I know it seems cheap to just kill her dad but Cely needs to keep her mom in reserve for the finals.
I know it seems cheap to just kill her dad but Cely needs to keep her mom in reserve for the finals.
Onmur
Archangel of Nutella.
The fact Toril's choice of tutor for learning Social was Wikihow is fascinating.
This is actually a 4D chess move to make Cely leave the arena and get disqualified!
If you think about it, this wasn't Cely's move, at all. It was Fiorina's. She dropped a bomb on the dude and left him holding his shoulder, a worrying sign on someone with heart problems.
This is actually a 4D chess move to make Cely leave the arena and get disqualified!
Chapter 16: R4 | Thanatos
Chapter 16: R4 | Thanatos
A shadow smeared Toril's straight face. It was straight, though.
In that face Cely felt love. True love. Love like she only ever felt those early days with MOTHER, when MOTHER and Cely both were so sick and so weak and so lonely. Desperate moments were the only times love truly existed. Happy people never loved, not really, not with any tenderness.
Toril loved Aracely. Loved her enough to prepare all these special tricks just for her. And you know what? Cely loved Tors, too. She loved her awkward little misanthrope. Her creature crawling out its depths still slopping slime. Look at her clothes. What was she doing? (Charlie must love it.) It overpowered Cely, clothes so absurd she could not tear them apart and remake an entity in her image. No wonder this was the final battle. Yes, she knew, there was a finals match, Red Akahata, sure, whatever, who cared, he didn't matter, last gasp bastion of a grand narrative gone twisted. Boring. Denouement, startling starred punctuation mark. Here was a climax, Cely was so happy when Toril beat Yui, it had to be this way, fate and all that. Her own little beast. Her monster. Was this why people loved Pokémon? Was this why they built this world to be this way, all along?
Aracely Sosa was the luckiest bitch in the world. Toril regarded Slowking's Sludge Bomb counterattack in disbelief. Toril beat her, she fucking beat her at her own game, and Sosa had the gall to demand the laws of probability correct her own error. She didn't even look ashamed. She smiled as if to say: "Nice move Tors, but how'd you like my counter?"
Okay. Done?
Done.
The match continued. "Elias, you're up again."
Shedinja appeared. It remained one of Toril's strongest outs. She still had many outs, and Sosa had—what? Azumarill Belly Drum, maybe a Kommo-o or Swords Dance Gliscor for her final slot?
Sosa didn't play to her outs. Domino designed the team to have outs, but that wasn't Sosa's style. She played reactively. She relied on reacting to her opponent's move the same turn they made it, or before they made it. Toril, meanwhile, already planned several steps ahead. She beat Yui this way, manipulating her motions turn by turn until the final two Pokémon appeared and it was the exact matchup Toril wanted. She'd do the same here.
"Flamethrower," Sosa said.
Oh no! Sosa figured out how to beat Shedinja finally? Dumb bitch.
"Trick," Toril said.
Shedinja moved at a speed closer to Ninjask than Shedinja, which probably clued in everyone except Sosa. It snatched Slowking's item on flyby and replaced it with its own: a Choice Scarf. Sosa's most versatile offensive coverage Pokémon was now locked into one move per switch.
For its trouble, Shedinja got Slowking's Assault Vest, which increased its durability but forced it to only use offensive moves. On Shedinja, more brittle than paper, this item was awful.
On Zoroark, it was pretty good.
Thanks to the newly-acquired Assault Vest, Gustav took the belch of flames like a champ. Upon being hit, his illusion wore off, but he'd done his job. Slowking was hamstrung. Toril's outs increased.
Now that Slowking was locked to a move, Annihilape was the most obvious of those outs. If Toril swapped him into Flamethrower, she won the match.
"Slowking, return," said Sosa. "Go, Ziggy!"
Perfect. "Sludge Bomb," Toril said.
Rather than switch out, Gustav nailed the water rat the moment it appeared with a super effective strike.
Azumarill nearly dropped from just that. It noshed a berry to regain some health, but that left it barely at half. Setting up Belly Drum was impossible now, which meant its only value was as a revenge killer. Sosa lost another out.
"Wow Tors," Cely said. "I'm impressed. You're really showing your stuff."
Toril's mask broke as she shot Sosa what her gut told her was a glare but what the jumbotron revealed as a look of shock.
"You've come so far, Tors. This is growth, isn't it? I can barely read you at all. You're evolving before my eyes. Ziggy, Aqua Jet."
Toril wondered if the small talk was meant as a distraction. If so, it didn't work. "Sludge Bomb."
Ziggy whapped Gustav, which in conjunction with the Flamethrower from earlier left him wounded, panting, barely standing. A guaranteed knockout for anything remaining on Sosa's squad. In return, Gustav hit Ziggy again and put him down for the count. Sosa only had three Pokémon left to Toril's four.
Toril was strangling her. Loose pockets of luck like the High Horsepower miss, crushed one by one. Soon, only 100 percent would remain.
Over the arena, Sosa didn't seem scared at all. She—just—kept—smiling. Did she not understand how bad her position was becoming? Toril knew literally all of her Pokémon. Whether it was Kommo-o, Aegislash, Tangrowth, or Gliscor last, it increasingly did not matter. Did she realize that? Was she too fucking stupid?
"I'm glad I've made you change so much," Sosa said. "Go, Scizor."
Made her change? Made her change?!
Oh. Toril understood. The Cynthia angle. Sosa planned to take credit for Toril's win. (No, she's planning to get in your head. Force a blunder. Shut up—focus.)
Scizor came in for the revenge kill, but Toril had no need to sack Zoroark. "Gustav, return. Go, Heidi."
Mawile switched in, intimidated Scizor with her scary jaws, and Sosa must have predicted a swap because instead of Bullet Punch she opted for Swords Dance. Scizor Mega Evolved in a flash, steam poured off it, Toril didn't pay attention, she crunched the numbers. Mawile won the matchup, 100 percent. Full certainty.
Which meant Sosa would swap. Probably to her final Pokémon. If that was what Toril thought it was (Swords Dance Gliscor), it was a bad idea to keep Mawile in. She preempted the swap with one of her own.
"Elias."
Shedinja appeared.
"Knock Off," Sosa said.
This stadium was a cup, into which the feelings of a whole world poured. Cely felt the emotions rise as a viscous layer past her head. She hoped Tors felt them too. She had to feel them. Which only made her stoicism so much more impressive.
Scizor, Mega Evolved and fueled by its own emotion, lunged the instant it heard Cely's command. Then something awful happened.
Red lights blared. A warning sound assaulted Cely's ears. Tors returned Shedinja to its Poké Ball before Scizor hit it.
"Hey!" Cely said. "That's not the rules."
She felt stupid, talking about something as trivial as rules, but it was a pretty egregious violation and also no fun.
"Shedinja is considered to have fainted," the robot in her headset intoned. Sure enough, on the holoscreen, the Poké Ball corresponding to Shedinja was crossed out.
"That's lame. Why not let Scizor hit it?"
No answer. On the arena floor, Scizor paced. Its shoulders slouched as it sent a death glare into the ground. Steam expelled from its spiracles.
"Tors, why didn't they let Scizor hit it?"
Tors tried so hard not to change her facial expression, it was adorable. Cely was going crazy, though, so she whined: "Tors! I know you hear me."
"Everyone can hear us!" Toril hissed.
"Then explain to them, too. I can't be the only one who doesn't know."
Instead, Toril sent out her next Pokémon. Mawile again.
"Tors!"
"Shedinja's too fragile to take a hit," Toril said, quickly. "It might literally fall apart. Okay?"
"Oh-h. So like, they simulated it." Cely played up the ditziness a teensy bit, because it made Toril more flustered. The crowd loved it too, especially after she shrugged and made a silly (but not too silly) face, as if to say "all these silly rules."
Because, surely, the audience felt cheated too, right? Like Scizor pacing in frustration. If they played it like that, why not simulate the whole battle? Play it in computers?
Immediately, though, she realized she took it too far. The crowd's laughter, inasmuch as any could be distinguished outside its all-consuming barrage of sound, died awkwardly. It got cold inside Cely's ribcage.
Toril tried to drown out Sosa's chatter to figure out what possessed her to use Knock Off instead of any other move, but as the timer ticked down she decided it didn't matter. At this point, Sosa might be picking moves at random.
"Swords Dance," Sosa said—she sounded distracted, morose even—as if to confirm Toril's hypothesis.
"Heidi. Mega Evolve and use Fire Fang."
She looked to Sosa for reaction, since Sosa made a resounding blunder, but Sosa stared at the crowd. Most first-time tournament challengers learned in regionals to blot out the crowd. Toril a few years back created her own method, to imagine the crowd as wind atop a mountain. That wind was the loudest thing on the planet, yet somehow the brain learned to filter it to nothing, to the point it became possible to sleep, to the point that on the rare occasions it suddenly stopped, the silence sounded louder. Toril was experienced enough now she didn't need imagination: it was the wind.
The second snapping set of jaws emerged as Heidi changed form. When she came out of her flash of transformative light she turned both sets loose on her prey. Ignited by the heat of acid saliva, the mouths belched fire as they clamped onto Scizor.
Steel squelched as it grew superheated and glowed with inner pinkness. The struggle lasted only briefly. Scizor's determination alone could not keep it conscious.
In the end, Toril wasn't too upset about losing Shedinja, especially since Azumarill—the Pokémon it countered best—was already out. Most likely it wouldn't make a difference now that Aracely was down to two Pokémon. Mawile and Annihilape both beat Slowking, so everything hinged on Aracely's final Pokémon.
Aracely had to send that Pokémon out now. Or else her loss became 100 percent guaranteed. If she put in Slowking, Toril swapped to Annihilape, and even if Aracely swapped to her final Pokémon the same turn, Annihilape won every possible matchup from a neutral position. Since Zoroark tricked Choice Scarf onto Slowking, Toril no longer needed to worry about Calm Mind nonsense. Mawile had a few bad matchups, though, so if Aracely sent out her final Pokémon now and made some great predictions, a slim possibility remained.
That slim possibility was what Toril focused all her mental energy on destroying. She refused to let up, to expect victory, until it was guaranteed—mathematically, not practically. The world of statistics was her world of safety, the way psychology was Aracely's. Malaise remained that, other than against certainty, Aracely would somehow squirm into the narrowest crevice.
Amazingly, Aracely still seemed distracted, even as the timer ticked down. Was she coming to terms with her defeat? Only at the last second, with a careless and disinterested twinge of her lips, did she announce her next Pokémon.
"Gliscor."
In truth, Toril expected it far earlier. She gave both Volcarona and Shedinja items to deal with Gliscor's Stealth Rock setup. If it showed its face this late into the battle, though, Stealth Rock wasn't the worry.
Grim, ghoulish, Gliscor arose upon its segmented tail, bat wings blocking the omnidirectional stadium floodlights to cast shadows crosswise. The wind atop the mountain roared and Toril became cognizant, for the first time in a long time, of her missing fingers, a phantom pain returning across the continents to remind her of that self that no longer existed.
One leg buckled. She caught herself on the railing.
If Mawile was running Ice Fang this match was over, but she'd run Sucker Punch for Slowking and Play Rough for Kommo-o—plus the essential Swords Dance, of course. That gave Aracely a window. Toril needed to play this smart.
Gliscor had two possible moves that didn't auto lose the match: Earthquake and Swords Dance. Swords Dance was better.
