Chapter 12: R4 | Mithridatism

Iono seized all eyes. "WOWZAH! What an amazeballs finish to the IPL quarterfinals! A real slugfest. And those strats! Yui Matsui, hold your head high, you've got a bright future on YouTube. The titles write themselves: 'You won't BELIEVE what I put on my Garchomp...' (Hit me up if you're watching Yui. We can go far with this.)"

"We'll have plenty of time to talk about that interesting match," said Cynthia. "But first, let's applaud our four semifinalists."

"For sure! Today marks a super historic first: the first time two girl trainers made it to semis!"

"Well." Bill twirled a finger in midair. "Technically, yesterday is when that happened, after Aracely beat Gladion. It didn't matter who won today."

"Boo, you're ruining my clickbait."

"On that tack," Bill continued, "it's already set in stone we'll have a female trainer in finals, another 'historic first.' Cynthia, your IPL 51 run was the first time we saw a woman reach semis. How does it feel knowing your record will be surpassed?"

Cynthia, cool in her chair, uncrossed her legs and crossed them the other way. A casual flick tucked a blonde lock behind her ear. All her existence was grace, like a goddess: who could watch but not love her?

"I'm happy. I'm incredibly happy. Which, you know, surprises me. Thirteen years ago, I hated to lose. Losing was the worst feeling in the world. But this is something I'm glad to have lost. Toril and Cely are both amazing young battlers. They've shown incredible resilience; I couldn't be more proud to see them reach this far and beyond. Whoever wins next week will be a serious threat to take home the trophy."

And you're proud of her, too, right? Even if she lost. She was so close. You're proud, right?

"That's where you and I differ," said Bill. "From my perspective, the other side of the bracket is significantly favored in finals. Raj is best trainer right now and Red is the best trainer of all time. Consider strength of schedule."

"Strength of schedule? Cely beat—"

"Jinjiao, yes, I know, but besides that. Gladion and Yui are, let's face it, not the same caliber as Jacq and SkiLL. And Toril struggled against Yui. A lot."

"Toril responded well to a series of hyper-specific counter matchups. The way she maneuvered Yui into locking in Choice Band Last Respects before swapping to Porygon-Z shows incredible on-the-fly decision making."

"Gr-reat point Cynthia," Iono said. "Do ya think Yui should've used a move like Psychic Fangs instead of Last Respects?"

"It didn't matter. Toril's Porygon-Z had Download and—pulling up the movesets—Shadow Ball. It would've beaten Houndstone in one hit regardless."

"Then what could Yui have done to win?"

Cynthia contemplated. Yui's face pressed into the holoscreen until Cynthia became a projection upon her forehead.

"Toril won when Sneasler and Corviknight went down," Cynthia said. "The way Yui played around Mawile was—a disappointment."

A disappointment.

That was Cynthia's last word on the matter. Bill butted in to say something about—something. The topic shifted. Yui stood there and watched the entire segment, but Cynthia didn't mention her again.

A commercial played.

For the first time she remembered, Yui wanted to go home. It didn't make sense to want that. She lived her life a nomad. What was home?

Home was the void between herself and others. Yui turned and left this world forever.

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Fiorella Fiorina, chic in a cerise coat, looked twenty-something, was forty-seven. Animated she leaned over the counter at the smiling fools opposite. "No, let me speak to your boss." They babbled something about a screening. "Your boss. I know her."

"The screening is complimentary. If you come this way, we may begin you on your journey."

"I told you, I'm not here to join. I already have a gym membership." Fiorella pinched the bridge of her nose, as if it might alleviate the pressure on her eyes. Her breath whooshed out: HAH. "Are you dense on purpose?"

Even this late—she'd only half-expected them to be open—people in the adjoining room contorted their bodies on yoga mats. Backs arched, eyes aimed up, they allowed their instructor's soft-spoken platitudes to wash over them: Soar skyward. Reach inside. Your dreams await you in heaven. Heaven is both above and inside. The key is in your own body... your very DNA... the Logos of this world.

"The screening is free and safe," a grinning fool proclaimed. "You'll learn truths about yourself."

"Unreal," Fiorella said, to the other fools grinning by the doors, to impose upon them the reality where they sympathized with her. In this sympathy she found strength.

The lobby was so fluorescent, and this building had so few windows, it felt like broad daylight. Fiorella took the last tram of the night down. If she wanted to get back to the Plateau she'd need to hire a cab and go the long way through Viridian. She couldn't think about that right now, it was simply too much.

They tried to hand her some books and pamphlets and she shoved them away. "Forget it. I'll find her on my own. Thank you for your time."

