kintsugi
the warmth of summer in the songs you write
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- #120
WOAH WE'RE ALIVE IT'S BEEN A WHILE.
This is an update that I've been agonizing over for a while now and cannot for the life of me make pretty. With that rousing statement of confidence, I hope you enjoy.
responses
lose your way in the dark become so edgy at writing that you forget the brighter parts of humanity, heh.
Silver was right. The girl I was staring at, who was only fifteen minutes removed from being me, looked completely inhuman. It was the eyes, too-dark and too-uncaring, that reflected nothing but the intent to follow through, that made me stop completely cold. There was a clatter as she threw the stake of wood that had impaled our thigh aside, not even noticing the bloodied splinters left behind. How could I fight something like this? How could I become something like this?
The answer came without preface, and suddenly I felt the weight of the past fifteen minutes landing on me.
My starter was dark. I had been granted admission to a locked Tower that housed impossible secrets for reasons I couldn’t begin to fathom. I had been thrown backward in time by the Forest Queen to save an ancient monument dedicated to uplifting human achievement in the face of inconceivable odds. This was just one last impossible thing in a string that I had to do. It was only a matter of time.
I was aware of Rousseau hovering around my shoulders and expelling thick clouds of gas from the nebula surrounding his body. {Whatever you do, ma cherie, do it fast. The others will notice soon.}
She lunged toward me. Perhaps she recognized that our existences were mutually exclusive. We locked eyes through the unnatural fog, and I saw the self-preservation painted deep in her pupils. She would stop at nothing to stay alive, and I was in her path.
But I was also smart, smarter than her, smarter than blind rage and the primordial desire to keep living. And most of all, I understood how my allies worked.
“Hypnosis,” I whispered sharply. Her focus pinned on me, she didn’t notice Rousseau phasing through her head until it was too late. She collapsed to the ground with a thud, and I winced in sympathy. “I can explain,” I said, as the gastly surged past my doppelgänger to look at me accusingly.
{Later,} he said. His wide smile remained, but I could see the way that his eyes were creased in a sharp frown, as if he were pondering something, hard. {And, honestly, I don’t think you can explain.}
The fog vanished as a blade of air cut through it, narrowly missing my head and splintering the wall behind us.
Right. I would deal with the ramifications that I was most-certainly prone to fits of utter evil at a different time. In the meantime, I had promises to keep. I turned toward Falkner and tried to keep calm.
Conventional battling wasn’t going to be an option. This thing could overpower us easily; the only option would be to use strategies it couldn’t expect. Luckily, I had zero training with this sort of stuff, so I wouldn’t even be able to consider how outlandish most of my plans were going to sound. “Rousseau, can you just hypnotize that?” I asked, trying not to sound too hopeful.
{No. His mental defenses are significantly more advanced than… hers. The undead are less prone to the distractions of the living.}
I don’t know what I had been expecting, honestly. “Icarus, get ready grab Gaia and get airborne. I want as much of this room as possible covered in String Shot. We need to slow him down.” My murkrow cawed in affirmation, heaving the caterpie upward and taking to the skies. “Atlas, stay close. I need your fire in a bit. Dante keep him—” I was cut off momentarily as Falkner threw another razor-edged blast of wind in our direction.
{Distracted. I know,} the abra said wearily, flicking his tail in irritation and glancing back at Silver for confirmation. Silver nodded, but he was frowning at me, and it took all of my willpower not to cast a guilty glance at past-me’s crumbled body behind the rubble. {Anything in particular?}
“How many teleports do you have left in you?”
There was a hint of pride in the abra’s voice as he answered stiffly, {Enough.}
We honestly didn’t have time for their arrogance or distrust. “That’s not a number,” I said, letting a hint of steel slip into my voice. “Dante—”
My breath hitched as a honeycombed screen of light materialized in front of me, barely forming before another Air Slash shattered on top of it. The wind sent my hair flaring up in a cloud of orange, and I coughed in the dust cloud that formed after. {It depends,} the abra said, voice strained from the effort of expending so much energy so quickly, {on what else you need done.} He fired a Shock Wave to keep Falkner from advancing any closer, but the gym leader batted it aside with a flick of his wrist.
He had a fair enough point with that one. I thought back to what I’d learned last time—the ghost took on the weakness of what it possessed. My brush with the froslass had shown me that I didn’t really know how to deal with a ghost, but a person was a different story. “Okay.” I needed to keep Dante in reserve; he was the only pokémon here who could even remotely match Falkner in terms of raw strength, and he’d be the only thing protecting us if it ever came to dealing with Falkner head-on. Which ideally, would never happen. “I need screens on Iris, the kind you keep using to block his wind blades—”
{Air Slash,} the abra said in a level voice. {And Light Screen.}
“Yeah, those, okay, whatever. Focus on keeping her safe. Iris, you’ll be drawing a lot of fire, so you need to be fast. Understand?”
The sentret nodded curtly. This level of obedience was frightening; I almost hoped that by the time we got to the bottom of the Tower, she stopped listening to me so well.
“Right. Icarus, get ready.” From the rafters, a squawk of affirmation. “Iris, you’re in. Slash him up, but focus on not getting hit.”
With a tiny snarl, the sentret leapt forward in a flash of brown, her claws skittering across the floorboards as she closed the gap between herself and Falkner. I saw the telltale yellow shimmer of a Light Screen forming around her, which helped immensely as a blast of wind skirted just a hair too close for comfort. Above, Icarus wheeled with Gaia clutched tightly in his talons. She fired a blast into the air, and sticky strings of silk streamed down, haphazardly draping around the room before pulling taut as Icarus carried her away.
