Hello everyone! The moment you've all been waiting for: the very last round of the tournament, the ultimate conclusion.

The GottaReadEmAllClub had a very thrilling, fun experience with running this tournament, and hopefully the contestants and followers have, too!

Remember, even if you didn't manage to end up a winner, that doesn't at all mean you're a bad writer. Not at all! Possibly the most difficult aspect of this tournament for the judges was choosing the winners themselves, since there were so many good writers participating. And remember: there's always next time :)

But! Enough of that, let's move on to the winners.

Because, sadly, @MelonLord7 was unable to submit her one-shot, @d_s_t_e is the winner of this round, hence the winner of the entire tournament. Congratulations!

First, here's her magnificent one-shot:

The citizens of Lavender Town are a people haunted by the memories of what once was. The recently bereaved wander into the borders weeping and heartbroken, bearing their spheres of midnight black – the pokéballs that are not pokéballs because there is no life within. Some carry their spheres like heavy burdens that drag them down with every step, others clutch them tightly in both hands, holding, squeezing, never letting go until the funeral presider must pry it out from between fingers that are too stiffened to properly release. I was one of those people, standing beside the freshly dug grave with my fingers curled like claws as I watched the midnight sphere release the corpse of my first and only Pokémon. "Royal looked so small and helpless, lying there inside a little hole in the earth," I say. "His eyes were dull and glassy, his fins were stiff and motionless. A part of me was panicking, thinking, you know, he can't be on dry land. He needs water. It was just so wrong. But the other part of me was thinking, that's not Royal. That's just some plastic dummy, something that's never been alive. Seeing his body there, I couldn't imagine how it had ever been alive." I stop speaking just as my voice chokes up. I sit back down in my metal folding chair amid murmurs of sympathy. The group leader thanks me for sharing, says something that's probably supposed to be comforting, but I'm not really listening to her. I'm nodding my head, pretending to accept her words while my head is filled with nothing but the remembered image of fresh dirt pouring down upon his scales, sealing him away bit by bit into his grave.

These support group things are supposed to help, but they never do. I have some kind of rare immunity. The only person in this room who's been in Lavender Town longer than I have is the group leader. Most of these trainers call themselves visitors, staying in the big hotel on the north west side of town only for a week or two, as long as it takes to recover from their loss and move on with their lives. I'm a permanent resident. For five months now, I've been renting the apartment between a middle-aged grief counselor and a crusty old tombstone engraver. The man who presided over Royal's funeral lives across the hall. Ninety five percent of the town's population is in the business of death. Another four percent are in the business of providing goods and services to those people. I'm in the one percent, the group that all the others like to call "the ones who just can't let it go". As the support group meeting comes to an end, all the newbies and hopeless dependents crowd around the group leader, trying to monopolize her attention. I feel her trying to catch my eye, but the needy people pen her in. I walk a straight course out the double doors. She should know by now that this is what I always do, but, then, I suppose she knows what day it is. Five months I've been renting my apartment, but seven months before that I was staying in the place I've nicknamed the Hotel Grief. All told, it's been one year. One year exactly since that day. The day I watched my friend die right before my eyes. Props to her for keeping all her patients' details straight, but props is all I'm giving her. "Patient" isn't the right word. Probably. I don't care. It's what I feel like I am to her.

"I don't want therapy," I have told my neighbor the grief counselor time and time again. When she passes me in the hall as I balance a bag full of groceries in one hand and a jug of Miltank milk in the other I pause in my attempt to stick my key into the lock to call out my refusal to her kindly repeated offer. When we both reach out into the hallway to retrieve our morning newspapers at the exact same time, I tell her that I am still not interested. And for weeks now I have said, "I don't want therapy" as my first and only greeting to her. Last week, she finally stopped me for long enough to ask the question: "Why?" "Excuse me," I said, trying to shuffle past her. "I'm sorry," she said, "But I will not move until you give me one simple answer." I closed my eyes. "I don't want therapy because I don't deserve it." In spite of all her years of experience, her mouth opened in shock. I pushed past her, thrust open the door to my apartment, and fell into a ball of grief and self-hatred. I reached up a trembling hand to lock the door behind myself and did not rise to that same height again until I awoke the next morning not one foot farther from the doorway. Still, it was not good enough to satisfy the loathing. Royal is dead, and it is all my fault. "Why do you even come to these things?" a voice asks me suddenly. I realize with a start that my feet have carried me away from the support group meeting and along the street to the Hotel Grief, the opposite of the direction I had intended to travel. The boy who asked this question has a face that looks familiar. He's a teenager, dressed all in black with a single spiky piercing in his left ear.

