Chapter Text
"Well, well," Zetta said, turning full attention to Aya, who only regarded him in return. "I'm pretty sure that's against the rules of battling."
"Anything is allowed in a fight," Aya says as he throws out an oddish, aimed right at her head. Cheshire explodes out from his ball and smacks it down with a wing, screeching provocations and soaring out overhead. "Especially considering I bet you know how to use that stupid thing in the sky and we don't. You have trucks of people and we don't. I'm pretty sure the balance is stacked in your way regardless. Too bad you just suck."
Zetta laughed and crossed his arms. "That machine of yours very much puts things in your favor." He watched her face as he continued. "Mind putting it away for me?"
"Yea," Aya said in the best imitation of a desert imaginable. "I do actually." She whistled and Cheshire dove, only to meet a hard helmet and beady green eyes. The creature flexed its legs and gave a rough shove, sending Cheshire back into the air.
"Nice one, Zepto," cooed his trainer, grinning at them. "We're sitting pretty with you, huh?" The creature growled underneath the helmet.
"Nerd," Melia whispered before she could stop herself, only to shriek as the… thing rushed towards her, perhaps towards the sound of her voice. Aya didn't even think. She rammed into the chimera with as much strength as she could muster, and threw it off course. It skidded across the grass, snarling and dragging its front foot deeper into the dirt to keep from splashing into the water.
Aya, for her part, only looked incensed. Melia swore she could see small embers flicker at the ends of her hair. "Learn to take a pot shot!" she snapped and yes, there it was, fire wrapping around her fingertips that was almost impossible to see in the setting sun. "Or a joke! High strung fuckboy!"
"We need to talk about you saying "fuck" on a regular basis," Melia said with a face that looked somewhat similarly disgusted and horrified. "You're twelve."
"I've said much worse." She rolls her shoulders, hearing them crack like the wings she sometimes wishes were there. "All the weird things in my life give me a get out of jail free card on saying fuck. Now get to somewhere remotely defense worthy."
"What are you going to do?"
"Get this guy off of us, what else?" Aya raised her hands, daring the growling monster to try. She had a shadow eevee, seen an absol up close for the fifth time in her life, had to reveal her even the bare bones of her secret to who equaled a purity sue, she wasn't afraid of shit at this point, especially not a pokemon she couldn't identify. "I know what I'm doing Melia, get ready to run off."
She did not, in fact, know what she was doing. But it was fight or flight at this point and lest she start literally flying, fighting was just as good.
Melia, unfortunately, kept picking up pieces of her spine to act like she had a backbone. "And leave you behind with this guy? No thanks!"
"Which one of us knows how to fight? Because I don't think it's you." Aya licked sweat from her mouth. "Go!" She refused to take her eyes off of blondie over there, who didn't exactly scream threat, but he still didn't feel right. It was like her nose and eyes were getting two different chain emails.
Zetta smiled. "Well well, trouble in paradise." He whistled and the Zepto creature (was that a nickname or a name she could not tell) leaped for Aya this time, crashing and slamming its rusty helmet into her throat. She wheezed and lifted up a knee but it held firm, three toed feet gouging into her shoulders. "Let me make this easy for you girls now, because blondie over there is living up to her stereotype of one brain cell to rub together. Put down the snag machine and leave, and I'll let you live. This time."
Aya raised an eyebrow, struggling to lift it. "What if I refuse?"
"I let Zepto knock you into my little Rifty friend over there. I know which one I choose. Do you?"
Aya took a deep breath and started to push, blood seeping from her arms and thighs and calves as she pushed Zepto slowly up into the air and rolled him off. "How about I just kill you instead?" she panted, managing to glare. "That sounds smarter."
Both of them stared at her for a moment. Aya didn't turn her gaze away, she made herself look and look at the expression ripping up Zetta's face, like he'd never heard someone say something so matter-of-factually before to him. Then, as if moved by instinct alone, Zetta snapped his fingers.
The ugly red bruise in the sky let out a singular pulse. The hair at the back of Aya's neck stood on end and her mouth went dry. The bruise then twisted and jerked, wind rising in slow, soft tumbles that picked up, scooping around her boots and dousing the embers in her fingers..
Zetta laughed, but it was shaky, wet, scrambling for composure. "You talk awful tough when it's just me. But this'll set you straight. Don't say I didn't give you an out." He raised a hand. "Rifty! Eat her!"
There was nothing at first, only the wind, only a slow drag at her heels. Then the bruise groaned and creaked, shaking like a battered fence. Aya scrambled for her pokeballs and Pich leaped into her hood with a squeak, leaving eevee staring at Zetta with empty eyes.