Hissing in annoyance and vaporizing one of the silk strings on his sleeve with a gust of wind, Falkner raised his hand and prepared to obliterate the rest, only for Iris to reach him and tackle him down with the force of a bullet. His hand and his strike went wild; the errant blast cratered another portion of the wall. I flinched: even with Dante’s help, getting hit by one of those at close range would end messily. Falkner yowled in pain as Iris spiraled up his body, leaving a pinprick trail of clawmarks as she did so, and then she went to town on his face. He raised a fist toward her, and I recognized the telltale signs from before. We needed to—
“Get her out of there. Now,” I commanded Dante, who obliged with a Psychic. Blue energy surrounded the sentret, and she was flying through the air, her claws still outstretched, even as Falkner obliterated the spot she’d been occupying half a second ago with a blast of wind. Dante set her down gently on the floorboards, only for her to leap back into the fray.
{Set,} Gaia called, and she was right: the criss-cross of webbing around Falkner was thick enough to almost be a cage, some areas so dense that I could barely see him. It would have to be enough.
“That’s your plan?” Silver called incredulously from his spot behind the pillar. “String Shot? Everywhere?”
“It’s working better than Plan ‘Get Hit by the Air Slash and Wait in the Corner to Die’, honestly,” I shot back through gritted teeth. From inside of the fence of silk, I could still hear Falkner’s growing frustration as Iris presumably antagonized him and then dodged. This would be our best chance to him with a surprise attack that he wouldn’t be able to block. “Icarus, get ready to go in. Dante, start charging Shock Wave. Fire it on my command.”
{It won’t possibly make it to him,} the abra pointed out. {Silk is an insulator.}
“There will be an opening.” Even though I should’ve seen it coming, I forced back the shudder of revulsion at the sudden déjà vu. I felt the cold sensation coming on, but I blinked twice and forced it down. Not here. Not now. I needed my team for this. “Atlas, fire.”
The houndour barked in delight at finally getting his turn to fight, and a trio of burning-hot embers whizzed past us, landing squarely in the middle of the silk. The fire spread quickly, incinerating the outer layer of string shot in an instant. The embers began chewing a hole through the silk where they’d landed, burning a gap nearly a foot wide. “There’s your opening,” I told Dante, and the abra didn’t need to hear it twice. “Icarus, you too. Iris, move out of there.” A sharp surge of electricity discharged with a hiss from between the psychic’s outstretched paws, and the abra fired the glimmering blue shockwave through the gap in the webbing just as Icarus finished phasing through the gym leader’s body with the last vestiges of a Feint Attack.
Iris was still skittering back to me when Falkner roared in pain as the electricity made contact with him. I thought back to Rousseau’s words: possessing a human might’ve given us the only possible advantage we’d had left to push. Falkner swerved, spinning around wildly to end the source of his torment, but by then the string shot around him had caught fire as well, leaving him with nothing but globs of sticky fire.
{It isn’t his fault,} Rousseau said half-heartedly, looking at the flailing gym leader with what might’ve been pity. {To die without memory—}
{—is no excuse to torment the living,} Dante said harshly, and fired another Shock Wave into the fray. Falkner screamed again.
The gastly flinched but said nothing more. He hadn’t joined in the fray, and now that I’d heard this, I didn’t think I would be able to ask him to fight Falkner in the future. But was this it? Had we won?
Too late, I mentally berated myself for tempting fate as an enormous blast of wind, bigger than any we’d seen before, formed around Falkner like a cocoon, sucking the remains of the flaming web into the vortex and extinguishing the fires in an instant. I took a step backward—like that would’ve done anything to help. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched as Icarus began frantically flapping toward us, Gaia in his talons as he veered around the raging air currents. Squinting, I could see Falkner in the center, looking bruised and burned and generally worse for the wear, but nowhere near out of it yet.
His eyes locked with mine, and I saw those too-black pupils clearly even through the smoke, before he bodily threw the hurricane toward us.
Shit. Dante wouldn’t be enough to stop this. “Can you at least slow it down?” I shouted to him.
{I don’t think so,} Dante said grimly, but the abra tried anyway, his entire body glowing blue as he tried to grab the hurricane in a psychic hold. I stared, dumbstruck, as the pillar of wind ground to a halt, cloaked in Dante’s blue light, and then his eyes grew unfocused and the energy flickered out. The abra dropped out of the air in exhaustion, and I barely managed to catch him. Time seemed to speed up as the twister surged forward, unfettered, and we had nothing left to stop it with.
In the moments before the cyclone obliterated us, my mind remained stubbornly blank. I stared, dumbfounded, as the hurricane spiraled toward us, inexorable and unstoppable, while my brain replayed useless high school lectures about science. I was back in Goldenrod, pencil tapping in class, while my teacher droned on about weather patterns and air currents, how—
Hot air rises.
“Atlas, get all of your fire on that thing!” I shouted, one hand uselessly outstretched as a sort of shield. “Dante, Icarus, prepare to get in fast once the cyclone’s out of the way. We don’t have much time.” It wasn’t going to be enough, but it would have to be. “Iris, keep it occupied.” The sentret wouldn’t be able to attack the ghost directly, but we didn’t have much of a choice.
