Ce N'est Pas Parti
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The furies are at home in the mirror;
it is their address.
Even the clearest water,
if deep enough can drown.
Never think to surprise them.
Your face approaching ever
so friendly is the white flag they ignore.
There is no truce with the furies.
A mirror's temperature is always at zero.
It is ice in the veins. Its camera
is an X—ray. It is a chalice held out to you in
silent communion, where gaspingly
you partake of a shifting identity
never your own."
-R.S Thomas
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There's nothing.
That's the first thing they could comprehend. Just the amorphous idea of severe lack of senses, substance, and… something. Anything, really.
But it's mostly the 'something'. There's something that's missing, but just like the yawning void of nothing that succumbs their entire being it can't be comprehended. So they drop it in favor of…
Of what?
There's nothing.
Nothing to do, nothing to see, nothing to listen to as she-
She? Oh. That is something.
…what is that? 'She' has a lot of connotations, but is it talking about something else or is she talking about herself?
…and now she's just answered her own question. Huh.
Almost like a circuit breaker with its switches being flipped, her thoughts slowly start turning on like an old bar with its old filament light being lit up one by one, and about as dusty too. Her awareness is stuck in this lacking abyss, but certain parts flash into her mind-
"-don't worry, I already ate-"
"-why, why, why, why oh God WHY-"
"~so I dove into the ti-ide, so I dove into the ti-ide~"
"-guess I'm just a massive tool, aren't I yOU STUPID-"
"-okay, I'll just check to see if anyone else needs help… don't worry, I won't-"
-and it's about as scatterbrained as she feels. All the cascade of pure id does to her is make her want to curl up in a tight, dark ball and hide, but there's nowhere to hide from one's own thoughts slowly reconnecting to the super ego, wired directly into the observer and peeling back their mind's eye to force them into…
Into what? What are all of these comparisons coming from? Why is this happening to her? Why can't she stop all of these loud thoughts and just go back into the sweet sensation of not dealing with any of this? Hell, throw away the discovery of the dreaded 'she' word and everything will be alright again.
Hiding again, are we?
A horrid, curling sensation not unlike a toxin coursing through one's veins seeps through her very existence, and she knows how true that one line is. But where did it come from? It's like a voice, but if voices could somehow construct words without the need for sound. But the feeling is still there, shivering down through everything and back out into the nothing, leaving just the thought behind. Adding onto her lack of substance to make her more.
I tried to give you oblivion, but something went wrong. I suppose that it's my fault for not being thorough enough. I'm sorry.
Sorry? Sorrow for no lack? Why?
Oh, it's nothing but pain and grief out there, filled with people never giving you what you want. It's a horrid cycle, really: you go do things for others, they charge you short for it, and that small amount somehow keeps you going round and round, over and over…
What?
And don't get started on the ball, either. The ball metaphor only really works if you're just some stupid, angry ape, but you're not stupid. Just a tool, working at the tower. Like some ant that can get snatched up by some bigger ant for a snack, without consideration for your sad, sad needs and wants. The tower doesn't care, either, just stands there behind you. Watching. Grading. Even your death is graded on its performance.
What?
Oh, what am I talking about, you're still unaware. ANNIHILATION wasn't kind with you, it never is, but hey: if you keep going the way you usually go, then that sweet sweet oblivion is there for the taking. You're a creature of habit, after all. It's inevitable.
She doesn't like it, but she's powerless to stop the inevitable…
Inevitable? Why? Why is it? What's going on with her and why is it all broken apart like tempered glass shattering into tiny, tiny little pieces scattered across the rocks like unwanted creations and and and Ican'tbreathe-
Oh joy, you're doing it again-
It was too much, and she broke again, the everlasting nothing filling in through the cracks as she
(The Small Figure Goes Further Away While Snow Falls Between Them)
f
a
l
l
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Reforming again was a different experience. Before, it was like existence itself was erased, put to the chopping block and reduced to atoms, unthinking. Now, she has way more sensation, enough to do what she wanted to earlier and curl up harder than before. The best part is that she can feel the curling up in action: a sensation like neurons forcing the muscles and flesh of her body to finally return to a fetal position in response to too much stimuli. She felt proud at having some part of her body work, at last being able to overcome the unending nothing by doing something. A nice middle finger to the lack of anything, if she says so herself. Slowly, slowly, she could discern what the signals that were running through her brain meant.
Dry. She's dry in a lot of ways, both outside herself and inside her mouth. It's as if she's been hung out to dry, but kept out for far too long.