A plain door beside the counter looked like a promising avenue, but when she moved for it, the fools converged, franticly renewing pleas about screenings and blood tests. Fiorella was half-willing to wield the rolled-up magazine she held to keep them at bay, but they fell back at once when the door opened and a woman with a blue stripe on her robes appeared.

"Lady Fiorina, a pleasure. Forgive the inconvenience; we didn't expect such an esteemed visitor at this time."

"Finally." Fiorella shot a look at the grinning fools, none of whom grinned anymore, their faces ashen, their arms straight at their sides as they stared at whatever wall faced them. Served them right. She turned back. "Now, you."

"You may call me Nilufer."

"Nilufer. I need to speak to your boss. It's urgent."

Nilufer, not grinning, still wore a smile, slight and somewhat coy. She had the face of someone who blended into a crowd shot on TV. But if, for some reason, you found yourself rewatching that recording over and over, she might flash for a frame and become an image imprinted on your soul.

"I'm sorry, MOTHER can't see you now. Her work is demanding, as I'm sure you understand. You may inform me your purpose; I'll relay it to her."

Pages crinkled as Fiorella unraveled the prerelease print of Battlers Weekly, opened it to an article, and held it in her face. "That's my purpose. Understand?"

Nilufer's eyes scanned the pages and read the headline:

A RISE-ing Star? Cely's Shady Past REVEALED!

"I see. I'll bring this to MOTHER's attention. Please wait."

After Nilufer left with the magazine, Fiorella stood amid the grinless fools, whose demeanor remained servile without any attempt toward service. The yoga instructor filled the spaces between them: Let this eternal truth guide you. Let it change you. It is eternal, yet it changes. It both changes you and may itself be changed. Must be changed. Nothing in this world is true without change. Change yourself. Feel that change in the shape of your body.

After ten impatient minutes, Nilufer returned. "MOTHER will see you now."

The interior of this building defied cartography. Soon Fiorella no longer possessed any conception of where within it she stood. Everything curved. White tile evoked a bathhouse, then they passed a set of showers where toweled figures peered from shrouds of steam. "One must be clean to pass," Nilufer explained, as two men opened two doors for them, "but your status as honored guest renders you such by fiat."

"That's how germs work?" Fiorella muttered. Not that she actually wanted to go wash. She was perfectly hygienic anyway.

In many spaces, Fiorella's coat and Nilufer's blue stripe were the only color.

It was conch-like, this structure, or maybe a helix. Along a perpetual curve Fiorella had the uncanny sense they were subtly ascending, as though the walkways were ramped at too gradual a rate to tell. This sense became certainty as the familiar cardiovascular ache emerged, her best friend since the coma. It didn't slow her (she beat discipline into her body through gymnastic repetition) but her lungs whistled deep from the wisp of poison that remained dormant.

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Dormitories where three-bunk cots lined the walls. A cafeteria of skinny benches. The center was a cone-shaped auditorium; terraces of seats descended to a chasmic pulpit. An orator with a blue stripe communicated something to a large audience that watched in perfect silence. After another stretch of rounded walkway took them past a modest library, the inner wall exposed the auditorium again, and Fiorella glimpsed the pulpit rising via mechanical motion to put the orator above all witnesses. Flowers in a field bloom, then die, then their progeny blooms in their place, and so on. I ask you: is this change? Or fixed eternity?

They reached two more doors that two doorkeepers opened for them; then two more doors, similarly opened; and finally, at what Fiorella assumed was some sort of apex, a pair with no doorkeepers at all, on which the clinic's triangular insignia was engraved above a double helix.

"The lights will not be on," Nilufer said.

The heavy doors drew open only enough to admit a person. Fiorella hesitated on the threshold. An inky interior confronted her, into which the light from the antechamber died immediately. The only indication of depth came from the far end, where two glass tubes pulsed with the bioluminescence of the Pokémon within. It was frigid inside. Fiorella wrapped her coat tighter, blinked as her eyes adjusted, and entered.

Nilufer's presence guided her to a chair. A desk manifested in part; on it, glossy magazine pages caught the scant light and shone.

It smelled like incense—

[Why have you come.]

The voice originated closer than Fiorella expected, but when she looked in its direction, no human outline took shape. A screen stood between them.

"Isn't it obvious? I've been on the phone for six hours with the Battlers Weekly editorial staff trying to get them to pull the article on Aracely. My voice is hoarse from shouting. Something needs to be done. Can we speak privately?" She flashed a hand in the approximate direction of Nilufer, who hadn't left.

[My minister will hear you whether she is here or not.]