Atlas leapt forward, tilting his head back and charging his fire in only an instant before letting out the largest stream of fire I had ever seen from him, nearly two feet in diameter and glowing a brilliant blue at the core. I shied away from the explosion, trying to shield my eyes from the blinding light without looking away from Falkner. The temperature around us skyrocketed, and the remaining rafters in the ceiling gave in with a huge groan and flew skyward. Whining with exhaustion, the houndour collapsed at my feet as well, and I felt my blood run cold. That had pushed him too far. I could still see the coal-grey fur against his ribcage moving, but—
Iris slammed into the gym leader once more with her tail, using her momentum as a pivot and springboarding off of his knees before launching herself far away. Icarus did the same, spreading his inky wings wide to pull up short before arcing back in the opposite direction, beady red eyes glowing through the smoke.
They were too slow. Falkner whipped his hands through the air, blasting them back with an explosion of pure wind. My pokémon weren’t fast enough to escape the crossfire, and I watched with horror as Icarus squawked in agony and plowed into the ground. Iris landed ten feet from us, rolling to a halt and not getting up again.
{A gazzze as blank and pitilessssss as the ssssun!}
“Roussea, please!” I shouted over the tempest to the gastly beside me. I felt like an icy claw had wrapped around my heart. If my pokémon died here, I didn’t know what I would do. “Do something!”
{Ma chérie, I—}
“They’ll die, Rousseau!”
Black energy around him surging from his evident frustration, the gastly phased through my stomach and appeared in the middle of the carnage, combatting bits of errant wind with spurts of his own darkness. He screwed up his eyes and released a cloud of dark smoke, blocking out the possessed body of Falkner, as well as the struggling forms of my pokémon, from view.
I took several steps forward, Gaia still in my arms, as I tried to get closer to the fray to get a better look. “If you can hear me, strafe!” I shouted.
“That word, Boss,” I heard Icarus crow from inside of the haze of chaos. “You use it often, but I do not think you know what it means!”
I felt a flash of irritation at my murkrow, but it meant that he was alive. Icarus burst out of the smoke, a desperately flailing Iris in his talons, before he bodily threw her back into the chaos. I watched her eyes sharpen with determination as she straightened her brown body, sharp claws pointing in toward where she could barely see the outline of Falkner’s figure, striped tail flapping in the wind. Then, she sank back into the cloud and I lost her from my view.
I heard a howl of pain, indicating that she’d managed to make contact, and then there was another blast of wind that sent all three of them flying back again, clearing the haze in the process. Falkner’s slouched figure appeared out of the fleeing smoke, the cold fire still in his eyes, but I could see a pair of three unbleeding scratches on either cheek, right beneath the eyes.
“Icarus, now!”
There was a squawk of affirmation, and Icarus sprouted through Falkner’s stomach again, nothing more than a golden beak followed by a sprouting pair of black wings cloaked in the dark energy of Feint Attack. The gym leader stumbled in response while the ghost within shrieked wildly, but another cannon-like blast of wind sent Icarus spiraling to the ground. “Reeling shadowsss of indignant birdsss.” Falkner began staggering toward us, and I knew that we were out of tricks. Screeching, Iris leapt at him, and Falkner didn’t even look as he slammed her into a wall.
I couldn’t bring myself to watch the undead limping towards us to kill me. The cold surged up against me, but I forced it down. Atlas hadn’t moved, Dante was still unconscious, and the rest of my pokémon were scattered around the room. There was nothing left to stop him from—
{Stay back.}
I looked up in horror to see Gaia facing down a monster alone.
The hunched shell of Falkner slowly approached her, his grin widening on one side only. “My sssmall caterpie, unloved and unwanted. I’d be doing your trainer a favor, you know, if I killed you,” the creature said, tendrils of darkness wrapping the walls, forming into the shapes of illusory trainers. “Bug-typessssss are perfect for children. They grow up fassssst and are eassssy to train.” The ghost tilted its head to one side as it wrapped shadowy tendrils around Gaia, who feebly spat another wave of String Shot at it that was promptly batted away by another blast of dark energy. “But they jusssssst can’t keep up with the resssssst of the team, can they? I’m sssssure you were winning at firssssst, every time, but when the time comes that the battlesssss ssssstart actually mattering—”
With that, he threw Gaia into the ground, creating a crater three feet in diameter before picking her up smashing her into the wall on the other side of the room.
“Gaia!” I screamed, voice catching in my throat.
Icarus squawked in protest, pulling his battered form airborne and struggling to gain altitude, his wingbeats barely keeping him in the air, but Falkner easily clipped his wings with an Air Slash and set him spiraling back down.
“Now you won’t feel bad about replacccing her,” the ghost hissed. “You can get something really sssstrong on your team, can’t you? Sssomething that sssuited you more? Were you ever going to tell that you didn’t want her?”
I opened my mouth, but no sounds came out.
“I ssssshould give you the badge for thissss,” the gym leader said quietly, and, true to form, the corpse of Falkner lurched forward and patted his pocket before throwing a tiny lump of metal in my direction. The winged badge skidded to a halt near my feet. “You’ve done sssso well.”
I stumbled toward the wall, desperately trying to see if I could find Gaia’s form in the rubble, but the all-too-familiar whiplash crack of an Air Slash, followed by the rafters caving in above me, stopped me in my tracks.
The pillar glowed gold.
“The darknessssss dropsssss again, but now I know,” the thing crowed victoriously, hovering over all of us and preparing to wipe us out, before a blast of psychic energy knocked it to the ground. I blearily turned around, expecting to see Dante pushing the offensive, but he was still struggling on the ground as a purple blur sent me skidding back.
