Chapter 23: MOTHER / BEAST
There were machines, Bill believed, not ready for mankind, or else mankind was not ready for them. In this inner sanctum he kept them, accessible solely to himself, a place for him to marvel at the directions progress might go or might have gone, a gallery of party tricks to show guests.
Lusamine pumped the charger to the giant device in the center. She'd tossed aside her parasol and it somehow still spun on its point, twirling and twirling and slowly losing the center. Once the machine hummed with inner vitality she gripped the gigantic switch and pulled it down.
It sprang alive. The room filled with mechanical noise. Panting, she turned to the other machines within the room, some covered by dusty sheets. Her wiry arms yanked them off one after another.
"It's here," she said.
In the center of the room, a hundred Clefairy watched with dull animal incomprehension, happy ignorance.
"I know you have it. Where?"
"Find it yourself," Bill grunted. He lay on his side beside the vault's closed doors. Before Nilufer left to deal with Toril, she knifed him in the hip, enough to keep him from moving. After they scanned his eyeballs to open the door, they probably should've killed him. They didn't, which meant: "You think I'm useful as a hostage."
Odd, unusual machinery. Lusamine's lips, only barely visible under her veil, contorted in frustration. "Where is it. I know who acquired it from Aether, one of your shell companies. You have it here, don't bother lying."
"What's your endgame, Lusamine?" He gripped his wound and winced. He knew exactly what she was looking for. Worse, he knew she'd find it.
She found it. Buried amid piles of old prototypes, curious devices Bill either created or acquired. It was small, nothing like the gigantic human-Pokémon converter, specifically built to be held in one hand. Why someone would waste the extra dev time to make such a thing portable, who knew. Bill liked his creations to sprawl.
It was a black box. Empty, as now, it looked like nothing else. Lusamine's late husband invented it, and it killed him, the way Bill sometimes imagined one of his own inventions might, though he usually saw the event involving a part falling and crushing his bones. Lusamine maneuvered it between her wiry, vein-wreaked hands. After a hesitant, self-conscious glance toward Bill, she removed the veil to inspect it more closely.
Bill saw her face before, when her daughter sent her to him after the accident in Alola. The purple, star-shaped scars that ran down like liquid. The one eye gone lazy. The veins that bulged and throbbed. They thought, him having suffered a similar fate, he might help. But what could he do? She'd already disentangled from the Pokémon she merged with. The problem wasn't her health, it was her mind. She wanted to go back. She begged him: turn me back.
"You can't make it work," Bill said. "I can't even make it work. Nobody should be able to make it work. It almost destroyed the world last time you used it. Remember?"
"The device is simple." Satisfied with her inspection, she tucked the black box under one arm and tromped past the Clefairy to the humming human-Pokémon converter. "It produces a reaction using special fuel. The fuel does most of the work."
"I don't have the fuel," Bill said, hopelessly.
"I do." And she produced it. A cylinder so darkly purple it looked black. The liquid inside sloshed as she tilted it. "Cosmog blood. My husband named it, you know. A name in the Pokédex for posterity." She wasted no time and inserted the cylinder through an aperture. The box lit up immediately with neon teal lines across its surface. A freakishly efficient machine for something so cutting edge. No grease or grime. Nothing to make you believe it was really there. But it was, and Bill felt the blood draining from his face. (Given the puddle around him, maybe not idiomatically.)
"Okay. I get it. You use the converter to turn yourself into a Pokémon. Then you threaten to create an Ultra Wormhole so they give into your demands. What do you want? Immunity? Money?" He didn't bother asking what the Clefairy were for. A few watched him with curious, but frightened, expressions. They kept away from blood.
"Threaten...? No. I'm creating an Ultra Wormhole regardless."
"Lusamine. Lusamine, that's nuts."
"I know what I'm doing."
"Yeah. Yeah, you do! You were there last time. So you know how nuts it is. In Alola the Ultra Wormhole almost ripped open the fabric of reality. We were moments from total doomsday. Moments."
"I am aware."
"Aether Foundation was a facility specifically equipped to handle Ultra Wormholes in a controlled manner and it still happened. This place is my junk drawer, Lusamine. If you start that machine here, there's no possible way we stop it. Are you listening? Lusamine? EVERYONE IN THE WORLD WILL DIE."
Lusamine checked over the buttons and switches on the converter. "Bill, I'm giving everyone back what you stole from them."
"What?! I—stole? Stole what?"
"Their future."
"I'm the one making the future!"
"Exactly." She scratched her hair at the roots. Her eyes never left the control panel as she experimentally tapped gauges to orient herself to their purpose. "Your junk drawer, hm. The secrets of science. You choose what the world learns."
"You can't be serious. Even you can't be serious about this. Everyone will die. Did you hear me? Everyone will DIE."
"I once collected Pokémon in glass boxes. I'd freeze them. They weren't dead, the way I did it. Their bodies couldn't move, couldn't age, couldn't die. Perfect, perpetual stasis. A scientific marvel. They're using a modified version of my technology for medical research now, I hear. On cells."