And like jumpluff in the wind, Aya was in the air, soaring away from the ground. Melia leaped to catch her, her fingers closing around her ankle for a second-
Only to be ripped away as "Zepto" tackled her, helmet gouging into her cheek and chest into her arm. There was a loud crack and she let go.
Aya's vision filled with red as Melia howled pain and the world was yanked away. And
She
Fell
Down.
And as she fell, Melia screamed her name.
The rift was not a quiet place.
The sea rocked against the rocks, pushing and shoving like kids out of line. A tree branch flung itself off and clattered to the grass, only to be picked up once more. A waterfall pushed and pushed, gushing and gushing as if to beat the rain that was drumming into the earth, onto her skin, on and on and on-
Like that day, when the whirlpools had filled her ears and she'd watched the stormy sky weep and mourn her and everything she loved and everyone she knew, the thunder reminding her you will save them, you will save everything and all it will take is you.
This storm, she thought to herself once she opened her eyes, was like a baby rain shower in comparison. Well, she was trying to convince herself of that anyway.
Still, the rain sizzled and boiled and lashed at her skin and she pushed herself up to get as much of herself out of direct fire as possible.
Pich, buried against her throat, whimpered. Smells funny, chimed in her ears, the once steady hum of her nearly perfect hearing aids dead as a doorstop and replaced with wild raw noise, a multitude of voices heard and Pich's loudest, closest to her ears. Dead, mum. Dead dead dead as old grass. Raw, hurt, red. All over, all all over.
Oh hell.
Aya raised a soaking hand to stroke Pich's tiny back. "Ssh," she tried to say, and probably succeeded. She couldn't hear to tell what her voice was at the moment. She reached out and returned Sadie, however, who was unconscious. Had probably hit the ground right along with her.
Her socks squished in their boots as she walked, rubbing against the sheathe of her knife. Wherever she was, she was alone. The path was empty, the trees bowing over the weight and pressure of the rain. Aya continued to walk through it, past the pathetic excuse for a dock and up towards a lake and a waterfall. All the while, Aya's pathetically short spikes of hair drooped lower and lower with rain and lower towards her shoulders and the marks spread like spiderwebs.
Little stitch spiderwebs, never seeming to stop.
As she reached the edge of the lake, something flopped miserably at the tiny dock. Red scales shone in the sudden flash of lightning. The magikarp let out a desperate wheeze for air, croaking at her with the largest pupils she'd seen on one in her life.
Aya regarded it a moment, her hands starting to shake from the weight of the water. Then she knelt and scooped up the fish. It flopped in her arms, shaking and groaning its rage to the world. Taking a few steps to the lake, she lifted the giant fish over her head.
"Okay buddy," she whispered over the roar of the waterfall, feeling the words on her teeth as they chattered. "You know what to do. Splash!"
Aya threw. The magikarp splashed and bounced like a stone over a smooth pond, dragged up into the waterfall. As it rose higher and higher, her hearing aids began to whine, screeching louder and louder with a tinny little voice adding,
"Warning, unknown energy interference. Warning, unknown pokemon type detected. Cannot interpret. Energy interference detected, unknown pokemon detected unknown unknown unnnnnnknnoooo- crrrcckk!"
The tinny voice turned into a screech and dead silent, all in the span of a few seconds, and once again, her ears filled with the sound of the rain and the grumbles of the earth.
From her right wrist, her nav device vibrated with a soft thrum on her hand. She lifted it up. Aya was really gonna have to send her dads the X-Transceiver when she got back. The nav seemed to work fine. Suspiciously fine, in fact. Once she got out of here and back to a steady PC, she'd deal with this. They needed a way to contact her on the go, if this was what her journey was looking like.
The small watch unfolded to a larger screen, which read "Downloading Rift data…" in soft white over chilling black.
Rift? Zetta had mentioned a Rift. She'd fallen into it?
"Download complete. Location: Rift Dragon Gate. Code: Evo. Analysis of Rift complete, would you like to see the information?"
Aya glanced up as the little shadow of the magikarp continued to rise towards the top. She tapped yes.
"Rift Gyarados, a water type. Born from the rage of all the magikarp in Goldenwood Lake, they rise up to mourn their regret of being unable to fly. Its ability is Intimidate."
As she finished reading those lines, there was a nearly silent splash.