{That twenty years of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,} a second voice finished. Translucent wings flared out, and the subsequent draft was so powerful that the clouds of smoke were sent shrieking back. The butterfree rocketed forward, a multicolored beam of raw energy erupting from her glinting eyes, and I numbly watched as the creature I’d pegged with the killing instinct of a damp paper towel systematically smashed Falkner’s corpse into the ground until the planks gave way. {You aren’t the only one who knows how to read,} Gaia said calmly, flapping above the crater she’d created.
“Holy shit,” I breathed, and then limped over to where Falkner had fallen. I peered tentatively down the hole in the ground, half expecting to see him surging up, there was only an eerie calm. Beneath us, Falkner’s body lay crumpled in the center of a slowly-settling cloud. “Gaia, you did it.” I looked into her newformed honeycombed eyes, trying to see if there was anything familiar in there, but she only looked saddened.
Something black erupted from Falkner's still chest, its features too smudged and too faint for me to see, but I think I knew. {Thank you,} the ghost whispered weakly, sinking to the ground alongside Falkner’s corpse and dimming a little more. {You have come to sssave usss… You came to ssssave usss… You will come to sssave usss…}
Rousseau looked away grimly.
{You musssst be careful that you do not lossse your way in the dark,} the ghost whispered, its voice barely audible.
Almost touching the ground, the ghost's blank smile crumbled away to dust, the blisteringly dark energy around it no longer vibrant. {Pleasssse,} it whispered quietly, feeble, vaporous arms reaching out toward us. {Who wassss I?}
I opened my mouth to answer, prepared to be furious at the bastard that had nearly killed Gaia, prideful over the monster I’d never expected to vanquish, uncaring in the face of what as nothing more than a shell, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. “I'm sorry,” I whispered instead. “I don't know.”
Maybe it didn't hear me. Maybe it did, and my uncertainty was the last thing it heard. The ghost did not respond, its eyes staring blankly upward before it, too, began to disintegrate alongside the long-dead corpse of its owner.
{The darkness drops, but now I know,} Gaia said from behind my shoulder.
Rousseau finished in a quiet, solemn voice as way of eulogy, {that twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.}
I had nothing more to offer a ghost that cringed by a man's unmarked grave.
Dante picked up Atlas’s limp form in a weak cloud of energy. I scooped up Iris in my arms and offered my shoulder to Silver, who refused to meet my eyes even as his entire body shivered from shock. There would be people at the bottom to look after him, at least. We'd survived the storm.
We limped down the Tower together.
This is an update that I've been agonizing over for a while now and cannot for the life of me make pretty. With that rousing statement of confidence, I hope you enjoy.
responses
I'm afraid I'm a little bit unclear on this--could you elaborate what you mean with the tone stuff? I always love your crit, but I don't quite understand this one.I think (And this is something I may change my mind on somewhat, come the Violet arc) that once you decide on what you want the atmosphere of a given scene to be, you stick with it. I may well be wrong, but I kind of feel that's what was at the heart of my problems with the Violet arc: you wanted the desperate survivalist tone and then you wanted to go all shades of grey, but the one worked to contradict the other.
eyyy squadThat leads me on to the second thought, which is that the edits here are definitely an improvement. The issue of Gifts and the cultural impact of the xatu in particular, but also the cold internal narrative - they all needed to be more prominent and you've put them all in their natural home. I actually thought for a moment that you were going to scrap that bit of warmth that Gaia brought, but you found another way to bring it in during the interlude.
Aaaaand, yeah, elephant in the room acknowledged. I think this is less of you and I having similar perceptions of villains (I wrote Silver to be a largely unforgiveable bastard type, with some sympathetic moments as an afterthought), and more of me being inadept at handling narrators. Silver is an awful person. Nara is an awful judge of character, and when the lens is so tightly focused around what Nara sees, the narrative becomes really tinted with that view. I tried having the few scenes that don't follow Nara capture this, but since I also wanted them to have those few sympathetic-Silver moments...yeah, I can see how this all fell apart. There's retribution coming in the interlude, if that helps?I think her internal narrative could do with some more recognition that so much of her so-called shitty behaviour was to avoid a summary execution - that way it would feel more like genuine moments of turmoil, and less like you're trying to pretend that TUPpy is something she isn't to make me look at Silver as less of a villain.
This last bit was actually what made me think the most when writing these next few chapters. Thank you for that reminder. It's easy toWhether you think those narratives are important socially or politically, they don't make for great stories artistically. Compare The Lord of the Rings, where for most of the story the plot is teetering on the brink of catastrophe, and the ending is distinctly bittersweet - but the moments of love and beauty throughout reminds us of why we should care that disaster looms.
hi hi I think I fixed all the typos you highlighted. Proof that I still can't English.typo: couldn't make heads or tails*
mmmmmmm yes, Nara's circular logic is basically my fatal flaw when it comes to writing this. I want to show that she's, like, desperately fixated on making sure things work out perfectly in a world that's spiralling out of her control, but I also don't want to make people take forever reading it. Gah. I'll throw these bits back at the editing board again (you should've seen the original cut lol).As I said, Nameless Narrator can be a bit complicated with her logic, and she tends to ruminate on literally every single detail of every single thing that's happening, will happen, or has happened. I like it because it's human - whether she's really human in the story or not, I don't know (yet - or if I should know by now, I didn't quite get it clearly enough). She's flawed and I can tell you're really trying to show that along with how terrified she is of what's happening, what will happen, and what has happened. This trait of hers is really... difficult to balance in writing, though, for lack of a better word. I quoted this portion in particular because I'd already read a similar paragraph probably 3-5 times before this, and there's not much point in bringing it up again unless new information is added to the mix. This isn't as big an issue from what I saw, compared to her ruminating - I just thought it might be worth bringing it up anyway, because the story (or at least, this arc) could be cut down quite a bit.