Bill knew about this, of course. He knew everything on the bleeding edge. "The results aren't coming like they hoped."
"I could've told them that. No matter what I did, I could never truly hold back change. In the end, I lost them all."
A wistful pause Bill had no patience to appreciate given he began to wonder if he was actually bleeding to death. His fingers, shoved into the knife wound—better to plug the wound than press against it—were not stemming the tide. Only making it too painful to talk, actually.
Lusamine kept talking to herself over his agonized groans.
The only way forward, she said, was progress. Bill worked with the IPL to hold back time, to sedate a populace prone to destruction with cake and circuses, but eventually it would crack. No, it already cracked. For such a happy world, so many doomsday cults kept cropping up. Those ecoterrorists in Hoenn, then the much-publicized Team Plasma attack on IPL 51. Plasma were radical Pokémon rights activists, to the point of religious fervor. They were, effectively, reactionaries. Though we live in the best possible world, they believed in an imagined idyllic world, prior to now, where the relationship between humans and Pokémon was more evenly symbiotic—idiots, weavers of fantasy. But maybe that was a natural reaction to a world kept stagnant for fifty years. If you can't progress forward, then why not move any direction possible, even backward? Human nature was restless. It hated the violence of change but craved it. Peaceful people were dead people.
Cracks, cracks, cracks. Nilufer said Red Akahata caught a god simply to show it off at IPL finals. They were bored people, so bored they'd do anything. They would eventually join cults without even the flimsiest ideological pretenses, cults simply to burn everything down. They would get their hands on gods and play with them like toys. Time, space, whatever cataclysm they imagined, it became possible, and only a dwindling number of knight templars forged by the IPL cared enough to stop them. Soon even the knights would betray them. Cely, her sweet Cely, was the first, or maybe it was more accurate to say Domino was the first, so consumed by a need for glory he was willing to slip an infiltrator among their ranks.
Or maybe Domino simply thought he controlled her—the way Lusamine thought she controlled her. She paused, eyes growing blank as she watched the converter function. Parents always want to build a better version of themselves in their children. Lusamine remembered her own father, an old money industrialist—how he despised Bill—storming the drafty halls of the manor. His oldest son groomed to inherit, second son a scientist, and what of Lusamine, his daughter? Birth rates are down. Below replacement rate in this region. We'll be extinct in a few centuries. And why? Why are we killing off our species? Because women need education now, they need jobs, or they need to become Pokémon trainers and disappear into the wilderness. Nonsense. We need women to marry younger. We need them to have children. Or the world ends.
Her ability to pursue higher education hinged on her agreeing to his terms. By luck she managed to love the man he arranged to marry her, a brilliant scientist like her brother. She earned PhDs while pregnant, she never took maternity leave. It was the only way—other than fleeing home entirely, cutting herself off, disappearing. Science was her passion, though, not Pokémon. Pokémon were a means. The people held thrall in the IPL's dream never knew how many Pokémon your average medical science experiment killed. An inconvenient truth of the gears grinding this world to halt, the bodies that gummed them. When she started as a researcher, she chopped off their heads, drained them and harvested their brains. Sacrifices.
She wished Cely were here. Cely should have been here. Not Toril Lund. Only a 1 percent chance and Toril wins that semifinals battle. Cely is here, Toril there, fighting Red's god.
An alarm blared and Lusamine jolted. She looked up at the twirling red siren. "WARNING," an AI voice said. "Unauthorized breach attempted."
Someone was trying to force their way through the door. Toril—it could only be Toril. Nilu was supposed to handle her. If she failed, it meant—Ah.
The goal had been for the members of RISE to join her down here. Clefairy, as one of the species that spontaneously adopted the so-called fairy typing, were some of the most broadly susceptible to change, which made them perfect for her project. Better yet, they were capable of surviving in the vacuum of space. Once the RISE members merged with the Clefairy, they would travel together through the Ultra Wormhole in search of new worlds. To progress the species. What happened to this world after that—didn't matter.
Luckily, she still had Bill. She always knew the IPL would send people soon after she abducted him, even if she failed to anticipate a trainer of Toril's caliber. Her plan from the start was to hold Bill hostage to buy enough time to transform herself and her followers into Pokémon.
"Turn the alarm off," she said. "It's annoying. Toril can't enter without you anyway."
"She's hacking her way inside."
"Hacking? Toril Lund strikes me as computer illiterate."
"Not... her. Her Pokémon. She has... Porygon-Z."
Lusamine stared at the door, as though expecting it to open that instant. Nothing happened.
"You're too good a programmer for such an obvious exploit," Lusamine said.
"True. I have safety measures... for exactly this situation." Bill groaned. "I also... have voice commands to override those measures."
"You're bluffing."
"I'm bargaining. Become a fucking Pokémon if you want, but turn off the Ultra Wormhole machine. Otherwise, I open this door."
Lusamine sighed. She placed the machine on the ground.
Then, she reached into her sleeves and withdrew two Beast Balls. Her last two: the ones she planned to merge with herself and Nilufer.
