Kasumi was the first to see it.
She'd been sitting in the Mobile Home's passenger seat since before dawn, unable to sleep through the last hours of the crossing, her forehead resting against the cool glass of the porthole-style window in the ship's vehicle bay where the RV had been stored. The engines had changed pitch sometime around 4 AM, she'd felt it through the hull, a subtle deceleration that meant the Lugia was approaching shallow water, and she'd climbed out of bed without waking anyone, pulled a blanket around her shoulders, and taken up her vigil in the dark cabin.
Now, as the first gray light bled into the sky, the harbor of New Bark Town materialized through the morning mist like a watercolor painting left out in the rain. Shapes first, the dark verticals of wooden dock pilings, the low horizontal of a seawall, the clustered geometries of buildings climbing a gentle hillside. Then color, seeping in as the light strengthened. The deep green of cedar forests pressing close on either side, the warm brown of traditional timber architecture, the silver-blue ribbon of a wide river emptying into the harbor, and everywhere, on rooftops, on signposts, on the curved eaves of what appeared to be a shrine at the waterfront, the soft glow of paper lanterns not yet extinguished from the night before.
"Hey," she whispered, turning toward the RV's interior. "Wake up. We're here."
Nobody stirred. She tried again, louder.
"Sasuke. Miyuki. Kiyomi. Get up. You're going to miss this."
A sound from Sasuke's lower-floor bed, the creak of springs, a muffled grunt that might have been words in a language exclusive to the recently unconscious. Then Victini's chirp, bright and immediate, the small Pokémon clearly having been awake for some time and simply waiting for someone to acknowledge it.
Miyuki appeared in the hallway connecting the upper bedrooms to the common area, silver hair loose and sleep-tangled, a cardigan pulled over her pajamas. She didn't speak, Miyuki rarely spoke before coffee, but she moved to the window beside Kasumi and looked out, and her lips parted slightly, and she stood very still.
"Oh," she said quietly.
The air, even filtered through the ship's vehicle bay, was different. They could both feel it. Heavier than Kanto's coastal breeze, carrying warmth that had nothing to do with temperature, a humidity that sat on the skin like a living thing, scented with cedar resin and river water and something floral that neither of them could name. The birdsong filtering through the hull wasn't Pidgey's sharp morning call or Spearow's aggressive chatter. It was rounder, more melodic, a low, rhythmic hooting that rose and fell in patterns that suggested not alarm but welcome.
"Hoothoot," Kiyomi said from the hallway.
They turned. She stood in the dim corridor fully dressed, leather jacket, boots, auburn hair already braided, as if she'd been ready for hours. Her field journal was open in her left hand, and she was writing without looking at the page, her golden eyes fixed on the harbor beyond the window.
"Hoothoot calls," she continued. "Nocturnal species, but in Johto's coastal regions they vocalize at dawn and dusk as well. The locals consider it an auspicious sound. Old Johto folk tradition says that if a Hoothoot sings as you arrive somewhere new, the place will be kind to you."
"Is that real?" Kasumi asked.
"It's tradition. Whether it's real depends on what you mean by real." Kiyomi's pen stopped moving, and she looked at the harbor with an expression that Kasumi had seen perhaps three times in eight months of travel, an expression of something close to wonder, carefully maintained behind the academic facade but visible in the slight widening of her eyes, the stillness of her jaw. "Johto preserves its history instead of building over it," she said, almost to herself. "This region is going to be extraordinary."
The SS Lugia docked at 6.47 AM, and by 7.30 they were on land.
The process of disembarking the Mobile Home from a cruise ship's vehicle bay was one they'd performed exactly once before, at the very beginning of their journey, eight months and an entire continent ago, when the SS Dragonair had delivered them to Pallet Town. The routine came back with the muscle memory of a language you hadn't spoken in years. Sasuke at the wheel, guiding the navy-blue-and-silver RV down the cargo ramp with centimeter precision; Miyuki outside spotting his clearance on the left; Kasumi handling the spatial compression controls from the passenger seat, ready to shrink the vehicle if the ramp proved too narrow; Kiyomi standing on the dock with her tablet, recording their official arrival time and coordinates in the meticulous travel log she'd maintained since day one.
The RV's tires touched Johto soil, and something about the contact felt significant in a way that defied rational explanation. The vehicle had driven across the entirety of Kanto, mountains, coastlines, plains, tunnels, eight months of road that had worn the paint along its flanks and collected a fine patina of dust and experience in every seam. Kasumi ran her hand along the side panel as they waited for Sasuke to park.
"She's earned her battle scars," she said.
Miyuki smiled. "She?"
"Don't pretend you haven't named the RV."
"I have not named the RV."
"You call her 'the old girl' when you think nobody's listening."
Miyuki's silence was conspicuously un-denial.
New Bark Town unfolded around them as they drove from the harbor into the town proper. It was small, eighty thousand people, a figure that would have been a rounding error in Saffron or Celadon, but it wore its modesty with a confidence that larger cities often lacked. The streets were cobblestone, narrow enough that the Mobile Home's side mirrors nearly brushed the facades of buildings on both sides. Traditional wooden architecture dominated.
Two- and three-story structures with curved clay-tile roofs, sliding paper-screen doors, and carved wooden lintels depicting Pokémon in flowing, stylized forms. Between the residences and shops, small shrines appeared at irregular intervals, stone basins filled with clear water, offerings of rice and berries arranged on low altars, incense smoke rising in thin columns that the morning breeze scattered like scattered thoughts.