So. Swap to Zoroark. Gliscor uses Swords Dance. Zoroark is faster, Hyper Voice range 50.5 to 59.1 percent. Factor in Poison Heal (12.5 percent). At maximum it has 62 percent health remaining. It knocks out Zoroark, swap in Annihilape. Gliscor outspeeds, Earthquake leaves Annihilape with 30.7 percent health at worst. It does its damage, then Mawile with Sucker Punch—25.5 to 30.1 percent—way too tight. It depended on how hard her Pokémon hit, if they put their all into their strikes or simply went through the motions. At high and medium ranges she won, at low ranges she lost.
Her stomach churned. She wanted to vomit. This tournament wasn't friendly to odds. It didn't matter if you won 75 percent of the time, if the one match you actually played was the 25 percent.
Losing meant you were—unfit.
"Heidi, return." Toril heard her voice blasted over the speakers, though not in her head. "Go—Rasmus."
Gustav came out disguised as Annihilape, though at this point the disguise meant nothing.
Aracely snapped out of her distraction. She gave Toril a knowing smile and said, "Earthquake."
The ground split and a shear traveled across the arena. Gustav, already barely upright, fell from the shaking alone.
As Toril withdrew Gustav into his Poké Ball, she watched Aracely's face for any change. Did—did Aracely not realize? She looked so smug, as if to say "See that Tors, another great prediction." To the layman, Toril guessed, it looked like she made an awesome play. Zoroark downed the instant he appeared. Great, right?
The wind on the mountain whipped feverishly against her fingers.
Toril tugged at her uniform collar. The endgame was upon them. The number of moves constricted. Her mask broke, she let herself show the fear she felt—the heart throbbing inside.
If Gliscor used Swords Dance now—
Annihilape appeared.
If Gliscor used Swords Dance—
Aracely kept smiling. In her smile manifested the peaks of mountaintops over low-strung clouds, and the halo around her head the sun.
"Swords Dance," she said.
Of course. With Swords Dance, Gliscor boosted its attack faster than Annihilape boosted its defense, even with the Chesto Berry/Rest strategy. It was the only way Gliscor won the matchup.
Toril closed her eyes. Serenity, for the first time in her life—it seized her. Her heart ceased beating. She, too, was a goddess.
"Final Gambit," she said.
Cely didn't react. She didn't know what this move did.
Annihilape opened his mouth to swallow the world and screamed. All his fury, it poured out, sweeping across the clouds and mountaintops, blasting them to molecules, silencing the wind, silencing the sun.
Toril gripped the railing and screamed alongside him. His wispy gray body grew bright. A flame—building inside it—a life—the art of his soul. The rocks and pebbles strewn across the arena levitated. The air became pregnant—anticipation a crackle like electricity from particle to charged particle.
Annihilape's soul flared, blasting him apart from inside. The blast swept in a corporeally formed ring to consume Gliscor in chunks. Its eyes were the last piece visible before all cascaded to a bright blackness.
Like liquid, the black sank into the arena. The pebbles fell, color returned, the air cooled. The unconscious bodies of Annihilape and Gliscor lay beside one another, and once they were visible to all, the wind whipped up between the mountains once more.
Tors looked ill. She bent over her platform and heaved for breath.
All game, Cely waited for the mask to crack. Here and there she caught it slip, but never enough to wrest control. Now, down to their final Pokémon, Slowking and Mawile, it no longer mattered. Mawile won, right? Cely was pretty sure Mawile won here.
Cely maintained her smile, though in the jumbotron it gave wan, gave very much resigned. It was so cold on the platform, like they pumped ice through a ventilation system. She wore her pastel multicolored jacket over her designer tee on the off chance Toril sent her snow team, and still. Chills.
She tried not to think the real reason and failed. Dark clouds. Dark clouds, dark clouds, dark clouds.
When Aracely was seventeen, the age Toril was now, she fell out of the world. At the time it was sudden, like she took a step and the floor was an illusion and she went tumbling tumbling tumbling down. Afterward obviously every inch of her life crawled toward that moment since birth.
The day started normal. The normalness was the whole terror. She woke up and Mom was already gone, the giant house silent and dark, the world outside even darker, as if nothing existed past the one lighted bathroom where she put herself together in the mirror. She already felt uneasy, surrounded by vials and powders, even before she noticed the droplet of blood on her white blouse. She remembered staring a long time, mascara brush in hand, wondering: Where did that come from? Wondering: Why is it there?
Later, as she left fifth period Environmental Science, Haydn and Charlie chattering about—something—she took that step and fell. In this world, people and Pokémon live together in harmony, the instructor said. Harmony echoed through the void. Evolve or die. Evolve and die. Cycles of life. Flowers wilting once a year. A world dark, a world light, a world dark. Everything in its perfect place and Aracely suddenly out of place, out of time, drowned in lipstick and moisturizer, in waves of cashmere and worsted, names on TV, brand names and Pokémon names, one thousand species discovered and counting, isn't technology wonderful?, her phone and her devices and an internet of interconnected innumerable voices conversing across the globe as one, one unified voice shouting HARMONY before the voices died and the next year's batch shouted HARMONY and the next year's batch and the batch after that and after that, the voices slowly twisting each moment as everything evolved into some other interchangeable form then another and another until the older forms were so thoroughly forgotten they were recreated as new forms and thought novel because the only way to learn anything new was to forget what was already learned.
Then out of the air she dropped and landed exactly where she'd been walking before, Haydn and Charlie chattering, and Aracely noticed for the first time the thing Charlie always whined about, that everyone looked exactly the same in their white blouses and pleated skirts—Cely had always replied, "Yeah, they look good?"—but nobody noticed Aracely.
That made her remember every night she spent crying into her pillow, usually days when Charlie made some mean remark, thinking to herself nobody liked her—even though everyone liked her—and wondering whether it was the mean remark that made her cry or the fact that, like a droplet on her white blouse, that mean remark reminded her of everything else that wasn't the mean remark, the whole white expanse.
In this world, being liked was cheap. Being happy was cheap. Nothing precious existed, and nobody mattered except as one flower in a field of 8 billion, blooming briefly to die for the next 8 billion to bloom.
That night, or maybe a week or month later, she waited patiently for Mom to get off the phone—"I don't care what they said. No. No. What? Budgetary constraints? We're the most-watched program in the world, what budgetary constraints—It's microphones, we need better microphones, every other word I say gets dropped. I'm not exaggerating—okay I'm exaggerating, but the fact any words get dropped is—it's unprofessional on a basic level. Amateurish. How do they not blush listening? Are they proud of this product? Are they proud of being incompetent? I'm not proud. I'm ashamed. 'Good enough.' Oh, my gosh. Good enough?! It's not—and don't you dare give me that cliché about perfect being the enemy of good. I'm already making unfathomable concessions with the cameramen you assign me. Am I the only one embarrassed?"—as Mom paced the living room past the award they gave her for falling into a coma. Finally the call ended.
"Is your homework done?"
Aracely nodded.
"Then study for Friday's pre-calc exam. You got a 94 last time. That's the danger zone."
"Mom, I think I'm depressed."
Mom's face twitched, and her eyes turned away as her mouth twisted. For a moment Cely thought Mom understood, and in retrospect maybe she did understand, that many others learned the fundamental truth of the world before Cely, but if they did, then they needed some way to protect themselves. Mom, obviously, found her way long ago, maybe during her coma.
"It's," Mom said tentatively, then with more confidence: "it's that Literature curriculum. They're always making you read those books about the war."
"Mom—"
"I'll speak to the headmaster. They need to modernize. Aspirational works, that's the key. In the meantime, study your pre-calc. There's nothing depressing about math."
Aracely thought about blurting the real reason aloud, but even then, what would Mom say? If you work hard, go to a good college, get a good job, live in a big house like this one with six rooms you never use, then your life will matter?
A few days, or weeks, or maybe months later, Aracely tried to kill herself.
For the first time ever, for a reason Cely still didn't know, Mom came home early that day, and so Cely didn't die. Which set off a chain reaction of events—RISE, MOTHER, Dad, the IPL—that led her here, face to face with Toril Lund.
A lot of improbable instances in a row, so many to make someone believe in fate, or as MOTHER might say a line of history traveling inexorably to its specified endpoint, an endpoint where Aracely for a brief moment stood above all, all 8 billion, and mattered, really and truly mattered to this world on the terms of the world's own narrative, even if she never really understood that narrative itself—all to end here, one week from her goal.
Tors deserved it, though. Really. Bittersweetness tinged the ice in Cely's body. Tors worked hard, struggled, changed herself in a way Cely did not. Maybe in the end there was some truth to Mom's substitution of hard work for meaning, because growth no matter how directed formed the illusion of substance, progress, purpose. Something growing grew somewhere.
And because Cely loved Toril, it all felt strangely okay. As if assisting someone else's growth was a way to leech their purpose for yourself. When people become adults and realize the secret Cely did, they've already had the child that can be that throbbing feeling of life for them. It worked that way for Mom and Dad. Toril could be Aracely's child, cradled in motherly embrace. The same embrace in which MOTHER once cradled Aracely.
Cely closed her eyes and sighed. She let her smile decay.
Sucker Punch relied on the opponent's focus in preparing their own attack to land a quick strike before they reacted. It failed if the opponent did anything other than attack, because then it was too easy to see coming.
That was in concept. In reality, a potato like Slowking might get hit either way. Similar to the Shedinja fabrication, the IPL was willing to break the audience's suspension of disbelief to ensure its rules standardization held. Meaning if Slowking didn't attack, and Mawile used Sucker Punch, it would be "considered" to fail, and Toril was expected to keep her Pokémon from landing a hit it wasn't "supposed" to land.
Luckily, because Zoroark tricked a Choice Scarf onto Slowking what felt like hours ago, Toril didn't need to worry about that. Slowking had to attack. The attack it would use was Flamethrower.
Toril already ran the calcs when Mawile and Slowking faced off earlier, during that interlude when she and Cely swapped every turn. From this position, she calculated a 99 percent chance of victory. Sucker Punch had a 12.5 percent chance to knock out Slowking in one hit. If that failed, Slowking would attack with Flamethrower. It required a critical hit—a roughly 4.17 percent chance—and even a crit only had a 31.3 percent chance to knock out Mawile. Of course, you also had to factor in Sucker Punch's chance to crit. In the end, it turned out roughly 99 percent.
Predictions were not a factor. Both sides had one viable move. A flat 99 percent chance.
Why the fuck was Toril so nervous still. Why did she want to vomit.
Cely was there, in her brain, which was fine, because there was nothing left to think, but feeling her there, entangled, the barrier between them crumbling, and an ineffable sadness seeping through, a sense of loneliness Toril never truly felt before, made her wonder, which of them needed the other more, which needed to win more, which mattered more, these questions so intrinsically tied to either's ability to connect with anyone beyond themselves, that they were not in fact opposites in kind, but only aesthetic: the same wisps wrapped in different shrouds. Mimikyu and Pikachu on the face of the card even now in Toril's pocket, but which was which, or was that Pikachu a shiny Azumarill after all? In that moment, Toril felt Cely loved her, and Cely felt the same about Toril, and the only thing the violence of this battle could do was obliterate that precious dewdrop.
Toril reformed. "Sucker Punch," she croaked.
"Flamethrower."
Ten thousand repetitions to practice this move. Heidi knew it by heart. Toril knew it by heart, so even when she closed her eyes too ill to watch she saw white outlines motion through the blackness like in the depths of that cave when Toril first found her, weeping, hoping to play upon Toril's motherly instincts so as to lure her close and devour her whole. They said it was rare even wild Pokémon ate humans. Nothing liked the taste. Heidi was always a confused child.
