~~~ Chapter 58 - Zed ~~~

At the front of Nimbasa City's theme park, the crowd practically throbbed, the neon lights shining in the last of expectant park guests' faces as they filtered through the ticket lines, and the music boomed. A ticket attendant named Chris watched as the vestiges of the crowd pulled out their phones and had them scanned. Entry into the park with the latest upgrades has really sped things up, Chris thought. New scanners, new cameras, new sensors. The system knew everyone who would come to the park before they even had a chance to pull out their phone and scan their ticket.

They weren't required, yet—not everyone was convinced to use the digital ticketing system or the facial scan system, but it didn't matter. Thousands of people still managed to enter the park in the span of just a few minutes. Honestly, Chris wasn't even sure a ticket attendant was needed with the new system. All he had to do was help a few old-timers feel better about themselves, he supposed.

As the crowd thinned, the stream of people entering the park or coming from the city began to taper off—they had deliberately limited the number of tickets sold for Elesa's opening night, per the new gym leader's demands.

A glint of pink and gold caught Chris' eye, drawing his attention to a woman stepping out between a pair of buildings. She swayed in a confident and demanding posture. His eyes instantly became magnetized to the young woman's face as she approached. Her eyes weren't empty, and her expression was neutral. And, if he was asked, he couldn't pin down specifically what was off about it, but her expression did not line up with her movement. Her arm was held out, as if she was walking with a boyfriend. But nothing was there but shadow.

Approaching Chris' gate, she paused. Chris kept his attention to her face, he had practiced this—despite the uncanny expression, it did no good to look anywhere else. The hair on the back of his neck stood on end, goosebumps on his arm stuck out. A light at his terminal shone in red. Face ID was not known. She had no ticket. "Uh, sorry ma'am," he said, "do you, uh, have a ticket? This is a limited event for Elesa and the Electric Meloetta's opening night, and tickets were sold out weeks ago…" His voice wandered off. The woman didn't even look at him, but past him. A chill rolled down his neck as the woman shook her head. Instead of going back the way she came, she disappeared in a void of black.

"We are tired. Remain silent, and we bid you pleasant dreams."

A more masculine, rhaspy voice whispered into his ear, and Chris stood straight up. "Ruin her night, and know the inverse for yourself, nights of perfect darkness that only she can break."

Chris dared to turn back, a single bead of sweat dripping down off his forehead. Behind him, and the gold and pink-haired woman was walking, not with a shadow in her arms, no. Chris turned back to the park entrance.

There was no need to alert security, not really.

~~~

On the battle train heading to Nimbasa City, the stars were coming out. Art and Leah sat next to each other, across from a man they'd just met. Alan was his name. He monitored Leah as she stared down at her shoes with uncharacteristic focus. Even so, it wasn't the focus that worried him about her—it was her stillness that was on his mind.

Something about the conversation, or Alan, had made her anxious, and that worried him. She had clued into something that Alan had said. Or, on the other hand, she could be picking up something about Alan that didn't feel right. You didn't have to be psychic to get bad vibes. Another part of him was worried there was another piece of the puzzle-that-was-Leah that he was missing. He took a quick breath to calm himself down and clear his thoughts. It did no good to overthink things.

He considered his response to Alan and decided to test the waters a bit. "Even if we met some powerful creatures, I can't really disclose the specifics to you. I've already logged what I know with someone from interpol, so you'll need to get more info from them. Still, not sure how that all relates to either Leah or your sensor." He had wanted some answers, and didn't want to let this particular spark of hope get in his way, so it was best to give it a bit of skepticism.

At his question, Alan just waved his hand dismissively. "Don't worry about it, brother. All good if I wind back a bit, now that I've got your interest?"

Art just nodded, pulling off the pokeballs on his belt, releasing Fidget and yet-unnamed Silcoon. "Go ahead—" Leah hopped off the bench, moving with Fidget to the front end of their subway car, drawing both his and Alan's heads as she walked past "—but I don't want to spend all night talking about this." I was hoping to catch a nap, he thought to himself.

"Right on," Alan said. "Anyway, so the Aether foundation is looking into threats against both humanity and pokemon. Lusamine's our CEO. Heard of her?" he asked. Art just shakes his head. "Right, then, well, I'm betting you're kinda tired, so I'll keep the rest of this brief. We work with interpol and plasma group labs. A group of us were sent here on an assignment from Alola, and while here, I was looking for, or seeing if I could find, powerful creatures or Pokemon via this Z-sensor, right?"

"Right. That was the beeping? You sense this Z-stuff? Got it," Art said, and Alan nodded.

"So, I followed you around, because of the sensor, yeah? Normally we find humans with a bunch of Z-energy, but it seems the sensor's picked up both on Leah there, and on you? I'm not sure. Uh, do you have any Z-Crystals on you?"

Art frowned. "No, I don't know what a Z-Crystal is." He was starting to regret letting Alan follow him onto the train. He could move a car forward, he supposed, but he'd hear the guy out a bit more before completely deciding he was full of shit.

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Alan just smiled, unphased, before his face lit up again, moving to look into his bags and pockets. "Right, right. Anyway, Z-Crystal, yeah? They're not actually crystals. They're more like… A metal. Here." Alan pulled from his pocket, a small, hard case.

"Is that case… made of lead?" Art asked.

"Yeah. Z-Crystals, they're safe. Not radioactive or anything, I just need to keep them in the case or else they end up messing with the sensor." Alan said, pulling the top of the case off. Art looked at the crystal, admiring its sheen, before sitting back and rubbing his temples.

