El-Ahrairah 4.2
December 16th, 2022.
After we had managed to defeat Rachel, we didn’t stick around for very long in Makiishi, instead taking a look at the fifth Gym’s website and managing to score an appointment for a Gym Trial and Battle a little over a month from now. That was going to give us a lot of time to travel and refine our training, as Shiromiya was a fairly large region, around forty five thousand square kilometers in total.
We decided to head out to another town, since that was where the people Lillian wanted us to meet were staying. Shio-ro was a pretty nice town, a compact settlement by the ocean, with a lot of sushi restaurants due to a healthy and dense commercial fishing industry.
Akari adjusted her blue robe over her black tunic, her red skirt going woosh along with her black leggings. I did find myself somewhat envious of her ability to dress stylish and practical at the same time. For example her skirt had pockets along with her robe.
It didn’t do much to distract me from that pending conversation on her nightmares after Arley and his Pinchers had nearly killed us all. I had definitely woken up soaked in sweat from numerous anxiety attacks striking with no warning. Especially when she had been refusing to answer any more questions on whatever the hell Burst was supposed to be, what did it mean to be two sides of the same coin with Bond Phenomenon?
Was Burst the name of the power Arley had shown, the power to equal that of monsters?
I breathed in and out, holding my breath for three beats before releasing, my aura circulating in and out in that same beat, just as instructed by Akari’s aura book, letting the Lesser Source interact with the Greater Source. Which was the basic terminology for the two forms of metaphysical energy. They called it Maryoku, the source of energy found naturally within themselves and the world, acting as the source to actualize the great mysteries of reality.
The Lesser Source was the energy, the life-force within all living organisms, within humans, pokémon and everything between the two. It was a fundamental aspect of being alive, the energy of the soul held within a mortal frame.
The Greater Source is the energy found within the boundaries of the universe, the breath of the cosmos filling the world and nature, and planetside it’s produced through the ley lines that trace the surface of the world. This energy was drawn upon through foundations carved into the surface of creation, through the actions of the beings that live within the world.
Her people had a lot of information on Types, on how to understand their place as the basic forces that shape Reality. I remembered the passage as clear as glass, and meditated on it.
For you, followers of the metaphysical arts. Let us teach you of the Types, of the Elements of the World elevated by the logic of this reality, given dominion over the shape of the past, present and future. If one wishes to understand their power, whether that of aura, of wizardry and sorcery and witchcraft, one must understand that all things are one, all the known Elements are the primordial powers that swirl forth from the Root, the unseen hands of the universe. Rooted in different aspects of the world.
Normal energy, was once known as Unaspected energy and is the natural default ‘elevated’ energy of life, all other Elements are Normal energy in a different phase and state from the purest initial step. Normal is the element of balance and harmony, neutral and unshaped clay. The key to wrestling Normal energies is to understand that it is all about being balanced, of being ready to adjust and shift and thrive in any number of conditions, to connect with the Unshaped Force.
Flying or Air, is the element of freedom, attuned to the skies and the wind and the endless storm. To learn of Air, to learn of Flying is to learn of flexibility and finding the path of least resistance, to understand lightness and agility and vision, the Sky’s Flow itself.
Bug… or Swarm as it was known in bygone days, seemingly humble and weak and yet it represents another vital aspect of the world. It is the element of function and form, of metamorphosis and survival. To master the energies of the Swarm is to realize that life is a struggle of life against life, that instinct, the cosmic imperative to thrive, to spread, to Evolve. The drive to live is fundamentally rooted in the most primitive aspects of life after all, the Primal Weave of it’s patterns.
Poison or Venom is the element of transmutation, kin to the metamorphosis of Bugs, the universal solvent that will transform matter and energy, to heal and destroy in equal measure. All medicines can be poison after all, to understand this element is to understand that it is plague and panacea both, the urge to create and decompose, to be mastered and nurtured, to connect with Azoth’s Flow.
