Our heroes (oh yeah, and Ermynne too) were gathering up their things and getting ready to leave the Pomelo Islands.  The trouble was…how would they leave?
 “We’d really like to thank you,” Silvia said to the girls, the next morning as they ate their breakfast (orange juice, grapefruit, and toast with marmalade) on the beach.  “Especially you, Sora.  For helping us save our pomelo crop.”
 “It was no problem,” Sora said.  “But, um…”
 “Yes?”
 “Y’see, we kind of need to get back on track here,” Sora said.  “The storm kind of blew us ashore here, and quite frankly I have no idea where we are.”
 “I have some idea,” Ferio said, “but still…you can’t see any other islands for miles around from here.  So we’re still kind of stuck.”
 Then, like a ray of hope out of the darkness, a ship passed by the island.  No, seriously, it did.  We are not making this up.  
Petra spotted the ship and grinned.  “Looks like there’s our answer.”
“We’ve got to signal it, though!” Silvia said, jumping up from the table and running off.
“Where’s she going?”
“To the lighthouse,” Cinzia explained, though she seemed rather disappointed by this turn of events.  “Won’t you stay another day?  It does get awfully lonely here on the island, all by ourselves…” She put on a melodramatic tone and made a melancholic sigh, all the while batting her eyes innocently at Petra.
“Thanks, but no thanks,” Ruari said shortly.  “Aoife has to train some more…right, Aoife?”
Soon enough Silvia had signaled the ship and it was on its way over.  It was only as it pulled into an inlet near the house that the group noticed a very, very important detail that they had overlooked before.
The presence of a skull and crossbones on the ship’s black sail.
“Hey, look at that,” Ferio said, shading her eyes and pointing at the sails.
“That…is not a good sign,” Sora said.  “Guys, maybe we should wait…”
“No way!” Aoife said.  “I gotta get off this island and get back to the next gym, come on, guys!”  And she took off down the beach, forcing the rest to follow her.
A door on the side of the ship’s body opened and a gangplank rolled out, splashing into the sand.  “Ahoy there!”  Step, clunk, step, clunk.  Then a figure appeared at the head of the gangway, one with tangled black hair and a beard to match, dressed in typical pirate’s clothes: black breeches, a white shirt with lace around the collar and cuffs, and a black jacket with gold-colored trim.  And of course, the obligatory wooden peg leg, although Aoife wondered where his eyepatch and parrot were.
“Um…” Cinzia said, slowly backing away from the gangplank.  “Sorry, um, Mr. Pirate, sir, but I think there’s been a mistake…”
“Not to worry, lass!” the pirate said genially, advancing the rest of the way down the gangplank.  “We’re not pirates, here!  We are a special division”—and he reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a shiny badge and flashed it at them—“of the Orange Islands Police Force.”
Ferio raised an eyebrow.  “How are we supposed to believe you didn’t just steal that badge off of some poor Officer Fiona in port?”
“Officer Fiona?  Where?” Petra looked around.
“You can check it yourself, lass.”  The pirate—or whoever he was—offered Ferio his badge again.  She glanced down at it and back up to the pirate, checking the photo against the real McCoy.
“Officer Jacob “One-Leg” Farnsworth,” Ferio read.  “Undercover Piracy Patrol.  That you?”
“Please, call me One-Leg,” the pirate said.  
Ferio felt a sweatdrop coming on.  “Well…One-Leg…you see, we got washed ashore here during that storm a couple days ago.”
“Yeah,” One-Leg nodded.  “Real doozy, that one, wasn’t it?”
“Indeed,” Ferio said.  “We were traveling around the Orange Islands and we need to get back on track…I think Aoife here is going to implode if she doesn’t find the next Pokemon gym soon.”
“Pokemon trainers, eh?” One-Leg sized up the group.  “Well then!  That settles it!  I can’t just leave my fellow trainers here to find their own way!  Of course I’ll help you!  There’s a gym on Mikan Island, we’re headed—“
“I know,” Ermynne said.  “My family OWNS the Mikan Gym.”
“Ignore her,” Aoife advised One-Leg.  “She’ll tell that to anyone who’ll listen.”
“Hmm.”  One-Leg pulled a map out of his coat pocket and considered.  “I was about to say, we’re on our way to Mikan right now to check out reports of a piracy ring…but we could stop at Valencia Island on the way and drop you off there, so you can get to the gym on Navel Island from there.  How does that sound?”
