Marlo
The day was cold and damp, the sky a featureless gray void. An expanse of budding trees stretched in all directions as far as one could see, the occasional southerly breeze rustling the forest and hushing the chatter and chirps of wildlife. She found comfort in that the effects of The Collapse were never so obvious in the wilderness. The calls and cries of wild pokémon reminded her that the world was not gone. The towns and cities were dead, but the bugs and the birds thrived nonetheless. She followed a short distance behind Seren and Dormer. The three of them had been hiking since daybreak. They had been assigned to locate an old research facility – she knew that much. She wondered how much more the others knew about their mission than she did.
They were agents of White Lightning, one of the many factions that had formed in the political power vacuum following The Collapse. When civilization as it had been failed to withstand the relentless invasions, all semblance of government ceased to be. In mere months, humanity was reduced to series of scattered and isolated societies. Two sorts survived The Collapse: the strong, and those who followed them. Survivors found respite under the protection of the most powerful pokémon trainers, who in turn came to command their own factions.
Marlo had heard stories about Seren. He was supposed to have been an accomplished trainer in the old world. In a faction such as White Lightning, that made him something of a soldier. She was troubled at the thought that the same could be said of her. She knew how to battle, certainly, but no part of her wanted to encounter an ultra beast. Seren was a slim man of twenty three with a mop of brown hair falling just past his shoulders, and a narrow, sullen face hallmarked by a pair of eyes that must have seen everything a few times over and had not been impressed.
She did not know Dormer. He was a tall, gangly man of about fifty with a long face, a curly, unkempt bush of black and gray hair, and an overgrown stubble of the same colors. He had mentioned that he was a physicist. People of scientific professions were invaluable: they offered a token of hope that all was not yet lost. Few living men understood what had actually happened during The Collapse, and even fewer had any ideas about how the world as it had been might one day be restored.
Marlo noticed a stantler nipping at the ground. She liked that. It noticed her, and then it was gone. Not much later, she thought she saw an absol for just an instant further ahead. She liked that less. The appearance of an absol was considered a bad omen in many cultures. This was not the time for superstition. They continued down the hill, and the forest terrain grew rougher. Gentle slopes turned steep as they walked along jagged earthy walls jutting from the ground, exposing curly roots and mossy rocks. They came to the side of a short cliff, and Marlo began to hear a faint engine-like sound. It grew louder, and Seren and Dormer suddenly bolted towards the cliff wall, pressing their bodies against the stony rise. Marlo froze in confusion. Seren grabbed her by the forearm and yanked her over, hushing her with his finger to his lips. Her heart dropped out of her chest as three celesteela rapidly came into view from behind the cliff, flying above the trees with their rocket-like propulsion. The ultra beasts flew east, and then they were gone. Fingers crossed, White Lightning pressed on.
They continued down slope until Marlo identified the sheer silver mass of the sea in the distance through the trees. The water was still as glass, mirroring the solid gray sky. The trees grew sparser as they approached the shoreline. Eventually, the forest conceded entirely to a sandy slope, dotted with brush. They descended the gentle cliff, and found themselves on a cold, gray beach. Here and there laid a random piece of driftwood. Out on the water, Marlo could make out the shadowy curves of the long, winding islands that hugged the coast.
She looked to the horizon and saw blue patches of sky just above the curve of the water. She pondered for a moment exactly how far she was from the end of the gloom.
"Alright science man," said Seren, almost playfully, "What now?"
"You know what now," replied Dormer, drawing a poké ball from his pocket.
Dormer tossed it into the air, and called out a lapras. It landed in the water with a splash, showering the beach. Seren followed suit and called out a salamence. They each mounted their own pokémon.
Marlo watched in amazement as Seren's salamence took to the air. She had never seen a winged dragon pokémon in person. Dormer scoffed and called him a show-off before he called back to Marlo.
"If you don't have a way of your own to get across, you should probably hop on," he patted his lapras on the head, "Unless you'd rather stay here of course and keep watch for buzzwholes."
She thanked him and reluctantly approached the ferry pokémon. She had never liked boats, and traveling into the sea on the back of an aniMarlo was no more appealing. He offered her a hand, and pulled her onto the shell, and they were off. Dormer's lapras waded gently through the water, intent on the islands ahead, while Seren and his dragon kept pace overhead in lazy circles, beating its wings with an occasional fmph.
Marlo struggled to find a comfortable seat on the lapras's shell, clinging to the bumps for dear life. Marlo had always hated being on the water. She envied Dormer, who stood proudly with one hand rested on the back of the creature's head. Anxiety rocked her back and forth as she began to force her gaze at the sky in an effort to fight the impending nausea. The beach growing sMarloler in the distance as they waded into the gray towards the island might have been beautiful otherwise. She wished Seren had invited her to fly on his salamence. Dormer glanced at her, and then away, and then turned his head back to her just as quickly.
"Relax, girl," he said, chuckling. Her dismay must have been more palpable than she had thought, which only made it worse.
"Sorry," she said, trying not to sound sick.
"Don't apologize, just calm down. Everything is alright."
Marlo did not reply, hoping not to hear more useless advice. All her life, people had been telling her to relax, to be calm, to not be nervous, to "not let it bother you," and it had always driven her mad. Certainly she would not be battling anxiety if she were in a capacity not to be anxious.
