PARAGON
Remnants of the Great War Arc [2]
Chapter 11 : A Hollow History
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Anabel Lila was not extraordinary.
She had no grand dreams, like Zinnia.
She was not on a righteous path of repentance, like N.
She did not have superhuman abilities, like Sabrina.
She was a mere pawn in Cynthia’s order of misfit toys.
She was not the strongest among them, nor did she surmise herself to be the weakest. She spent equal time on and off Paragon Island in between missions. She had no hobbies and held no hatred.
If she were a character in a novel or movie, she’d undoubtedly be a side character. She was the type of character people would say is “kind of bland.” Maybe future novels or movies would build on her character, or maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe she’d just be killed or written out in some other way because the audience didn’t like her. And the story would progress without incident, because ultimately, her scenes were what the kids called “filler.”
These sorts of thoughts and more did not run through Anabel Lila’s head on a regular or semi-regular basis ever since joining the Paragon Organization.
Anabel Lila was a zero. Not positive and not negative. If she was the dramatic type, she’d say she was a “void.” If she was the pragmatic type, she’d say she was a “rock.”
But Anabel Lila was neither of these things. She voiced her insecurities to those who’d listen, but she didn’t have many of them.
She had parents who loved her, and friends to call friends. When she became a trainer, as all kids her age did, she had an instant knack for it. When she became a Frontier Brain in Hoenn at the age of twelve, people called her a child genius. As she got older, they dropped the ‘child’ but still called her a genius. And when she got older still, they seemed to forget that there was anything special about her to begin with, as shinier talent splashed onto the Frontier scene.
Oh well. That was the entertainment industry. If the Pokémon League was the pinnacle of glory, then the Battle Frontier was the pinnacle of gluttony. The complete opposite, where corpulent wallets, friends in high places, and the rarest pokémon around were the tickets to the top.
Which is why Anabel left the Frontier.
And somehow she’d ended up here. Most people probably followed a similar trajectory as her. They drifted through life from one thing to the next, anchoring themselves to whatever opportunities materialized from the aether. After leaving the Frontier, she found herself in the employ of the International Police. And it was from there that Cynthia poached her.
Of course, even that had happened without any drama. Somehow, Cynthia got ahold of her contact info, scheduled a meeting, and laid out the terms. It took Anabel four years to beat her. And the rest was history.
Oh, yeah. Then Ash joined.
Ash.
Ash Ketchum.
Ash.
She rolled his name around her mind like a morsel of food that was too hot.
When he’d appeared on Paragon Island, her heart flipped over in her chest.
But then it stuck the landing.
Hmmm, nope. Yeah, nope. Nothing. That flame had fizzled out long ago. Of course she’d gotten a pang in her chest after seeing her old crush after so long. That was to be expected. But her feelings, at least those feelings, were long gone now. Ash was now just Ash.
So her life wasn’t about to turn into a riveting, heart-pounding romance between two old friends reunited after ten years while they took on a world of evil and enigmas either.
In other words, Anabel Lila was not extraordinary.
Even her propensity for self-evaluation rode a thin line between critical and aloof. She was humble enough to know that she wasn’t some once-in-a-generation icon, but not so much so that she would devalue her own achievements in a vain attempt at modesty. They had earned her a spot in the Paragon Organization, after all.
And as a result, she now found herself on a small island at the center of the world. Despite its size, the place bustled with activity. Armored vans cruised past her in a hurry, and massive tents had been erected across the smooth sandstone at the island’s interior. A veritable hive of International agents swarmed around her, but they were far too busy to greet her, and she passed them all without interruption.
As she rounded a tall cliff, her destination came into view. The World Prison loomed high into the perfect sky. It was a column of justice constructed of stone, iron, and more that housed criminals from throughout the lands and ages. It was brown and overgrown at its base, but as it stretched higher and higher, it turned to metal, and thin currents of energy pulsed across its surface at the highest levels. The World Prison had been built countless years ago, but to this day, it was still incomplete, always adding more floors to accommodate the ever-growing number of villains.