Toril loved her. She loved all her Pokémon, though battling necessitated treating them like pawns, sacking them when necessary, allowing one piece to fall to take another—wasn't that the opposite of how the story went, the story of unbreakable bonds? Could these battles, this war destroy every sort of love? She was the goddess of war.
She opened her eyes as Heidi stepped back from her strike. Cely's Slowking wobbled.
The holoscreen displayed Slowking's biometric readout as its health declined toward the predetermined faint threshold. Slowking was the kind of idiot that could easily stay standing, eyes open like nothing happened, long after it was rendered unconscious, so the biometrics were especially important.
The bar depleted by percentage points: 50 percent, 16, 8, 4, 2.
1.
It stopped at 1.
Slowking kept standing. As Heidi danced to her side of the field, she kept her back and jaws to her opponent. Her eyes glanced apologetically at Toril. Toril nodded that it was okay, which made Heidi sharpen in determination to receive Slowking's attack.
It came after fifteen seconds of strangled silence. Toril forgot the wind. Slowking finally reacted, blinked once, noticed seemingly for the first time he stood in an arena and faced an opponent. His mouth slowly, slowly, excruciating like a knife you're trying to hold back overpowering you millimeter by millimeter as it glides into your heart, slowly opened.
The instant the jet of flame burst out Toril knew what that dagger tickling her heart already told her: CRITICAL HIT. Some said if your bond with your Pokémon was strong they would unleash these rare strikes, strikes that otherwise exceeded their physical capabilities, strikes that the best biologists between shrugs and hemhawing might mutter had something to do with the innate Pokémon characteristic of evolution. But it had nothing to do with a bond, Toril knew that, she conducted experiments herself, it simply happened sometimes, a random chance as if at that moment a space particle beamed from the sky to empower them.
Heidi clenched her jaws into a shield to protect her main body, though their iron makeup conducted the heat. Her eyes squeezed shut as her body tensed and her feet dug through the dirt and a sweat broke out on her brow as her mouth—her real mouth—snapped open and a cry of pain emerged.
Toril didn't watch the holoscreen this time. She watched Heidi, who would tell the outcome before the health bar. Even with a critical hit, the odds of a knockout were less than one third. Surely—
Surely.
Surely, the fire dissipated. Heidi, staggered, singed, sweating, hissing, slumping, pitched.
One small hand reached out and caught herself before she fell. The red-hot jaws slouched to either side. Their weight seemed almost too much for her tiny body to bear. Almost.
"You can do it," Toril heard herself say. She never spoke like this during battle, it severed the understanding she and her Pokémon shared. "You can do it, Heidi."
Heidi's brows sharpened. She grunted, then rose.
On the holoscreen, Heidi's health bar showed 4 percent.
The battle was over. No uncertainty remained. Slowking had Choice Scarf. It must use Flamethrower again. Heidi's Sucker Punch would hit before it attacked. No chance of a miss.
The battle was over. Toril won. She won. She won. She won. Everyone in the world loved her and she won. Everyone in the world recognized her. It was all worth it. Everything was worth it. She mattered. She mattered. She had a justification for her existence. The world was saved. She was saved. Love welled in her heart. Love for herself, for the world, for everyone in the world, the faceless masses once reviled. She loved them all. She loved Cely too. Love! God, what was this feeling? It was love!
The look on Toril's face defied all tragedy.
Then the holoscreen dinged.
The holoscreen dinged. Toril's eyes fell to it.
MAWILE HAS BEEN BURNED.
Heidi gave one last gasp and fell.
The winds swallowed the mountains in all-consuming oblivion and this was it, the end of the world.
Toril stood on the platform still basking in the warmth of her glow, still plastered with her smile. The platform broke apart around her, the arena already gone, Heidi's body gone in the tornado, Slowking gone, only the glowing golden goddess present within this blank abyss.
"Why?" she asked the goddess. "Why are they cheering?"
The goddess smiled.
"Cheated"—Toril herself was breaking apart—"they should feel cheated. It was luck. It was—just—luck."
The goddess broke apart.
Toril remained standing atop the platform during Aracely's entire post-match interview. Mom asked the right questions, chipper and professional, and amazingly Aracely heard herself giving the right answers, chipper too, smiling, thanking her fans, asking them to follow her Instagram.
Mom sent the broadcast to a commercial break and walked with Aracely off the field. Only when they entered the elevator did she say, "Your father had a heart attack."
Ferb_Ancos
The one under the table
- Pronouns
- He
And thus.
The world burns.
With her Heart,
Her Will,
Her Soul,
Her Hope.
To be the very best, like no one ever was.
Although...
Maybe she was missguided.
I wonder what will happen next.
Qoheleth
Archivist
- Pronouns
- Any
Can't get this metaphor out of my head.
There's no reason to think that it's not just a metaphor, a visualization of Cely's uncanny empathy.
But RISE is planning something for the day of the final. Something about human evolution. The timing could be a coincidence, but I doubt it is. And if Big Mom had had her say, Cely wouldn't've been one of the two humans standing at the match's epicenter.
I can't help but take the metaphor too literally, and wonder: if this stadium is a cup, brimming with the human world's feelings... then, now that the cup's full, who's gonna take a drink?
Oh my god what a chapter.
OP, great quality of writing, and its incredibly evocative. I want to preface this with the fact that bad writers inspire apathy, and good ones evoke emotion, and you are an incredibly talented writer, and it's enjoyable reading work that has such a rich feel to it.
However, it's safe to say that no matter the character growth you write, the early impression of Aracely invoked so much loathing, I was actually bummed out when Toril didn't slap/black-eye or suckerpunch Aracaly when she followed her to the balcony, and even now I still want her to loose everything and have to survive in a desperate situation for a few months after loosing all her family resources permanently. God she just runs me the wrong way.
It's rare that an Author writes a character that makes me not want to read a fiction not because they write poorly, but because they are written so well. Bad first impressions for characters and all that.
I love the writing, but man, can you write characters that inspire emotions!
However, it's safe to say that no matter the character growth you write, the early impression of Aracely invoked so much loathing, I was actually bummed out when Toril didn't slap/black-eye or suckerpunch Aracaly when she followed her to the balcony, and even now I still want her to loose everything and have to survive in a desperate situation for a few months after loosing all her family resources permanently. God she just runs me the wrong way.
It's rare that an Author writes a character that makes me not want to read a fiction not because they write poorly, but because they are written so well. Bad first impressions for characters and all that.
I love the writing, but man, can you write characters that inspire emotions!
I feel certain this has nothing to do with "bad first impressions" and everything to do with "hits too close to home".
Descriptively, it's still a bad first impression; mechanically, the first impression was excellent, in all the wrong ways... for you, and everybody else who dealt with golden-spoon girls like Aracely in real life.
seriously, no matter how human or empathetic those sorts of girls may really be, they are still too alien to the human experience to be anything but monsters.
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You aren't wrong, and especially with the corporate themes going on as well, the dissonance between personal empathy, and big picture empathy or whatever you want to call it for that will always feel jarring to me, when people in those positions play around with other people lives for their own amusement or "narrative" or goal. Then turn around and try and make friends because they are personally interested? Fuck off, I'm leaving before I end up arrested.
Sigh. Time to hit that watch button so I can re-read and hope Aracaly gets something horrible to happen to her.
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Qoheleth
Archivist
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Good gravy @Bavitz , somehow you've just got me turning your fic over and over in my head all of a sudden. I just thought back to the previous chapter's conversation between Domino and Jinjiao, and found myself writing another 500 words about it somehow.
No, I'm thinking of an esport that existed long before the word "esport": chess.
Chess is almost the opposite of IPL in terms of the rules changing under your feet. Chess rules take centuries to shift. Chess formats take decades. The result is a championship format which – due to being outpaced by the natural, gradual shift in optimal play at the top level – has become so grueling that it's less a test of your chess skills and more a test of your endurance. Magnus Carlsen, the strongest chess player in the world, after holding the title for years, has stopped participating in the world championship because he thinks it's a waste compared to other top-level chess events. (Are there other formats than FIDE Classical which have a "world championship"? Yes, but they're not the world championship because they're not considered "real chess".) Meanwhile, computer-assisted prep has completely changed the way players "prepare" for games, to the extent that being the first person at the board who "needs to think" probably means you're at a disadvantage... and yet despite alternative formats like Chess960 existing for decades – formats where you have to "play chess" from move one – and despite those formats being praised by many top GMs as better than Classical, a return to what they once loved about the game... such formats are once again not "real chess" and get no support.
The freaks and misfits who "climb a mountain and come down weird" are, in a way, the "true" Pokémon trainers if you see the trainer-team bond as something sacred. How many of those trainers actually compete in the IPL? How many of them even give IPL rules the time of day? Did all those "pro trainers" who couldn't reset their hearts really quit? Or have they just traded the IPL for some underground league – fled to some Galt's Gulch for the Pokémon world's Magnus Carlsens where your team is your team?
And why have the rest of them stayed? Why did Domino stay for as long as he did, if his team was his family? Why did Red – the archetype, the image of the inscrutable prodigy who swept his region and then fucked off to the wilderness for years (assuming he isn't just a glove for an alien hand) – decide that this dead-end of a format was worth coming back down the mountain and contending year after year?
If Domino and Jinjiao are right, and they've been selling their souls to punch their tickets... what did they think they were buying, exactly?
And what does IPL leadership think it's buying? Just a palatable mass market product? Or has someone up there realized what they're doing to the institution of the trained team and decided to do it deliberately?
There's a... parallel to this, in a real esport. Not Pokémon, since – after all – in the real world, your team in a video game isn't your family.
No, I'm thinking of an esport that existed long before the word "esport": chess.
Chess is almost the opposite of IPL in terms of the rules changing under your feet. Chess rules take centuries to shift. Chess formats take decades. The result is a championship format which – due to being outpaced by the natural, gradual shift in optimal play at the top level – has become so grueling that it's less a test of your chess skills and more a test of your endurance. Magnus Carlsen, the strongest chess player in the world, after holding the title for years, has stopped participating in the world championship because he thinks it's a waste compared to other top-level chess events. (Are there other formats than FIDE Classical which have a "world championship"? Yes, but they're not the world championship because they're not considered "real chess".) Meanwhile, computer-assisted prep has completely changed the way players "prepare" for games, to the extent that being the first person at the board who "needs to think" probably means you're at a disadvantage... and yet despite alternative formats like Chess960 existing for decades – formats where you have to "play chess" from move one – and despite those formats being praised by many top GMs as better than Classical, a return to what they once loved about the game... such formats are once again not "real chess" and get no support.
The freaks and misfits who "climb a mountain and come down weird" are, in a way, the "true" Pokémon trainers if you see the trainer-team bond as something sacred. How many of those trainers actually compete in the IPL? How many of them even give IPL rules the time of day? Did all those "pro trainers" who couldn't reset their hearts really quit? Or have they just traded the IPL for some underground league – fled to some Galt's Gulch for the Pokémon world's Magnus Carlsens where your team is your team?
And why have the rest of them stayed? Why did Domino stay for as long as he did, if his team was his family? Why did Red – the archetype, the image of the inscrutable prodigy who swept his region and then fucked off to the wilderness for years (assuming he isn't just a glove for an alien hand) – decide that this dead-end of a format was worth coming back down the mountain and contending year after year?
If Domino and Jinjiao are right, and they've been selling their souls to punch their tickets... what did they think they were buying, exactly?
And what does IPL leadership think it's buying? Just a palatable mass market product? Or has someone up there realized what they're doing to the institution of the trained team and decided to do it deliberately?