Fire is the element of drive, the overwhelming will and determination to accomplish tasks and desires. It is using the light and heat of the universe to ignite one’s desires, the trinity of fire, air, heat, and fuel. Fire is passion, purpose and power, that is how one can connect to Fire, to the Sun’s Pulse.
Something about those passages tickled at my brain, and I noted the instructions to ponder on the Mysteries of Nature to gain a connection to them. To learn how to use different kinds of aura, you had to understand them, their secret and meaning, the concepts that underpin their place in the universe I guess?
There wasn’t any one way to connect, but the author of the book was offering examples on the direction one could take on their respective path. Akari was definitely passionate and energetic, she had a drive that put most people I knew to shame.
“Did Lillian ever tell us where we needed to go to meet these mysterious trainers?” Akari asked with a weary tone and I opened my mouth to reply… then closed it again.
“No she did not.” Akari palmed her face, and then she blinked as someone shouted in our direction. Trying to catch our attention.
I turned around to find an Alolan ninetales trotting along their trainer, pointing to us with an affectionate love towards her trainer. I could feel my pokémon react to the powerful pokémon, surrounding the world in a pressure of Ice and Fey, and I calmed them with a soft whisper. The ninetales’ trainer was a college age girl with blonde hair with long square bangs and a braided side ponytail. She ran to catch up with us, breathing hard before being forced to rest, laying her hands on her knees. She wore a white fancy button up blouse blue jeans
“Wait! Please… just let me catch my breath!” I glanced at a puzzled Akari, who looked like she was trying to unravel the rather pretty mystery girl like a present.
“Sure?” She didn’t look like someone easily tired so how long had she been running to track us down?
“T-Thank you, when I realized Lillian never gave you a location, despite having your contact info,” an eyebrow twitched dangerously on her soft featured face. “I ended up taking charge of looking for you… my partner shouldn’t be far behind.”
She stood up straight after taking in a few mouthfuls of fresh air, and brushed back her bangs with a sweet and kind smile. Akari narrowed her eyes as if there was something she had caught that I hadn’t.
“I didn’t catch your name?” Lillian was an idiot. I gazed at her strikingly green eyes, curious about who she was.
“My name is Lillie Jardin, I’m an ecologist and… trainer from Alola, Lillian said you’re working with Professor Laven when it comes to pokémon biology and other work?”
What?
“Partner?” Akari’s eyes were wide and I had a sinking feeling in my stomach.
“Selene Mizuki, she’s uhh…”
“The former Champion of Alola?”
Lillie giggled. “Um. Yes.”
“I’m going to pinch Lillian the next time I see her.” I declared my intent and promise to the universe for her getting me into this situation.
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“So what brings you to Tohoku?” I managed to spit out a question towards the pair, as Selene had arrived a half minute after our meeting up with Lillie.
She was far taller than her partner, putting even Akari to shame with a height of 6’2 that was both impressive and kinda hot. Not that I was going to tell her that to her face, I was gay as hell not stupid. She had an athletic build to the point, I could see the abs under her tight, red, black and green top and black exercise shorts despite the cold. She had two long bangs that curled around her cheeks, and her gray eyes were darting up and down Mirko’s form, who had popped out to watch the pair.
“Several reasons, Selene wants to participate in the Sternwing Conference and fight against the Gym Leader’s true teams.” Lillie was happy to explain and I blanched when I registered what that meant.
If we participated in this Conference we were up against Selene, who was a monster who had become the Champion of Alola with a nine-star team cultivated over the course of a year and in her two year rule became strong enough to compete fairly with the likes of Lance and his Elite Four.
And to fight against a true Gym Leader’s team was a monstrous task, Major Gyms were major due to their leaders having a skill and power rating at least 10-stars, and weren’t much weaker than the Elite 4.
One fear.
“Your lopunny is really well taken care of,” I blinked at Selene’s comment, and Mirko seemed to preen at the sincere compliment aimed at her of course. “Her fur shines brightly, as well as clean and mat free, do you help her brush?”