"Fine! Some place you have here, seriously! It's like you're asking them to make up the nonsense they've got in this article. Well that's your problem. But Aracely is my daughter and I can't let them—drag her through the mud, just because she interned here two years ago."

Her hands gesticulated pointlessly in the dark, more for herself than her audience. The day's worth of exasperated rage uncorked into this null sphere, where nothing reached more than a meter.

[They are only aware at all because of what that boy said in your interview.]

"Oh, it's my fault now? I only ask the questions, I can't control the answers. I hardly expected Gladion to say three words, let alone—that!" She sighed, sagged. "Look. I know things have been rough for you, I understand your desire to keep unseen. But can you drop this—act, or face, or whatever it is, and work with me here? We're friends, aren't we?"

Something did drop, because the voice that responded lacked force, became ponderous: "Friends...? We're... friends?"

"Are we not?"

They met seven years prior, at the height of her prominence, when she sponsored the IPL. Fiorella interviewed her. The interview itself presented the professional, personable image expected by all interested parties, the sort of interview Fiorella excelled at producing when given actual humans to work with instead of whatever the competitors might be classed as. After the cameras stopped rolling, the chat became conversational. They were both single mothers, both forty, and both more than anything driven professionals. They went for drinks. They laughed about what they dubbed their "Unovan Psycho" beauty routines, laughed about the need in this world for women to be both beautiful and unquestionably best in their field to be taken seriously. They met a few times thereafter in professional capacity, then she fell out of favor with the IPL, though Fiorella was experienced in press and knew what that was about: yellow paper sensationalism, a necessary scapegoat, gleeful betrayal of the idol they themselves constructed. Fiorella kept tabs on her afterward, and when Cely had her accident, knew her fledgling clinic was the perfect place for recuperation.

"The article's brutal. Not sure if you've read it yet, but. They basically say you're running a cult. It's incredible. Battlers Weekly is a rag, sure, but I've never seen them stoop so low. The only thing they kept out of it was your real name."

"They don't know it."

"Clearly a rush job. I counted five typos, seven stylistic errors, and I'm not even an editor. What drove them to such libel, I've no clue, but as it affects my daughter—"

"They're scared."

"Of what? Vitamins and minerals? Everyone's so scared, it's unbelievable." Would she talk this way if it wasn't to a friend? Who else could she even call a friend? "They're doing security checks on trainers and staff now. I have to put my bag through a metal detector, like I've got hidden Poké Balls or something. Bill's going around with a bodyguard—"

"A bodyguard?" said Nilufer, whom Fiorella had totally forgotten about.

"Since last week." Fiorella waved her away—eyes adjusted, some sense of her was known—and continued. "Oh! Plus, they've got IPL agents posted everywhere. They're in staff clothes, they have staff badges, but who are they fooling? I know everyone on staff, and they're obviously not doing any actual work. They just talk into headsets and scan the area. What do they expect?"

"IPL 51, again," said the voice behind the screen.

HAH, was Fiorella's response, an exhalation that felt like it carried a snatch of residual poison. "I wish."

"You wish...?"

"It'd be something new, something important at least," Fiorella said. "Twenty years I cover this tournament. Every year it's the same. Names change but faces don't. Questions don't. Stories don't." Looked twenty-something, was forty-seven.

"Stasis."

"Right."

"Permanence."

"Exactly. Like I'm sitting in traffic waiting for the light to change, and finally it does, and I drive ten feet and hit another light. And it never ends."

"Why... did you never quit?"

"Quit. Quit? There was a time. After the coma. I was in a coma after IPL 51 if you didn't know."

"I knew."

"After it I knew something had to change. I couldn't put a finger on what. I tried to bear it but a few years and I was losing my mind. I divorced Dom, thought that was it. It worked for a time, then it came back, and I knew what it really was. I considered it, quitting. Becoming a photojournalist on the fringes, somewhere there was still disorder. Orre, maybe, or wherever a team tossed its weight around. But then I was a single mother. I couldn't run off and leave her. What then, Dom would raise her, that fucking loser? I forced everything down like swallowing my own vomit, for her. To give her the stability she needed."

"And it wound up sending her to me."

Fiorella said nothing for a long time. In this darkness she felt like she was deliquescing, becoming the darkness herself. The things in the tubes ebbed and her eyes watched them, tried to identify the specific species.

"I thank you for that," Fiorella said. "Truly. That was—a bad time. I didn't know what to do. When she came back she really—looked better. So I thank you. You helped her."

"Many come to RISE in a similar state as your daughter. One might call it our specialty, helping them."

"No, I mean... you helped her."

There was a falter. "Yes. She helped me, too."

These words gave Fiorella what she needed to gather the liquid streams of herself back to her body. Sitting up, she solidified.

