Chapter Two: Fragments of Memory

“Hm... do you have anything good for breakfast here?” Jenny hesitated for a moment, but she still asked.

“Savory crepe wraps, and hearty beef noodles. As for steamed buns, I didn’t make any today,” Heath answered at once. As a chef, he knew every item in his restaurant by heart.

“I don’t see anything I like, so I’ll pass. If you have something to drink, I might consider it,” Jenny said with a playful smile, her eyes darting about.

Heath froze. Something to drink? Could a ghost even drink water? Wouldn’t it just leak out from some strange place?

He suddenly thought that he might be able to open a whole new field of study someday: ghostology. He could explain how ghosts lived, what traits they had, how they ate, and all sorts of other questions. That sounded like a promising business.

“Of course I do. I have some barley tea I made yesterday, with a dampness-dispelling effect. Please enjoy,” he said. He could not bear to send a customer away empty-handed, and besides, he was curious to see what reward would come from serving Jenny this time.

Jenny stared at the hot tea Heath handed her, her expression visibly blank for a moment. Then she spoke.

“Uh, I forgot to bring...” Jenny waved a hand.

“It’s fine, Sister Jenny. You’ve had a hard day at work, so just think of it as my treat,” Heath said with a smile.

Jenny’s expression grew even more pained, but in the end she still nodded awkwardly. Taking the cup, she gave a small wave and left, moving so quickly that Heath did not even have a chance to stop her.

“That’s some speed,” Heath muttered, clicking his tongue. He had wanted to see how Jenny drank water, and afterward he could check whether his barley tea had appeared on the ground. If it had, then one more mystery of ghost life would be solved.

He waited patiently for a while before the prompt from his special ability finally appeared.

Heath blinked. A memory shard? What kind of strange thing was that? If it had been a vitality shard or something, he could have understood it, since those were already part of the world of Pokemon. But he had never even heard of a memory shard before.

He reached into his pocket and fished out a tiny red fragment. Curious, he held it in his hand. How was he supposed to use this thing?

The next second, he accidentally crushed the memory shard. His vision went black. When sight returned, he found himself standing in a dim room.

“What place is this?” Heath looked around in confusion. He had never been here before.

Then he realized his body had started moving on its own, and a shout rang out from within the dark room.

“Hands up, don’t move! Put down the Pokeball and stop resisting futilely!”

The voice sounded vaguely familiar. Heath remembered it as Jenny’s voice from before, though now it sounded strangely different.

Still, once he thought about how hearing one’s own voice was always different from hearing someone else’s, he felt calmer.

Now he understood. That memory shard must have been Jenny’s memory shard. He just did not know how to break free from it.

“Do you really think trash like you can catch me? Dream on! Stay here and be buried with those dead officers!”

A frenzied figure appeared ahead. The next instant, a deafening explosion erupted, accompanied by a violent blast of air that slammed into Heath and made him grit his teeth in pain.

The last thing he saw was a pair of hands reaching out in vain to resist, and then a blaze of orange from the explosion. After that came a sudden, searing pain, and Heath found himself standing once more inside the food cart.

“Huh... what just happened?” Heath looked around in a daze. He was still in the food cart, unmoving. Zorua was lying on the sofa in the rest area, Charmander was training its muscles with beads of sweat clearly visible on its body, and Farfetch’d was also working on its arm strength. Everything looked as though nothing had happened at all.

“Trainer, what’s wrong?” Zorua asked in confusion.

“I’m fine...” Heath waved it off. Coming back to himself from that agony, he understood. What he had just seen had to be Jenny’s memory, the memory before her death. He had simply never expected that this memory shard would reproduce even the pain.

If his cheat system had a review function, Heath would definitely give it a bad one.

Still, thinking of that orange-red burst of the explosion, his mood turned heavy. He had already guessed Jenny was dead the moment he saw that she was a ghost, but he had not expected her death to be like this.

“Jenny, was it? I’ll ask Sister Bell when I get back to the dorms and see whether there’s an Officer Jenny in Viridian City with that name,” Heath sighed. He had not expected that the carefree, easygoing Jenny would have such a past.

While Heath was sighing over it, another group of Officer Jennys rode past him on their motorcycles at high speed. He frowned.

Viridian City had excellent public order. Even if there really were inspectors making undercover visits, there should not be this many Officer Jennys mobilized. It looked more like some kind of emergency. What on earth was going on?

He looked outside the food cart. There were no flames, no smoke. It did not seem as though anything had exploded anywhere.

“What a lively day this is... Heath, give me a full breakfast set. Yesterday’s salad was excellent—give me plenty of that,” Mr. Fujiyama said, wiping sweat from his forehead as he walked over with a Machoke.

“Right away, Mr. Fujiyama. Please wait a moment,” Heath replied with a nod. He was curious, but this was not the time to ask.

Mr. Fujiyama looked as muscular as ever today, but what caught Heath’s eye most were the Snorlax dehumidifier packets hanging from him. They were already full of water, which made Heath swallow unconsciously. As expected, Mr. Fujiyama really was Viridian City’s human Machoke.

Anyone who could exchange warm feelings with Machoke, then judge another man’s thoughts by the clash of their muscles, was not normal.

But thinking of it that way, Heath felt that Ash was probably a hidden superhuman too. After all, the ridiculous things Ash did in the anime were far too numerous to count.

“Mr. Fujiyama, do you know why so many Officer Jennys are riding past today?” Heath asked as he packed the finished savory crepe wrap into a bag.