Chapter 22: DEMIGOD \ URGE
What remained of the Pewter Museum of Science smoldered. Cynthia circled once overhead but the localized snowstorm brewing within made it difficult to see much. Something big, like a beached Wailord, burned.
When she descended into the mist she saw the entrance clogged with people. Teeming, each in white robes. A procession stretched into the distance, in the direction of the RISE temple. They moved as though on pilgrimage, barefoot.
"What's the situation?" she said to the pathetic line of local cops established a good distance from the crowd.
A harried policewoman with an Arcanine wore visible relief as Cynthia landed beside her. "Battle in the museum. We can't get in. Those RISE freaks outnumber us fifty to one. They won't back down even after we threaten force."
Cynthia noticed a plainclothes guy barking into a communicator. An IPL agent.
Fiorella's cameraman sat on the curb, hands on head. An officer handed him a bottle of water, which he chugged.
"Lutz," said Cynthia, "what happened to Fiorella?"
He shrugged in anguish. "I ran, man. First sign of trouble I ran. Can you blame me? After what happened to her guy at IPL 51?"
"Everyone's at the Plateau," said the policewoman. "We're requesting backup but..."
An ominous stormcloud swirled over the stadium. Cynthia prayed that was an expected part of the battle, though it looked far greater than a regular electric Pokémon's output.
"I'll handle the museum." Cynthia sent out her Garchomp. The police stepped aside, well aware she was better qualified to handle their business then they were. She approached the RISE crowd.
They formed a human wall barring entry. Arms linked, faces turned defiantly toward her. No matter their complicity in this attack, attacking unarmed people was impossible. It was, however, possible to move them.
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The elevator descended into black depths.
The world fell away, strip by strip. These dark bowels, tremulous, were the remainder of an earth whose history had been obliterated. Only this: and the cycles of the moon, now you know.
Something wasn't right. With her body. Toril sensed it: a tingle, an anticipation. Was it only her stupid head that wanted this, needed it? How many times she almost died before, but it was never like this. She was all too aware of Fiorella's camera at her back, and not because Fiorella kept reporting—her voice the elevator's internal mechanism. The crank lowering them through darkness.
Toril's life reached an end here. She understood finally what Aracely told her that day in the restroom. End punctuation, the relief of an actual end. A tingle in one arm, a tingle in one leg, and Toril was ready to die here. All 8 billion would see it. Finally, the toil of her existence mattered.
"Nihilego neurotoxin is in my bloodstream," she told Fiorella. Knowing it did not diminish her desire for martyrdom. It was more like the poison awakened her. Cold and hungry days as a child, cold and hungry days crawling over mountains. Missing fingers, missing flesh. Scars along her back. Wasn't this what she sought? Wasn't this why she snarled at every human she met?
An attempt to transmute her own worthless self into one of value. To be valuable she couldn't be one of them. She had to be above. She needed their arms to reach up to her, while she remained safely beyond their touch. A hero.
The elevator hit the bottom. This whole horrible world was dredged down to its roots.
With her four battleworthy Pokémon she led the way through the research center's main corridor. She followed the same route as Bill's tour. They passed a room with several tied up researchers. Fiorella lingered to film them, but Toril continued. They passed the Clefairy nursery. She expected it to distract Rune but the nursery was empty save one small scared Cleffa cowering behind a chair leg.
Then, at the darkest fringe of the passageway beyond, the darkness moving and not her, Nilufer appeared. She held the "object." The two RISE members stood behind her. MOTHER and Bill weren't there.
"Stop, Toril," Nilufer said. "You know what this gun can do. You have no cover in this corridor."
It was true. A straight stretch, maybe thirty meters between them, no obstructions.
"I don't wish to kill you, Toril. I believe physical touch forms the strongest bonds between people. Your body told a story. I feel empathy."
Nilufer's face lit up at that word, empathy, like there was something miraculous about it. Toril's Pokémon, Baxcalibur and Rillaboom, moved to shield her, but Toril extended her arms. She wouldn't risk them on what she wouldn't risk herself.
Her leg rose, swung forward slowly, and took a step.
"Toril, don't," said Nilufer.