fuuuuuuck. logic. fixed that.Not sure how the sentret couldn't touch Brigid but Brigid could "pry" the sentret off. Unless it was with fire. 0_0
Yeah she's a teenager with 0 forethought. I'm glad that this finally showed through, though! She holds herself as a paradism of good planning and is honestly horrible at it, which I kinda struggle to convey sometimes.Answering to Bates later in the middle of a deserted forest makes far less sense than explaining to him up front when she was still in a relatively populated town area. She knew he would be taking her to an empty forest area, too. My understanding is that Nameless Narrator tends to act now and think later. For all the thinking and ruminating she does, she tends to go with where her emotions want her to go rather than her head. Not always, but usually. That's also very... human. Which makes her more interesting to me, given the idea that she might be something else entirely.
bwahahaMy original comment I saved for this quote was: "Nameless Narrator's got a past even she can't explain, apparently. And the possibilities there are endless, really." Now that I'm caught up, I can confidently say that none of the possibilities I immediately thought of were even remotely close to what was actually happening. Oh, unreliable Nameless Narrator...
Reaaalllllly close to the money on this one in all the right and wrong waysI liked this bit of tension in particular. And again, now that I'm caught up, I'm going to assume it's some light caused by Celebi's time travel shenanigans.
General consensus was that this scene could've played out better. I'm trying to work on it.Except it's obvious to us readers that she knew she shouldn't have touched it while she was weighing her options. I personally feel like her behavior might seem more believable here, and in some other instances, if she'd just admited that made a mistake in her calculations, instead of having it seem like she never thought that the option she chose was a bad idea to begin with. Obviously this doesn't apply to things like when Gaia and Icarus were missing and she had no idea if that was her fault or not, but yeah.
The swearing is... yeah, not sure. If I told you I'd actually included it for some really obscure plot/mythos reasons that'll never get explained for another dozen chapters, that probably wouldn't reassure you very much, but that's what I've got.Overall, I can't say I know what happened for sure. Celebi's strange, laidback and condescending dialogue put me off at first, but the more I think about it, the more it's growing on me. If the swearing were gone completely, I'd probably be sold on it.
You are a saint for doing this. At some level, yeah, I think it lines up the way I want, and the bits where you've pointed out that it doesn't become a lot easier to fix. Thx sensei.I see that a lot of people reviewing you have been questioning Nameless Narrator and Silver, but my concern is more the former, and most of my comments revolve around her. I've given some criticism and some "here's what I got out of the story" for you to see whether or not you're succeeding in what you want readers to get out of this fic. I hope it helped a little bit, and I'll keep an eye out for the next update.
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chapter xvi. nihil supra
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Silver was right. The girl I was staring at, who was only fifteen minutes removed from being me, looked completely inhuman. It was the eyes, too-dark and too-uncaring, that reflected nothing but the intent to follow through, that made me stop completely cold. There was a clatter as she threw the stake of wood that had impaled our thigh aside, not even noticing the bloodied splinters left behind. How could I fight something like this? How could I become something like this?
The answer came without preface, and suddenly I felt the weight of the past fifteen minutes landing on me.
My starter was dark. I had been granted admission to a locked Tower that housed impossible secrets for reasons I couldn’t begin to fathom. I had been thrown backward in time by the Forest Queen to save an ancient monument dedicated to uplifting human achievement in the face of inconceivable odds. This was just one last impossible thing in a string that I had to do. It was only a matter of time.
I was aware of Rousseau hovering around my shoulders and expelling thick clouds of gas from the nebula surrounding his body. {Whatever you do, ma cherie, do it fast. The others will notice soon.}
She lunged toward me. Perhaps she recognized that our existences were mutually exclusive. We locked eyes through the unnatural fog, and I saw the self-preservation painted deep in her pupils. She would stop at nothing to stay alive, and I was in her path.
But I was also smart, smarter than her, smarter than blind rage and the primordial desire to keep living. And most of all, I understood how my allies worked.
“Hypnosis,” I whispered sharply. Her focus pinned on me, she didn’t notice Rousseau phasing through her head until it was too late. She collapsed to the ground with a thud, and I winced in sympathy. “I can explain,” I said, as the gastly surged past my doppelgänger to look at me accusingly.
{Later,} he said. His wide smile remained, but I could see the way that his eyes were creased in a sharp frown, as if he were pondering something, hard. {And, honestly, I don’t think you can explain.}
The fog vanished as a blade of air cut through it, narrowly missing my head and splintering the wall behind us.
Right. I would deal with the ramifications that I was most-certainly prone to fits of utter evil at a different time. In the meantime, I had promises to keep. I turned toward Falkner and tried to keep calm.
Conventional battling wasn’t going to be an option. This thing could overpower us easily; the only option would be to use strategies it couldn’t expect. Luckily, I had zero training with this sort of stuff, so I wouldn’t even be able to consider how outlandish most of my plans were going to sound. “Rousseau, can you just hypnotize that?” I asked, trying not to sound too hopeful.