She began her ascent up a flight of grand polished marble steps flanked by massive banners of all the regions of the world. They flapped their colors in the wind: violet for Paldea, added most recently at the bottom, black for Unova, gold for Sinnoh, and so on. Finally, she reached the top and passed between the crimson standards of Kanto.
Sabrina was waiting for her at the top. If nothing else, the girl was punctual, though she’d probably just had her Alakazam teleport her to the top. Or she’d done it herself. Unlike Anabel, who tried to dress the part of a Paragon operative, Sabrina wore simple black tights and an oversized indigo sweater dress. She looked like she was out to get groceries.
Sabrina put up a hand when Anabel arrived and hopped off the granite plinth she’d been sitting on beneath one of Kanto’s banners. Anabel smiled and waved back. Sabrina was a nice girl. She’d been a total cold fish when they first met, but after some… insistence on Anabel’s part… okay, it was really more like a total invasion of her privacy for the better part of a year, she’d come out of her shell, at least when it was just the two of them.
“Hey,” Sabrina said quietly.
“Hey!” Anabel beamed. “I thought for sure I’d beat you this time.”
“Oh. Sorry. I sensed you coming so I told Minior to fly faster.”
“You little—“ Anabel grabbed her and locked her neck in her arm, and the girl giggled as she squirmed to escape. When she finally did, Anabel placed her gloved hands on her hips and looked up at the structure before them.
Anabel scowled at its sight. She’d only been here a few times, but it was an unsettling place. Legions of scum served their time here, and as the prison continued to graft greater defenses into and onto itself, it seemed to become more and more like an abomination. A cylindrical golem that had long outlived its expiration date, yet continued to persist, somehow.
Its oaken doors rested on the wall beside the gaping entrance, separated from their hinges, and Anabel led the way inside. Hooded guards beside the entrance bowed at their approach.
Immediately, once they passed through the arch, Anabel gagged and slammed her hand over her nose. A malodor of rancid iron clawed up her nostrils, and she almost threw up on the spot. Sabrina closed her eyes, and her gauntlets whirred. A gentle wind enveloped them, and the stench of death subsided, and Anabel nodded at her in thanks, wiping her eyes. They crossed a short hallway, and the source of the stench quickly made itself apparent.
The atrium was covered in blood, from floor to ceiling. Anabel gasped as she stepped across the carpet, dried blood cracking under her feet. Beside her, Sabrina shielded her nose and mouth with a sleeve-covered hand. Despite the fact that she was keeping the stench at bay with her powers, moisture rimmed her eyes. They’d both seen some things after joining Paragon, but a gruesome scene like this was new even for them.
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“It’s quite something, isn’t it?”
Seated on a broken piece of pillar in the center of the room sat a man whose stained armor crumpled around him in a twisted sculpture. He looked to be in his fifties, and a pad of gauze covered half of his scarred face, though blood was seeping through. He held an ice pack to his head, and a medic was stitching up a gash on his arm. Unlike his guards scattered throughout the room, he wore no mask, as if the smell didn’t even faze him.
Anabel composed herself and walked up to him. “I wanted to believe the report I read was an exaggeration.”
“I’m afraid not,” he chuckled, though there was no mirth in it. “Bastard got us good.”
“Seems he missed a spot.”
“Heh. Luck, and nothing more, sweetheart. If I hadn’t been buried under my Stoutland during the massacre, and broke half his ribs in the process, I’d be a pile of meat like the rest of my men.”
Anabel pursed her lips. “Do you want to talk now?”
“Day’s not getting any younger. Get off of me,” he shooed the medic away and stood up. “Everybody out!” he bellowed. Before he could get light headed, he sat back down and steadied himself for a moment. Then he smiled, his lips pressed together, and the many wrinkles on his face deepened. “So. How can I help the Paragon Organization today?”
Anabel ignored his glib attempt at sarcasm, and motioned to the psychic. “I don’t think you and Sabrina have met. Sabrina, this is General Nathaniel Barke, warden of the World Prison. General, maybe you’ve heard of Sabrina—“
“Yes, Saffron gym leader. Human psychic. Extremely dangerous. I would know, I was in the room when those were being made,” he pointed at her gauntlets with his pinky. “Pleasure to meet you, princess.”