Rough. There's this coarse feeling right beside her that she's leaning against, rubbing right down to her skin with a hint of…
Dampness? Wasn't she dry a few moments ago? No, there's something else there, some other reason she feels this dry…
Salt. It's starting to waft into her nose now, or perhaps it was always there, and it is strong. She can practically taste it from how strong it is… but it could also be inside her mouth. Explains why her mouth feels so dry, but where can all this salt come from?
Then she hears it. A beautiful sound, like wind flushing against uneven ground, but rolling and more solid than that. It crashes and flows and recedes and cycles and… and…
And she realizes it's the ocean. Ocean waves crashing against a beach, with sand and oh, oh, that's what was giving her the dry and rough and damp feelings; she's on a beach!
A sudden flash of misty sand pictures in your imagination. A horrible place to work, a horrible place to vacation: really, it's all just horrible.
A sudden thought, gone just as quickly as it came. What's a vacation? Work? What's the deal with all this work nonsense and why does it feel so foreboding to think about it? She drops the thought in favor of dealing with her current predicament. Honestly, half of her problems would be fixed if she could see what's going on around her instead of using her other overloaded senses.
Oh. Right, she has eyes. Little balls that let you see, or whatever. Bless those things. Peeling back the lids to her sockets, she lets the bright light in and-
Holy fuck, that's bright! Turn it off turn it off oh God why-
-she feels her brain start to melt under the blades of photons cutting deep into her skull. Her eyelids slam back shut, but the damage is already dealt. She moans out of pain, the first thing coming out of her mouth since she woke up. It's a dry, cracked, hoarse thing that's somewhere left of a pitiful whine.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
She doesn't remember how long she stays like that, but by the time she gathers enough bravery to open her eyes again the light is slightly dimmer and a lot more orange than before. Sure enough, right before her is a good amount of golden sand, wavy and quite soft- if gritty.
That… was a much more coherent thought, she muses to herself.
Which explains how she can see the beach much more clearly than before. The sight itself is probably breathtaking, if she wasn't so off-kilter because of what happened earlier. The water's waves are glittering in the light of the orange sunset, moving and churning and spitting seafoam like some feral animal. She quickly looks away to avoid the sun, and instead sees golden sand, cresting in frozen waves of their own and glittering like the precious metal it's colored like. There are a few blemishes of gray rock here and there, but in her eyes it's more of a beauty mark than anything, accentuating the surface in a natural way.
…this place is way too beautiful. She thinks, staring at the waves as they wash up and licking the grainy false-gold. Am I dead?
Vaguely, she remembers the awful, awful feeling she felt not too long ago. It certainly feels like she wanted to die, with how awful that place was. But…
Why was she here? How did she get here?
She can't remember.
Suddenly, she feels something well up from within her mind. Some urge, some need crawling into the forefront of her presence. It brings about the aroma of a thing nostalgic and primal in equal parts, this feeling.
It's curiosity. Have a look around, maybe you'll find something.
Deciding to see if anything around her holds any clues, she turns her neck to look around her, feeling her ears twitch as the sound of the ocean shifts to somewhere behind her.
There's a cliff there. Sheer, rocky, and the yellowing of tree leaves peeking over the edge and down at her.
Next to her is a bigger rock, like some sentinel watching over the ocean to make sure it stays there.
And she stops. Something's wrong. Very, very wrong. She looks back over everything, but the rock feels fairly normal and she hadn't spotted anything but the trees peering down at her, so what is the problem? Her ears twitch again in annoyance, not finding what could be causing this discrepancy in her thoughts…
She feels her ears twitch again as the waves make another crash beside her. Ears, twitching?
She brings a limb up to investigate, feeling the side of her head to see why they're doing that, except she didn't feel them on the sides of her head. Going further north of her head, she finds them on top of her head.
Triangular. Easy to fold. Soft. Furred?
So many things were wrong with the thoughts going into her mind, but for the life of her she can't figure out why it's wrong. She even tried to pull them down to the side of her head, as if it'll just slide back down and feel better down there.
The ears stayed put, to her frustration. Her mounting frustration at not knowing why things don't make any sense, she goes to rub her temples to massage away any emerging headaches-
-and her arm is wrong.
Right before her, an arm, one just like that of some kind of animal, covered in white fur and tipped with a dark gray paw.
Distantly, somewhere in the back of her mind where a manic laughter shrieks and shapes form ideas, it tells her something. That's a foreleg, like that of an animal.
Looking down further at herself just makes her more confused. A headache forms.