{No. His mental defenses are significantly more advanced than… hers. The undead are less prone to the distractions of the living.}
I don’t know what I had been expecting, honestly. “Icarus, get ready grab Gaia and get airborne. I want as much of this room as possible covered in String Shot. We need to slow him down.” My murkrow cawed in affirmation, heaving the caterpie upward and taking to the skies. “Atlas, stay close. I need your fire in a bit. Dante keep him—” I was cut off momentarily as Falkner threw another razor-edged blast of wind in our direction.
{Distracted. I know,} the abra said wearily, flicking his tail in irritation and glancing back at Silver for confirmation. Silver nodded, but he was frowning at me, and it took all of my willpower not to cast a guilty glance at past-me’s crumbled body behind the rubble. {Anything in particular?}
“How many teleports do you have left in you?”
There was a hint of pride in the abra’s voice as he answered stiffly, {Enough.}
We honestly didn’t have time for their arrogance or distrust. “That’s not a number,” I said, letting a hint of steel slip into my voice. “Dante—”
My breath hitched as a honeycombed screen of light materialized in front of me, barely forming before another Air Slash shattered on top of it. The wind sent my hair flaring up in a cloud of orange, and I coughed in the dust cloud that formed after. {It depends,} the abra said, voice strained from the effort of expending so much energy so quickly, {on what else you need done.} He fired a Shock Wave to keep Falkner from advancing any closer, but the gym leader batted it aside with a flick of his wrist.
He had a fair enough point with that one. I thought back to what I’d learned last time—the ghost took on the weakness of what it possessed. My brush with the froslass had shown me that I didn’t really know how to deal with a ghost, but a person was a different story. “Okay.” I needed to keep Dante in reserve; he was the only pokémon here who could even remotely match Falkner in terms of raw strength, and he’d be the only thing protecting us if it ever came to dealing with Falkner head-on. Which ideally, would never happen. “I need screens on Iris, the kind you keep using to block his wind blades—”
{Air Slash,} the abra said in a level voice. {And Light Screen.}
“Yeah, those, okay, whatever. Focus on keeping her safe. Iris, you’ll be drawing a lot of fire, so you need to be fast. Understand?”
The sentret nodded curtly. This level of obedience was frightening; I almost hoped that by the time we got to the bottom of the Tower, she stopped listening to me so well.
“Right. Icarus, get ready.” From the rafters, a squawk of affirmation. “Iris, you’re in. Slash him up, but focus on not getting hit.”
With a tiny snarl, the sentret leapt forward in a flash of brown, her claws skittering across the floorboards as she closed the gap between herself and Falkner. I saw the telltale yellow shimmer of a Light Screen forming around her, which helped immensely as a blast of wind skirted just a hair too close for comfort. Above, Icarus wheeled with Gaia clutched tightly in his talons. She fired a blast into the air, and sticky strings of silk streamed down, haphazardly draping around the room before pulling taut as Icarus carried her away.
Hissing in annoyance and vaporizing one of the silk strings on his sleeve with a gust of wind, Falkner raised his hand and prepared to obliterate the rest, only for Iris to reach him and tackle him down with the force of a bullet. His hand and his strike went wild; the errant blast cratered another portion of the wall. I flinched: even with Dante’s help, getting hit by one of those at close range would end messily. Falkner yowled in pain as Iris spiraled up his body, leaving a pinprick trail of clawmarks as she did so, and then she went to town on his face. He raised a fist toward her, and I recognized the telltale signs from before. We needed to—
“Get her out of there. Now,” I commanded Dante, who obliged with a Psychic. Blue energy surrounded the sentret, and she was flying through the air, her claws still outstretched, even as Falkner obliterated the spot she’d been occupying half a second ago with a blast of wind. Dante set her down gently on the floorboards, only for her to leap back into the fray.
{Set,} Gaia called, and she was right: the criss-cross of webbing around Falkner was thick enough to almost be a cage, some areas so dense that I could barely see him. It would have to be enough.
“That’s your plan?” Silver called incredulously from his spot behind the pillar. “String Shot? Everywhere?”
“It’s working better than Plan ‘Get Hit by the Air Slash and Wait in the Corner to Die’, honestly,” I shot back through gritted teeth. From inside of the fence of silk, I could still hear Falkner’s growing frustration as Iris presumably antagonized him and then dodged. This would be our best chance to him with a surprise attack that he wouldn’t be able to block. “Icarus, get ready to go in. Dante, start charging Shock Wave. Fire it on my command.”
{It won’t possibly make it to him,} the abra pointed out. {Silk is an insulator.}
“There will be an opening.” Even though I should’ve seen it coming, I forced back the shudder of revulsion at the sudden déjà vu. I felt the cold sensation coming on, but I blinked twice and forced it down. Not here. Not now. I needed my team for this. “Atlas, fire.”
The houndour barked in delight at finally getting his turn to fight, and a trio of burning-hot embers whizzed past us, landing squarely in the middle of the silk. The fire spread quickly, incinerating the outer layer of string shot in an instant. The embers began chewing a hole through the silk where they’d landed, burning a gap nearly a foot wide. “There’s your opening,” I told Dante, and the abra didn’t need to hear it twice. “Icarus, you too. Iris, move out of there.” A sharp surge of electricity discharged with a hiss from between the psychic’s outstretched paws, and the abra fired the glimmering blue shockwave through the gap in the webbing just as Icarus finished phasing through the gym leader’s body with the last vestiges of a Feint Attack.