The girls went for this choice, but Aoife was skeptical.  “How far is Valencia from the next gym, anyway?”
“Oh, not too far,” One-Leg said.  “Not more than a few hours by sea, anyway.  So what do you say, do we have a deal?”
Aoife looked at the others, who nodded.  “Yeah.  Deal.”
After saying goodbye to Silvia and Cinzia, they boarded the ship and One-Leg showed them to their cabins.
“It’s going to be an overnight journey,” he explained, as he led them down the halls beneath the deck.  “So you’ll have to sleep on the ship.  Hope none of you get seasick.”  Aoife and Sora laughed, but One-Leg wasn’t joking.  “And as payment for this ride we can work out a trade.  We might ask you to do some…service for us while you travel.”
Ruari stopped dead.  “Ohh no.  No, no, I don’t think so.  Sorry, One-Ball, but we’re not that desperate to get to Valencia.  So skip that, and let us off NOW.”
One-Leg looked at Ruari, puzzled, as did the rest of her group.  “What’s wrong?” he asked.  “I mean, if you have some objection to cooking and cleaning a little while you’re on board, maybe helping us with navigation…”
“Cooking…cleaning?” Ruari repeated.  “Navigation?  Eheheh…oh.  So that’s what you meant.”  She laughed nervously and continued walking down the corridor.  “Sorry!  False alarm!  Carry on!”
“And what did you THINK he meant by service, Ruari?” Sora asked, leering at Ruari and poking her in the side as One-Leg led them to their cabins.
“Never mind,” Ruari muttered.
“It’s four to a cabin,” One-Leg said, stopping at the end of the hall.  “Four of you can sleep in this empty cabin, and the other two can be with Jim and Blue-Eye in this cabin.”
“Hey, Aoife,” Sora said, noticing Aoife and Ermynne scooting away from each other.  “You and I can be in this room, okay?  It’ll be more fun this way, anyway.”  Aoife was more than happy to agree.
“Great,” One-Leg said.  “So you four in this cabin, and I’ll get your friends set up in here.”
“Oh, um, One-Leg?” Ruari said, before she went to her cabin to get settled in.
“Yes?”  One-Leg turned away from Jim and Blue-Eye’s door to look at Ruari.
“I’m really sorry for overreacting and, um, calling you One-Ball,” Ruari said, lowering her head to show her sincerity.  “I just kind of jumped to conclusions, and it’s okay if you hate me for the rest of the trip or whatever.”
“No, of course I won’t,” One-Leg said.  “That’s all right.  I can understand why you’d get that idea.  I mean, a ship full of men…out at sea for months…don’t get to see women except when we go into port…but let me assure you, they find ways to entertain themselves.”  He winked at Ruari.  “These two in particular,” he added, before turning back to the door of Jim and Blue-Eye’s room and giving it a few loud raps.  “Jim?  Blue?  You decent?”
“Whoa,” Ruari murmured, before turning back around and joining the others in their cabin.
Once a voice from the other side of the door assured One-Leg that yes, they were decent, the captain opened the door and showed Aoife and Sora in.  The room was tiny, with two sets of bunk beds just barely big enough for one and a sea chest at the foot of each.  Two young men, both in striped t-shirts and cutoff pants, occupied the room, one looking out the window and the other sitting in a chair under the window, reading.
The one with the book looked up and smiled when the door opened.  “Hi.”
“Lassies, let me introduce you to Jim and Blue-Eye,” One-Leg said.  “Boys, these ladies are staying on with us until we get to Valencia Port.  Their friends are staying in the empty cabin across the hall.  I expect you’ll be courteous to them during their stay…and try not to scare them _too_ much, all right?”
“That doesn’t seem like too much to ask,” the brown-haired boy looking out the window said, turning to look at his visitors as One-Leg left.  He walked over to the girls and held out his hand.  “Hey.  My name’s Jim, nice to meet you.”
“I’m Sora,” Sora said, shaking Jim’s hand.  Aoife, too, introduced herself in turn.  The other lad, obviously Blue-Eye, got up to introduce himself as well.  Sora noticed that Jim was alright looking, but nothing compared to Blue-Eye.  “This guy could be a model,” she said, trying not to blush as she shook hands with Blue-Eye.  He had wavy, layered, shoulder-length blond hair, which put Sora in mind of Aidan.  And he was true to his name too: One of his eyes was bright sea blue, and the other was…red?  Sora blinked then looked again.  Yes, it was definitely red…how unusual, she thought.