Aya looked up to see the lake hiss with steam. It was starting to boil over. "Shit," she whispered. Gripping Pich tight, she threw the pichu and her pokeballs as close as she could to the nearest tree and bolted the other way. Pich squeaked terror, but was safely behind a tree as the monster rose up from the water. Aya felt her feet burn as they were drenched.
The gyarados roared.
Melia had never expected today would turn out like this. It was just supposed to be a fun last day with a new friend, she was supposed to start her work as a gym leader, that was all that was supposed to happen.
Instead she was here, cowering behind the garbodor her friends had smacked down and accidentally created. It swung an arm at the Zepto monster again, which stumbled and snarled, digging its foreclaws into the ground. At her side sat eevee. Not her eevee, but… they looked similar. Underneath a strangely visible film of violet, there was a sparkle to the fur that only came from the recessive shiny genes, that made them sparkle in the light and stand out in a crowd with differing colors.
Just like hers. Unlike hers, however, the softly purple eyes held complete disinterest in her. She rubbed her aching wrist. She was pretty sure that Zepto thing had broken it. She wasn't going to look at it to tell. She could barely touch it without touching something-
She'd just look when she got home. If she could go home again.
What if Jan knew? What if Amanda knew? What if they were in on this, like…
Melia bit her lip. Dad wouldn't work with this person, these people. He… loves pokemon. He studies them, doesn't… destroy them.
He wouldn't do this!
And yet he'd been insistent she come here before she go. And take pictures of a wall. A wall that had suddenly made a passage.
Something was wrong somewhere.
Hapi chirruped by her ear. The togetic's head cocked a little and Melia made herself smile. "I'm okay… kind of."
There was an ugly squelching noise as her wrist throbbed again and again, louder and louder in her heartbeat in her ears. Zepto roared again in front of her, but the Garbodor just didn't budge.
"I swear," she whispered. "When this is over, I'm catching you."
Garbodor gurgled. It seemed like he understood that well enough.
Melia raised her head to look at the ugly bruise in the sky. Aya hadn't come out yet. What if… what if she was gone forever? It would be her fault. She'd dragged her into this mess.
"Please… someone, let her be okay…" she breathed. "Please… God or somebody… please let her come back safely."
Most people would be perturbed by this. The two of them hadn't known each other for more than a couple of days. There wasn't really any need to be that emotionally invested in her, especially since she'd recently burned that wrist (that was now broken) and was revealed to have superpowers she couldn't control and had calmly made the suggestion that she kill another human being. That was a person you should stay far away from.
But… the idea of it made Melia's stomach churn, a part of her mind violently disagree. All of that aside, she'd still cared about Melia. She'd not turned away forever and left Melia to the wolves or these bastards who turned their own partners into monsters. She'd stayed.
Something deep in Melia's core, maybe her soul, warmed to that notion, the nostalgia of gripping a hand a little bigger than her own, the steady back of someone in front of her standing to protect, to defend and speaking so firm and strong against a real monster.
"No one can make that happen."
Melia almost jumped out of her skin as she opened her eyes (when had they closed?) to see a little boy with white hair staring at her. Aside from the hair color and the one bit that curled up like an imp's smile, he seemed like a perfectly normal child. Plain clothes, a shirt and shorts, shoes that were falling off his feet, pale skin. He seemed like an ordinary little boy. And yet looking closer, he seemed a little sickly, a little too pale, a little too faded away.
Then she saw his eyes, rings of green and red and black, staring at her like she was nothing but a bug he had let out from its terrarium.
"God can't save her," he said. His voice was high and pleasant and of course, very young, but it was ruined by the complete deadpan of his voice. "We cannot make her be all right. It's too late for that. But you can help her right now, if you want."
"How?" And later she would question where the little boy had come from, when he'd arrived, how no one had seen him, or anything really. But right now, all she cared about was doing something other than sitting here and sniffling at the pain in her arm, the misery of her situation, and hope futilely that Zetta and his monster just got tired and left.
The boy smiled, an expression like wax, rarely used and uncomfortable. "Pray to her, little mortal," he said with a wave of a hand. "Pray to the baby god and let her burn."
Melia had no idea what that even meant, but as garbodor grunted in pain, she closed her eyes and made herself believe, made herself pray.
She didn't see the boy vanish the second she bowed her head.
Lightning struck the tree Aya had been crouched behind a second ago, forcing her to run to another. Overhead, Trinity screeched, a white sheen over her wings as she dodged another blow from the furious looking dragon. The gyarados' teeth crackled with electricity as it snarled, slobber dripping from its mouth. The dull color of its scales made it hard to see without the light from the storm, barring its full sclera red eyes.