Sabrina nodded, and rubbed her gauntlets absentmindedly. Then they started to spin slightly faster, and a breeze passed over Barke. He wrinkled his nose, and took a few sniffs, then glared at her.
“That’s some trick. Cynthia found quite the catch to add to her menagerie with you, eh? No need to bother with me, though. I selfishly survived when all my men died, the least I could do is have the courtesy to smell their corpses.”
Sabrina didn’t react, but Anabel cut in before he could continue.
“What can you tell us about the escapee?”
Barke raised his eyebrow as he turned back to her. “Not much.” He laced his thick fingers together and sighed, now all business. “He’s known as AZ, though that’s certainly a mistranslation from Old Kalosian. He was the World Prison’s first prisoner, and it’s said it was built to contain him.”
Anabel shifted uneasily. The World Prison, despite its human construction and obvious purpose, was nearly as mysterious as any other inexplicable phenomenon across the world. She knew this tower had its secrets, but even its secrets had secrets, it seemed. “And how long ago was that?”
“Three thousand years, give or take a few decades.”
Anabel frowned. “How is that possible?”
Barke threw his arms out. “We don’t know. We haven’t fed him anything in years, and he doesn’t move. Every warden is briefed on the protocols regarding his treatment when they become warden, though most of it boils down to ‘don’t let him escape’ and ‘try and kill him, if you can.’ All who came before me maintained the first directive just fine, but had no luck with the second.”
“Are you sure he’s even human? It sounds more like you’ve been looking over a statue this entire time.”
“Oh, he’s human alright. There are records of his crimes. Apparently he was a bit of a big deal back during the Great War. Some king or general from Kalos or something, the translations are a little unclear on that. Name a war crime and I’m sure it’s on his ledger.”
Anabel bit her lip. There wasn’t much known about the Great War. Three thousand years ago, humanity devolved into a bloody clash against one another on almost every continent, and it’d taken a catastrophic event known as the Calamity to end the fighting. Supposedly, the population of both people and pokémon were cut in half in a single day, though the source of such destruction remained unknown to this day. If Cynthia were here, she’d probably know more.
“It’s funny,” Barke continued. “The World Prison held a monster like AZ for millenia, yet we still know next to nothing about how, or what our predecessors intended for him. You’d think they would’ve been a little more detailed in writing that history down.”
“Are there other prisoners like him here?” Sabrina asked.
“No. The next oldest prisoner here is ninety-three, and he’s in for bestiality.” He shook his head in contempt. “You see? I can tell you everything you’d want to know about anyone else in this damned tower. But the one guy who puts all the others to shame… nothing.” He spat on the ground. “Gone, in just a few minutes. No outside help. After three thousand years.”
“What were the protocols in place to contain him?” Anabel asked.
Barke glanced up at them, and his eyelid seemed to sag wearily over his eye. “What I’m about to tell you doesn’t leave this room.” When the two nodded, he continued. “Interpol knows a breeder, I think out in Hoenn, who creates metalworks from the steel of a Metagross. Every ten years or so, we commission a new set of chains from the guy and rebind the prisoner. As the old chains decayed, the new ones would keep him restrained, theoretically. We had psychics monitoring his emotional state at all times. Ghosts kept his thoughts in check, and disrupted them any time he got a little too active.”
“That’s inhuman,” Sabrina murmured.
Barke sneered at her. “If only. And that’s just for starters, you’re gonna love what else we were cooking, sweetheart. Several years ago, a defense firm in Unova invented a weapon that was supposedly powerful enough to turn his bones to sand and boil his blood in an instant. We weren’t able to test it out on him because it would’ve destroyed his cell, but it’s safe to say that’s eighteen million dollars we won’t be getting back.” He rubbed his face in annoyance. “We had a damn armory’s worth of similar such defenses, and there was supposed to be some sort of ancient magic imbued in the very stones of his cell from when the World Prison was first erected. But he tore through it all like it was made of paper.”