“I taught her how to use it, and help out with the spots she can’t reach as easily.” I scratched my chin, with a light flush. It had become a routine of sorts between us, I brushed her hair or helped her trim scruffy mats and she brushed my unruly ass hair and assisted with skincare to rub away grime I was awful at cleaning up, like a spot on my neck that was always grimy. Until it was shaved off, because it was grimy hair. I clipped her nails so they wouldn’t get too gnarly, and she clipped mine and kept me from biting them out of nervous habit.
Selene raised a brow. “I have a feeling she helps you out just as much huh?”
“How do you know?”
The champion placed her arms behind her back, nose curling as she offered a grin. “Elio has a lopunny on his team, grooming is an important bonding experience with them, it’s how they show they care. It’s pretty common with rabbits.”
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“That does explain a lot.” Jericho was about the same though not quite as touchy, it was more him using his nose to sniff out rotten or spoiled food, and warding me from poisonous plants and venomous animals. He did enjoy spray baths to clean his scaly skin, along with a moisturizer he insisted I help apply so he could gently shed his scales and keep his skin healthy. He’d help me out the same way with my face, which was sweet of him. “I’ve got three rabbits on my team.” I added more detail at Selene’s questioning eyes.
Llayda liked being rinsed off with soft water, and her hair being combed and even blow dried. It was necessary since her hair was an important part of how she kept herself warm on top of Thick Fat. She liked using the blow dryer on me which was nice and helpful.
Selene looked pleased. “It’s good that you’ve developed such a close bond with your pokémon, I’ve met plenty of trainers who don’t seem to understand that bonding with their pokémon is more than just throwing them into battles and healing when they’re hurt.”
“I just… try to treat them like weird shaped people?” I rubbed the back of my neck. “They might not be human, but they still have feelings and minds of their own right? What I do can’t be that special.” Fleur was still a bit distant, but apparently taking into account her own desires and feelings made me more likable than her old trainer.
If I had only realized that rude trainer from before was the guy or I would have kicked him in the dick.
“So did Lillian actually tell you why she wanted the two of you to meet us?” Lillie said with a slightly exasperated tone and I sighed.
“No. She just said she knew people I could be friends with to make up for the whole… almost getting murdered by the Pokémon Pinchers.” Lillie gave me a horrified expression and Selene twitched, muscles tensing like steel. “I managed to bag about six hundred thousand pokédollars from that discovery mission, plus another two hundred thousand from Arley using me as a hostage on a League-sponsored mission.” Selling off stones through the GST was pretty lucrative. “But I guess she wants to make up for the ‘trauma and mental injury’ from that shitshow.”
“Are… are you both okay?” Lillie sounded concerned and I opened my mouth to reply and then closed it again to think.
“Definitely not,” I decided to go with that. “I’m not like mentally destroyed or anything but… it definitely left a mark.” I still flinched whenever someone placed a hand on my shoulder, and I was definitely more anxious. And I was already a stress ball of a person.
“Arley… reminded me of something I prefer not to think about.” Akari looked turned, her shoulder dropping with a heavy weight I didn’t quite understand.
Wait.
“You never answered what other reasons you had for being here in the region?” I questioned the pair, and Mirko backed me with narrowed eyes.
“I heard rumors about sightings of the species of artificial pokémon known as Type: Null, along with a range of other invasive species of unknown origin found within old Aether Foundation files. Ones you might become familiar with.”
“Ultra Beasts?” I noticed that the area we were in was fairly empty and I felt mildly paranoid. “And you… know about me?”
“Only because I was brought in as a consultant, and Selene has high-level clearance as a former League official.” Lillie’s words were comforting enough, I knew a handful of people knew about me through the project to map out the sea of dimensions I had crossed.
“Consultant?”
“Because of Nebby.” My blood ran cold as something nagged at me, a familiar feeling, one I had only felt when I had woken up in another world, that sense of otherness that knew no bounds.