"Some of the others told me you've been coming to these things for months," he goes on. "Coming". Oh, yes, he was there tonight. A first timer who told us in his introduction that it's been two weeks since his Ninetails died. "I come to talk about Royal." "But these things are a waste of time, right? You don't feel any different." "What do you care how I feel?" I ask, regarding him suspiciously as we turn a corner. "I want to prove to my parents that I don't need to come to these stupid things. They won't believe me when I say that I don't need them." "It's only been two weeks," I say. "Trust me, you need them." I turn around and begin to walk the opposite way, the way I should have been walking all along, back to my apartment, but the boy turns as well and starts to follow me. "But they don't work. You're proof that they don't work." "They don't work for me because I'm not trying to make them work," I snap. "I just want to talk to people about Royal, and the support groups are the place where people will really listen." "Why do you want to talk about that fish of yours?" The boy pulls up a corner of his mouth and wrinkles his nose. "They told me it was a Magikarp." The way he says that word— "Magikarp" – it's like an obscenity. I turn on my heel. "It?" And then, without feeling that I have consciously willed myself to do so, I feel myself pulling back my fist . Magikarp is a worthless piece of trash Pokémon, that's what he thinks. A Pokémon that no one wants. A Pokémon that no one could ever love. The sweet Pokémon I spent the best years of my life with, who swam with me through glittering palaces of coral reef and leapt five feet into the air just to welcome me home after I had been away and loved me more deeply than I had known that it was possible to love, reduced to nothing. No, not nothing. Soiled and degraded to an "it".

The teenage boy whose name I could not remember deserves this punch and every ounce of the lesson he might learn from it, but the strange thing is that, as I push forward into his jaw, I can almost swear that the face I am punching is my own. And, as I reel back with knuckles smarting beautifully, I look into the shock and pain reflected in that teenage face and know that I never truly wanted to hurt this boy at all. "I'm sorry!" I call out as he runs away, but the damage has been done. Once more, I am the cause of pain, and the flood of guilt is somehow both agonizing and viciously pleasing. *** The most beautiful thing about a Magikarp is that he doesn't mind. She is the butt of every joke, the punch line on all lips, the mocked and scorned and rejected. And yet he bears it all. Royal knew what people thought of Magikarp. He himself had heard the insults they thought he was too stupid to understand. They were not smart enough to realize that everyone understands cruelty. But Royal would not please these people by changing who he was. He knew that a Gyrados would not fit in my little backyard swimming pool, and he cared nothing about strength in battle. I cared nothing about strength in battle, either. In all our years together, I never once brought him out into a fight. And I never took another Pokémon. He was all the friend I needed, and he wanted nothing more than to be my friend in return. The others called him stupid, but he was right where they were wrong. He knew that he was wonderful just the way he was, and he did not need to prove himself to them in order to prove it to himself. And he was happy. Royal would not have been hurt by that boy's comments, and my action does nothing for the sake of his memory. I know that I did it for myself.

***

Everyone knows that pokéballs run on battery power, but no one ever fears them running dry. For those who battle regularly, their frequent trips to the Pokémon Center ensure that the pokéballs act as though they have a magical and completely unlimited power source. The Pokémon inside is healed, and the pokéball regains the tiny sliver of energy that it lost over the past two days. I knew that Royal's pokéball was running low. It had been a year, maybe two since his last recharge. I'd heard the little blip that acted as the warning, but I was worn out, in the middle of a long journey home from Pewter City, and I thought that it would hold until I reached Cerulean. A pokéball holds the Pokémon in storage as a form of energy, keeping it inside, sustaining it, and holding the pattern from which it can bring that Pokémon into material being once again. When the battery dies, all functions stop. Anything trapped inside would die instantly. But there's a safety feature, of course. With its dying breath, a pokéball will spit back out its inhabitant, giving flesh and bone and breath, setting the Pokémon free until a recharge makes storage safe again. But Royal was set free inside a cavern of dry rock. A freak accident, they said later, the first case in a century. I had people knocking on my door for months, asking for permission to publish my story in children's textbooks as a warning of what not to do, a horror story to set them straight. The first time, I slammed the door in the would-be-publisher's face. But no Pokémon deserved to meet with Royal's fate, and I deserved the shame. Every time after, I invited them in for a cup of tea and gave the whole story fresh. And every time, amid the dropping in of sugar cubes and the clinking sound of teaspoons stirred within ceramic cups, I relived the day again.