"Open the door. I'm ready for her."
Bill squeezed his eyes shut. "Initiate process: Override door safety mechanisms."
"Please state confirmation code to override door safety mechanisms."
"Sylveon."
The door opened.
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The doctors took their sweet time discharging Domino. Desperate to saw him open and spoon out his intestines. A whole part of himself, to make him less. "For your health, Mr. Sosa." Nah, none of that. By the end of it he expected they misdiagnosed the heart attack even. Maybe he only fainted. What the hell did Jinjiao know when he told them it was the heart? And the doctors went with it. Supported their agenda.
He felt fine now. Great even. Felt like he wanted to be in attendance at the IPL World Championship to watch his daughter sign her name into the history books. On and on the doctors prattled their "advice" to avoid excitement, strenuous activity—strenuous how? Sitting on his ass in a booth?—that he needed to "take it easy" for four to six weeks, that a quarter of heart attack victims are back in the hospital within ninety days, yap-yap-yap.
Now it was finals and still they refused to let him out. It'd been a damn week already. He knew they did it to be bastards. He called Cely: Tell em to let me out. She said, "Dad, maybe do what they say?" Like she didn't want him there either, fine on her own, none of his prep needed, well okay. He told himself to take pride in that, not take it the wrong way. But who else to call? He got desperate enough to call Fi-Fi, she never answered.
Finally he settled on a jailbreak. Since he handled Cely's Pokémon the whole tournament, the only one of his own on him was Britt. But there was a Center just down the street with Bill's PC access. He told Britt to go in, use his access code, withdraw one of his bigger birds.
She refused! Britt refused! She pointed to his medication, pointed to his diet. Oh, it made him mad. She was playing the nurse alright, fretting over him in the hospital bed, bringing him trays of fruit and vegetables. Lopunny food.
He snarled at her, called her a traitor, but that was the end of his resistance. He couldn't hate Britt. He nibbled the damn lettuce, stroked her head when she sat beside him. The hospital room TV played a relaxing montage of boats in Kylind fjords.
Stifling a gag, he swallowed. "Fetch some more, will ya?" Britt nodded, took the plate, and hummed down to the hospital café.
He hit the remote and switched to the match.
Aw fuck. How'd this happen? Last peek Cely held a 5-2 lead. Red about to send out his second-to-last Pokémon. Now he tuned in and it was 1-1, dead heat. He breathed deeply to keep from getting worked up. Britt would be able to tell. (She was an empath, she would tell either way.)
Ziggy out. Full health. Not the worst Pokémon for the situation. Especially since Red used the same anchor the whole tournament. The camera cut to him, same damn kid as twenty years ago. Come up from the dirt just like Domino remembered. They said he started in some nice suburb, Pallet Town, so he had to throw himself into the dirt first before he came up. Not like Domino. The place he came from, he vowed never to let them know it to look at him. That was the first thing that annoyed him about the kid back then. Playing in a sandbox.
The fingerless glove pulled back and tossed his final Poké Ball into the arena. The announcers hyped it up: What will it be?! A question Domino found absurd until they added: What Pokémon could possibly follow Zapdos?
Zapdos?!
The volume was turned off, but the subtitles clearly said Zapdos. He imagined a typist error. He prayed for a typist error.
What showed was Kingambit. Humanoid, shogun-shaped, a massive blade protruding from his helmet and two others jutting from his face like whiskers. A bug-like carapace covered his back, forming at its base a clump of material he spread his legs to sit upon. His arms rested on his knees. He stared down Ziggy. Ziggy stared back.
Kingambit was a natural leader, a commander. Only capable of evolution after defeating three rival Bisharp for control of its pack-army. It used its leadership qualities to browbeat its army into wave tactics: suicidal mass charges. The more soldiers it lost, the more powerful it became... strength from suicide.
Hence why Red always sent it out last, even after—apparently—a demigod.
Supreme Overlord, the TV subtitles typed in slow, methodical progression. Kingambit gained strength from the fallen!
The camera cut to Cely, and Domino was shocked how she looked. She was so sweaty it picked up even on the hospital's shitty old set. Hair askew, eyes roving. He never saw her so perturbed in her life.
His image of her came from age six. "Mommy's in the hospital now," he said, uncertain how to speak, how to make his voice sound. Cely shrugged. "Okay."
Come on Cely. He tried to make her hear him. If she had psychic powers, then maybe. Come on Cely. Let's see that energy now. Look at this guy and say okay. A planned endgame. Only a few ways these final moves go. Get in the kid's head and predict him.
She took a deep breath. She wiped her forehead and instantly she returned to her ordinary state, like her hand was a magic wand. Her lips moved, but no sound came out, the subtitles only showed the commentary track.
Belly Drum, she said.
Perfect. Ziggy stood his ground, the way Domino taught him. Never fear what's coming at you, even as Kingambit arose from his self-made throne, strode forward, and swung the gigantic blade on his head. Ziggy took the strike like a champ, then reached behind one ear and pulled out the Sitrus Berry he kept for this exact reason. One nibble and the infographic on screen showed his health lurch back up.