A sea of white fur covers her, with three similar ar- legs just like the first one she saw, a large puff of a mane surrounds her neck just barely in view, just as white as everything else about her… Except for a tail that she has - apparently - which slowly turns into a bloody red as it reaches the tip. The tip itself seems to wave in the wind, as some kind of anomaly of extra fur trailing off of it.
Her heart starts beating faster than normal, her breath quickens and her vision starts feeling shakier than it should, and she swears she can feel the shadows being cast by the setting sun seem to reach for her, want to grasp at her limbs and choke her for daring to live-
"Um, hello?"
The voice is fear. A whisper in her skull chitters. They're scared.
A boyish voice calls to her. Young, but not too young sounding, and a touch nervous for some reason. Tearing her eyes away from the shadows' claws, she looks at the origin of the voice-
-right at a thing. The thing of blue-and-black fur, cat-like but so, so wrong and a tail that looks ripped straight out of a fairytale with a literal yellow star-shaped object attached to it. The thing tilts its head, looking at her.
"Are you okay?"
She screamed. Loudly. And probably ran.
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Shinx didn't think today would have him meet a mysterious pokémon at his favorite spot, greet them, then have them scream and run behind the big rock he usually sits next to, but here he is.
He had a long day today, helping others in Treasure Town. It wasn't much, to be fair, but doing a few favors for others in town nets him a few goodies for the day - sometimes even more than that! - and the electric cat can't say that helping out others doesn't make him feel good. He went and talked to some of the regulars, he got a good deal with the Kecleon Brothers, and Kangaskhan when and gave him a hug that embarrassed him in front of a few others, but she gave him a bit more food for the week so he can't be too upset.
But he picked up one too many favors, and he didn't really manage his time too well, so by the time he finished the sun had already started to set. Still… he wanted to go to his favorite spot on the beach. At this time of year, the Krabby clusters aren't there to blow bubbles to make the scene even better, but by the time autumn runs its course in Treasure Town it'll be too cold to go to the beach in winter. That, or it'll be too dark by the time he does his share of help for the day. Either or, really.
The walk down to the beach was surprisingly calm, without a single distraction to stop him and not a single red mohawk in sight. In no time at all, he could start feeling his shoulders relax as he walks down the familiar path. There's no particular reason for him to want to be here, but some would argue that the raw beauty of the beach is reason enough to be there.
Then, when he dragged his paws through the sands, Shinx found that he wasn't the first one to be there this evening.
Lying in the sand, right next to the largest rock on the shore, is… a pokémon? They look to be some sort of fox pokémon, with white fur tipped with wispy red streams of even more fur, the three most prominent coming from on top of their head - which looks like some weird cloud - a mane in shape of a scarf, then finally their tail where it trails out to the point where the tip occasionally gets licked by a rogue wave. For some reason, the species looks familiar but he can't put a digit on which one specifically.
He doesn't have much time to dwell however, when he notices that they start hyperventilating. They're staring at their body with a scared look, their yellow eyes shaking as it looks around frantically, now starting to gaze at the surrounding rocks. Being a Shinx of a much kinder disposition, he gathered up his courage and took a few careful steps forward. "Um, hello?"
Quick as his own lightning, they whip their head away from the shore and towards him. Now that he's a bit closer and they're looking at him, a certain species' name comes to mind: Zorua. But they're not supposed to have white fur, or so much of it, from what he could remember of seeing one in passing. He tilts his head at that little discovery and gives them a worried look.
"Are you okay?"
Shinx gets a loud, spine-chilling, womanly scream in response. He has to use all of his control to keep from sparking, even then his fur stands on end. Right after that, the pokémon twists onto their paws and runs in the opposite direction of him-
-right into the large rock, a small crack sounding out as their head slams right into the hard surface. He cringes as they fall back into the sand, right where they were laying down. Undaunted at the blow, which was surprising to Shinx, the white and red fox shakes it off and instead runs around the rock.
He widens his eyes, leaning to the side to see where they went. "Wha- hey, wait! Are you okay?"
"Stay away!" They, although they definitely sound like a 'she' now that Shinx heard her speak, yell back. "You weird cat-thing!"
Shinx blinks. "What?"
Not realizing his question was done out of rhetorical confusion, she yells again. "I said! Stay away! I'm having! A moment!" She slowly pronounces every word, as if he had a problem hearing her before. "Please and fucking thank you!"