“Hi,” he said.  “I’m Grant, but everyone here calls me Blue-Eye…you can probably see why.”  He grinned shyly, pushing his golden hair out of his eyes.
Sora smiled goofily and didn’t say anything to that, leaving Aoife to explain their story to the boys.  “…So we’re going to be on Valencia, just as a stop-over like, before we go to Navel Island…and my next badge,” she finished.
“Cool,” Jim said, nodding.  “Yeah.  I was a trainer myself—I’m from Tangerine Island—but the Orange Islands is like the worst place for a beginning trainer.”  He shook his head.  “The Orange Crew is really tough.”
“I know,” Aoife said.  “I just got my first Orange League badge last week, see?”  She opened her shirt and showed the young men her badges.
“That’s a lot,” Blue-Eye said.  “You must be pretty good.”
“Yeah, well…I’m all right,” Aoife said modestly.  She went over to inspect the beds.  “Hey, Sora?  Can I have the top bunk, pleeeeease?”
“No arguments here.”
“Yay!”  Aoife flung her backpack up onto the top bunk and climbed up.  “I’m gonna read Mating Habits of the Wobuffet until it’s lunchtime.”
Sora sweatdropped.  “Oookay.  You do that, Aoife.”

***

 One-Leg barely gave them a moment’s rest, between swabbing the deck, helping Jim adjust the sails, and peeling potatoes and slicing onions for that night’s dinner.  That evening after kitchen duty, just when they thought it was safe to retire to their rooms in peace, One-Leg rounded them up and brought all six girls up to the deck.  “Bring a sweater,” he advised them.  “Gets a little cool out there in the evenings.”
 He wasn’t lying.  Ruari hadn’t packed a sweater and soon found herself shivering as the girls sat on benches on the deck, watching the aftermath of the sunset.  Fortunately Petra was there, and she was glad to share her jacket with Ruari.
 Before too long Tall Paul, another one of the sailors (he was around 24 or so, Sora guessed, making him a little older than Jim and Blue-Eye), appeared on deck to talk to the girls.  “Okay, lasses,” he said.  “You’re going to help us navigate.”
 “Oh, man,” Petra said under her breath.  “I’m really bad with directions.”
 Paul laughed.  “That’s no problem.  You see that?”  He pointed up in the sky, to a star that was almost on the horizon.  “That’s Polaris, the North Star.  This one’s Sirius, and that one’s Arcturus…we’re going to be using all three of those to find our way to Valencia tonight.  Now, we’re going south-southwest, so we want to be headed away from this star.  We use Spica as a guide…see this constellation?  That’s called Bootes, and it…”
 Paul explained to them how sailors use the stars, constellations, and their positions in the sky to determine direction, time of day, season, and even possible weather conditions.  Once they figured out which direction they should be going in order to reach Valencia, they helped him align the sails towards that direction.  Once their task was done, Paul taught them the constellations; any constellation Aoife could name, he could pick out in the sky, and vice versa: if she pointed one out, he could name it.  
 “Wow,” Ruari said, as after their chore Paul led them down to dinner in the mess hall.  “Paul really knows his astronomy, doesn’t he?”
 “He’d have to,” Ferio said, sounding blasé although they knew even she was impressed.  “All these guys probably took some astronomy as part of their qualifications to be on the UPP.”
 “The what?”
 “Undercover Piracy Patrol.  Like One-Leg said.”
 “Oh.  Yeah.”
 Dinner that night (as Ferio, Ermynne, and Petra knew, since they were the ones who helped fix it) was red stew and hardtack, and the girls sat at a long table with Blue-Eye and Jim, listening to their stories.
 “Yeah,” Jim was saying, himself being the more talkative side of the duo, “my parents…sheesh.  They kicked me out and basically cut me out of their will when they found out I was gay…it wasn’t even my decision to tell them in the first place, either.  The guy I was seeing at the time told them to get back at me when we got in a fight.”
 “Goodness.”  Sora shook her head and bit off another piece of hardtack.  “Sounds like you’ve had a tough life.”
 “Eh,” Jim shrugged.  “It’s not so bad anymore.  Being in the UPP is great, and the guys are amazing.”
