She faced the crowd. Her heart hammered like a Sudowoodo’s fist.
“Only when you steal my experience points,” she said. And for the first time, he smiled like he meant it.
The crowd turned on her. Her own neighbor, Mrs. Fennel, shook her head. “You’re young, Lyra. You don’t remember the embargo. The poisoned berries. My brother still can’t walk straight.”
“I stopped it,” Gold said, rising. His voice cracked. “I helped .” 4780 - Pokemon Heartgold -u--xenophobia-
“It’s fine,” he said quietly. He returned Typhlosion to its ball. “I’ll take the Magnet Train back tonight.”
The breaking point came at the Lake of Rage.
“The war was twenty years ago. We were babies. Gold wasn’t even born. You want to blame Kanto? Blame their government. Blame the old syndicates. But this kid? He beat Team Rocket. He saved the Slowpokes. He—” Her voice broke. “He’s my friend.” She faced the crowd
Lyra laughed it off. Her mother didn’t.
But Lyra noticed the whispers. The way Mr. Pokemon locked his door when Gold passed. How the Day-Care couple charged him triple. The ugly curl of a fisherman’s lip as Gold fished on Route 42: “Go back to your Celadon City high-rises, city boy. These waters are for Johto blood.”
Silence. The Gyarados’s corpse floated belly-up, a red island in the violet lake. And for the first time, he smiled like he meant it
“We don’t eat that here,” he said flatly, though they absolutely did.
They didn’t fix Johto that night. The old wounds didn’t heal. But as they walked back through the dark forest, Gold’s Typhlosion lighting the path, Lyra realized something: xenophobia isn’t a monster you defeat in a single battle. It’s a wild Pokemon you have to raise—slowly, patiently, with more failures than successes.
A fisherman spat. “You helped create it. We don’t want your kind here.”
Professor Elm introduced him as “Gold,” though he wore the sullen silence of someone who’d lost something. He spoke with the clipped, efficient vowels of Saffron City, and when Lyra offered him a Rage Candy Bar, he stared at it like it was a foreign insect.
That was when the locals arrived. A dozen of them—fishermen, berry farmers, a kimono girl with cold eyes.