Although there was a cable car, it wasn't very fast. Its top speed was only about six meters per second, and under normal circumstances, it didn't run at top speed for the sake of passenger safety. So its average speed was probably around three to five meters per second.
By the time Misty and Tracey had ridden the cable car up to the frigid mountaintop blanketed in snow and ice, more than twenty minutes had passed.
Meanwhile, Ash and Danny had climbed less than a fifth of the way up. It would take them at least another hour or two, if not longer, to reach the summit.
As for Annie, Misty and Tracey said they hadn't seen her anywhere on the way up.
They'd been very worried about her. For a while, they'd even thought she might have gotten trapped somewhere out of sight or accidentally fallen to the bottom of a cliff. They planned to ask Ash and Danny about her when they arrived, then figure out what to do!
But...
What they saw was completely unexpected, something they never could have imagined. When they reached the mountaintop of the freezing island of Navel and arrived at the cable car station in the midst of the snow and ice, they had barely stepped off the car when they were shocked to see:
Not far away, in the vast white landscape, a small red figure—the troublesome little girl—was crouching beside several steaming hot springs, fiddling mysteriously with something.
"Hey!"
"Misty..."
"Look, is that Annie?"
Tracey rubbed his eyes in disbelief, then turned to Misty and asked in a tone as if he'd seen a ghost.
"Of course it is!"
"I recognized her right away. Who else did you think it could be?"
Misty answered without a moment's hesitation.
But the