myself…"

"I thought that with what I'd learned from our textbooks, I could deal with it on my own. That's why I didn't go back to the tower with the prefect, and came here on purpose to find it. If Yuzo, Harriet and Ron hadn't arrived in time, I'd surely be dead under that club by now…"

Ron whipped her head around, mouth hanging open, and her old wand almost slipped back into the water.

Harriet stared too, thoroughly stunned. This was the model student who held the school rules higher than the heavens, and she had never expected her to step forward and lie, taking the blame herself.

Yuzo stood to one side. He didn't interrupt Hermione's self-blame, and he didn't rush to pile all the guilt onto himself either.

When Hermione finished and paused, he smoothly took up the thread and filled in her account.

"Hermione only meant well, Professor McGonagall. She wanted to solve the school's problem for it."

Yuzo bent down, fished his pine wand out of the pooled water in the corner, flicked the droplets off and shoved it into his pocket. "Harriet, Ron and I noticed she wasn't in the line, and we rushed over right away to save her."

"Things in there really were tense. That big lug was terrifyingly strong, and she lifted me right up to her mouth. If you and Professor Snape hadn't stepped in just in time, I'd probably have been 'chomped on (suggestively)' by this troll on the spot tonight."

"But as her friends, we failed to talk Hermione out of her rash move beforehand, so the three of us share some of the blame too."

This half-true, half-false addition neatly established a legitimate reason for their coming to the rescue and shared out the charge of recklessness for going into danger alone. With the thrilling phrase "nearly chomped," it also brushed aside, lightly and in a single stroke, the absurd sight of the troll girl clutching him and begging for a kiss.

Having heard them both out, Professor McGonagall went through several changes of expression on her delicate, fair face, which looked like a sixteen-year-old girl's. In the end it all dissolved into a long, helpless sigh tinged with lingering fear.

"Miss Granger… that was utterly foolish, reckless behavior! I thought you were the least troublesome student in this year's first-years, meow…"

Professor McGonagall first docked Hermione five points with a stern face, then turned her gaze to Yuzo, Harriet and Ron. A flicker of relief passed through the depths of her eyes. "As for the three of you… you also disobeyed the order to withdraw, but since you stepped forward to save a classmate's life, and since first-years holding out against a full-grown troll until we arrived is nothing short of a miracle, meow."

"For your friendship and courage, five points each to the three of you."

"Now, stop getting in the way here. All of you, go straight back to the Gryffindor tower, meow!"

The four of them, pardoned, thanked her in unison with great relief and hurried out of the devastated bathroom.

But at the instant he stepped over the wooden threshold, Yuzo used the motion of turning around to glance back.

Professor Snape, standing in the shadows, was silently taking half a step backward, using the hem of her wide black high-collared robes to cover her calves tightly.

Subtle as the movement was, Yuzo still caught the torn fabric above the shaft of her black boot, and a smear of dark red blood seeping down her pale ankle.

On the other side of the doorway, Professor Quirrell, who had just picked up from the floor, was still clutching the back of the head wrapped in the purple hijab with both hands, drawing sharp, pained breaths across a face of foreign features.

Professors McGonagall and Snape stepped forward in concern, trying to lift the headscarf and check the bruise. The Defense Against the Dark Arts professor seemed utterly terrified at once, stammering refusals and waving both hands, then stumbled back toward the other end of the corridor.

So Yuzo withdrew his gaze without lingering, turned, and followed Harriet, Ron and Hermione briskly up the spiral stone staircase back toward the dormitories on the eighth floor.

In the dead of night, only the echo of their four sets of footsteps filled the corridor.

As they rounded the second-floor landing, Hermione, who had been lost in thought with her head down the whole way, suddenly slowed her pace and turned to Yuzo, who was walking beside her.

"Yuzo… there's something that felt very wrong to me back in the bathroom."

Hermione knit her delicate brows, her dark brown eyes fixed on his profile. "When you threw your wand and hit that troll, by all rights an attacked troll should have turned even more violent."

"But once she turned her head and saw your face, not only did she stop swinging her club, her face went red for no reason, and what she was shouting when she picked you up sounded like 'like'… She didn't look like she was about to eat anyone at all. She looked more like you'd enchanted her…"

"Right! I heard it too!"

Ron immediately chimed in, her hands acting out the horrifying scene from before. "The way that big girl puckered her lips, she was obviously about to plant one on your forehead!"

Harriet pushed her round-framed glasses up the bridge of her nose, her emerald-green eyes full of curiosity and probing.

Under the unwavering stares of the three girls, Yuzo knew the scene had been far too abnormal to hide, and he sighed inwardly without meaning to.

That scene had been far too explosive, and the three girls weren't blind.

Knowing there was no way to hide it, his eyes darted, and he decided to cash in on the era bonus: this year, the original Pokémon games were nowhere near being released in this world. He rattled off, right there on the spot, a backstory that sounded profound and unfathomable:

"Ahem… since you've seen through it, I won't hide it from you."

Yuzo stopped walking, glanced left and right down the empty corridor, put on a mysterious, solemn expression and lowered his voice. "Actually, back in my hometown, I'm a descendant of an ancient, secret Eastern magical family. The name of that family is the 'Pokémon Master Clan'!"

Meeting the three girls' rapt gazes, he went on spouting nonsense without a blush or a skipped heartbeat. "For generation after generation, our family has specialized in dealing with all kinds of magical creatures."

"Every family member with this 'Pokémon Master bloodline' is born with a peculiar innate ability… namely a powerful charm that works on magical creatures of the opposite sex. That lets us tame creatures with violent natures and keep up long, peaceful contact with them."

"And that troll earlier was female, so she got hit straight on when she saw my face!"