"You know what?" Art said, "I just… Don't care about your Z-crystals or whatever these are, no offense. Unless you can tell me that this explains Leah being vastly more intelligent than her counterparts, or her strangely common encounters with really, really powerful pokemon, I don't care."

"Oh, uh, sorry man. Uh. Right." Art rolled his eyes at Alan getting flustered. "I'm just tryin' to say that you and her are covered in this Z-energy, yeah? Just like in this metallic crystal. Z-energy is building up, yeah? And we're trying to save the wo—"

Once more, Art rolled his eyes, cutting Alan off. "Stop, dude. Can you save me the save-the-world nonsense. Why does this matter to me? I'm a teen with two badges on my record. Tell me what I wanna know."

"Right. Well, uh. Where did that Z-Energy come from, yeah? Fallers have trace hints of the stuff. You're both positively radiating it."

Art was watching Leah's antennae twitching along with their conversation, growing more and more taut. She wasn't wheezing like a zebstrika with a punctured lung, at least. "I've already been through this with Lyra. Unless you're telling me Fallers are from another planet?" He asked, his question being both rhetorical and incredulous. Leah was shoved to the ground by Fidget. When Alan didn't respond right away, Art threw up his arms, and was about to call Leah over. But no, he decided not to. It wouldn't be fair to her.

Art took a breath through his nose, then released it out of his mouth. There was no need to cause panic for either him, or Leah. And, if Leah really was from another place, she had her reasons not to be more forward about it. Assuming she was pretending not to understand all their words, that was. She had paired up with him, and he had no reason to think she meant ill will, even if Alan's nonsense turned out to be true. Though, he definitely had questions for her.

If she was so smart, why hadn't he pushed her harder? Asked her more questions? The old man's voice echoed in his mind: "They're not human, no matter how much you think you understand them, they're still animals," the old man had said over and over again, in so many different ways during the few weeks they were allowed to stay at his home. Leah was definitely not human. Still, a few extra pieces were fitting together in Art's mind. The other option was some kind of abandoned genetic experiment. If he could convince someone to get the sequencing done, then that could be ruled out… Could he trust the local companies? If she was an escaped experiment, would they want her back?

Alan began to speak up again. "Uh, sorry man, I just thought—"

Art just waved his hand at the guy. "Don't worry about it. You're serious about this Faller stuff being from other planets?"

Alan didn't nod. Or shake his head. "Well, it's complicated, and we don't actually know right now yet. We're trying to find portals into Ultra Space and know for sure, but uh, if I'm right then Leah's a Leavanny from a planet, either ours or like ours, and she's got loads of Z-Energy just building up inside her. I'm surprised she's still alive to be honest. Z-Energy is like a magnet…"

"Hmmm", Art hummed, before his face lit up. "Actually, uh, put your crystal away. Leah recently had to have some metallic-like rocks removed from her insides. Can your sensor tell me if they're Z-Crystals?" Alan just nodded, as Art pulled out of his pocket a bag of the rocks the pokecenter had removed from Leah after she was body slammed by the scolipede during her panic attack in Nacrene City.

"Right, uh, they didn't clean those things off at all, now did they?" Alan said, eying the plastic bag. Art just shrugged as Alan held out his sensor, pointed at the baggie. When the sensor beeped, "Yeah, that genuine Z-stuff." he said, pulling back the sensor.

"Okay, so what's that tell me about Leah? She had this stuff inside of her. You're not about to tell me that aliens are abducting pokemon and stuffing these things into them, are you?" Art said.

"No, I don't know, we've never seen Z-crystals inside of a Faller before. Granted, it's not like we find Fallers every day, right?" Alan said.

"Right. So there's too many confounding factors. And we'll need more sensitive equipment to separate traces of Ultra-Space from Z-Energy on her, but for the Ultra Beasts, it shouldn't matter. They'll smell that Z-Energy from a mile away and come knocking." Art just waved his hands. His head was already hurting, and he wanted to have a conversation with Leah—who was laying face down on the subway train floor, motionless.

"I'll get the rundown on the rest of this Ultra-Stuff later," Art said. "For now, I've got a team member who needs my help. And uh, no offense Alan, but I'm going to move up a car and talk to Leah there, in private."

"Right man. I know how it goes. In fact, you know what?" Alan said, pulling out his own pokeball, releasing a Raichu, floating on their own tail. "Don't worry about changing traincars. Sorry about the uh, coming out of nowhere and chasing-you-down thing." Alan says, chuckling lightly. "Right. I'll just uh, I'll just give you my number here, and I'll be outta your hair. Call or text me when you're ready to chat more about this," Alan said, his Alolan-form Raichu reaching out and grabbing his leg. In the blink of an eye, they disappear without a sound, leaving a single card on the seat he was originally on.

He sighed, popping a piece of candy into his own mouth. He looked up at the front of the car. Leah was still on the ground, moping. Fidget had decided to commiserate with her, though Art was sure it was more following Leah's motions in a consolation attempt, rather than a mutual understanding.

"Leah," he said. His gut clenched as she rolled over. If it wasn't for her drooping antennae, and the fact that she didn't constantly lay on the floor, there was no way he would know the way she was feeling in that moment. He got up from his seat, putting away the Z-Crystals. The pokecenter had only removed the ones that had actually punctured her organs. There were others or trace remnants of the rocks still inside her.

He walked over to where she was lying down on the subway car's floor.

"So, uh," he said, picking her up. Her limbs hung, limp in his arms. "It's going to be okay, you know," he said, offering her a piece of candy. Her mouth opened, and he dropped it in for her. Fidget was right nearby, practically begging for one as well. He smiled.

"You CAN understand humans, can't you?" he asked.