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sicilian
culling witches
Haha. Aracely didnt seem loathful to me. I think lots of people, and at least I do, admire characters that live in ways we cannot.
It's kind of enchanting, to live with so much confidence and therefore freedom.
EDIT: I want the golden spoon girl to win. Like the audience, and unlike Tori, this is all sufficiently distant to me to live vicariously.
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Chapter 17: Finals |
Chapter 17: Finals |
They airlifted Dad to Viridian, which had a better equipped (human) hospital. For Aracely, who didn't own a flying Pokémon, this was a problem. Actually, it was a problem before that; she couldn't even escape the stadium. Universal laws funneled her behind a press release podium.
"Bill Masaki attributes your success in this tournament to luck. What do you say to that?"
"I'd say Bill's mad he gets more predictions wrong than Iono."
Laughter.
"Photographs showed you with Toril Lund several times prior to this match. What's your relationship with her?"
"We're friends. I love Tors." She intercepted the follow-up. "The victory's bittersweet, of course. But I know we both gave it our all out there."
"The Battler's Union president called for a vote earlier today on whether to pressure the IPL to formally ban coaches. Do you believe this is a response to your coach, Domino Sosa?"
For a moment inconsequential to everyone else but fatal to Aracely, she hesitated. "Uh. Sorry. I blanked the moment you said union. Whoops!"
Laughter. Nobody pressed for more. Aracely realized she'd accidentally given the response they expected.
"Last question, Cely. Can you tell us what Shedinja's ability Wonder Guard does?"
More laughter.
She convinced three random guys milling outside to drive her down Victory Road and endured their awkward fangasms/flirtations en route. Leaving the Plateau at all was a risk, but she'd seen no trace of Nilufer since last time and hoped MOTHER gave up. Maybe that was optimistic.
Viridian Community Hospital snaked like something bioluminescent at the bottom of the sea. From the outside it never seemed to end and the three guys (all, including the driver, drunk) argued how to interpret the signs pointing toward the entrance. They wound up revolving through an empty overflow parking lot for fifteen minutes until Aracely opened the door and jumped out. As she ran toward light she got the feeling they were running after her and even heard their footsteps but when she looked back the car was gone completely.
The ER lobby had seven hundred seats but only five occupied, which seemed strange. There should be more emergencies in the world, more people dying. Or was this the calm, the peace of a top standing still at the end of its spin the moment before it dropped to the side.
In one of the seats, or two actually, on his side with his knees tucked up, was Jinjiao Zhang, asleep. His Lopunny was under the chairs, not asleep, rolling back and forth and knocking the legs as if trying to see how hard it could knock without waking Jinjiao up.
Aracely spent maybe an hour arguing in muted tones with the nurse or receptionist or whoever she was, who recognized Aracely and kept saying how if she didn't recognize Aracely she'd be willing to bend the rules and let Aracely through, but since she did recognize Aracely it made the concept feel corrupt, as though she was only letting Aracely through because she recognized her, and then the receptionist—who, by the way, wore mismatched socks—kept asking the same questions about the match that the press people and drunk brothers three asked, pointing constantly to a mounted TV broadcasting a replay. Aracely watched, hypnotized, as she told Scizor to use Knock Off on Mawile before Toril swapped Mawile with Shedinja. Aracely didn't remember this happening at all.
Finally some doctor in a labcoat with coffee and a clipboard blundered by. She also recognized Aracely and called her over so loudly Aracely thought it would wake up Jinjiao but didn't.
"That Lopunny saved your dad's life." The doctor sipped, then pointed, her mug. Jinjiao's Lopunny cartwheeled between seats and landed in a flop of furred ears. "Administered CPR right away. Saved his life." Then, incomprehensibly: "It wasn't that bad of a heart attack though."
Aracely asked if she could see him.
"He's resting. What I plan to do is, on account of his weight, recommend gastric bypass. Then I'll put him on a cardiac rehabilitation program. That'll be thirty-six supervised sessions over twelve weeks... Great match by the way. Could I get an autograph?"
"Where's Brittany?"
"Who?"
Aracely rubbed the bridge of her nose. "The Gardevoir."
"Oh, in his room."
"Why can she be in his room and I can't?"
"Well, uh, she's officially registered as a service Pokémon."
Then, the doors to the lobby slid open and the three drunks came in, two supporting the third, whose leg was bleeding. "Accident. We had an accident!"
The commotion caused Jinjiao to lurch upright, blinking. Aracely really didn't want to bother with him, so she yanked the sleeve of the doctor and hissed: "Okay. Autograph. On one condition."
Finally she made it to Dad's room. Pleasantly arranged, but inundated with the stench of hospital and the persistent beep of a heart monitor. A painting of a strangely abstracted Magikarp hung over Dad's head.
Because Brittany was asleep in the only chair, Aracely stood in the corner. The room was dark except for what moonlight made it through a window fenced by a closed courtyard. Dad's body seemed shriveled on the bed. He wore a hospital gown. She wondered what happened to his suit and fedora.
She thought he was asleep too, and maybe he was at first, but after a few minutes his voice rasped: "Didja win?"
"Yeah."
"Really?"
"I won Dad. I'm in finals. Red Akahata."
"The doctors wouldn't tell me. Ha. You're a good girl, Cely."
"Sleep, Dad. I'll be here tomorrow."
"Nah. You gotta prep. Red Akahata. He's tough."
"I'll prep. Don't worry."
"Don't know if I'll be able to help. You should... ask that Toril."
Cely wondered if Toril would ever speak to her again. Her face at the end of the battle, exultant in all the wrong ways, felt deeply, deeply wrong. On the ride down, while the drunks swerved like lunatics, the thought crossed Cely's mind that Toril might kill herself. Then Cely wondered if she was only imagining what she would do if she were Toril. Toril might be stronger than her.
"I will, Dad. Get some sleep."
Brittany gave a loud, quack-like snore. The moon neared full and Aracely wondered what it looked like in Pewter, whether it intersected the mountain, whether it summoned the lunatics to pray to it, a body coloring itself yellow to seem the much more popular sun.
"Cely," Dad said.
"Yeah?"
"I haven't been a good dad."
"It's fine. Later."
"All this time I told myself. If I was better than my dad, I was okay. But you needed—you needed—"
"Dad."
"Did you really try to kill yourself?"
Cely stared at the Magikarp over his head. Her immediate thought was that MOTHER told him, either personally or via Nilufer, as part of an elaborate plot to draw Aracely back to her. But no matter how she pieced it together she couldn't see any underlying logic, and only after a long time did she realize Mom must have told him.
She didn't say anything.
"Why?" he said, pained.
She wondered how she could possibly explain. "The world seemed to tell a story and I wasn't in it."
It was clear Dad didn't understand. She wasn't sure if what she said reflected reality at all or was simply words that sprouted in her brain. It felt so long ago that it was like stepping outside herself to remember.
"I should have been better," he said finally.
"Dad."
"My only thought was. I only thought."
"Dad, it's okay."
"I felt like I failed life when I lost that match. I thought I'd... redeem myself... if you... if I helped..."
"Rest, Dad."
"I wanted you to win so I could win."
The more Aracely stared at the Magikarp, the more it broke apart, until she started to doubt if it had ever been a Magikarp at all.
"I'll win, Dad."
He said nothing.
"I'll win," she said. "I'll beat Red." Then MOTHER will end the world, and we'll all die happy.
Dad said nothing. Only when she figured he'd fallen asleep did he speak.
"I love you, Cely. Whether you win or lose."
The word she wanted to say, why, did not form. The Magikarp meant absolutely nothing now and it was because her eyes bleared. Watery, the world broke apart.
"I love you too, Dad."
In the morning a different doctor but basically the same doctor entered the room, glanced disapprovingly at Cely, and handed his clipboard to a Chansey nurse before recommending Dad get gastric bypass surgery, a suggestion Dad responded to with way more vigor than Cely expected.
"Nope! None of this nonsense. I won't stay in this hospital an extra minute."
"Mr. Sosa. You're at risk for several obesity-related diseases—"
"I'll walk more. I'll eat more salads. I'll do it myself!"
In the sun his color returned, he shook his fist, he brushed off the protestations of Brittany and Chansey. He looked, essentially, same as ever. Cely wondered how much of the previous night she dreamed as she waved him goodbye, promised she'd check back soon (he assured her she needed to start researching Red), and slinked out behind the doctor during a jargon-filled rebuttal.
Toril worried her now. She somehow didn't own a phone; only her Porygon-Z used her laptop. If she checked out of the hotel already, Cely might never see her again, and this fact filled her with the same urgency as Dad's heart attack. It was like everything all at once started to unravel. A response to the world's final days? Finality as a concept struck her far more strongly than it had before Nilufer's kidnapping attempt.
Every corner concealed a Nilufer as she waded through endless empty hospital sectors, but rounding them exposed white space only. It was the perfect time to nab her, since she forgot to reclaim her Pokémon after the battle (Dad always did that), but nothing happened.
Jinjiao met her in the lobby. "They said you were here," he muttered, "but I must've been asleep."
The twerp sufficed as a bodyguard. She clasped her hands and gave him and his Lopunny a big sincere thank you for saving Dad, assured him Dad was fine, relayed with a casual, exasperated-but-only-mildly-and-in-a-relieved-way eyeroll how he was arguing with the doctor already, how that was just like him, and wow you really were such a hero, weren't you Jinjiao? She nodded attentively as he fumbled through a retelling he thought made him sound cool but boiled down to "I called the ambulance," and because he was thirteen he mistook basic attentiveness for potential romantic interest. Snared.
When she mentioned needing a ride back to the Plateau, he offered to fly her on his Skarmory. Being carried through the air on a sharp metal bird sounded super awful so she steered him toward hitchhiking.
The first motorist they accosted shockingly hadn't heard of either of them. He looked maybe eighty, jowls and warts, and sucked air through his teeth when Jinjiao said they were from the IPL.
"I remember," he said, "before all that. We had more important things to worry about."
"Sure old man. Wars and stuff, big deal."
Ultimately, the man said he was headed to Pallet, the opposite direction.
The second motorist, who looked like anyone's mom except Cely's (plump, pleasant), knew all about them, was so delighted, would have to tell her son, oh he would be so jealous, and of course she'd drive them to the Plateau. The entire drive, besides the obvious questions and calls for autographs, she kept insinuating she would really, really appreciate if they got her two tickets for the grand championship. Jinjiao ruined Cely's vapidly optimistic "I'll see what I can do" with a breakdown of how impossible such a request was. At this point, tickets had been sold out for months. You'd be lucky to find a scalper selling one, cost obscene. The woman frowned. Cely got the impression she didn't actually know who Jinjiao was.
Cely tried to shake Jinjiao when they returned to the hotel but he refused to go. "You know, sure he's the GOAT and all, but I haven't actually been impressed by Red this year. Really showing his age. Dropped a game to Lachlan Nguyen in groups. Not to mention he dropped a game to me, of course. You'll beat him."
"Oh yeah? Won't I destroy the sanctity of battling or somesuch?"
"Heh. Whatever. Guess we all need to evolve."
She looked at him, for a split second convinced he was working for MOTHER the entire time. At the end of an awkward pause she gave him a hug that left him so flustered it was trivial to finally escape.
When she knocked, the door to Toril's room stood silent. Aracely expected this, but behind the door she didn't feel Toril's presence, or any presence at all, which was ominous. Week by week, this hotel, run by the stadium and cordoned for competitors (how Dad got a room, no idea), emptied and emptied until now it was like a horror movie.
A cleaning lady passed.
"Yes, hi," Cely said. "Did the girl in this room check out already?"