Feeling his worry over her well-being grow stronger than his care to listen to her, Shinx leans to the side a bit farther, hoping to see her. "Are you okay? You looked like you saw a ghost." He feels his face flush slightly at the last word. "Not that Ghost types are bad, but I know Duskull can get a little carried away with his scaring. I didn't mean it like that!"
Shinx can feel the moment after he said that stretch on, almost awkwardly long, before he sees a tip of that long red fur peek from around the rock. Slowly, the strange pokémon pokes the rest of their head around the rock. "What?"
Shinx shakes off the embarrassment and repeats himself. "Are you okay?"
The weird fox's eyes are strangely half-lidded - maybe that's natural? - but he can see them narrow a bit more. "No, forget that, what's this nonsense about ghosts?"
The electric cat's own eyes narrow, too. "What do you mean?"
"What do I mean? What do you mean: you said ghosts like they're real or something." She's putting a lot of emphasis on the word 'ghosts' for some reason, which confuses Shinx as much as the statement itself.
"Because… they are? Do you not know about Ghost types?" He almost feels silly asking the question, but the pokémon in front of him is certainly strange, to say the least. What pokémon doesn't know about Ghost types: they're one of the oldest known types around, and while the knowledge of Fairy types are somewhat new, word tends to spread fast about a whole new type, of all things!
"...No?" Now she sounds confused again. She walks a bit farther out from behind the rock, a strange look on her vulpine face. "What are you on about, kid? Ghost type?"
"Yeah, it's a pretty common type of Pokémon. Why don't you know about it?"
Another stretch of silence, once that has the Zorua lookalike's head slowly tilting to one side. "...what the hell's a Pokémon?"
Shinx suddenly feels way out of his depth, with part of him wishing he just went straight home to Sharpedo Bluff.
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"Do I have brain damage?" Is a question she's been asking herself for the past couple of seconds. The easy answer is probably yes: she has a mild case of serious brain damage, but being aware of that isn't helping her right now.
It turns out that the thing is a lot less terrifying than they look: in which they never really looked that terrifying in the first place, really, so maybe her 'probably brain damage' problem is causing her to think weird looking cats are some sort of world-ending horror or whatever. On top of that, they sound like an innocent boy; one that won't stop asking if she's okay, at that.
But hardly any of that matters, because the questions he asked her were simply quite vexing. Pokémon? She took a moment to roll the word around in her mind, and when it came up without ringing any bells she asked the blue and black cat what it was.
The cat proceeded to look at her like she grew a second head. Hence her whole self-reflection moment on whether or not she truly is mentally impaired.
She doesn't have much time to herself, however, because the weird cat starts talking to her again. "Are you sure you're okay?"
Deciding to be honest, she shrugs one shoulder and says casually "Not really."
The cat stares at her.
She rises to the challenge and stares back at him.
"...okay. Um." He looks behind himself - victory! - and towards a path behind him, one that she hasn't noticed until now. "I… think I can help? Or find someone to help you, at least. The Wigglytuff Guild is probably closed now, and they don't open until tomorrow morning. I can bring you to them tomorrow, if you want?"
Oh good, more things I don't know. Feeling like this is going to become a common thing for her, she resigns to asking all of the questions, starting with "What's the Wigglytuff Guild?"
He gasps, as if she just asked another stupid question. "You don't know about the Wigglytuff Guild?"
She feels her eyes drop into a deadpan. "Kid, I asked what a 'pokémon' was and you looked at me like I have brain damage."
He winces, like she just slapped him. "Oh. Um, I'm sorry." Then a goofy grin replaces the previous expression, as if he never realized what he did. "The Wigglytuff Guild is home to some of the best Explorers and Rescuers ever! There are teams of Pokémon of all kinds, coming together and taking up the task to help others and find treasure in dungeons!" His eyes seem to light up brighter and brighter as he talks about them…
This kid loves them, without a single shadow of a doubt in sight.
Which is a lot more literal than she thought, as she watches small sparks pop around him, like little lightning bugs dancing across his bi-colored form. His eyes then dim, and the sparks stop. "So they're the coolest, ever. I hope I can join them one day!"
Looking over him one more time, she collects whatever thoughts she has. "I have several questions." She pins him with a look. "And you still haven't answered what a Pokémon was."
His grin takes a more nervous turn. "M-maybe we should walk and talk? And maybe start with what you know, first?"
She nods, padding over to his side as the two of them walk to the path the cat looked at earlier. "Alright, let's see here, please don't fail me again brain…"
A long pause.
"...are you a pokémon?"
The cat sighs explosively.