Aya whistled. "Down, down!"
Trinity squawked. Heard ya, ma'am. She spiraled downward, joined by Cheshire, who was firing hearts at gyarados' middle, covering the torn up form of Red. The fomantis was shivering in pain, ice half crept across half its body. The other half was tattered leaves and- something the center surely could fix. It had happened so fast, Aya'd only been able to let out more of her team to buy time.
Gyarados roared again, raising its tail and swinging it towards shore. Pich shrieked and fled. Isaiah's ball trembled in Aya's grip but she couldn't risk it. Isaiah would be on the same field as a rampaging gyarados in a small lake. She couldn't risk it. He'd die.
Aya took a knee, picked up a rock and smacked the enemy in the head with it. It turned its head and Aya threw herself forward as it did, tackling the vulnerable Red into her arms and out of sight into the trees. She quickly returned him to his ball, the little guy shivering so hard his spare leaves were falling off. "Good work." She settled the ball back into her bag.
A murmuring in the back of her mind made her turn. But of course, no one was there, she was alone but for her pokemon and this monster
Pich's squeaking made her turn again. The little mouse was sparking, having latched onto the serpentine form of the gyarados. His tiny body exploded with electricity and the roar of pain that ensued would have been great if the writhing and shaking hadn't thrown the baby clear off of it. Aya leaped to catch Pich now, hitting the ground and rolling.
"I can heal, that doesn't mean shit doesn't hurt…" she groaned. Pich grinned weakly up at her, body still sparking with stray electricity. "You crazy baby, what were you doing?"
Pich blinked black eyes at her and squeaked. Helping Mama, what else?
Her eyes misted over. "Silly billywig," Aya said, making to stand up.
A very large mouth, with very sharp fangs opened its jaws over her head. Pich leaped towards it and exploded with electricity again, sending it careening back into the water. Aya caught Pich again, who whined with pain.
"Why doesn't it just fly," Aya muttered. "Does… because it lost the flying type mean…?" She leaped up to move, but her legs throbbed, all the rain heavy on her knees and spine and she stumbled because everything was burning. She lost her grip on Pich just as gyarados' great tail swiped through the air and sent her across the rift and into the water on the other side.
Fuck.
Again. She was drowning again. Drowning was such a shitty way to die, she knew. And if she had a little more energy, she could reach Puff or Isaiah, but…
Her arms ached. Her body throbbed with the weight of the water, the burning on her insides. She just wanted to close her eyes and sink.
"No!" screamed in her skull in seven voices. "Don't you dare! Don't you ever!"
"We need you! Don't you dare!"
Isaiah's ball burst open and her brionne kicked up underneath her stone of a body. Melia's voice screamed in her ear to keep her eyes open, to live, live live-
It took Cheshire and Trinity with Isaiah's help to haul her onto the ground. Aya coughed and spat, rolling to vomit up the water that had gotten in her system.
"Thanks guys," she wheezed. "You're the best."
Cheshire and Trinity chittered at her various sounds of of course and you're welcome.
A flash of light startled both pokemon and made Aya turn her head. Pich stood at the other side of the clearing, glaring down the Gyarados trying to pull itself out of the water and gouge through the shore. His cheeks shone a brilliant white. Comically he crouched on all fours.
Gyarados roared and Pich charged. Electricity thundered around his tiny body and it turned more and more white the closer he got until he was simply a shooting star that struck the gyarados right in the throat. The force of the impact threw both pokemon into the waterfall. There was a sickening crunch as rocks tumbled down from the top of the falls.
Trinity squawked and sped over, catching what had to be Pich as fell from the recoil. Even the sparks dancing along his fur didn't phase her, though his weight did. She flew back to Aya, who took the pokemon into her arms and returned both exhausted fliers. Pich grinned at her again, soaking and exhausted. She glanced over at the gyarados, who didn't seem to be moving.
Aya managed a laugh. "Good work buddy. Could have said something about having volt tackle though."
Her newly evolved pikachu gave a loud squeak of assurance.
Then the world crumbled all around her and she and her pokemon all fell down.
Aya, for a moment, thought they would fall forever. Then a small hand, bigger than her own, grabbed her drenched shirt and pulled.
She opened her eyes to golden leaves and trees and Melia's face staring worriedly down at her. Her pokemon, the two conscious anyway, were just as close.
Melia managed to smile. "You made it."
Aya smiled weakly. "Somehow." Before she could say more, her eevee trotted over and made herself comfortable on her other arm. "Hey you," she said.
Eevee chirped.