"Nope. I'm supposed to clean the room once she does, but I haven't heard a word from the front."
At first, this answer thrilled Cely. She thanked the cleaning lady exuberantly, went to a gift shop in the stadium, picked out some excellent stationery and a cute pink envelope and already paid before she realized she pulled this trick last time. Well, it worked last time. But when she slipped the envelope (Tors! I still want to be friends. Don't you?) under the door, the complete lack of aura remained and Aracely arose with a chill.
She looked around. Hallway to the end one way. Hallway to the end the other. Not even Nilufer was there. Nobody was there. Aracely was completely alone.
Qoheleth
Archivist
- Pronouns
- Any
It's unfortunate. A little unfair, maybe, for a girl whose whole way of seeing the world revolves around connecting to other humans.
But... it's also a fitting "dark night" for her, because this is the world she chose to live in.
She decided that the final narrative of her life would be "ascension", and that this ascension would occur via the precise framing that the IPL has gotten people (even people like Toril) to swallow hook, line, and sinker: the world as an eight billion person Gu Jar, and herself as the critter that survived after everyone else had been winnowed out.
But it was never a suitable narrative for her, was it? "Red as the final boss", in the games, happened not in a League gym, but up on a mountain where nobody sane would dare to go: a world of only two humans. Or, to put it another way: to be the last one standing, by definition, means that no-one else remains.
Chapter 18: Finals |
Chapter 18: Finals |
The Poké Balls in the case were bizarre. Actually, they were proprietary, the patent not yet lapsed. An endless thin finger stroked their webbed surfaces. Small plaques under each ball gave names as unusual as the balls themselves.
"These are the ones we recovered," Nilufer said. "Plus, of course, the canister of fuel."
"It's enough. It'll—it's enough."
"If I may be frank, I consider your anxiousness unwarranted. From my perspective, the obvious failure point is not our capacity to exert sufficient force. Instead, it's that we rely on Bill acting a certain way."
"He'll act." MOTHER's finger lingered, stopped on a certain ball, tapped it. "Bill's like me. A fanatic." Her head lolled and she laughed, bitter. "He might be the only one like me in the entire world."
Her words broke apart, wistfully, as she sank into her chair, limned by the light of Nihilego. Nilufer possessed line enough to her heart to know she thought about Aracely, and enough tact to let those thoughts wallow. The reprimand for Nilufer's failure had not been as severe as it might have been—partially because MOTHER needed her, and partially, Nilufer sensed, as surrender, a shrug similar to the settling of a corpse newly dead, an allowance for fate less malleable than the world itself. I'll never see her again, she had said.
"Nilu, I have—a confession to make. I have not been entirely truthful, in my sermons."
"Of course. There are necessary lies."
"When I opened that hole and looked out, at those other worlds... I said they were similar to ours, only dead. That they died recently or long ago, that the cause was, invariably, Pokémon. Either a single godlike creature or a species that spread like weeds. Worlds wrecked by twisted ripples of time and space, or worlds flooded, or worlds without water, or worlds with toxic air, or worlds where monstrous mouths sucked up anything with flesh. Remember?"
"I remember."
"I lied. Not every world was destroyed by Pokémon."
"I see."
"We encountered other worlds. Worlds with no Pokémon at all. There were other creatures, but not Pokémon."
Though Nilufer previously listened in calm, she became excited unexpectedly, even to herself. "That's amazing. No Pokémon at all? But these worlds were dead, too, yes? How did they end without..."
"Without Pokémon, the intellectual evolution of humanity changed course. The natural world produced few weapons, so they built their own, by means mechanical and scientific. To fight these weapons, they built stronger ones, and stronger, until finally their weapons were strong enough to destroy the world. Which they did."
Behind her veil, MOTHER set her gaze on Nilufer, and Nilufer reflexively looked down, at her own hands.
"I looked at these worlds in disbelief. Because what could it mean? That humanity was simply doomed, no matter what? That if Pokémon didn't evolve to end it all, humanity itself did? That we would always, in the end, become too successful for our own good? Fated suicide?"
"That... can't be true."
"The research we conducted to view these worlds, it required killing Pokémon. We had to kill them, cut them open, and harvest their blood. People don't know, or they know and don't see, but scientific research is like that. Vivisections, exsanguinations, decapitations: they create our pills, they pioneer our technology, they push our boundaries. They stimulate our intellectual evolution. I was willing to do it. It was easy to make myself callous, to harden my heart, knowing the sacrifices I made on the altar of progress would bring down rain. But—if that rain flooded the world—a twisted, ironic vengeance—"
The sentence ended abruptly with the suggestion of a conclusion never given.
"I don't know what's worse. Progressing to end the world or ending progress to prolong it. I want both, I crave both: eternal progress and eternal life. God Nilu, I want it all, grasped in my arms"—her unfathomable arms extended—"the things I cherish and hold beautiful, the things I love, there always with me, always the same, even as I work to make them different, greater, more beautiful—it doesn't make sense, this paradox, the paradox of motherhood. To cradle a baby, loving them for the potential they promise, the better version of yourself they'll grow to be, yet wanting them also to remain a baby forever, yours to nurture, yours entirely... a realized orb of mercy... You have no children. Perhaps you can't understand......... Anyway, I finally found one world that wasn't destroyed."
"With Pokémon? Or without?"
"Without. It had the weapons of mass destruction that destroyed the other worlds. But it survived, because it had those weapons... and chose not to use them."
"Why?"
"Harmony. They attained... harmony. There was no reason to fight. The world's peoples were at peace with one another, like our world, without the threat of another species taking our place."
Nilufer thought it over. "That's why you need Aracely."
"Exactly. That girl is smart, yes, and skilled. But what she's best at is seeing inside others. Understanding them. Controlling them, without them feeling like they're even being controlled. When we rip this world apart and flee to a new frontier, I need her—I thought I needed her—to ensure harmony, so our progress advances solely against the rigors of the natural world, not against ourselves. That is why I needed Aracely Sosa."
"I see," said Nilufer. "I'll go back to the Plateau. I'll get her, no matter what. If you only told me sooner—"
"No."
"No?"
"If she won't come willingly, it defeats the point... especially if she turns against me, as others have before."
"She has already turned."
"She's neutral now. Besides, when I asked you to bring her back, this wasn't what I was thinking about. I was weak. I simply wanted her, in my arms."
"But if we don't have her, how do we achieve this... harmony? Maybe you, MOTHER, may show your face to them, and with their love for you control them—"
"Ah. What a dream. I'm no fool who makes the same mistake twice."
MOTHER lifted. Under the veil her mouth smiled, a peaceful smile suggestive of calm, and Nilufer realized she was in another sermon now, that everything was arranged.
[No, we must ignore harmony, this impossible harmony, and do as evolution demands: find another way. Rage against the odds!]
"Ah... ah..."
[Consider: it's a miracle life exists at all. Even with an infinity of living worlds, there's an even bigger infinity of void. Planets upon planets inhospitable to microbes. That you, me, we exist is a one in quadrillion chance. Life's tendency toward evolution is its way of fighting those odds, fixing the match, transforming luck into fate. That's the key in our DNA—you cannot abandon it now. If evolution itself tends toward destruction, then embrace it all the stronger and evolve past our own fated self-oblivion!]
She spread her narrow arms; they shone.
[Cast aside your pathetic, anti-scientific fears of progress. Progress is life! If progress brings destruction, then progress again, to survive the destruction your own progress wrought. My children, I already know a way. Yes, I already know a way! There is a lifeform, I discovered, able to survive those weapons of mass destruction. If we only—]
She broke off with what Nilufer first thought was a cough, but revealed itself as a laugh:
"Ha, hahaha, hahaha! I don't need Cely. I need nobody. Myself—I've always been able to rely on myself, at least. I have faith in that!"
"Yes," said Nilufer.
"If I can't control others, I must only exert more control over myself."
Nilufer was about to say "Yes" again, but her earpiece chirped. She cupped a hand around her ear. Message from the front desk. Her face diminished.
"Someone's arrived."
"Who? Police? IPL agents? Their psychic bitch?" MOTHER gripped the edge of her desk. "They have nothing. No cause for a warrant."
"It's Toril Lund."
Displaced from reality, Toril spent an indeterminate interval of time in the women's restroom trapped with emotions she failed to parse. One feeling bled into another. Was she sad? Mad? At who? Cely? Herself? Every moment of the battle replayed and she plucked apart errors, missed opportunities, inefficiencies to determine where blame lay but it always came to the ending. Her calculations were correct. Mawile won 99 times out of 100. So should she be mad at—fate? Luck? The world?
When the door opened and buoyant steps clip-clopped at her back she knew it was Cely. Why else did Toril linger in the restroom, than that she expected Cely to appear?
When she turned, though, a mishmash assaulted her. Only when the girl bounced to a sink and examined herself in the mirror did a name manifest: Iunno. Iono.
Toril turned to leave when Iono's voice knifed her in the back: "Hey-y-y."
She staggered. Her knees bent. She imagined herself walking downward, into the floor, until she disappeared underground.
"I have to—go—to sleep," she muttered, still moving.
"When you're dead, friendo! Wanna hear a hot tip? Totally exclusive! Not clickbait!"
"Nrnngh..."
"Book a ticket tomorrow. Paldea. Trust me, I'm in the know. It's not just Terastallization coming next year. They're findin' super duper cuh-razy new Pokémon in Area Zero. You gotta get on this before everyone else!"
New Pokémon. The image of it: capturing, training, et cetera, it drained her blood onto the tile.
"I swear! Pokémon from the past and future. They're callin' em Paradox Pokémon."
Toril stopped. She hadn't been moving anyway. "The future?"
"Rightio. They're made of iron, like robots! Très chouette, non? Sugoi!"
"The future." That word trapped her. She kept thinking it until it broke apart into a meaningless collection of letters, then she thought it until it became real again. "The future. How?"
"Iunno!" Her accent rendered it identical to her name. "But they're mondo strong. Everyone next year will run em. Like the Ultra Beasts."
Unfit. "Why. Why tell me this?"
"We gotta get more consistent storylines," Iono said. "Everyone knows the key to content is consistency. People love to tune into their favorite streamer because they're always there. It's like seeing your friend every day! La vie quotidienne. We need trainers like that at this tournament, familiar faces. People don't get invested when it's a whole new crop every year. So haul your butt to Paldea pronto and keep ahead of the curve. I better see you at IPL 65!"
This world will end on October 12.
Cut. Toril in her hotel room. Lights off, ostensibly attempting to sleep, but she sat on her bed instead of laying down, and she wore the same uniform she battled in. Her Pokémon, though healed, refused to leave their Poké Balls. Incapable of comprehending fate and chance, incapable of comprehending Aracely Sosa, they thought their failure was their own. Heidi took it especially hard.
Maybe it was Heidi's fault, though. If she hit harder, Slowking fainted. Was it Toril who ascribed chance to what was, fundamentally, written within the biology of her Pokémon? When he gambled on bloodsport, her father sought a mathematics, an order or logic, that superseded fundamental randomness. In doing so he vivisected Pokémon to their physical components, strength and speed and defense. How exactly did Toril see the world?
Cut. Morning. Toril sat on her bed. Confusion turned a new trajectory. Did Sosa use her? Every interaction a mental manipulation? Friendship faked to comprehend a series of mental processes like the physical properties Toril used to comprehend her Pokémon? Did Toril, fundamentally, use her Pokémon? Were they not actually her friends, either? Was friendship possible?
Was it possible to know? Was it possible for it to mean anything or only possible for her to believe it meant something?
The phone rang.