Anabel stifled her rising fear. Who were they about to go after? This mission was supposed to be little more than intelligence gathering, but it’d be up to Paragon to apprehend him once they had more information. Cynthia would need to mobilize far more than just her and Sabrina for that, Anabel could already tell. But before all that, was killing him even possible?
“Did it have any effect?”
“Gave him a little headache, if my men’s words are to be trusted.”
Oh. Great. “What else have you tried? What have wardens in the past tried?”
Barke shrugged, as if the question was completely pointless. “His skin is completely impenetrable. He can’t be poisoned, and is immune to fire and lava. He can’t be drowned. He can’t be crushed. He can’t be buried. Anything more invasive than that we’ve been hesitant to try for fear of incensing him.”
“Any idea where he is now?” Sabrina asked.
“He was headed in the direction of Kalos last we saw him, though no further details beyond what was in the report.”
“And I don’t suppose you know why he decided to break out now, of all times?”
“My men are looking into it now. But no.”
Anabel sighed and closed her eyes. “Do you mind if we have a look around?”
Barke shrugged. “The cell’s down below.”
Anabel turned to Sabrina, and the psychic nodded. She released her Alakazam, and after a few moments, its spoons glowed, and Anabel felt her stomach turn weightless, before her feet fell back upon solid ground.
They were now in front of the broken cell far beneath the atrium. Spotlights flooded the floor with light, but the empty cell held an eerie darkness unrelated to the light. There should have been something in there, amidst the ruin, but now there wasn’t. And it was terrifying.
Anabel selected a pokéball and released its contents. Decidueye emptied out onto the cobblestone, its dark eyes already studying its surroundings. “See what you can find,” Anabel ordered, and Decidueye trotted off.
Beside them, Alakazam hovered above the ground, its legs crossed, as it searched the chamber for clues. Although it was clearly making an effort, Anabel knew it wasn’t necessary. Sabrina’s gauntlets spun about her wrists, alternating directions every so often. Her senses were even greater than her pokémon’s, a fact she seemed eager to hide through ruses like this.
AZ.
It was a name that was simultaneously meaningless and infamous. To the world at large, it meant nothing, but to those in the International Police, it was like an urban legend. A completely inexplicable existence. A man out of time. A monster at the bottom of the world.
An extraordinary man.
Anabel frowned.
No way.
Am I… jealous?
She narrowed her eyes. Inquiry, begin.
Am I jealous of AZ? she asked herself again.
No. The answer came easily. No. And it wasn’t just denial. It was like jealousy. But not exactly. It was fascination. Beneath her fear lay an inexplicable desire to find him. Like a moth to a flame. She knew she’d be incinerated, but she wanted to find him anyway.
But why? What would I do if I found him?
Although she didn’t have an answer, she savored this new development. A fleck upon her ordinariness.
As she noticed Decidueye approaching her, Anabel decided to earmark her thoughts for later. “What do you have for me, Sophia?”
Sophia the Decidueye cooed and held up her wing. She saw with more than her two eyes, and nothing organic escaped her ghostly gaze. Upon one of her quills was a tiny speck of gray.
Paper. Paper, which would never be found down here, damp as it was. Unless someone had brought it down recently.
“Sabrina,” Anabel called.
Sabrina’s gauntlets slowed as her concentration was interrupted. She picked the piece of paper off Decidueye’s wing with her powers and it floated through the air. After examining it for a few seconds, her gauntlets began to spin again, and more gray specks started flying out of the decimated cell and assembling in the air in front of her. When she was done, she placed the patchwork gently on the floor in the center of the room, right beneath the spotlight. Though there were holes in it, and they only had a single page, it was obvious what it was.
“A newspaper,” Anabel breathed.
Though it didn’t tell them anything yet, this was a first step. Something AZ had read in this newspaper had catalyzed his escape. For three thousand years, AZ had remained an enigma. A void. A nondescript rock at the bottom of a mountain.
If Anabel could shed a light upon him, what would that make her?
Next — Chapter 12 : Revival
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