 “Being out at sea sometimes does get lonely, though,” Blue-Eye said.  “But as long as we’ve got each other, we’ll pull through.  Right, Jim?”
 Ruari looked like she was going to cry.  “That’s so sweet.  You know, Petra, we’re lucky our families…well, your family and my, uh, research assistants, were so supportive of us.  As ourselves and as a couple.  I still sometimes forget that some people don’t have that.”
 There was silence at the table for a while before Jim spoke up again.  “Hey, guys…they say this ship is haunted…”
 “Really?” Aoife looked up immediately, spilling a bit of red sauce down her chin.  “That’s so cool!  Maybe we’ll see the ghost!  Wouldn’t that be awesome, guys?”  Her friends were less enthusiastic.
 “I was just going to say…” Jim began, “we’ve got a Ouija board in our room.  If you guys want to come by after dinner and try it out, just to see if we get any results…”

(Who's that Pokemon?  It's Haunter!)

 The five travelers (minus Ferio, she refused to participate in “such a blatant display of hogwash and the suggestibility of the human mind”) assembled in Jim and Blue-Eye’s room on the floor, in front of the Ouija board.
 “Okay,” Jim said.  “I think it’d work best if you guys all closed your eyes, and have someone to write down what the board says.”  He held up a paper and pencil.  “Any takers?”
 “I guess I could,” Ermynne offered, taking the writing stuff from Jim.  “Hey, Jim…I was reading the box, and it says that the two people who are on the board should be a boy and a girl.  Is that…”
 “Eh, screw gender,” Ruari said.  “Sora and I can go first.  Right, Sor?”  Sora had no complaints.
 “Does it have to be just two?”
 Jim wasn’t sure.  “It worked with me and Blue and Quick-Draw that one time…but I don’t know.”
 “Quick-Draw?” Ermynne repeated quietly, out of the corner of her mouth.  Aoife shrugged.  “Are they pirates or cowboys?”
 “Let’s try it with all of us,” Blue-Eye spoke up.  “It might work better that way.”
 So somehow they managed to fit five of them sitting in a circle on the floor of Jim and Blue-Eye’s tiny cabin.  Sora was sitting next to Blue-Eye, which she was very pleased about, and Petra had offered to watch the message indicator with Ermynne, since they couldn’t all fit on the floor.  She and Ermynne sat on the bottom bunks, Ermynne with pen in hand, and watched as all five closed their eyes, put their fingertips on the message indicator and waited.
 A minute or so went by.  “Why isn’t it working?” Aoife said, squirming a little and getting impatient with the board already.
 “Um, guys?” Petra said.  “I think you have to ask it a question…”
 “Ooh!” Sora said.  “Let’s ask it who we’re going to marry!”
 “Yeah, but some of us know already,” Jim said, opening his eyes and glancing at Blue.
 “We might want to start out with a more serious question,” Ruari suggested.  “Not get the spirits mad, or anything.”
 “Oh wait, I have an idea!” Aoife said.  “Here, everybody put their hands back on the thingie.”  They did so.  Ruari snickered a little but stopped when Petra nudged her with her foot.  “Okay, here we go…spirits who are controlling this board…who are you?”
 “Good question.”
 “Thanks.”
 Ermynne and Petra watched the message indicator intently.  It moved a little, and a little more… “Okay, someone must be moving this thing,” Ermynne said.
 “I’m not.”
 “Me either.”
 “Shh!  You’re bothering the spirits,” Aoife hissed.  “Everyone be quiet and keep your eyes closed…SORA…”
 “Hey,” Sora protested, “how would you know I had my eyes open unless you had yours open too?”
 “Shh, guys,” Petra said, “it’s spelling something.”
 An “m” was the first letter the board spelled out.  Petra looked up at Ermynne, who wrote this down.  M…A…R…Y.  But it wasn’t finished yet.  The indicator wavered around for a while before it added a P…another A…R, K, E, and an R.  Then it stopped.
 “Is it done yet?” Aoife asked.
 “Yup,” Ermynne said.  “You can all open your eyes now.” 
 Everyone did.  “What’d it say?” Blue-Eye wanted to know.
 “The ghost’s name is Mary Parker,” Ermynne said.  “That’s all.”
 “Ah yes, Mary Parker,” Jim said.
 Sora turned to look at (in her opinion) the less-good-looking boy pirate.  “You know who that is?”