For whatever reason Toril intuited this call to be the hotel kicking her out, so she answered. The receptionist told her someone needed to talk to her.
"I'll leave," Toril said. To Paldea? Why not.
"Toril?"
"I'll be gone in an hour."
"Do you remember me?"
The veil ripped. The voice sounded familiar, but. "No."
"I'm your brother."
"Oh. Right." She had brothers. Step-brothers. Much older. She'd seen them only a few times before she left home.
"It's awkward to call like this. Don't feel like you've got any obligation or anything."
"Right."
"Our father, uh, it's hard to say but, he died last night."
"That's"—awareness of the world returned. She grew suspicious—"a trick. He wants money."
"What? No, he's dead. They had me, uh, identify him."
"Like his cough. Everyone is"—Sosa—"everyone needs something from me."
The voice on the other end coughed too. It might be her father, disguising his voice. "He, they tell me he froze to death. He was walking home from, well, from the bar, and passed out in the gutter. The snow covered him up." Cough. "They're not sure if he passed out because he was, uh, drunk, or if it had something to do with this, sorta, poison wound in his side. They wanna do an autopsy. Anyway, you there? Anyway, you don't need to, come back, or anything. We all, we all had to put up with him, in our way. But if it's something you want, the funeral is—next week—October 12. I think Sunday."
Toril hung up. The phone didn't ring again.
Someone knocked on her door. "Tors? You there?"
Nothing.
Cut. Toril, carefully, crawled to the door. She found a card. Tors! I still want to be friends. Don't you?
What more did she want from Toril? All along, Toril could only rely on herself. She opened the window and escaped.
Escape to where? Paldea? Kylind? Traps. Anywhere in the world was open, but no names came. Blundering about the Plateau, where everyone recognized her—still in her uniform—she came across the suspended tram down to Pewter. Nobody was boarding, so she slipped in before the doors closed. Why? To go to Bill's museum, to beg to use his machine?
The silence and the vista as the sun rose over the mountains calmed her. She made a logical assessment that shock and sleep deprivation caused her to think and act strangely. The idea that her father was actually dead seemed true, rather than part of an elaborate scam. Not that it saddened her.
As she tried to decide whether to go back and talk to Aracely, the billboard appeared. [Evolve yourself. RISE.]
Evolve herself? Her life philosophy. From childhood she warred against the innate baseness of her existence. No mentor taught her. Their voices her entire life said only: Unfit. In the wild she stood atop a peak and saw lightning writhe thick as veins. Malnourished, half mad, she dared them to strike her—they did not. Since then she believed in an order to the world, a logic, a design, a something, some inner mechanism, and that if only she became attuned to the mathematics by which it operated she might climb the bodies of the others. In isolated towns in northern Kylind, she scoured paltry libraries to affirm her thoughts and so learned about EVs, IVs, optimal movesets, innate physical capacities of various species. She sought powerful types, evolved them, evolved alongside them. With them she meditated by waterfalls, in forest glens, within serenity and turbulence, and learned from their bodies the world's inner workings. Creatures changed to fit the world, so from their shapes she saw the invisible forms against which they molded themselves. A battle was the same way, a line unseen but nonetheless preordained, leading to a final moment—an out—and the key was to see that out before you reached it, to discern it by the way the invisible line bent the Pokémon that participated.
In the end, Cely was the same. Except the line she saw bent the trainers, not their Pokémon. Toril recognized that, and so evolved herself to account for it. And it worked—until the line itself betrayed her. Until the inner mathematics of the world spat an outcome wholly, unfairly random: chance, not fate.
The RISE Health & Wellness Clinic was one of three notable buildings in Pewter City, the others being the museum and the gym. It was, Toril realized only when her feet took her toward its entrance, visible from everywhere in the city.
It was a giant—purple—cube.
Nowhere on its façade were the words Health & Wellness Clinic or even RISE. Only the upward-facing arrow that Aracely once wore as jewelry signified the building's intention. No other buildings were within one hundred feet, so it rose from a flat plane as though it once hurtled out of space and impacted with enough concentrated force to annihilate anything in a certain radius. After millennia the crater filled with silt and grass regrew, and now a field of flowers swayed around it, but a pulse of otherworldly radiation remained, urging subconsciously to keep away, for it was a thing neither to be touched nor trusted.
Toril approached the cube. All in this city was quiet.
Heavy doors opened onto a strangely modern lobby. An angled counter housed four robed secretaries with nothing to do except stare smiling as Toril entered. A room adjacent contained figures in yoga contortions on mats, as a smooth-voiced instructor exhorted them to "reach inside" for their "true potential." On a television, words faded into existence over clouds: [Have you ever believed there must be something... More?]
"Welcome," said the secretaries. "Please, come here."
Behind the counter, signboards indicated daily itineraries. 15:00—aerobics. 15:45—cardio. 16:30—pursuit of knowledge. 18:45—resistance training. 19:00—ANSWERS (meal 3). 20:00—healing. The next day promised a seminar on cancer.
"Have you lost yourself?" said one secretary.
"Do you wish to be stronger?" said another.
"Please, take these materials." A third handed over a stack of pamphlets and a printed book: DNA: The Unbroken Lines of History, by MOTHER. On the cover, lightning sprouted from a purple sky.
"This way." The fourth opened a divider in the counter and indicated a door. "You're just in time for the free screening."
"What is this place," Toril asked.
"This way. The screening will explain everything."
Toril glanced back. Two smiling robed people stood by the doors now. She almost laughed at the nakedness of the tactic. They underestimated Toril Lund's capacity to violate social faux pas.
Before she turned, though, all eight—eight now—of the robed people snapped to attention. From the doorway opposite the yoga room, someone she recognized appeared.
"Nilufer," said Toril.
"Toril," said Nilufer. "What a great honor to receive you. May I inquire as to the purpose of your visit?"
"You want to know if Cely sent me."
Nilufer kept her hands clasped, though it was impossible to see them because of her long sleeves. Anything might be concealed there.
"Would you come with me? Given you're a VIP, I'll give you a personal tour of the campus."
Toril's own hands rested casually—what she thought was casual—on the Poké Balls affixed to her belt.
"Sure."
"This way, please."
As she followed Nilufer through the door, Toril felt the line again. Her veins, lightning, DNA double helix. Wild fantasies of the next five minutes slideshowed across her aching eyeballs. The whiteness of the cube's interior grew dizzying as the doors brought her into a space of uncertain purpose, where the robed people inside immediately left upon their entry.
Nilufer stopped in the center, back to Toril. Ostentatiously vulnerable. "You seem tired."
"I slept bad."
"You haven't slept in days. You know, a healthy body is the first step toward a healthy mind, and vice versa. That's one of RISE's core tenets."
"What wisdom."
"How tempted are you by death, Toril?"
The question didn't sound real. "Huh?"
"When I heard you were here, I did think Cely sent you. She's far too good at getting people to do what she wants."
"Yep."
"But you came of your own volition."
"Who can say? Maybe I only think so. Maybe Cely mentioned something five days ago knowing I'd lose the battle on a one percent chance, knowing the loss would put me in such-and-such state of mind, knowing I'd then remember her words subconsciously and come to what I thought was my own conclusion. Playing to her outs."
"Her—outs?"
"A saying."
"I'm unfamiliar."
This area was all tile, all white, filled with a veneer of steam that only confirmed its existence in such belabored stillness. Notches in the walls for showers. No curtains. No indication of division by gender.
"I don't think that's the case anyway." Nilufer turned and pulled her sleeved arms apart to reveal two empty hands, which she held at her sides. "Maybe I can help you, though. Would you enjoy a massage?"
Defenses burst from the ground and sequestered Toril into an unassailable square.
"A—a what?"
"A massage," Nilufer repeated. "It's one of my skills as a human being."
"You're insane!"
"A steam bath and massage offer many therapeutic benefits. Relaxation, stress and pain relief, improved blood flow, lowered blood pressure, muscle repair, detoxification."
"This is—it's nonsense. What does this have to do with anything?"
"It's why you're here, isn't it?"
"For a massage? No."
"For connection." Nilufer's robes rippled. All air was warm. "For harmony."
"There's no such thing."
"For solace."
Toril's posture loosened. In her drowsiness she laughed. It was—it had to be—an attempt to distract. So when the knife lashed out—but there was no knife. Arms held outward and upward, Nilufer's sleeves rolled down veinless arms. Toril noticed pale crescent moon scars on each wrist.
"Are those..."
"It's common, here," Nilufer said. "Aracely has them too."
She too.
"Okay," Toril said. "What more do I have to lose?"
She stripped herself bare, remembering the state of her body while the loose white robe contained her gelatinizing form within the sauna. Supposed relaxation was, in fact, a test of endurance, a heat dripping out her every pore, but one word of many—detoxification—consumed her brain and she imagined her spite escaping with the contaminated sweat and also the idea that Nilufer waited outside the cabinet door to bring down the knife and how apathetic Toril was to that thought. She swayed.
When Aracely gave her clothes Toril insisted on retreating to the bathroom to change, never an inch of herself revealed. Her body, Toril once thought, was an affront, and for others to view it the highest embarrassment. Seeing Nilufer's wrists, imagining Aracely's, her mindset changed: her body was still an affront, but a weapon she possessed even nude, even shed of her Pokémon.
As she lay facedown on the table, covered by only a strip of cloth, her head turned to her outfit—cleaned, pressed, folded—on a square object of no other discernable purpose, her Poké Balls and a pink card arranged atop. She waited for Nilufer to enter, to see the cataclysm of Toril's skin, the scars and blotches, the waves of purple from wounds poorly healed, the chunks of flesh missing. Her hands, spread on either side, with no gloves: fragments of fingers like stones of an ancient civilization rising out the sand. Grotesque and unseemly body hair, uneven because so many slices of her had been shorn off to the quick. This was Toril Lund. The her only she saw, the her that was worse than the her she actually showed. Both the creatures of this world and the world itself had bitten her, eaten parts of her. Dragon fangs or sharp rocks at the base of an incline, all the same. Relaxation? What remained to relax? Her own underlying form lost its order. No part of her surface remained according to natural design, unmodified by violent alteration.
She laughed when Nilufer came in. The room was so white—so faded by steam—and Nilufer herself so faded—anyone who came in here would be faded—except Toril, the human blot. Nilufer said nothing and Toril wished she detected perturbation, disgust, but while her laughter grew coarse and thorny Nilufer's oiled hands slathered Toril's back and shoulders.
"Here's evolution for you," Toril said. By the end of it she was crying, for herself, for the parts that remained.
Afterward they let her go. She dragged herself and melted blobs of her remained in her wake, until she shambled onto a park bench and descended into a deep and dreamless slumber.
- Location
- England
Cockroach-humanity for the win?
Fan Art: Aracely, by Mel
This was Cely's counter-attack against Nilufer.
Chapter 19: Finals |
Chapter 19: Finals |
By midweek Aracely knew she would never see Toril again.
Suddenly Saturday. Twenty-four hours remained. The week burst apart like air. Illusory time. One million obligatory interviews promotional shoots fan interactions and every other moment spent on battle preparations, Red Akahata's eight known Pokémon, one hidden all this time, and Cely thought: Yes, it must be exciting somehow. Though hard to top Shedinja. Shuckle, Smeargle, Eiscue, Pyukumuku, Pachirisu—she compiled a list of niche goobers just in case.
Then she was in a helicopter. Kanto passed below and Mom, seat opposite, stared under the overpowering whirr of the rotors. Red watched out a window and said nothing.