"Okay. I have to ask. Please, tell me honestly. This place—is it a cult?"

What answer she expected, who knew. Maybe, having given her own confession, she expected this friend of hers to give the same.

The voice behind the screen unraveled.

"Those organizations you call cults were birthed in ignorance," she said. "Ignorance was not simply the cause that created them but their most vaunted objective. At IPL 51, it was Team Plasma, seeking reversion to a past where people and Pokémon supposedly lived in greater harmony; a past that never existed. Elsewhere, it's been groups like Team Magma or Team Aqua, attempting to save the environment by bringing about calamities that would obviously, to anyone with basic knowledge of environmental science, annihilate it. Lysandre's followers strove for a goal that, if accomplished, would have killed them all by design. It's nonsense. It had to be nonsense. It was rebellion against a world grown too sensible, where too much unknown was stamped out. To them, it was only possible to create their own story by ignoring the story of the world entirely. That's what made them a cult; the willed divorce from reality."

"And you live in reality."

"My organization fights ignorance at every turn. Physical health, mental health, it's all connected. Only through knowledge can humankind progress. It's how we progressed this far. If we fight against this world, it's only to fight the stasis, the permanence, that even you feel. I helped them see—I helped Cely see—a direction neither backward nor imagined, not a 'return,' but a movement forward."

Fiorella closed her eyes; the blurred white forms of the Pokémon in the tubes remained. "On trial," she said, "Ghetsis claimed he never believed any of the crap he sold his followers. It wasn't ideological at all. It was only about the most fundamental form of human relationship: control. The whole thing was transactional. He received control; his followers, community. Or maybe companionship."

"If control and community are all it takes to make a cult, then what else can you call the IPL?"

"Maybe," Fiorella said, ignoring her, "for them, even control and community were only possible by ignoring the story of the world."

The silence burned. In that blank space, Fiorella was allowed to imagine any possible truth for her friend beyond the screen, even the truth that she was a friend. Nothing could be contradicted.

"Anyway. I didn't come to talk philosophy."

"No... I suppose not." And was it only Fiorella's imagination that injected disappointment into those words?

"Ever since Aracely's accident, I've worried. No matter how strong she seems. I can't have this article come out for everyone to gawk at. My friends—my contacts on the editorial staff are arguing even now to pull it, it's fifty-fifty, but I've done all I can. I came to you, in case—there's anything you can do..."

"I'll do everything in my power."

"Thank you." She took in a lungful of frigid air and added: "I'll leave you alone now."

She rose. Nilufer's presence manifested beside her to lead the way. They tiptoed across a space now defined.

Only when Nilufer opened the doors a crack and a shaft of light pierced them both and traveled on to stop at the screen did Fiorella turn back. "Also, if you ever have the time, I'd like to get drinks again."

"If I ever have the time," said the voice behind the screen.

Fiorella felt foolish and left quickly. Exhaustion assaulted her; the watch face on her wrist read well past midnight. She still needed a cab to the Plateau, an hour drive at least. Worse, though, was the premonition of the next day, and the next, and every day after that, but she knew once she slept she'd wake up renewed enough to confront them, no matter how endlessly they cycled.

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Nilufer returned to the sanctum.

"What now, MOTHER? We have no connections at that magazine."

"I know. She must have known too. She came just to talk."

"Then whether they run the article is down to chance. Lady Fiorina at least provided useful information—"

"Why did you join RISE, Nilu?"

Nilufer stood rigid in the dark, arms folded behind her back. "Pardon?"

"Was it to reject reality?"

"No, MOTHER. Of course not. If anything, it was to embrace reality. To prove myself worthy of existing within it."

"I see." Nothing in MOTHER's tone betrayed what she thought of that answer. Though if Nilufer gave any other, she wouldn't be Nilufer, and thus wouldn't be the person MOTHER trusted most. "You've never cared much for Cely, have you?"

"I believe... frankly... you overstate her importance to our goals. You wanted her to become your weapon. I'm a strong enough weapon for you."

"Maybe so. I just had a terrible premonition I'll never see her again." But at the tail end of MOTHER's sigh, she hardened, and Nilufer's hairs bristled, as she anticipated the coldness of the words that followed: [Bring her back to me.]

"She won't come willingly."

[You know how I mean.]

"Yes, MOTHER. I do. According to Fiorella, though, the Plateau is crawling with IPL agents. There's risk involved. What Aracely told you could be true; it could be best to leave her, so their attention remains at the stadium."

[I need her. You'll bring her to me. If you are my weapon, prove your worth.]

In the dark, Nilufer closed her eyes and smiled. "I wish for nothing more."