I glanced up and felt the blood rush away from my face, as I saw a large skeletal, legless bat with wings of living night, and a round crescent hooded head reflecting a starscape of its own, rectangular eyes burning like a sunset.
Lunala, the Beast That Calls the Moon.
They had a Legendary pokémon on call, and I remembered that much of my work on catching stantler was as one of several solutions when it comes to maintaining spacetime bridges without needing external intervention. Hell Burnet was one of Laven’s co-workers.
“I really should have taken a look at more of Laven’s research, even if I was still learning a lot of the groundwork in terms of science.” I probably should have figured out in that one email she sent about how their bio-probe is establishing an alternate route to avoid the dangerous obstacles of between-spaces.
Stantler tend to portal within a more limited scale, and most pokémon outside of Legendaries have the same limitations.
“You’re the Faller I’m supposed to be helping?” The Lunala floating in front of us had to be Nebby, and couldn’t ignore the pressure she emitted without even trying. To my eyes her influence was like the firmament of the night sky had been brought down to earth, a power of Mind and Spirit that made reality tremble and crackle. “You’re even smaller than Lillie!”
She… sounded young, my mind conjuring the image of a teenager, just barely grown. She was a god perhaps, but a young one still coming into her own, learning the ropes of her role and purpose as a Legendary. I felt my body lose it’s tension, as I saw how the young god being surrounding us in a field of psychic energy, very gently pushing a feeling that kept the area free of people.
Lunala… Nebby tilted her head, gently floating down onto the ground with a quiet hum that cut through every mind and spirit in her reach.
“I haven’t seen you in some time, not since—” Her following words became static as a precious barrier broke at the familiar pressure and I fell, Akari and Mirko’s voices all I could hear.
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Fleeting images of memory, knowledge and information, a hint of the structure of the multiverse and transdimensional travel. A tiny kernel of sand’s worth of knowledge of the breadth of the universe.
I saw a great and endless sea, infinite in scope and depth, touching every world no matter how distant, the Primordial Chaos, the Void from which all things in heaven and hell and earth had arisen from. An extremely chaotic and yet unchanging abyss, settling into layers upon layers of realms upon realms.
Within that sea of Nothing, I saw how the Sun and Moon understood the universe. From the Sea of Empyrean came an imaginary tree of timelines, spreading their branches and roots into an endless web of worlds, an ecosystem of unlikelier timelines being recycled into larger ones, and those liminal worlds made up the abyss between, some being home to Ultra Beasts, beyond the trunk of the great tree, all of them connected by the golden web of ultra-space as the lowest branches, guarded by many Solgaleo and Lunala, protecting the outer gates from invaders with the great hordes of Ultra Beasts forming an additional unwitted defense against the anomalies and beings from other cosmic trees of timelines, spilling out from the Root that was their origin, of What Is Reality.
I followed the journey I took, a distance that was both infinitely long and infinitely short, a twisted golden path carved through dozens of cosmic trees, walking along the branches of Yggdrasil, of Irminsul, Jianmu and Ashvattha, of Bai-Terek and more.
Something had punched a hole in the world, pulling one such tree closer by millimeters and light years both, creating a path of least resistance that their natural motion would follow, and it had pushed realms closer together, holes in existence that created looping tunnels across multiple realities, now closed off by the machinations of the Sun and Moon to protect the Infinite Realms from their denizens.
I saw beings unfolding like tesseracts, made up of trillions upon trillions of shards, overlapping across multiple realities at once, devouring worlds, extending their tendrils to this one… and shattering for the insult, set upon by gods and the unseen hands of the universe. I saw dead gods with heads the size of moons and bodies the size of planets tilting their heads, and turning away when the gates were closed to their passage.
I saw my home, that infinite tree of timelines that was my origin, captured within the grasp of the Original One’s Tree, sprouted from the Cosmic Egg that was His/Her/Their cradle.
I felt the Pressure of the Void, and I saw the shadow that blotted the stars turn into a shining quasar, the Blinding One exercising mercy and empathy once thought lost for centuries.