They landed atop a skyscraper in Saffron. Blinding light rose off the towers and it was a tough choice whether to shield eyes or ears as they escaped down a staircase. Mom led the way, striding, but when she wheeled sharply at a bend to grip Cely's shoulders, Red kept going, already aware of his direction.
"You let the Old Man speak."
"Sure, Mom. Why wouldn't I?"
"No. You don't get it. You let him speak. You don't say anything. He may sometimes sound like he wants your input. He doesn't. Every question is rhetorical."
"Then why am I here?"
"He needs someone to listen."
On a whim Cely said, "Dad's doing better."
Mom took in air. She put on a smile. "Good. I'm glad. It would be a better world if everyone in it... did... better."
In the penthouse, all glass walls to float over the city, a long table was set with three plates of luxurious but sparse seafood. Red already sat at one, and the Old Man, withered, crumbling to dust, at another. At the head.
"Fiorella Fiorina," he said, his voice a recording on burning film. "Charming and lovely, as always. They still send you on these errands?"
"I do anything necessary, sir," Mom said.
"They ought to have made you broadcast director years ago. Why on earth not?"
Mom said nothing, but smiled, ingratiating and self-effacing.
"I'll see what I can arrange." The Old Man unfolded a lace napkin and tucked it into his neck to protect his bowtie.
Mom glanced potently at Cely and left.
The Old Man was encased in a stealth designer suit beyond even Aracely's capacity to brand-identify, but it didn't conceal the decrepitude of his body, the skull showing through skin, the translucent hair, and the triangular patch of discoloration from eyebrow to temple. Pinned neatly to his lapel was the IPL's original logo, from a time before logos became the world's first form of expression: a golden circle, an hourglass shape within dividing it into four segments, three reading I \ P / L, and the bottom, much smaller, ⅂ԀI.
Though the Old Man didn't fit this century, Red didn't fit the room. Amid every conceivable finery—finest wood, finest cloth, finest decorative plants, finest china, finest food, finest carpet, finest chandelier—he sat hunched, head down, dirty baseball cap covering his eyes, stubble on his chin, filth on his jacket, filth on the fingers sticking out his fingerless gloves, filth under his fingernails. Only Aracely belonged here, a fact she knew and that she thought both of them knew.
"Satoshi," the Old Man said, "this is, I believe, the seventh time we've spoken."
Red's caked layer of dirt seemed to spread out from him, curdling the room's beauty inch by inch.
"And Aracely. I spoke to your father, once, twenty years ago. Of course, I'm well acquainted with your darling mother, whom you resemble so strongly. My blessing—some say curse, I say blessing—has been to watch time change."
Aracely shifted her fork. Neither the Old Man nor Red ate; the food sat like offerings. The Old Man contemplated space and time, and no matter how dead he looked, his voice remained alive. Kindly, even, the universal grandfather. Aracely never met her grandfather, but the tape of Dad's finals began with this Old Man. Still old, even then, but not impossibly so, he gave a dedication: Here age relives fond memories of the past... and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future.
"I don't believe I've ever spoken to the child of one to whom I've spoken before. No, I do not believe. This world always gives something new, doesn't it?" That sepia-tinged form of him transposed onto this one, compounding the brown smear that emanated from Red. The Old Man cleared his throat horrifically and adjusted his lapel pin. "That's why I've called you here, of course. I always insist on meeting my finalists. It's important, I feel, to gauge how the world has progressed. To ensure it's moving along the correct path.
"I, too, was young once; I too was young. Then, the future of the world was still so, uncertain. So many hands pulling so many directions. So many directions seeming so dark. Which way would the world go? Everyone with a voice bellowed: I see the future! History was a line, and its direction ordained. Of course, they all saw a completely different direction. So who was right? Was anyone?
"After the War, and my service ended, I came to this region to help it rebuild. I saw people blinking, looking around at their broken homes and lives, their broken dreams and ideals. People in despair. Disillusioned. Those who once believed themselves to be, uh, chosen by fate, now cursed their bad luck. Had the whole thing been luck? Was there no true order, no grand narrative, no universal truth? Things I saw in the War... no. No, I'm traveling the wrong boulevards.
"Amid the rubble I saw two young children. Too young to understand why their world was now this... waste land... they simply accepted it as 'the way things are.' They were playing a game, with Pokémon they caught scrounging the rubble, rope leashes around their necks. A Pidgey and a Rattata, I believe. They'd devised a game, with rules, to determine which was stronger, and rather than a fight to the death, they pulled away at the pivotal moment, to cradle and nurse their tired Pokémon, with the tender mercy children always feel.
"That image, stirred my soul."
The Old Man took a breath. A hard, rasped inhalation.
"There was a world, I saw in that moment, shining brightly, the future. A world where, the violent impulses, that led to so much... squandered life... could be aimed another way. A way of peace and progress. Where children would grow old, remembering only that world, would love it, and strive to maintain it in their adulthoods. That's the meaning and purpose of nostalgia... I, too, was young once; I too was young. Long may it last."
Breath. Breath.
He regarded the glass band that enveloped the penthouse, as though the towers of Saffron were the full scope of the world.
Breath.
"Now, I understand everything. During the War, winners and losers weren't chosen by chance. Now I see... everything... was meant to be this way. Because this world is better than all others in human history. It can't be luck. No. It was industry, creativity, vision, and a spirited drive to do what was right. Good prevails. Those I speak to must all be good, because they are the ones... who share my qualities. That is the meaning of the sport. To create those who may love even those they master. When the powerful love, then the world will always be made better."
Breath. Breath. Breath. Slowly, the Old Man reached under the table. He pulled up a mask, which he pressed to his mouth, and breathed. He returned the mask under the table. The entire time he stared fixedly at Aracely.
"You do not belong here," he said.
Cely was unable to stop herself from smiling. She looked from the Old Man to Red and back, Red having no recognition at all of the words said. Only Mom's warning kept her from immediate response, which allowed the Old Man to continue:
"Oh but they love you. Those parasites, the ones who never belonged themselves, those advertising agents and financiers. They come to me and say, viewership is skyrocketing! As if that alone matters, as if we built this world to make money, when we make money to build the world. They come to me and say, this is how we crush that Battler's Union once and for all. HAH. Who do they think made the Union? And why? A unifying philosophy! People and Pokémon! Working together! Warrior-philosophers, warriors of the spirit. People with power who choose not to use it. Only that way... only that way..."
He tugged his mask to his face. Cely took fork and knife and cut into the flesh of the fish on her plate, still smiling.
"Your father failed you," the Old Man said. "He learned all the wrong lessons. It was never to win at all costs. Never. It was never to grow old and bitter. But to learn, that your love for your Pokémon... that love...! Is more important... Our trainers learn the lesson and surrender willingly, in the end, rather than discard their loved ones to try again. Perhaps it was the circumstances, how close he was, robbed, one might say, by bad luck alone... Then the divorce, plunging him into a world where he could only live in the past... His nostalgia became corrupted. They failed you, your parents. They created a monster."
Cely actually didn't eat fish. Of course they didn't ask for dietary restrictions beforehand. So she simply cut it up. An abstracted Magikarp.
"Is that so?" she said. "I'm the only one at this tournament who seems to even have parents."
She motioned at Red, to give him chance for rebuttal, and took his silence as agreement. Mom told her not to talk, but what would the Old Man do? Disqualify her?
He breathed into his mask. One, two, three times.
"A whole parentless world," she said. "Isn't it unbelievable? Everyone gives me shit, and for what? Because my Dad helped me? As if there can't be any sort of, of, of continuity? Everyone leaves home at ten to relearn everything from scratch, on their own, every time? That's what you call progress? Or is that by design, too. A world of perfect stasis, because nobody can ever grow past a certain point before they reset? A world where present and past are the same. That's what you mean by nostalgia, right? A field of flowers, blooming, repeating. Yeah it's always pretty but... you've eliminated the line of history, you've turned it into a point."
The words came out strangely angry. Cely was so good at controlling herself, but these words bounced out of her head the moment she opened her mouth, and she couldn't tell how many of them were hers and how many MOTHER's. Why did it matter, anyway, when the world ended tomorrow?
"Ignorance," the Old Man said. "Stasis? Haven't you seen the leaps technology has made? On timetables nobody imagined! That's progress! Bill Masaki, and those scientists at Silph Co., and the other great corporations, the things they've done... Interconnected digital storage systems. Poké Balls so cheap even a child can afford them. Devices that heal Pokémon in seconds. Technical Machines, move tutors. We can go into a Pokémon's DNA and alter their IVs, EVs, abilities, natures. We created a Pokémon! Porygon, we created something from nothing! And you think there's no progress? You can't tell me that. I lived it. I saw what this world was before. I saw this world laid bare, the cruel hard world lurking beneath this one I've created. It's a utopia compared to that hellfire!"
He, too, was young once; he too was young. And the world progressed according to his vision. And science developed gadgets useful to that world's maintenance. Looking back at the past, the line seemed to have always been destined to lead where one stood. There was only ever one possible outcome, this one. Long may it last.
But the Old Man, sucking his mask, was weary. Aracely peered into his mind and saw him, so weary, propping up a dam with his feeble body, praying that all his efforts in life weren't simply so that, once the dam broke, it burst forth even more ferociously than before.
She didn't need to respond.
The Old Man lowered the mask. Breath. Breath. His eyes flitted to an arbitrary corner of the room, as though something awaited him there. Then he loosed a desiccated, threadbare chuckle. "They say they can't do without you," he muttered. "And all the money you'll make them. I'll show them I mean what I say about money. I'll show them how much I'm willing to pay." His chuckle descended into a cough. He gripped the table and waved her away with the hand that gripped the mask. "Now go. I've said all I want."
Immediately, Red rose. He tucked his chair into the table and left, Poké Balls jangling on his pocket. Which was interesting, because they confiscated Cely's Pokémon (yes, she actually started carrying them) before she boarded the helicopter, citing "regulation."
What happened next was insane, but somehow she expected it. In the anteroom outside the Old Man's chamber, three people waited, plus Mom. Red was already vanishing around a corner. Two of the three moved toward Cely. They were men, one middle-aged and one younger, wearing ties but no jackets.
"Cely, you don't have to tell them anything," Mom said.
"Aracely Sosa, would you come with us for a minute," said the middle-aged man. Under his bushy mustache, he maneuvered a toothpick left and right.
"No, I don't think I will," Cely said.
The younger guy, tactically nondescript, shook his head. "Wrong answer."
"You don't have to say a word to them Cely. Not a word. What they're doing is completely out of line. It's a violation of rights."
As the middle-aged man placed a hand, firm but not brusque, on Cely's shoulder, she stared at the third person, who sat in a chair more decorative than functional. A woman with dark hair and a severe expression, though levied at a pattern in the carpet rather than at Cely. She wore a close-fitting maroon tracksuit and she was terrifying, because Cely knew exactly who she was. As if she read Cely's mind—no, there was no "as if"—she turned her eyes to Cely, gripped the armrests of her chair, and stood.
"Good," the woman said. "I don't need to introduce myself. That saves time."
"This way, Sosa," said the middle-aged man.
"Cely. Don't tell them anything. Don't let that woman scare you. Nothing she says is admissible in a court of law. They can't break all their own rules. Cely! They want to intimidate you. Don't say a word to them."
Mom followed the carpeted path the men led her down, shouting all the while. The younger man turned and barred her way. "You'll need to wait there, ma'am. If your daughter's innocent, there's nothing to worry about."
"Bastard! Goosestepping fascist! You can't do this. Do you have any idea who I fucking am? The people I know?"
"Don't worry, we know you, Miss Fiorina."