"Shoot," said Toril.
"Do not take another step."
"Shoot me now, or you lose."
After Nilufer fired in the lobby, she passed the "gun" off to the others to be reloaded. It only had one use. The distance was thirty meters and, as Bill proved when he bumped her, even a slightly wrong trajectory led to a miss. Nilufer's hands trembled—or Toril thought they did.
"Toril. There's no reason for this. Do you understand what MOTHER is doing?"
"Evolve," Toril intoned. She took a second step. She gauged the distance. Porygon-Z's Thunderbolt had a range of twenty-five meters—Nilufer probably knew that. Toril readied the command.
"MOTHER will make us into Pokémon," Nilufer said.
Toril stopped.
"Pokémon?" said another voice. It was Fiorella, whom Toril forgot existed. "That's the—that's the reason? I am—you heard it. The motivation of Team RISE is to become Pokémon!"
"Pokémon?" said Toril. Bill's machine. It all made sense.
"The only way is forward. Time cannot turn back, and neither can evolution. Humanity must evolve to survive. It must shed these immutable bodies. You understand, don't you Toril? You understand?"
To make this body something else. The scars, the missing parts, the abuse, the misanthropy, the withered soul. Or would the soul stay the same?
"Only those chosen by MOTHER will become the new species. Together, we'll leave this world through a rip in space. We'll travel to other worlds, better worlds, before this one is destroyed like every other world that refused to keep evolving. It's essential, Toril. Not only for ourselves, but for our history. Everyone—they want to stop. They want to sit still and keep the world frozen this way forever, with their little games and their peace and satisfaction. They're not hungry anymore, Toril, don't you see? They're smallminded. You know it. You always hated them. Detested them, aware in your heart you were superior. It wasn't ego, Toril. Nor pride. You are superior. You played their game because that was the only way you knew to prove it. If only you won their game, they would recognize your right to exist. I'm right, aren't I? I am, Toril. You belong with us. You belong above all others!"
Toril stood there, silent, as these words echoed down the corridor. She let them envelop her, these sweet words, as gentle as the buzz in her veins where the Nihilego poison still flowed.
Then she laughed. She gripped her face with her gloved hand and laughed.
"Above all others? But—"
She couldn't stop laughing. She bent over, held her stomach, coughed out the laughter like her father over the phone, spewed it like vomit until every laugh, every residual drop of poison left in her body was gone, and her lungs ached.
"But Aracely Sosa beat me," she said.
She took a step forward.
Nilufer, eyes alight, fired the gun.
A whirling something cleaved a fingerful of flesh off Toril's cheek. Her mouth filled with blood, which she spat as she aimed her finger and told her Pokémon, "Get her."
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A charging of adrift molecules set hair on end across the stadium, caused arches of electricity to flutter from point in space to point in space. The cracked dirt strewn across the arena levitated in a slow, winding spiral centered around the bird of thunder whose presence suggested a horrible, whispered grandeur.
Jinjiao was screaming—The IPL okayed this? They cleared it for tournament play? Without leaks?—a fundamentally small reaction, a reaction perhaps only he of everyone gathered could have, the reaction of someone who won in this scenario. In her simple incomprehension, Haydn slipped far more appropriate into the gathering storm of bodies and minds. The announcers hadn't spoken in ten seconds; in airtime that was eternity, a semipermeable silence through which light osmosed to every screen around the world.
The timer to choose moves didn't stop, however.
"King's Shield," Cely managed to blurt on the cusp of a buzzer. There was a fear though that this thing before her, this Zapdos—as the holoscreen read—might punch straight through a shield supposed to block every possible attack.
Even she felt the potency of the demigod, though she could not possibly know its tangled history with the locals who called this now-cosmopolitan region home, the ancient carvings in its image or the totems erected by nomadic clans as the sole permanent artifact of their existence. She could not possibly know that scientific consensus still disagreed—until now—whether the thing was actually real, nor did she understand it was part of a trio, a polytheistic theory of creation and conversion by those huddled in whipped huts under an encroaching tempest. She could not know that there was only one Zapdos, only ever one, without gender or age, the same that existed in the earliest days of humankind, or what medical breakthroughs that hearkened: cells immune to senescence, perpetual rejuvenation without reproduction, without evolution. She did understand, instinctually, that MOTHER would want to dissect it.