 “Was,” Jim corrected.  “When this used to be a real pirate ship, they kidnapped a noblewoman named Mary Parker for ransom.  Thing is, her family was going into debt, and they couldn’t pay…so they had Mary ‘take a long walk off a short plank’, as they used to say.”
 “That’s terrible,” Sora gasped.
 Aoife didn’t get it.  “What was terrible?”
 “She walked the plank, Aoife,” Ruari explained.  “She died.  That’s what ‘long walk off a short plank’ means.”
 “Oh.”  Aoife paused as this sunk in.  “Man, that sucks!”
 “But wait,” Jim said.  “Let’s make sure if this is the right ghost.  Let’s see if whatever is controlling this Ouija board knows when Mary Parker died.”
 Blue-Eye looked at Jim.  “You don’t think this is Mary?”
 “I’m just making sure…Ermynne?  Can I write something down?”
 “Sure.”  Ermynne handed Jim the paper and pencil back, and he scribbled a few things down.
 “Okay, this is the right year—I don’t want to say it out loud in case the spirits can hear—and if the board doesn’t say that, we know it’s not really her.”
 “Got it,” Ermynne agreed, taking the paper back.  Everyone closed their eyes and put their hands on the message indicator again.
 “Okay, Aoife, you ask.”
 “Me?  Cool!”  Aoife sat up straighter; she had a job to do.  “Mary Parker…we know how you died, but in what year did you die?”
 Petra leaned over to see as the message indicator slid down to the numbers at the bottom of the board.  It stopped on the 1, and then the 8…Wow, the 1800s?  That’s a long time ago… It moved off of the 8 momentarily, then back again, and then over to the 3.  Ermynne looked up at Petra and pointed frantically to her paper.  Petra nodded.
 The eyes opened again.  “Did she say what I told you she’d say, Ermynne?” Jim asked.  Ermynne had gone pale, and she only nodded.  She turned the paper around and pointed to the number “1883” that she had written there, underneath where Jim had written the same.  “And that’s what she said?” Jim asked.  Petra and Ermynne both nodded.  “This sounds like the real thing, then…”
 Ruari frowned.  “This is getting kind of scary…um, Jim?  D’you think the board would work if I…er, kind of took a break?”
 “Sure,” Jim agreed.  “It’ll still work with four people.  Go ahead.”
 Ruari crawled up onto the bed next to Petra and huddled against the other purple-haired girl.  Petra gave her a reassuring pat on the back, and to Jim said, “What do you want to ask next?”
 “Just one more question to make sure…ask her where she’s from.”  Jim turned to Sora and winked.  “Then you can ask it who you’re going to marry as many times as you want…you know, in case it doesn’t give you a good answer the first time.”
 Jim wrote the correct answer down on Ermynne’s paper, then passed it back to her and put his hands back on the controller.  “Mary Parker, we want to know where you’re from.  Where was your hometown?”
 The board said “D” first.  Ermynne frowned, then looked up at Petra and Ruari and shook her head.  That’s not it, she mouthed.  But the three of them continued to watch the board as it spelled out two more letters: I, followed by E.
 Ruari’s eyes widened, but she had no time to react to the board’s suddenly throwing a death threat at them before lightning hit the water outside with an awful CRACK!  She made an “eep!” noise and buried her head in Petra’s lap, and everyone opened their eyes and looked up.
 “What happened?” Sora asked.
 “The board told us to die,” Ermynne squeaked, handing the paper over with a shaking hand.
 “No way,” Sora said.  She read what Ermynne had written, every letter the Ouija board had spit out since they first began, with Aoife reading over her shoulder.
 “Oh, noooo!” Aoife shrieked.  “We’ve got a homicidal ghost!  It wants to kill us all!  It’s mad because it thinks WE’RE the ones who made Mary Parker take a long walk!  WAAAHHH!”  And she promptly hid herself under the bed.
 Another loud CRACK from lightning outside elicited a scream from all the females present (even Petra, a little); this time, they actually saw the lightning hitting the water.  Aoife peeped out from under the bed as Blue-Eye got up and crossed over to the window.
 “It’s a storm,” he said, unnecessarily.
 A knock on the door produced more screams and made just about everyone jump.  “Guys?”