Then, standing tall, Ziggy extended his arms and drove them into his stomach.
His face neither wavered nor contorted despite the vicious, brutal slaps he laid onto himself. Red imprints remained on the skin, showing even through the fur. His health depleted, down to the red. In exchange, a fury entered his beady little eyeballs. An intensity, a passion beyond all scale. Yes. Yes! Domino clapped his hands, then glanced to make sure no passing nurse noticed. That's right, buddy. You're strong. He's a mighty warrior and you're a little water rabbit, but you're strong. You're stronger than him, even though you came from nothing. No—BECAUSE you came from nothing!
Azumarill possessed a crazy endocrine system. Adrenaline flooded its body at a rate double the average creature. Ziggy's power skyrocketed to the maximum level, past the maximum level. It was this ability that made him competitive, even at the highest possible tier. This determination to exceed the natural limitations of his birth. His lemon-colored fur bristled.
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The Kingambit empowered by his fallen allies. The Azumarill empowered by a body that defied biology.
One final clash.
Encore, Cely mouthed.
Kingambit snapped forward, aiming a Sucker Punch for Ziggy's throat to stop him before he got a chance to attack. Wary, hyperfocused, Ziggy danced out of range and slapped his paws together like a Seel, encouraging—or rather forcing—the prideful Kingambit to repeat its action.
From here on out, it was as much a battle of the Pokémon's power as their trainers' minds. Whichever Pokémon hit the other first won.
Domino leaned forward on his bed. Come on, Cely. This was your moment. Get in his head like all the others. Know exactly what he wants to do—and destroy him.
Then Britt walked back into the room and he quickly changed the channel.
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The gigantic door to Bill's chamber split down the middle and slid, screeching, apart. Toril stood with Ingmar beside her—Rune still inside the door's electronic eye scanner. Fiorella behind, filming.
Toril, knee-deep in Grassy Terrain, held out her gloved hand. "Be ready to fight. Ingmar, Rune, focus on—"
Something came out from the door. Toril didn't see it. It was impossible to see. It struck the Aurora Veil hard enough to spray sparks, made it through, and passed through her arm above the elbow. She watched her arm fall off. Her arm was gone. She had no arm.
She tried to say something, maybe scream in pain, but her mouth gurgled. Whatever went through her arm kept going. Her other hand went to her neck. A thin slice was cut across it and the blood flowed through her fingers. Into the wall beside her, its trajectory having gone haywire from hitting the veil, a tiny razor-sharp piece of origami embedded itself.
Toril stumbled back in slow motion.
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"Okay, this is crazy." Jinjiao stood at the fore of the box, as though he spoke to everyone, but the Kalosians still babbled among themselves about Zapdos, despite Zapdos having fainted two turns ago. "We're looking at a trademark Sucker Punch Shuffle."
"Cely will win, right?" asked Haydn.
"The way it works is. Both of these Pokémon are strong enough to beat the other in one hit. Assuming standard EV sets Kingambit is faster, so usually it hits first. But! Azumarill has a move called Aqua Jet, which always goes first. So Azumarill wins, right? Heh. You might think so. However, Kingambit also has a priority move: Sucker Punch."
On the arena floor, Kingambit attempted to use Sucker Punch again. Like before, Ziggy danced out of range, but he wasn't able to attack Kingambit, either.
"See there? Sucker Punch failed. Why, you ask? Simple. Sucker Punch only works if the opponent uses an attacking move. So, for instance, if Azumarill used Aqua Jet, Sucker Punch would succeed, knocking out Azumarill before he attacked. In that instance, Red wins the battle."
"But Cely needs to attack to win, right?" Haydn said. "How can she do that if Kingabble keeps using his punch move?"
"Kingambit. It's not difficult to remember, Haydn."
"Just answer the question smart guy!"
Jinjiao crossed his arms behind his back and paced. "In theory, you're correct. If Red uses Sucker Punch every turn, Aracely's odds of victory become zero."
"Doomed," said Charlie.
"But! There's another mechanic at play here. The IPL balances moves by giving them—uh—Power Points." He almost said the abbreviation, but under the expectant gazes of these girls, shyness struck him. "Power Points are the number of times a Pokémon is allowed to use a move in a battle. Once Power Points are depleted, the move cannot be used again."
"Oh, oh, oh. I get it! Cely has to get him to use all his Power Points to win. But how many Power Points does the punch move have?"
"Sucker Punch has five Power Points by default. However, the IPL sells something called, uh, Power Point Up, which can increase the Power Points to a maximum of eight."
"Pay to win." Charlie nodded, as though this explained everything.
"The IPL hands out complimentary Power Point Ups to every competitor at the tournament, so really it's not pay to win at all. They give us free TMs, too. It's actually quite generous."
"Okay, so." Haydn bounced on her seat, held her hands out and lowered two fingers. "The punch move has eight Power Points. So far, the King's used... two."