Iris was still skittering back to me when Falkner roared in pain as the electricity made contact with him. I thought back to Rousseau’s words: possessing a human might’ve given us the only possible advantage we’d had left to push. Falkner swerved, spinning around wildly to end the source of his torment, but by then the string shot around him had caught fire as well, leaving him with nothing but globs of sticky fire.
{It isn’t his fault,} Rousseau said half-heartedly, looking at the flailing gym leader with what might’ve been pity. {To die without memory—}
{—is no excuse to torment the living,} Dante said harshly, and fired another Shock Wave into the fray. Falkner screamed again.
The gastly flinched but said nothing more. He hadn’t joined in the fray, and now that I’d heard this, I didn’t think I would be able to ask him to fight Falkner in the future. But was this it? Had we won?
Too late, I mentally berated myself for tempting fate as an enormous blast of wind, bigger than any we’d seen before, formed around Falkner like a cocoon, sucking the remains of the flaming web into the vortex and extinguishing the fires in an instant. I took a step backward—like that would’ve done anything to help. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched as Icarus began frantically flapping toward us, Gaia in his talons as he veered around the raging air currents. Squinting, I could see Falkner in the center, looking bruised and burned and generally worse for the wear, but nowhere near out of it yet.
His eyes locked with mine, and I saw those too-black pupils clearly even through the smoke, before he bodily threw the hurricane toward us.
Shit. Dante wouldn’t be enough to stop this. “Can you at least slow it down?” I shouted to him.
{I don’t think so,} Dante said grimly, but the abra tried anyway, his entire body glowing blue as he tried to grab the hurricane in a psychic hold. I stared, dumbstruck, as the pillar of wind ground to a halt, cloaked in Dante’s blue light, and then his eyes grew unfocused and the energy flickered out. The abra dropped out of the air in exhaustion, and I barely managed to catch him. Time seemed to speed up as the twister surged forward, unfettered, and we had nothing left to stop it with.
In the moments before the cyclone obliterated us, my mind remained stubbornly blank. I stared, dumbfounded, as the hurricane spiraled toward us, inexorable and unstoppable, while my brain replayed useless high school lectures about science. I was back in Goldenrod, pencil tapping in class, while my teacher droned on about weather patterns and air currents, how—
Hot air rises.
“Atlas, get all of your fire on that thing!” I shouted, one hand uselessly outstretched as a sort of shield. “Dante, Icarus, prepare to get in fast once the cyclone’s out of the way. We don’t have much time.” It wasn’t going to be enough, but it would have to be. “Iris, keep it occupied.” The sentret wouldn’t be able to attack the ghost directly, but we didn’t have much of a choice.
Atlas leapt forward, tilting his head back and charging his fire in only an instant before letting out the largest stream of fire I had ever seen from him, nearly two feet in diameter and glowing a brilliant blue at the core. I shied away from the explosion, trying to shield my eyes from the blinding light without looking away from Falkner. The temperature around us skyrocketed, and the remaining rafters in the ceiling gave in with a huge groan and flew skyward. Whining with exhaustion, the houndour collapsed at my feet as well, and I felt my blood run cold. That had pushed him too far. I could still see the coal-grey fur against his ribcage moving, but—
Iris slammed into the gym leader once more with her tail, using her momentum as a pivot and springboarding off of his knees before launching herself far away. Icarus did the same, spreading his inky wings wide to pull up short before arcing back in the opposite direction, beady red eyes glowing through the smoke.
They were too slow. Falkner whipped his hands through the air, blasting them back with an explosion of pure wind. My pokémon weren’t fast enough to escape the crossfire, and I watched with horror as Icarus squawked in agony and plowed into the ground. Iris landed ten feet from us, rolling to a halt and not getting up again.
{A gazzze as blank and pitilessssss as the ssssun!}
“Roussea, please!” I shouted over the tempest to the gastly beside me. I felt like an icy claw had wrapped around my heart. If my pokémon died here, I didn’t know what I would do. “Do something!”
{Ma chérie, I—}
“They’ll die, Rousseau!”
Black energy around him surging from his evident frustration, the gastly phased through my stomach and appeared in the middle of the carnage, combatting bits of errant wind with spurts of his own darkness. He screwed up his eyes and released a cloud of dark smoke, blocking out the possessed body of Falkner, as well as the struggling forms of my pokémon, from view.
I took several steps forward, Gaia still in my arms, as I tried to get closer to the fray to get a better look. “If you can hear me, strafe!” I shouted.
“That word, Boss,” I heard Icarus crow from inside of the haze of chaos. “You use it often, but I do not think you know what it means!”
I felt a flash of irritation at my murkrow, but it meant that he was alive. Icarus burst out of the smoke, a desperately flailing Iris in his talons, before he bodily threw her back into the chaos. I watched her eyes sharpen with determination as she straightened her brown body, sharp claws pointing in toward where she could barely see the outline of Falkner’s figure, striped tail flapping in the wind. Then, she sank back into the cloud and I lost her from my view.
I heard a howl of pain, indicating that she’d managed to make contact, and then there was another blast of wind that sent all three of them flying back again, clearing the haze in the process. Falkner’s slouched figure appeared out of the fleeing smoke, the cold fire still in his eyes, but I could see a pair of three unbleeding scratches on either cheek, right beneath the eyes.
“Icarus, now!”