 “EEP!  It’s Mary!”  There went Aoife back under the bed again.  “Eew, it’s dusty under here…”
 The door opened.  Just Ferio…although the look on her face made Petra wish it was Mary instead; she knew any ghost would probably be easier to deal with than a sleep-deprived karate master.  
“What in god’s name is going on in here?” Ferio said crankily, looking around at the scene: Aoife’s toe sticking out from under the bed, Sora looking as if she was going to be sick and Ermynne looking similarly, Ruari doing her imitation of a pillbug and Petra trying to calm her down, Jim sitting by the Ouija board and Blue-Eye still looking out the window.
 “Ferio, you missed the exciting part!” Petra said.  “There was lightning, and then the Ouija board said ‘die’, and we’re all having a great time.  Right, Ruari?”  She patted her girlfriend on the head.  Ruari whimpered.
 “Sounds like fun,” Ferio said, arching an amused eyebrow.  “Mind if I join in?”
 Aoife crept out from under the bed and resumed her place at the board.  “But Ferio, I thought you didn’t believe in this stuff.  You thought it was suggestive, or something.”
 “You thought WHAT?” Sora said, looking up at her cousin.
 Ferio laughed and climbed up onto the top bunk.  “Suggestible.  That’s what I said.  Humans are naturally suggestible and the Ouija board and stuff like that just takes advantage of that.  I’ll explain it all to you tomorrow,” she added to Aoife, who was still looking confused.
 Now that everyone had somewhat gotten over the shock and Blue-Eye returned to his place, they were ready to ask another question.  “Wanna play, Ferio?” Jim offered.
 “I’ll just watch this time, thanks.”
 “Okay.  Um…Mary Parker?  What did you mean by ‘die’?”
 Mary clarified.  “KILL”, the board spelled out.  Again Ruari made a frightened mouse noise, turned into her Dratini form, and curled up, shivering, in Petra’s lap.
 Everyone opened their eyes again and looked up.  “Well?”
 “It said ‘kill’,” Ermynne said quietly.  “Guys, maybe we should stop…”
 “No, no, don’t stop,” Ferio said, finding this whole situation highly entertaining.  “It’s just starting to get to the really funny part.”  She jumped down from the bed, almost landing on poor Blue-Eye, and sat down.  “Mind if I join in?”
 “Uh…no,” Blue said.  “What should we ask it next?”
 “Ask it if it wants some tea?” Ferio laughed.
 “Ferio…” Sora said.
 “What are you ‘Ferio’ing at me for?” Ferio said.  Sora just shook her head.
 Dratini-Ruari slithered up behind Petra and laid her muzzle on Petra’s shoulder, then turned back.  “You’re not taking this very seriously, Ferio.  That thing just threatened to kill us.”  She shook her head, as if to get the memory out.  “I’m sorry, but growing up spending a lot of your time in the Cinnabar Labs…do you know how many ghosts they had running around there?  They’d pop randomly out of the walls and play tricks on people…geez, those things scared me to death.”
 “Really?” Sora said.  “Man, poor Aidan…”
 Jim didn’t ask who Aidan was.  “Well, let’s just try to ask it something.  Everybody, close your eyes and put your hands back on the message indicator.”
 “Oh, we close our eyes?” Ferio said, although she complied.  “I didn’t know you guys were doing that.  That makes it different.”
 “Different how?” Aoife asked.
 “Different in that no one can see the board,” Ferio said.  “So presumably no one could cheat…”
 “That’s the idea, yeah,” Jim said.  “Right then, let’s see…Mary Parker, why do you want to kill us?”
 The message indicator bounced back and forth a couple times, and Ermynne wrote down what it said and was very puzzled by the results (Ruari wasn’t even looking; she was still too scared).
 When everyone’s eyes opened back up again, after the message indicator stopped moving, Ermynne was in a state of puzzlement.  “What did it say?” Aoife asked.
 Ermynne just shook her head and showed them what she had written down.  “Ha ha ha ha.”
 “What the HELL?”
 “What’s ha ha ha supposed to mean?”
 An answer came just then.  “Haunter!” a voice gleefully cried.  Everyone jumped and looked around.  “Uh-oh…Jim…” Blue-Eye said, glancing nervously at Jim.
 “Haunter!” it cried again.  A face emerged from the center of the Ouija board, and the girls jumped and backed away from it.  Poor Ruari looked like she was going to have a nervous breakdown.  The face pulled itself out of the board some more, and it did indeed turn out to be a Haunter.  The Pokemon floated above the circle and laughed.  “Ha ha ha ha!”