"Three," Jinjiao said, as Kingambit (the King? Was she fucking with him?) tried and failed once more to Sucker Punch Azumarill.
"But if Cely isn't attacking, why doesn't Red use another move? He's not gonna let her drain all his Power Points, right? Or does the King only have this one move?"
"Kingambit has other moves. But if Cely predicts when he uses them, she can attack first with Aqua Jet. Get it? And besides, right now, Kingambit is forced to use Sucker Punch because Azumarill used Encore, which makes a Pokémon repeat the same move for the next three turns."
Haydn tapped her lip as she thought this all over. "Uh, then. That means... After this next turn, Kingambit won't be affected by Encore anymore, and can choose to use Sucker Punch or another move. Right?"
"Right."
"So Cely needs to predict which move he'll use?"
"Right. The Sucker Punch Shuffle: will he or won't he use Sucker Punch?"
"Her fate, decided on a single choice," Charlie muttered.
"Exactly." Below, Kingambit used Sucker Punch for the fourth time in a row, and nothing happened. The Encore wore off. "This is it. This next move decides everything. If she plays it right, she wins. If she doesn't..."
Charlie laughed.
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As Toril fell, the doors spread wide enough to grant her a full view of the interior. Over a sea of one hundred Clefairy heads, Lusamine gave her a single lookover, then turned to Bill's machine, the one that changed people into Pokémon.
Something caught Toril before she hit the ground. Her eyes bulged in her head and she kept pawing awkwardly at her throat—awkwardly because she now only had one hand.
Kartana, embedded in the wall, shook as it tried to free itself. Ingmar gave it no chance. He bristled his nine tails of fur. One shake, and ice crystal shards fired out. They spiraled into Kartana, coated it, clumped, kept clumping, building and building as Ingmar with an uncharacteristically ferocious and spiteful snarl layered wave after wave of ice over the tiny papercraft body.
Lusamine placed a Beast Ball into one of the chambers of the machine. She slid the door shut with the full exertion of her narrow arms, then under the wave of steam that chugged out the machine's exhaust pipes opened the door to the other chamber and climbed inside.
The vault doors were fully open. Bill dragged himself on his elbows between them. Rillaboom's remnant grass curled as he left blood on the leaves. "The box," he said. "Destroy the black box."
His hand jabbed out, too erratically to connect anywhere, and Toril felt both airheaded and strangely sedate, but somehow the box leapt at her, placed beside the machine, glowing teal.
"She's trying to create an Ultra Wormhole," Bill said. "She wants to go through it, but—there's no way to shut it down after. It'll grow and grow until—!"
Until it splits open the sky.
Until the world ends.
All along, Aracely knew.
Rune emerged from the door's security system, a dot of light that sprung from its computerized machinery to the device that powered his hard light projection. When the projection rematerialized, Rune flitted in concern around Toril's body.
"Go on, move," Fiorella said. She was the one who caught Toril, who held her up even though Toril's legs were incapable of supporting herself. "Destroy the box!"
A harsh spray of steam issued out the human-Pokémon converter. It flooded the interior of the chamber, swallowed up the machine and the box and the hundred Clefairy, whose gleaming eyes showed disembodied within the smoke.
A tall, lanky silhouette gathered reality. An elongated entity both human in general shape and utterly inhuman by all other metrics. Yet, somehow, as the steam cleared, the thing emerging looked like Lusamine. Not the one that entered the machine, dark haired, scarred, wearing a loose dress to conceal the emaciation of her body. It was the one Toril remembered, five years prior, in the pristine sterility of the Aether Foundation's offices. Hair so blonde it was almost white, everything about her white: her clothes, her skin, her aura. As though it was her that turned the entire Foundation her color, perfect cleanliness, devoid of any speck of dirt, at odds with the reality of the world Toril inhabited, its mountains, its mud. Purity incarnate, a draining purity that bled dry whatever it touched, the erasure of all color into her all-consuming halo. The same loathsome purity of spirit Toril once sensed in Aracely Sosa, a color hideous and repugnant until its sustained proximity sucked even from her everything that made her herself. Unfit.
Lusamine was also, now, metamorphosized into a gigantic insect.
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It was impossible to read him. Even before Zapdos, she never found what lurked beyond the face. She uncovered patterns in his gameplay, but he himself, whatever he was, eluded her. Was he the enigma or was something leaving her now, some part of her soul, a faded ember under this world's curdled sky?
The crowd almost did not care. The battle, for them, ended the moment Zapdos appeared. Their reactions came uncharacteristically muted, not that they were quiet—they were so, so loud—but that the sound they made no longer seemed connected to the action onstage. A misalignment of reality, theirs and hers and his: How could anyone possibly care about this utterly ordinary Kingambit playing out its utterly ordinary Sucker Punch Shuffle? For the first time Aracely understood her father, how Red was this thing manifested ex nihilo for the pure purpose of ruining him. Why did Red leave Kingambit for last? Insurance? A return, after the glimpse of divinity he showed them, to the world as it ought to be? Did he want to win or want to have fun or want to be challenged or want to put on a show? Was he simply bored, did his actions follow no logic beyond the vicissitudes through which boredom drags someone, idle thoughts pursued on a whim and as easily discarded?