Zapdos hovered in air without flapping its wings, as though some magnetic pull of static kept it afloat rather than the laws of physics that applied to every other bird. Its stern gaze, imperious and prideful, passed over Aegislash with the least possible concern. A column of lightning blasts rained down and each blast dug a crater into the arena until the line descended onto Aegislash's shield.
The electricity flared out, crackled, and dispersed to dust. Aegislash stood, unharmed. The rules of the game still applied, even to a demigod.
Cely clenched her teeth into a hateful smirk. Her glare cut past Zapdos, into Red.
That bastard.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, it made her so mad, oh her arms were crawling, her breaths laborious and cutting. He was ruining everything, not just by sending out this stupid bird, no, he was undercutting her, slashing her feet off at the ankles, a kamikaze pilot blasting himself apart in his own inferno. Now the narrative changed. Now it was different than what it should have been, and she was only a passenger. If she won now—well, who cared, he wasn't trying for his first four Pokémon, he summoned a god, who cared if she won?
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And if she lost?
Cely was suffocating to death on her own spit. If she lost? If she lost, now?
"Shadow Sneak!"
Aegislash slashed his arm as shadow against Zapdos. Zapdos remained motionless in midair, it didn't register a hit, but the biometric sensors did, and Cely watched its health dwindle on the holoscreen.
Zapdos rooted its long beak into the down on its chest and nibbled at something. Its health went back up a smidge. The stupid freaking thing ate Leftovers. Junk scraps found in a wastebasket. A god! She seized the railing, flung back her head, and cackled—he was making a mockery, of it, of her!
The air sparked and caught fire. Actual, literal flame, a whirling cyclone of it. Okay! A fire move on this electric bird, why not. The holoscreen called it Heat Wave, and sure enough a cold sweat broke on Cely's brow, murdered her makeup, spread cracks from her dimples until she imagined she looked identical to Red—remove his hat, remove that jacket, shave his beard, treat his skin, moisturize, and we'll give him, yes, a light pink polo, tiny insignia of a player on Rapidash stitched over the heart, and hahaha white Wainscott shorts, put him on a golf course, spirit him away to a golf course...!—and the burning gout of atmosphere came down on Aegislash.
One hit wiped it off the face of the earth. Her chapped lips pressed together to hold in another laugh.
"Kommo-o!"
Her big dragon appeared. Aegislash was just a sword with one weird carved eye, so reading any emotion on it was futile. Kommo-o, however, visibly flinched from the mere sight of Zapdos. "Get your head on straight, it's nothing, we're beating it," she yelled. "Ice Punch!"
Kommo-o failed to even move, though Cely didn't know if that was due to fear or because Zapdos was faster in general. Kommo-o resisted both electric and fire, though. All it needed was to survive one attack.
For the first time, Zapdos beat its wings. Only once. That was enough. Wind surged, the ripples of heat that lingered from the last attack dispersed, Cely's hair blew back. Hurricane, the holoscreen flickered. A gust shaped like a giant white worm opened its mouth, slurped up Kommo-o, and spat it out. The scales clanging up and down its body created a complete disaster orchestra that continued even after it slammed into the ground, pitched, dragged, and ended sprawled upside-down, a dead faint.
Cely took a deep breath as she returned Kommo-o to its Poké Ball. She shut her eyes. It was a long time since she needed her meditation mixtapes, but she felt herself losing focus. When she tried to imagine something soothing all that appeared was Charlie mouthing those words. She imagined Charlie wearing a chic but boring blouse-skirt combination, which exorcised her, but a jitter remained.
Red was not taking this away from her.
"Scizor."
Scizor appeared. Even in a state of competitive focus so extreme it was melting its own body from the inside, it started in surprise to see its opponent.
"Bullet Punch. Bullet Punch. Bullet Punch!"