There was a squawk of affirmation, and Icarus sprouted through Falkner’s stomach again, nothing more than a golden beak followed by a sprouting pair of black wings cloaked in the dark energy of Feint Attack. The gym leader stumbled in response while the ghost within shrieked wildly, but another cannon-like blast of wind sent Icarus spiraling to the ground. “Reeling shadowsss of indignant birdsss.” Falkner began staggering toward us, and I knew that we were out of tricks. Screeching, Iris leapt at him, and Falkner didn’t even look as he slammed her into a wall.
I couldn’t bring myself to watch the undead limping towards us to kill me. The cold surged up against me, but I forced it down. Atlas hadn’t moved, Dante was still unconscious, and the rest of my pokémon were scattered around the room. There was nothing left to stop him from—
{Stay back.}
I looked up in horror to see Gaia facing down a monster alone.
The hunched shell of Falkner slowly approached her, his grin widening on one side only. “My sssmall caterpie, unloved and unwanted. I’d be doing your trainer a favor, you know, if I killed you,” the creature said, tendrils of darkness wrapping the walls, forming into the shapes of illusory trainers. “Bug-typessssss are perfect for children. They grow up fassssst and are eassssy to train.” The ghost tilted its head to one side as it wrapped shadowy tendrils around Gaia, who feebly spat another wave of String Shot at it that was promptly batted away by another blast of dark energy. “But they jusssssst can’t keep up with the resssssst of the team, can they? I’m sssssure you were winning at firssssst, every time, but when the time comes that the battlesssss ssssstart actually mattering—”
With that, he threw Gaia into the ground, creating a crater three feet in diameter before picking her up smashing her into the wall on the other side of the room.
“Gaia!” I screamed, voice catching in my throat.
Icarus squawked in protest, pulling his battered form airborne and struggling to gain altitude, his wingbeats barely keeping him in the air, but Falkner easily clipped his wings with an Air Slash and set him spiraling back down.
“Now you won’t feel bad about replacccing her,” the ghost hissed. “You can get something really sssstrong on your team, can’t you? Sssomething that sssuited you more? Were you ever going to tell that you didn’t want her?”
I opened my mouth, but no sounds came out.
“I ssssshould give you the badge for thissss,” the gym leader said quietly, and, true to form, the corpse of Falkner lurched forward and patted his pocket before throwing a tiny lump of metal in my direction. The winged badge skidded to a halt near my feet. “You’ve done sssso well.”
I stumbled toward the wall, desperately trying to see if I could find Gaia’s form in the rubble, but the all-too-familiar whiplash crack of an Air Slash, followed by the rafters caving in above me, stopped me in my tracks.
The pillar glowed gold.
“The darknessssss dropsssss again, but now I know,” the thing crowed victoriously, hovering over all of us and preparing to wipe us out, before a blast of psychic energy knocked it to the ground. I blearily turned around, expecting to see Dante pushing the offensive, but he was still struggling on the ground as a purple blur sent me skidding back.
{That twenty years of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,} a second voice finished. Translucent wings flared out, and the subsequent draft was so powerful that the clouds of smoke were sent shrieking back. The butterfree rocketed forward, a multicolored beam of raw energy erupting from her glinting eyes, and I numbly watched as the creature I’d pegged with the killing instinct of a damp paper towel systematically smashed Falkner’s corpse into the ground until the planks gave way. {You aren’t the only one who knows how to read,} Gaia said calmly, flapping above the crater she’d created.
“Holy shit,” I breathed, and then limped over to where Falkner had fallen. I peered tentatively down the hole in the ground, half expecting to see him surging up, there was only an eerie calm. Beneath us, Falkner’s body lay crumpled in the center of a slowly-settling cloud. “Gaia, you did it.” I looked into her newformed honeycombed eyes, trying to see if there was anything familiar in there, but she only looked saddened.
Something black erupted from Falkner's still chest, its features too smudged and too faint for me to see, but I think I knew. {Thank you,} the ghost whispered weakly, sinking to the ground alongside Falkner’s corpse and dimming a little more. {You have come to sssave usss… You came to ssssave usss… You will come to sssave usss…}
Rousseau looked away grimly.
{You musssst be careful that you do not lossse your way in the dark,} the ghost whispered, its voice barely audible.
Almost touching the ground, the ghost's blank smile crumbled away to dust, the blisteringly dark energy around it no longer vibrant. {Pleasssse,} it whispered quietly, feeble, vaporous arms reaching out toward us. {Who wassss I?}
I opened my mouth to answer, prepared to be furious at the bastard that had nearly killed Gaia, prideful over the monster I’d never expected to vanquish, uncaring in the face of what as nothing more than a shell, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. “I'm sorry,” I whispered instead. “I don't know.”
Maybe it didn't hear me. Maybe it did, and my uncertainty was the last thing it heard. The ghost did not respond, its eyes staring blankly upward before it, too, began to disintegrate alongside the long-dead corpse of its owner.
{The darkness drops, but now I know,} Gaia said from behind my shoulder.
Rousseau finished in a quiet, solemn voice as way of eulogy, {that twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.}
I had nothing more to offer a ghost that cringed by a man's unmarked grave.
Dante picked up Atlas’s limp form in a weak cloud of energy. I scooped up Iris in my arms and offered my shoulder to Silver, who refused to meet my eyes even as his entire body shivered from shock. There would be people at the bottom to look after him, at least. We'd survived the storm.
We limped down the Tower together.
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