I watched in horror as red light shot out onto the ground in front of me, resolving into scales of the same color and fins as white and crisp as sails. I saw his eyes wide and his mouth wider, gasping, sucking in nothing but dry, suffocating air. He fell sideways and slapped his tail against the ground, not with all his might, but with all the force of his panic and terror. His gills flapped open and shut, open and shut, and the next slap of his tail drew blood as it tore against a rock. It flipped him completely off the ground, and my arms shot down to catch him. I ran two steps before he flopped wildly out of my grip, but I picked him up again and ran, not knowing which way I was going, only hoping that behind the next turn an underground spring or pool would appear. With every patch of empty rock that greeted me, I wished three more wellsprings into existence. With all hope running out, I wondered crazily if I could keep him alive with the moisture of my tears. When he stopped moving, I knew that he was still alive, was still holding on for me. Unconscious but not dead. I burst out of the cave exit and threw him into the first puddle I saw, but he hit the ground like a discarded object. He would never move again. *** "How long has it been since you've been swimming?" my support group leader asked the last time she was able to corner me after a meeting. I just looked at her. I'd never said, but she knew the answer. I hadn't taken a step into the water since I saw his body lying limp at the bottom of that puddle. "It would be good for you," she said. I didn't doubt it, but I wasn't looking for what was good for me. Now, I run my right hand under the cold stream coming from the faucet. I don't know if I'm trying to numb the pain left over from the punch I threw or trying to freeze out the memory that it ever happened.

I had never meant to hurt anybody. A year ago I never would have done this. A year ago I wasn't sick with guilt and pain. It's twisting me. I'm not just causing myself pain, I'm self-inflicting injury. Bent and broken, bitter and filled with hate, who will I strike out at next? What will I become? This wasn't about Royal today. This stopped being about Royal a long time ago. It wouldn't hurt Royal to hear what that teenage boy said out of his ignorance, but it would cut him to the bone to see the state I'm in. I look up into the mirror, above the sink, surveying bloodshot eyes and hair hanging in dirty strings above a stained old t-shirt with at least three holes. I say that it serves me right, but Royal, even knowing what I did, even in full remembrance of all the pain and fear, I know he would forgive. I sink my fingernails deep into my scalp like claws. I didn't deserve him. I want to scratch and tear until I rake canals of blood, but slowly, slowly, I release. I walk out my apartment door and turn left instead of right. There's a backyard sort of area here, behind the complex. I kick off my shoes, peel off the old t-shirt, and slip out of my shorts. I always wear a swim suit underneath. I dive into the deep end with all the grace that comes from years spent living among the fish. The water feels good. Not vicious like the flood of guilt after the punch, and not numbing like the cold water of the faucet. It glides across my skin as though it's cleansing, rinsing congealed blood from the surface of my heart, spreading like soothing aloe across the wound beneath. I spread both arms straight out in front of me and do a dolphin kick, horizontal to the white tiles on the bottom, midway between that solid floor and the beckoning surface. Just before I know that I need air, I spread my arms and pull upwards. When I break the surface, the first new breath feels as sweet as the water's kiss. No more harm. This is healing.

———-

So! The winners in order:

1st place: @d_s_t_e

Prizes: a public review of your book (of your choice), a follow from all the members, a shout-out

2nd place: @MelonLord7

Prizes: a private review of your book from all the critics, a follow from Helsu and Ivy, a shout-out

3rd place: @DragonsRose

Prizes: a private review of your book from two critics (you choose who), a shout-out

Congratulations to all three winners! Also, keep in mind that we won't be giving prizes until after our May Break, which ends on May the 31st.

Thank you to all, and have a great day!

-GRA