On the third shout Scizor did as asked. It sprang forward even at a god, claw outstretched, and dealt a blow to Zapdos that did about as much as Aegislash's Shadow Sneak. Chipping away, chipping away, but was it enough?
The temperature in the arena rose again. Cely glanced down and in a curious state of displaced mortification witnessed rings of sweat gather around her armpits.
A blaze came down and wiped Scizor out. Whatever. It did its job. Everything depended on her last two Pokémon.
"Rotom," she cried.
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What Nilufer did made no sense. After the gun missed, she charged down the hallway with a knife. Four of Toril's Pokémon faced her. It was impossible for her to win.
Speaking hurt after what the gun did to her cheek. Grassy Terrain worked too slow. Still, she spat out: "Nils, Rune, stop her."
Baxcalibur and Porygon-Z moved forward. Nilufer still had fifteen meters to clear before she even hoped to threaten them. It was over. It was pathetic. Toril was disgusted to see the desperation, but maybe she understood it.
Then—
The singular Nilufer sprinting down the hallway became two.
The two became four.
The four became eight.
The eight became sixteen.
Suddenly an army of Nilufer confronted them—an entire bracket conjured out of one finalist. Porygon-Z fired a Tri Attack into one and it went right through. Baxcalibur spat shards of ice to the same effect.
Toril stared. Not uncomprehending. Only for the briefest moment did she entertain the idea this was some hallucination brought on by the neurotoxin. She knew, somehow, exactly what she was looking at, though it existed outside the realm of possibility for Nilufer to be doing it.
Nilufer was using a Pokémon move.
Nilufer was using a Pokémon move banned in every IPL competitive format.
Nilufer was using Double Team.
Double Team. Type: Normal. PP: 15 (max 24). Power: Null. Accuracy: Null. Effect: Increases the user's evasion by one stage.
"USE EVERYTHING," Toril screamed. Blood filled her throat.
Ice and electricity shot down the corridor. Ninetales whipped up a snowstorm. It only made Nilufer's sixteen selves in white robes blend in.
Then Nilufer was emerging, knife bared, one rapid jab aimed toward the center of Porygon-Z's hard light projection body, where it kept the CD-ROM drive with the disc that contained all facets of its identity. Porygon-Z glitched slightly to the side, maybe by complete random chance, and the knife punched through the rounded pink surface at a slightly wrong angle, still enough to gash his carapace like cotton candy.
She kicked off Porygon-Z's body and reoriented toward Baxcalibur. The snowstorm's mist was filled with Nilufer, she was the snowballs pelting the grip strut walkway, and she landed on Baxcalibur's head and drove the knife into each of his eye sockets with two maneuvers so effortlessly quick Toril didn't realize until the blood flowed down his face.
A toss of his neck launched her into the wall, but she caught herself against it like gravity didn't exist, slid down, melded into her illusory clones, evaded the tail swipe Baxcalibur sent after her. Fights in the underground. Her father brought her there. Blood. (Here at the bottom of the world. Order stripped away. Blood.) Baxcalibur thrashed against the wall. He groaned, clawing uselessly at his face as Nilufer rotated around his body and jabbed a series of swift stabs between his scales.
Toril extended her arm and pulled Baxcalibur back into his Poké Ball before he took more damage. The sudden dematerialization left Nilufer without support and she dropped to the grating, where with a spiderlike profusion of limbs she crawled toward Toril.
Rillaboom swung; missed. Ninetales sprayed a beam of fey light; missed. Nilufer infested everywhere, she scuttled, she promulgated. Aurora Veil alone saved Toril from instant execution as Nilufer bounced against its shimmering translucent surface like a mime.
Her projections weren't stopped by the veil. They went through.
Toril pointed. "There—the real one!"
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The washing machine stared down the god. Unlike Kommo-o and Scizor, it maintained its irrepressible smile from the moment it appeared. It bounced back and forth joyously.
The sky was so many brutal colors. Aracely wasn't sure if it was splitting open yet. MOTHER would be in Bill's basement, behind the doors he only allowed himself to access. The machines she needed to end the world—to save humanity—at her fingertips. It started any moment now.
Cely needed to hurry up. She needed to win. The world was rising against her. The crowd was thunder. Sweat soaked her face and she strained hair through her fingers.