Ahh.
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Soft. Am I dead?
Was my first thought back in the waking world after that daymare of a vision, and I felt the phantom pain and fear from when I had fallen into that crack between realities and seen the structure of the universe at its greatest level.
And understood effectively none of it outside a skin deep level as a simple mortal, in terms of knowledge and skills rather than needing godhood to understand dimensional physics.
What was I resting on?
It was furry, soft and warm… hmm.
“Mirko?” I shifted my head, and finally noted that my starter had laid down my head in her lap, gently inspecting me along with Lillie who seemed to be checking my vitals. “Did I pass out?”
Lillie nodded. “You reacted badly to Nebby’s aura, she’s young but she’s still a Legendary pokémon and should have known better when it comes to keeping her power in check.”
“Well it certainly jogged my memory when it comes to hurtling across the unforgiving Void Between All Realities.” Lillie flinched back, like I had said something strange. “What?”
“Most people don’t tend to remember crossing ultra-space, especially the greater void that connects it with other clusters of universes.”
“I kinda didn’t, it was sort of a black hole in my memory outside of occasional nightmares I’d forget in an hour.” I admitted as I pulled myself away from Mirko’s comfy thighs. “Though I can see why I forgot, and it’s still a bit fuzzy outside getting picked up by Necrozma.”
There was a silence started by my name dropping, and even Nebby seemed surprised by that. “I’m guessing that wasn’t known?”
“I only knew that an elder found you drifting through the Eternity Gates,” I blinked. “The doorways and angles that lead to the greater multiverse, patrolled by the oldest and most responsible Solgaleo and Lunala.” Nebby explained with a chipper psychic tone, like the existential horror of needing to guard the multiverse was quite normal.
And maybe for her it was.
“I haven’t seen Necrozma since I released them,” Selene sounded so very surprised. “I kinda thought Necrozma had run off to some far off corner of the universe to rest for a couple hundred years. Not that it’d be easy to tell for anyone even with psychic powers or precog.”
“Why is that?”
“The Aura of Legends is… much more potent than the aura of normal pokémon,” Nebby explained with a shrug of her massive wings. “We can ignore the effects of metaphysical abilities to a far greater degree due to our power and place in the world. So attempting to scry for information on us is… hard? Yes that.”
The concern on Lillie and Selene’s faces were clear as day. “What else aren’t you telling me?”
“People who meet Legendaries are… Marked by the encounter,” Lillie responded with a weary expression. “They tend to encounter way more disasters, run into pokémon more often… it’s like a subtle wrinkle in Destiny, making unlikely things a bit more likely.”
…
“I suppose I did leave on a journey with full knowledge I was like a catnip for extraterrestrial pokémon, would have been nice to have gotten more info though.” I said dryly, fury at the back of my mind.
Selene sneered. “The local branch of the International Police made a huge mess of what could be told to people, they’ve been squabbling with the League for months,” her disdain was obvious. “Acting like a bunch of fuckwits trying to get a new Faller in their hands, it’s why Tedesco placed you under the authority of Laven. That pissed them off so they made a mess with their connections in the League. Hell we thought you and Laven had been told about what contact with Legends entails.”
Oh those Motherfuckers—
“Someone is getting kicked in the head.” Was all I said with a sigh. “So you’re here to investigate weird shit, and Lillian got us in contact? Does she know?”
Selene denied it. “No, it was just a lucky break,” and now I was suspicious about Destiny being kind to me. “We thought it was a good idea if the two of you had people you could talk to…”
I raised an eyebrow. “So you want to be our friends?”
“Yep!” Was Selene’s chipper reply.
I offered a hand, and she shook it with no hesitation. “Sure, just no more heart attacks or someone is getting bitten.” I should probably stop threatening people with bites.
Selene smiled, “I make no such promises.” Akari laughed and Lillie watched her partner fondly.
We’ll see how this friendship will work out, won't we?