 “Oh, man…Haunter!” Jim said.
 “Haunt?”  The Haunter turned to Jim, who reached for a Pokeball.
 “Get back in there, Haunter,” Jim said wearily.  “And DON’T COME OUT!”
 He recalled his Pokemon and tossed the ball aside.  “My Haunter,” he explained.  “It likes to do that sometimes…I usually let it run around, but not when we do the board…it tends to mess it up.  Anyway!  Now that that’s over…”
 “So does that mean it wasn’t Mary after all?” Aoife asked.
 “No…I think the Haunter just came in during those last few lines, to stir up trouble.  The real Mary is still there…I think.  But let’s make sure.”  Eyes were closed again, and hands went back to the indicator.  “Mary Parker, are you still there?”
 Ermynne watched as the message indicator slid over to the “Yes” on the upper corner of the board, and reported this back to the group.
 “That wasn’t you who wanted to kill us, was it?” Aoife asked.  The board indicated “no.”
 “All right,” Jim said.  “Now that we’ve got that cleared up…NOW we can ask it the marriage questions.”  He grinned.  “Who wants to go first?”

***

 Apparently, the board had much knowledge.  It told Sora that she would marry a man named “Brad” and have two children…though only one would be his.  Ruari took this opportunity to tease Sora about that, until it told her that she would have one baby by an “unknown” man, and that the baby’s name would be “Ocean”. (“I don’t get it…does it mean Oisin?  I’ve always wanted to name my first son that…”) Petra pressed it again for the name of the father of Ruari’s baby, and it said “mystery”, upon which point Aoife seized the board and asked it who she would marry (the name of Aoife’s future husband, it turns out, is ‘ha ha ha’…that was Tall Paul’s Haunter this time, and Jim had to wake Paul and tell him to come get his Pokemon).  The board had a few more things to say before it got tired and conked out…it revealed that Jim and Blue-Eye would stay together for a very long time, as would Petra and Ruari, and it told Ermynne “you will get what you wish for,” which she was quite pleased about.
Then Aoife asked it who the next mayor of Pallet Town would be, and it responded EJC, then began spitting out a whole line of nonsense letters before Blue-Eye decided it was time to go to bed and give the board some rest.  “Spirits get tired, too.”
“And so do Pokemorph girls who’ve just been scared out of their wits,” Ruari agreed, as she and Petra headed back into their room.
 Petra looked disappointed.  “So that means we aren’t…”
 “NO, Petra.”
 “Aww man…”
 Ermynne and Ferio left a minute later (“No, Aoife, I will NOT push her out the porthole for you.”), leaving just Sora and Aoife, who climbed into bed.
 “No more rogue Haunters around?” Aoife asked Jim, who was bunking in the top bunk across from her.
 “Nope, no more,” Jim assured her.  “Well…One-Leg has a Gastly, and it might make an appearance…did you know his room is the one directly above ours?  And sometimes it—“
 “AAAUGH!  JIM!” Aoife yelled, burying her head under her pillow.  “Stop freaking me out here!”
 “Yeah, Jim,” Blue-Eye added.
 “Yeah, Jim,” Sora echoed.
 “Fine, fine,” Jim said, turning and facing the other way.
 Great, Aoife thought, as she tried to get to sleep.  Now I’m going to have dreams about some scary 1800s lady trying to push me off a plank.  Thanks bunches, Jim.
 
 
Author's Notes
Yes, finally, huh?  Willow writes another episode of Conclave, after god knows how long...I've been working a lot on these novels of mine (I've got at least four going right now, which as you can imagine is not easy to do) and Conclave has kind of been on the shelf for a while.  I may write more episodes occasionally, but they definitely won't be frequent.  But enough of that depressing stuff, how about the episode, huh?  Jim and Blue-Eye are so cute...*squee* The whole Ouija Board session was based on something my friends and I did, and we used the same method as the Conclavers (everyone closes their eyes, and one person writes everything down) and got actual coherent answers.  Not the same ones as they did in this episode, however...oh, and pay attention to those "prophecies" the Ouija board made.  If I ever finish the series, some of them will come true, and we may get to meet "Brad" and "Ocean."  But I won't tease you any more, because this might never happen.
 
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