After she lost Gliscor—and of course Gliscor was the one he got rid of before this scene stealing gambit—Rotom was her bulkiest Pokémon. If anything survived a hit from this thing, it did. But it already took lumps earlier in the fight, sat now at half health. It had Protect, could stall a turn, recover a fraction from Leftovers, but Zapdos would do the same. She needed to ensure Aegislash and Scizor's sacrifices weren't in vain.
Everything banked on mathematics Cely could not possibly know. An opponent with no discernable face. Undreamed dimensions of science and philosophy. Was fate simply probability that no tool could measure, or the other way around?
"Hydro Pump," she said.
The lightning crashed down first. The sky opened its mouth and loosed it. Rotom vanished in a flash and Cely held a hand over her eyes. All became white, senseless, even the heat broke apart and only her body remained, the thudding of her heart. It felt like falling through nothing.
Then the world returned. Rotom's orange box washing machine crackled. Smoke spewed out. Its smile remained. It bounced, left, right, joyously.
"You did it," she whispered.
Bounce left, bounce right. It extended its hose. A torrent of pressurized water sprayed.
Hydro Pump was powerful but had accuracy issues. A full fifteen percent chance to miss. Cely knew it would never miss. Zapdos floated there, in the air, unmoving, as if disdainful of the concept of motion, disdainful that it might ever have to. Bodies climbing up the caves of a pitch black mountain and at the hollow peak a monster beyond the reckoning of man: all it said was silence.
The water crashed against it. It did not move, not even an inch. Its gaze leveled on its opponent but Cely couldn't tell if it stared at Rotom or at her. On the screen, its health went down. Only the world's inner mechanisms knew if it went down enough.
Another ray of light shone down on Rotom's grinning face. Grinning, it went into oblivion.
Aracely was down to her final Pokémon. She gripped the Poké Ball on the magnetized rack and clutched it to her chest. A silent prayer: she no longer knew.
"It's up to you, Ziggy."
He shimmered in the static that sprayed off Zapdos' body as he pirouetted for the crowd, spun on one toe, bent in a bow that showed off his floppy ears. He was as terrified of Zapdos as Scizor and Kommo-o, his only difference being he didn't show it—somehow Cely read his heart. The crowd's cheers were muted, like a subterranean rumble. Emerging from the basement of the Pewter Museum of Science.
Azumarill was once a worthless Pokémon. Weak, uncommon, preyed upon in the underground rivers it called home. What happened? Something across the entire species changed overnight. It developed new characteristics, it found a way to double its strength, it learned new moves, acquired new immunities and resistances. From its caves it crawled and approached humanity, who first took it in as a cute pet, then as a lifeguard, and finally here, on the stage of the IPL World Championship, to face down a demigod.
What made it do that? What impetus, from its cave, told it to find another way? What cataclysm altered its course? And how many times did it need to die before it reached this destination? Her heart, his, tied together along this atomic point of connection: one common creature standing against the world.
"Aqua Jet," she said.
Ziggy quit grandstanding and instantly launched itself on a wave of water.
He hit his target, bounced back, and landed with aplomb. Under the sky's black gyre he extended his arms.
Zapdos remained where it was, unmoving.
But the holoscreen showed its health at 0.
A voice in the communicator intoned: "Our biometric indicators deem Zapdos no longer fit to fight without serious risk of permanent harm. It is considered fainted for the purposes of this battle."
Cely laughed. How could their biometric indicators possibly read this creature nobody ever knew? But Red accepted the conclusion. He held out a Poké Ball and pulled Zapdos into it with a beam of light.
The crowd wasn't sure what to say. These little fabrications the rules made for fairness always perturbed them, a grand narrative in tatters, but they seemed glad to be rid of Zapdos. Either way, Red's final Pokémon was obvious. The only Pokémon it made sense to send after a god.
"I'll win," Cely told herself. She looked at Ziggy. "We'll win." Time kept ticking.
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Nilufer landed on all fours, reoriented, aimed for her target. After striking the Aurora Veil that protected Toril, she understood the primary target was Ingmar—Ninetales. She slithered toward him and her copies slithered over the walls and ceiling.