Did the battle mean nothing to him? The less it meant to him, the more it meant to Aracely. She regained her composure, and a few swift strokes of her fingers rearranged her back into a perfect painting, but the inner world kept contorting. The truth of it was, for all her cute remarks, her coy dealings with MOTHER, the knowing winks she gave Toril or Dad or anyone, all she wanted from the start was to win. To win was to be special. To lose was to be—pacing an apartment, muttering, drinking beer, wondering at the branch in fate that consigned you to this oblivion. A school where everyone wore the same uniform, a track of life shared by all, a field of flowers dying, living, dying, living, dying, living, endless.
The cold feeling of the crowd leaving her, the eyes leaving her, the 8 billion watchers shrugging in apathy. He rose out of the dirt for no reason except to ruin her specifically.
She had two options. Either she told Ziggy to use Encore, or she told Ziggy to use Aqua Jet. Encore was the right move if Kingambit used Sucker Punch. Aqua Jet was the right move if Kingambit did anything else.
Functionally, both outcomes were the same: an incorrect prediction meant loss. Psychologically, there was a slight difference, and it was in this difference Cely thought the key must lie. Using Iron Head or Kowtow Cleave or anything and dying to Aqua Jet was an immediate loss. The game ended immediately after the failure to predict. But using Sucker Punch and getting Encored created a delay. The game was functionally over, but would continue for three subsequent turns, until Sucker Punch ran out of PP.
Would Red want the game to end when it was over, or risk the chance of some elongated state of finality, a fate sealed but still within the process of being enacted, ninety seconds of pageant? Because, somehow, Cely felt he had no interest in trying to pick her brain, trying to predict what she would do. He always operated with a sense that his fate was his own.
That left Ziggy. Her little spaceman, yellow orb body like a moon in the arena, mimic of the world's most popular Pokémon, a Pokémon once synonymous with Red—where did it go? What did he hollow out of himself to reach this point?—the moon a mimic of the sun. Since the beginning they told her to bond with Ziggy. What did they know? That he was her, and she him, all along? He was ready to applaud.
She closed her eyes and tapped the holoscreen. It made a clear, tactile sound. She said, "Encore."
Kingambit used Sucker Punch. Ziggy applauded.
In ninety seconds, the game ended.
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In ninety seconds, the Ultra Wormhole would be created. The black box needed only that much longer to charge. Then, Lusamine, in this new metamorphosis, one suited to travel across planets, galaxies, dimensions, one suited to survive any weapon mankind might ever build, departed. Alone. Cely was gone. Nilu was gone. Her followers never reached her. The plan went awry. Alone she would go.
She needed only to stop Toril for ninety seconds. Toril looked nearly dead. One arm missing, her throat torn open, bleeding despite the terrain's attempts to heal her. She only had two remaining Pokémon, thanks—Lusamine supposed—to Nilufer's final efforts. One was Porygon-Z, offensively strong but slow and with a natural weakness to Lusamine's typing. The other was Ninetales, Alolan Ninetales, a creature that darkened Lusamine's mind with images of a past, of more and more people irrevocably gone, of the eternal loneliness of her existence in pursuit of progress.
With blistering speed, faster than nearly any known creature from this world, Lusamine moved. One leap with her long and impossibly thin insect legs took her over the heads of the confused Clefairy. Graceful and elegant and beautiful, as all things should be, even these movements of maniacal ferocity. Porygon-Z looked briefly distracted, discombobulated, a natural state due to its glitched operating system, but its gaze was directed for some reason at the Clefairy, and besides that it was slow. Ninetales' focus was on the black box. Lusamine saw it breathing in air that the intensely low temperature of its lungs might spew as icicles. The black box was not designed to withstand damage; one direct strike would destroy it.
But everything moved so slowly to Lusamine's new mind. She was in front of Ninetales while it still breathed in, her lithe arm shot out, seized it by the nape.
A weak toss took it into the air, where it seemed to hover as Lusamine buffeted it with a series of blows: kicks, punches, jabs, swipes, to the head, the neck, the ribcage, the limbs, precise and methodical in their motions. Her body was barely comprehensible to herself, even her own limbs left afterimages. She felt bones snap and watched puffs of blood fly and she thought: If that girl never went against her...!
One sweeping high kick crushed into Ninetales' side and it shot like a projectile at Porygon-Z, who hadn't moved the entire assault. At the last moment Porygon-Z recognized the threat and a spastic glitch carried it aside, leaving Ninetales to hurtle through empty air until it finally crashed into a grotesque profusion of machinery wrenched from Bill's aimless mind.
Triple elements sparked around Porygon-Z's beak. It aimed at the black box. Lusamine pirouetted into the next position, one leg brought up to sweep through Porygon-Z's thin neck, severing it completely. The head hurtled off. This did not incapacitate or even seriously injure Porygon-Z because its vital processes occurred in its central mechanism, not its head, but it disrupted its ability to act offensively.
