The Next Morning...

You wake up in your room at the Pokémon Center, daylight spilling in through your window. You check your phone and realise you slept through your alarm and that it's already late morning. You suppose that's to be expected, though, as you were up pretty late yesterday aboard the S.S. Anne. After exchanging text messages with your mom and Daisy, informing them of your victory over Surge (although conveniently leaving out the part where you got a job as a sex worker and then got fired from it) and receiving their congratulations, you get up out of bed and take a quick shower before throwing on some clean underwear and your vest, shorts and hat.

You thank Nurse Joy as you enter the Center lobby, before heading back out onto the streets of Vermillion and check the map on your Pokedex, not exactly sure where you're headed.

Bill had given you the address of his grandfather in Celadon City, but the easiest way to get there involved heading through Saffron. Saffron City has a gym in itself so is well worth visiting, but you had attempted to go there following your win at the Cerulean Gym and found the roads into the metropolis closed for some vaguely-explained reason involving maintenance of some kind, forcing you to take the underground path to Vermillion instead. If the roads to Saffron are still closed, your only way of getting to Celadon will be by backtracking to Cerulean, passing through the formidable Rock Tunnel and the small town of Lavender, and then through another underground path to Celadon. Your other option is to head south from here to Fuchsia City and its new Gym Leader Janine, but you know that this will then involve yet more backtracking in the long run.

You decide to head towards Saffron just to see if anything's changed; after stocking up on some items using the prize money that Surge had begrudgingly given you along with the badge, you take the north road out of Vermillion. Unfortunately, you find the roads are still closed. Irritated with the continued impediments to your progress, which had been a consistent theme since way back in Viridian with the gym being closed, you decide to head back to Cerulean and then through Rock Tunnel; once in Lavender Town you would then have a choice of hitting the Celadon and Fuchsia gyms in whichever order you chose, as well as Saffron if it had opened up by then.

There are significantly less trainers in the underground path and the surrounding above-ground road than there had been on your previous trip through here, and the ones you do encounter you are able to defeat fairly handily, meaning you arrive back in Cerulean City by around mid-afternoon. You head towards the East exit, intending on starting your trek through Rock Tunnel today, but as you pass by the gym you can't help but be distracted by some kind of commotion that seems to be going on there.

You look over to see all of the Cerulean Sisters, Misty included, involved in some kind of verbal altercation, shouting words at each other that you can't quite hear from where you're stood. A part of you feels that you should just get moving; you have no desire to ever see Lily, Daisy or Violet again after the humiliation they'd put you through, after all. But then again, Misty had been nice in the end, and you'd shared an... intimate time together after your battle. Besides, you can't deny you're curious to know what's going on...