But Toril saw. She knew which was real after it bounced off the veil. Her finger shot out. Her Pokémon understood.
Still, the transference of their attention from Toril's finger to their target cost a split second, and Nilufer was fast. Ninetales leapt back as her knife lashed out and he wasn't quick enough because a sliver of flesh and fur split off his face, enough to dot the grating with warm blood.
Unrelenting Nilufer swung again but this time Rillaboom crashed into her way with a lumbering thud of her wooden drumstick. Nilufer darted back. She moved like water, but the heavyset Rillaboom kept up with her, making up for agility with the breadth of her strikes, large swaths of areas rendered dangerous at any one moment. It saved Ninetales, but caused another problem. Porygon-Z no longer had a clean angle. Rillaboom blocked his line of sight. He zipped erratically for a shot but the randomness of his motions slowed his efforts.
As long as Rillaboom's attacks kept the real Nilufer moving in predictable ways—backward—she couldn't blend into her clones. In terms of firepower she was horribly outgunned—
The gun.
"THE GUN!" Toril screamed.
The two RISE members tossed the gun. Nilufer kicked off a wall and caught it in midair.
Rillaboom—Trude—was smart. She'd always been smart, an ape's intelligence behind an expression of permanent displeasure. The moment Toril shouted, she changed her focus. Her hand shot out, not toward Nilufer, but toward the slow-moving gun as it sailed through the air.
The instant Nilufer caught the gun, Trude caught Nilufer—by the head, with one gigantic palm.
The flash of the muzzle seared the image into Toril's eyes. Something about Nilufer's face at that instant, lined by the light. Some sense that she, like them all, hoped to prove they deserved to exist.
Bits of blood flicked out of Trude's back. Her hand crushed Nilufer's head against the wall.
Toril found herself running forward as Trude sagged to a knee. The wrecked remains of Nilufer were dropped, the gun rolled away. A fan of blood smeared. The two RISE members stood, silent, watching.
"Fuck," Toril said. "Fuck."
She was beside Trude, hand on her shoulder. Trude clutched the wound so Toril couldn't see. The grate was growing grass but some types of wounds didn't heal, and Trude struggled to breathe, she turned away from Toril as if to conceal the pain, as if not to make Toril worry, but what else would Toril do? Vomit. She could bend over and vomit at the sight of Nilufer's corpse, which she did, hands gripped against her stomach as she swayed.
Alright. Alright. It was over. She shouldn't have—why did she—and what of the others? Baxcalibur, Mawile, Zoroark? She saw their wounds. Why until now did she not think—what doom march was she making?
"Over," her vomit-spittle lips mouthed. "No more."
Putting Trude in the Poké Ball didn't matter. Any hope was in the Grassy Terrain. If she had Jinjiao's Umbreon with Wish, or something, or anything...
"What are you doing?" Fiorella. "Come on. Lusamine must be down the hall."
Trude was on the ground now, half-hidden in grass growing taller. Ingmar and Rune, both beside Toril, looked at her for guidance or understanding.
"I'm running out of pieces of myself to cut off," Toril said.
"You're ridiculous." Fiorella kept an eye on the RISE members, who did nothing. "This is the real world. All their pageant plays are built on top of it. You girls don't even know what death is. Children playing with fire. Move!"
Her voice was stern but desperate, like if she stopped moving, stopped filming, she herself would die.
"There's only one direction. Don't you realize? You think you can just go back now? This is the only thing in your life that will ever matter."
Ingmar and Rune were beside her. They were ready to continue. Like her fingers, her flesh, they were ready to do whatever she asked, and curdle and die for her.
Maybe for as long as she'd been alive she'd known, secretly, she deserved it.
What could be left at the end of the hall for her? The prophecy. The world's end. She wished—
She wished she could see Cely again. The pink card burned against her heart, even now.
Her legs lifted her body. She stroked Trude's fur once more and left her in the grass to rest. She looked at Rune, looked at Ingmar, and continued down the corridor, past the RISE members who parted silently to allow passage, toward the giant door at the end.