Something caught her eye in the periphery. Toril, supported by Fiorella Fiorina. Her remaining arm tossed something out. A Poké Ball. It felt illogical for Toril to have held back any Pokémon this long. Could she be desperately sending out something wounded? A simple distraction? Lusamine's focus moved too fast for that.
The ball popped open.
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Kingambit used Sucker Punch.
In lieu of anything else to do, since he couldn't attack, Ziggy kept using Encore. It failed to accomplish anything either, but the point was to waste time, waste the final minute before the game ended. He clapped and clapped. Encore, encore. An encore for this world. Final bows. Roses on the stage, and a crowd confused it wasn't already over.
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The Pokémon Lusamine had become was the fastest Pokémon confirmed to exist—except one.
That one was Ninjask.
The Pokémon that emerged from Toril's final Poké Ball was not Ninjask. It was the husk Ninjask left behind.
Toril gripped her throat. Loose strands of skin and flesh sifted between her fingers. "BRKKHH," came the inhuman sound from severed vocal chords, "BRRRREAKKKHHH THE BOXXXXHHHHH."
Elias drifted into the room, an inanimate angel pulled by invisible string.
Lusamine gripped Rune's headless body and pitched him into the ground, off which he rebounded twirling, spraying bits of his form and small mechanical gears. She leaped at Elias. Her legs weaved through him in a series of brutal, graceful strokes. Her fists, head, every part of her limber multisegmented body: antennae, joints, abdomen.
Elias drifted at the same pace. Toward the black box.
Bug moves, fighting moves, even poison and normal moves passed through the wisp of Shedinja, touching nothing at all. Lusamine's motions grew desperate. She ripped pieces of machinery from their places and hurled them. She peeled a pipe off the wall and swung it. She cratered the grate floor and stabbed with blade-like strips.
Elias drifted.
Toril was crumpling. Her blood, everywhere. Fiorella stopped supporting her, let her settle onto the ground, then aimed her camera and reported on observed fact. Toril was too faint to care. All her Pokémon—squeezed and used up. Her blood shed in offering to this world, which gladly took all.
Elias drifted.
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Kingambit used Sucker Punch.
It had now used Sucker Punch seven times. One use remained, and Encore forced it to use it next turn. Then nothing stopped Ziggy from finishing Kingambit with Aqua Jet.
Unsure why, Cely felt uneasy.
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One week ago, it was a one percent chance. A one percent chance as Toril Lund's final Pokémon stared down Aracely Sosa's. One percent that Cely won, that she moved on and Toril was eliminated.
That chance happened. Now, everything fell apart.
Lusamine kept attacking Shedinja long after she understood the futility. The Pokémon she merged with knew no moves that hurt it. It drifted toward the black box. Its ghost moves were impossible to intercept.
The Clefairy looked up at Shedinja with wonder. They clapped their hands and laughed together. They pointed at the halo over Shedinja's head. Their tiny, vestigial wings fluttered. Angels and angels.
Lusamine stooped, hands—or what served as hands—on her knees.
"Metronome." Despite the transformation of her body, her voice sounded wholly her own.
The Clefairy glanced at her.
"Use Metronome."
Smiles perked up the Clefairy faces. They loved this move, Metronome, innate to their DNA. A move that allowed them to mimic any other move—at random. The Clefairy held up their fingers and swayed them back and forth in synchronized rhythm. They chanted, chirping nonsense Clefairy babble.
Roughly one thousand moves existed. Metronome would pick one of those. It only needed to be a move that hurt Shedinja, no matter how weak. Ember, Wing Attack, Bite, Rock Throw, Lick.
This was what it came to? Random chance? Like Cely winning against Toril. Was it always random chance, the whole time? Was there never any order to it, any reason or meaning, any Logos? Or were fate and luck always, observably, identical? The difference only interpretation?
The Clefairy quit their timed oscillations. Their fingers pointed straight up. They began to glow.
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What was it? Why did Cely feel something was wrong? Did she miscount? No. Seven Sucker Punches. One remaining. Was there some mechanic she forgot or never knew, some way to escape Encore early?
Nothing. There was nothing. Why the feeling then? A misfire? Her finger slipping from the pulse of whatever Logos dictated the progression of this world? That aura fading forever?
It was impossible for Red to win from this position. Chance played no part in it, nor human error. This turn, he would use Sucker Punch for the last time, and Ziggy would use Encore. The next turn, Ziggy used Aqua Jet and won.
Everyone watching: she won. Aracely Sosa won. Over this entire world, she triumphed. Do you see her now? Really see her?
"Encore," she said, for the final time.
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Metronome possessed zero utility in a structured battle. Its randomness made it infeasible for professional competition.
