Priorities

Over a late breakfast, the mood darkens when Amy — a four-badge battle trainer up from Cinnabar to meet her brother — confirms what the news only hinted: the low-precipitation cell that has churned over the Pewter Mountains for two days isn't weather. It means Zapdos is active, one of the seasonal storm trio (Articuno's winter blizzards, Zapdos's summer lightning, Moltres's autumn fire — the "Storm Gods" whose passing can bury or burn a town), and CoRRNet is calling experienced trainers toward Pewter and Cerulean. Amy intends to wait it out in Vermillion, and tells the newbies to do the same.

Blue refuses. When Amy calls him dewy-eyed and worse, he answers quietly that his parents were killed when Moltres flew over Fuchsia; he isn't going to catch a god, but to protect the people in its path. Red knows the fuller truth — the two of them swore as children to fight the trio once they had pokemon, and despite his words Blue would kill a Storm Bird given the chance. Leaf, who still has nightmares of Tornadus tearing through her hometown of Accumula and whose mother would revoke her license for charging at a Tier 3 threat, won't go to the front but agrees to help with periphery work through CoRRNet. Red threads the needle: they'll go, but sanely — aiding evacuation and the injured rather than dueling lightning with no ground pokemon between them. Amy, mollified, warns that these storms move faster than weather and carry something called the Pressure. In the lull, Red learns that his rattata-nest report was resolved and the route made safe — a small, real good done.

Worldbuilding deepens over the trio: the birds are seasonal, and it's unsettlingly early for Zapdos; whether the storms summon the birds or the birds raise the storms is still disputed. Legend holds a fourth, spring god of rainbow or golden plumage whose feathers could heal and even restore the dead — possibly real, possibly a story invented to complete the pattern of the seasons.

The chapter's title turns on a private test of nerve. Amy's brother Donovan arrives by skarmory — Mags, whose magnesium-alloy feathers are a marvel Red has read about — and offers to let them pet her. Faced with the razor-edged "metal death machine," Red's body mutinies, and he steadies himself with an explicit hierarchy of his own priorities: learn about pokemon toward becoming a Professor; become an effective trainer; protect the public; earn standing in his community; and ultimately fund the search for the origin of species. He interrogates the fear against that ladder, labeling each thought as it surfaces — Exaggeration, Irrelevant, Strawman — until he concludes the paralysis serves none of his priorities, that the fear simply is, the plain consequence of a reality in which even his capable father could die. His father faced that reality and acted anyway; so can Red. He steps forward, sweating, and lays his hand on the warm body beneath the cool metal.

The lobby stirs as Reza Salur passes through — the dragon trainer who alone turned a kangaskhan herd from Rifu Village — his scarred jaw and missing ear a wordless argument for how dangerous dragons are to train. Then the three set off north to shop for a gas mask, a whistle, and a hat, flagging a taxi as an exeggutor bolts across the road with a stolen meal in each mouth.