"I'll have your fucking jobs. I'll have them, I swear. Even yours, you fucking fraud bitch!" She fired a finger at the back of the woman in the tracksuit.
"We're just doing our jobs, ma'am. You should be sympathetic. Didn't you get caught up in the last terrorist attack?"
"My daughter isn't a—Cely! Cely!" Although the middle-aged man led Cely around a corner, she still heard Mom screaming. "Cely don't say a word! I'll get you out of there Cely. Cely!"
They sat Cely in a small, gray, windowless room that was ostensibly still on the penthouse floor. The two men did a classic good cop bad cop routine (middle-aged good, younger bad) that Cely tuned out as they paced back and forth. Her eyes remained riveted to the woman, who stared back.
What would the Old Man do, disqualify her? That thought exposed itself as pathetic naivete, the only consolation being they planned this trap regardless of how she acted at dinner. It was Saffron City of all places, why didn't she see this coming the moment she got on the helicopter? In this soulless room, under the bare buzz of a lone light, the throbbing intensity of her fear pervaded every cognizant inch of self.
It had to be her. Nobody else, certainly not these two IPL secret police, provoked even a flinch. But her, this woman Cely knew so well, because for six years between age eleven and seventeen she hung on Cely's wall, a glossy poster where she posed in a white tuxedo with purple trim, one arm extending a top hat, from which confetti burst to form a word: READ. The pose and colors were meant to look whimsical, but the woman wore the same severe expression then (she'd been a teenager when they took the photo) as now, which made the image somehow unnerving, as if even that flat copy was READing your mind. Charlie gave Cely the poster as an overture of earnest friendship at a pubescent time where such things still seemed possible, a point of common interest that tethered them despite the growing rift in their respective personalities. Psychic powers. If anyone in this world was truly psychic, if anyone's existence kept alive the hope that you, too, might be able to read minds, might be special, then it was this woman, the woman who presided silent over Aracely's adolescence, the woman who waited for the two men to finish their spiel before taking her turn:
Sabrina, gym leader of Saffron City.
"Girl's not talking," said the middle-aged agent.
"You're here for a reason," the younger said to Sabrina. "Work your magic, if you've really got it."
They stepped aside. Sabrina pulled out a chair at the small table and sat staring into Cely's eyes. On her bangs, there was something that didn't exist on the poster: a single gray hair.
The problem with facing a mind reader was that the more you tried not to think about something, the more you thought about it. From the videos Cely once watched, Sabrina was only capable of scraping surface-level thoughts, not delving into the abyss of memory. ("A human has a lifetime's worth of memories, whether they consciously remember them or not. It would take a lifetime to parse.") Nor could she read the subconscious, the unconscious, dreams, any psychological strata beyond the waking world.
That made everything doable. Because Aracely—
"Well? What's she thinking?" the younger agent said.
"Nothing illuminating, yet," said Sabrina.
"What baloney."
Because Aracely had practice. Years of visitations to Dad's condo, where Brittany poked around her mind. Years shutting her out entirely, or modulating what exactly she—
"Gardevoir is an empathic psychic type," Sabrina said. "It reads emotions, not rational thoughts. It is different from me."
"Huh?" said the younger agent. He was about to say more, but his partner stopped him.
"It seems you can control yourself in a vacuum, at least," Sabrina said. "Tell me about RISE."
Unlike the agents, Aracely was too afraid to simply ignore her. An associative image appeared: MOTHER, parasol, veil, office—
And she abruptly rewound, sharp and straight to the thought that once sent Brittany sobbing to Dad, of razor blades across wrists, blood flowing out, all over the bathroom tile, back then it was only fantasy, now she drew on memory and left her past self dying on the ground before Sabrina, an offering bleached and corpselike.
Sabrina's eyes shut slowly. "One of my colleagues was a soldier. He fought in secret wars that aren't supposed to exist. Though he doesn't try, sometimes corpses bubble to the surface. Now tell me, does MOTHER plan to attack the stadium tomorrow?"
"No," Cely said quickly, maybe too quickly, though her carefully collated suicide self lifted her head off the tile to say it's true, absolutely true, there is no plan, Cely knows of no plan, that was the whole point, why she did it the way she did.
"Did what?" Sabrina asked.
Cely led her to a dark room, the only light streaking in a single ray between the curtains, the ghostly form of a woman sitting on her bed, and then as Sabrina tried to puzzle this image Cely came at her from behind with an axe, the blade cleaving into her skull, splitting the brains of that woman in the white tuxedo, spraying the poster with blood as Cely stood heaving over Charlie's corpse, bringing the axe back up for a second swing—
"Juvenile," Sabrina said. "Let's return to that room. What did MOTHER tell you then? What is RISE planning?"
Sabrina circled closer and closer to some truth. But the truth was—Aracely didn't know the truth. MOTHER never told her. It was Nilufer who'd know. Nilufer. That name conjured a new image of a loading dock, Cely gagged and bound, while Toril Lund stared down a bizarre device with two barrels.
Sabrina's eyes opened. "Did that really happen?"
"Yes," Aracely whispered.
"Hm." The intensity of her gaze angled into the table. Her brow creased, revealing a face more wrinkled than it first appeared. Aracely focused on the single strand of gray in her bangs. How old was she now?
"Thirty-five," Sabrina muttered aimlessly, then looked up. "Please understand that I am not an agent. I do not typically conduct interviews such as these." A stilted, deliberate delivery; she weighed each word before speaking. "I am here because I was told I may prevent a catastrophe akin to IPL 51. I decided preventing something like that would be something I want. I am uninterested in punitive measures. If you are truly a victim of RISE—"
"Victim?" the younger agent said. "That's MOTHER's right-hand girl. Some victim!"
"Shut up," said the middle-aged agent.
"Forget this crap. Ask her who stole Bill Masaki's flash drive."
A yellow Azumarill flashed in her mind before she had a chance to tamp it down.
"She did," Sabrina said. "Using her Pokémon." Did the character of her stare change?
"Hear that, Sosa? You're cooked. Property theft, oh boy."
"I said shut up," said the middle-aged agent.
The flash drive wasn't what they cared about. The middle-aged guy didn't say it, but he knew Mom was right: statements Sabrina claimed to read off someone's mind wouldn't fly in court. Wasn't Cely better aware than anyone? Half the world thought Sabrina was a faker, Mom and Dad included. Her powers—mind reading, small weight telekinesis, horoscope-tier precognition—were indistinguishable from any TV magician.
"Why did you steal the flash drive, Aracely."
The IPL promoted Sabrina to gym leader when she was twelve, two years after her abilities supposedly manifested. (Details from a Wikipedia article once read, reread, read again.) Either she was a marketing gimmick or they knew exactly what she was, and if they put her in this room now that answer was clear. Yet they never made an effort to conclusively prove to the world she was real. In fact, dressing her up in a stage performer's tuxedo and top hat for literacy posters, did they want people to call her a fraud all along?
"Aracely. Answer my question."
Even these agents think you're full of crap, Sabrina. Isn't that interesting? What has the IPL been doing with you? Keeping you on a leash? The way they've kept Bill, and Silph Co., and all those so-called innovators? Aracely knew what you truly meant because she once believed it herself: the next step in humanity's evolution, a genetic mutation proving a direction the world would one day go, someone special, and that's why they put you in the gilded box of Saffron City, one block away from their headquarters, the perfect place to keep you contained.
"Aracely!"
Thirty-five. Unmarried. No children. They're just waiting for you to dry up inside. To let those special genes die with you. Because you threaten their order. Like Aether Foundation, blackballed the instant it became clear what that technology could do. How lonely are you, Sabrina?
Sabrina stared, and stared, and stared.
What life do you live? Alone, in some nice home they let you own, with Pokémon that unnerve you because so often you seem more like them than your own species, a feeling you can't stand. You can't even be righteously angry at your situation. The IPL has been magnanimous. An earlier era you're burnt at the stake, a witch. A less peaceful or egalitarian epoch and they spirit you away into some lab to be vivisected and weaponized. This world is the best possible world, like the Old Man said, and the tragedy for you is that even in utopia you're alone, so pathetically alone. Isn't it true? Because I felt that way too. I took a step and fell out this world and realized. That's why I slashed my wrists. Have you ever tried to hurt yourself, Sabrina?
"She's in my head," Sabrina said, stunned.
"What the fuck? You're gonna say she has psychic powers too now?"
"I don't know." Sabrina rubbed a temple. "I don't—I don't think she does. But..."
The middle-aged guy stepped forward and slammed a palm hard on the table, startling Sabrina to a jolt, startling Cely too. "Answer her fucking question! Did MOTHER make you steal Bill's flash drive?"
She didn't. And it was true.
"She didn't," Sabrina said. "It's true."
"No it fucking isn't. Why else would she steal it?"
Cely didn't know. A whim, a sense; serendipity.
"She doesn't know," Sabrina said. "S... serendipity..."
"The flash drive's a distraction anyway, what is RISE doing tomorrow? How will they attack the stadium?"
They won't.
"They won't," Sabrina said.
"They're gonna do something. We know they are. What happens tomorrow? What happens on October 12?"
The world ends.
"The world ends," Sabrina said. She awoke from her daze and pierced Cely with a questioning stare. "What does that mean?"
Cely had no idea. MOTHER never once told her.
The younger agent scoffed. "I can't believe this."
I can.
"She can," Sabrina said. When both agents gave her a death glare, her eyes went straight down into the tabletop.
"Alright, out of the chair."
"Let the professionals handle this."
And they handled it, the way they knew how, with shouting and intimidation, pacing back and forth while she spoke not a single word. Sabrina remained in the corner, watching her feet and only sometimes turning eyes toward Cely. As the agents' words became a meaningless drone, Cely imagined the READ poster, the face in that tuxedo still so severe, so alone, no matter what guise they wrapped her in. Wasn't that why Cely eventually tore the poster off her wall?
Tragedy. One special flower, cut and displayed under a glass dome. Cely wasn't like that. She wouldn't end up that way. None of them, not the IPL or Mom or Dad or MOTHER, none of them would control her. She alone, shining, as the story ended forever.
Eventually, Sabrina excused herself for a drink of water, and never returned.
Hours of yelling passed before a pounding came at the door. It opened a crack, someone whispered, the agents grimaced. With terse, pissy flicks of their hands, they told Aracely to scram.
Mom met her in the hall. She gripped Cely by the arm, dragged her close, and walked shielding her from the eyes of the agents at their backs. "That Old Bastard thinks he's all-powerful," Mom hissed. "It's not twenty years ago, buddy. I called every single member of the politburo. Even his loyalists. You should've heard them when I explained he was trying to sabotage his own finals! HAH."
Hand clenched around Cely's wrist, she led her to an elevator. The sun was down and all windows they passed were full of city lights that twinkled like stars.
"The helicopter left, so I had to bring the car. It's in the garage." She said this like bringing the car was what took her so long.
Buttons lit up in sequence to track their descent down the skyscraper's hundred floors. In silence Mom and Cely stood together, watching.
Suddenly Mom turned and wrapped her arms around her. She drew Cely in, bony body all angles as her chin touched Cely's forehead. "Promise me," she whispered, "promise me this is the last battle."
"I promise," Cely whispered back. She slid her phone out of her pocket just in time to watch 11:59 tick over to the next day.
1 internet dollar says Red's last pokémon is his starter. Charizard. Specs or MegaY or something so he can pretend it fulfills a role on his team as a wallbreaker but really only there because he's old. He's tired and sentimental. And he wanted his oldest friend to get recorded in the hall of fame just one (more?) time.