But the move meant something to the Clefairy. In their hidden corners of Mt. Moon, the narrow gasps of an endemic species, they swayed their fingers and summoned monsters or miracles. Individuals whose Metronome created powerful attacks, who saved the tribe from predatory Onix or Golbat, rose to an exalted status within the community. They became leaders, allowed the rare privilege to touch the shards of moonrock scrounged from the dark in a ceremony of evolution. It made no logical sense, of course. Randomly using a good move didn't lend a Clefairy any actual leadership qualities. There was an element of self-fulfilling prophecy, because by evolving into Clefable they became more powerful and thus better suited to lead, but the internal dynamics of choosing by chance baffled those early researchers who studied the creatures in their natural habitat. They passed it off as inefficiency, or even used it as evidence for why Clefairy failed to spread past its small habitat, why its population never grew until humans captured it, bred it, and gave it guidance.
A competing theory, perhaps wild fancy, existed. This theory proposed that Metronome was not truly random. That Clefairy tapped into some underlying force, perhaps subatomic, that determined the world's seeming chaos. Those Clefairy who, in times of trouble, managed to bring to bear the exact move needed to save themselves were somehow better attuned to this so-called chaos, which humans only called chaos because they failed to understand it.
The Clefairy's Metronome ended. They glowed, then something sparked, and a white force blasted out.
It was Explosion.
Briefly, behind her camera, Fiorella's world became clear. A line starting thirteen years prior finally closed its circle. Apotheosis, atonement, antidote, a wordless apology to herself, an apology to her daughter. It all meant something. All along, it meant something!
The blast swallowed Lusamine and Elias. It swallowed the black box and the converter machine and the sea of smiling Clefairy. It roared toward Toril and Fiorella and Bill in the entryway. Something tiny and fast struck Fiorella's camera and she reared back screaming, her face full of blood.
A creature vaulted them and landed in the entryway. Its body only silhouette, but its shape and fins unmistakable as it braced itself to shield them from debris: Garchomp. Cynthia's Garchomp. And Cynthia was there, her other Pokémon pulling them to safety. Everything was white. Everything was over.
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Kingambit tried to use Sucker Punch, as Encore forced it to do.
It couldn't.
It didn't have enough Power Points.
It only had seven. It didn't have the maximum eight.
Its body trembled. Its body shook. Its arms thrashed limply. All its dignity, all its poise fell away.
It used Struggle. Its body, its only weapon left, flailed. It flopped into Ziggy. A weak move. It looked pathetic. It hurt itself.
It hurt Ziggy enough. Ziggy, after spending the last eight turns clapping, looked down at his body. Where the bladed parts of Kingambit stabbed him. His eyes turned up, toward the crowd, then he tilted toward Cely. Cely watched in emptiness—in empathy—as, theatrical in how he pressed the back of a paw to his forehead, he fell.
"Aracely Sosa is out of usable Pokémon. IPL 64 is over!"
She remembered curling up. There on the platform, curled up, staring at nothing.
The world wasn't ending. Did it ever mean anything?
She remembered the devastated arena as Red stepped onto it. She remembered Iono appearing with a microphone and camera crew. It wasn't Mom, but Iono. Iono babbled into the microphone, not her usual spiel—she knew the moment.
"An amazing finish, Red. We'll ask all about that INCREDIBLE Zapdos in a bit, but first, I wanna hear it: How do you feel winning your SEVENTH Interregional Pokémon League World Championship?"
Red, man of clay, seemed incapable of speech. The brim of his hat remained lowered over his eyes. The pause lingered to the point of pain and the whole time Iono stayed there with her silly smile and bobbing hair ornaments.
Then Red tilted his head up. His hat lifted, revealed his eyes. Tears streamed from them. They ran in rivulets that washed the caked dirt off his cheeks.
"Thank you," he spoke haltingly, as though needing to remember how. He spoke to the crowd. "For always—loving me."
"This has been the latest chapter in your unparalleled story, Red. One for the history books. Nobody's ever gonna match what you've done here. Twenty years! Twenty years..."
She remembered taking the elevator capsule from the stage to the competitor offloading dock. Dad called her en route, a ring in her Rotomless phone. She answered but found she couldn't speak. Red stole her ability, stole her story, stole everything. The man who always won, winning again, and they loved it, everyone loved to see it.
"I'm proud of you," Dad said. "Know that. No matter what. I'm proud of you and I love you. That's all that matters. You're everything to me, Cely. I'm proud. I'm so proud. I'm sure your mother feels the same." And every consolation: nobody expected her to get this far, she proved everyone wrong, she showed what she was made of.
She cut herself open and showed them everything.
She remembered the capsule door opening and she stumbled out and in the distance, at the end of the hallway, she saw Haydn running toward her. No Charlie, but Cely remembered her sins, she felt them creeping up her back, because Red's final Pokémon fought with the weight of every single one.
Haydn kept running, running. Never reaching. Like a dream, where certain outcomes are not allowed. IPL agents were already beside Cely, they gripped her each by an arm. Leon led them, followed by other famous trainers, a special procession of past heroes all for her. Sabrina stood among the group, staring—staring so sadly—while the agents said something about a museum, about RISE, about Mom, about Toril. Blood and death. "Are you happy?" they said. "Is this what you wanted?"
THE END