The islands began to grow into view, but not quickly enough for Marlo. They were flat, marshy things, sparsely dotted by leafless windswept trees. Dormer's lapras ferried them to a rickety wooden pier jutting from a concrete platform on the shore. He hopped off and extended a hand back to Marlo. She clung to his arm with both hands as he pulled her from its back. Seren landed on the sand, dismounted, and recalled his salamence to its poké ball. Dormer did the same with his lapras.
The island was empty, save for the pier and at least a thousand little metal signs stuck in the sand around the shoreline displaying "keep out" messages and legal warnings. Ostensibly, the island was a nature reserve. It was a short trek over a sandy slope before they reached their destination: a windowless concrete shed scarcely large enough to store a car, with a heavy steel door displaying a faded yellow and black sign, DO NOT ENTER.
"That sign can't stop me, because I can't read," said Marlo, remembering a joke she had heard sometime before the end of the world.
Seren sighed, Dormer was silent, and Marlo was sorry she had said anything.
Dormer retrieved a key from his pocket and unlocked the door. Within the shed lay a treasure trove of junk: a shovel, an axe, a spool of wire. He led them them in, and closed the door. Complete darkness reigned for a moment before Seren activated the flashlight on his phone. Dormer shoved some tools out of the way to reveal an electronic number pad mounted in the wall. He punched in a long code. A mechanical roar blared somewhere deep beneath them. The floor shifted, and then the ceiling was rising above them. The shed concealed an elevator.
"I would have never pictured you working in a place like this," said Seren as they plunged deeper and deeper. "You must have been involved in some pretty clandestine stuff."
"I worked for the government. Everything I did was clandestine," said Dormer, flatly.
Seren scoffed.
The elevator came to a stop. Dormer stepped off, followed by Seren and Marlo, and a door slid into place behind them with a mechanical hiss. They found themselves at the mouth of a long hallway, lined with metal doors of which each was protected by another number pad. Each door was labelled, A1, A2, and so on. Along the walls, the length was illuminated by dim red lights. Dormer led them to a staircase at the end of the hall, just past A7 and A8. They descended two landings to another identical hallway, labels beginning with B, and then another two, and again. The staircase ended at bottom of the eighth landing, at a single steel door, labelled E0. Dormer began to fumble with the number pad mounted on the wall beside it.
He punched in a code, and the pad responded with two unpleasant beeps. Dormer growled and clenched his teeth.
"No access?" asked Seren, annoyed.
"Just do your thing," replied Dormer, equally annoyed.
Seren pulled out a poké ball, and called forth a rotom. The walls lit up in a flickering light from the little pokémon's electrical aura.
"Break us in, Tesla," said Seren.
The rotom replied with a cheery electric buzz, and vanished into the door in a flash of light. A rotom is a pokémon with a body composed of plasma, capable of living comfortably inside of an electrical system. Rotom are gentle, curious creatures, not likely to damage equipment unless they so choose. They were often employed by hackers to disable security systems, given that they could apply their powers in such a way to manipulate computers without concern for such silly things as administrative privileges.
Dormer went back to the number pad, and got a nasty shock. He yanked his hand away, shouted a curse, and started sucking on his fingers.
Marlo cringed. Seren laughed and called him an ass.
An alarm began to blare throughout the facility. Marlo instinctively reached for a poké ball, tense with anticipation.
"Don't worry," Dormer said, still sucking on his index finger. "No one is left to come after us."
Seren's rotom emerged from the door, and it slowly began to pull itself open. Bright lights turned on inside automatically. Within was a massive chamber that seemed to belie the close-quarters layout of the rest of the facility. The entire room must have been close to a thousand square feet. A round platform stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by an array of machines decorated with panels of buttons and levers and monitors. Cables as thick as a man's arm ran towards the platform's center, meeting each other at a tall door-frame-shaped structure rising from the floor.
Seren sauntered inside, his rotom floating erratically behind him, while Marlo stared in awe from the entrance, wondering just what the machine was supposed to do. Dormer wiped his fingers on his jeans and followed him. He approached one of the panels.
"Make yourselves comfortable, guys," he said, entering instructions at the terminal, "We'll be here for a while."
Seren strolled around the room, his rotom darting curiously about. Machines began to hum and whir.
"How long is a while?" he asked, "Hours? Days?"
"A while," Dormer repeated, sharply.
"You have no idea, do you?"
"Shut the fuck up," barked Dormer as he moved about the panels, pressing buttons and flipping switches, "You want to help? Go with the girl to C7 and find me a bottle. Help yourself to anything in there."
"There's solid food in there too, right?"
"And put that rotom back in its ball – I don't want it fucking around with anything else in here."
Seren recalled his rotom and made his way back to the stairway, frustration bleeding through each step. He walked past Marlo without as much as a glance in her direction. Feeling unwelcome as Dormer worked, Marlo followed him upstairs, though she felt not much more welcome in Seren's company.
C7 was a storage room, lined with rows of shelves and racks of foodstuffs. Gallons of water, packages of dehydrated meals, and a sMarlol selection of liquor. Seren found a half-empty whiskey bottle, took a swig, and offered the bottle to Marlo. She politely declined. He shrugged, made a joke about having more for himself, and then made his way around the shelves to find some dinner. She was uncomfortable drinking on a mission, and even more so drinking alone with him. Seren found a bag of barbeque flavored potato chips, and promptly attacked it. Marlo looked for something other than junk food, rapidly remembering how hungry she was.
"We should probably bring him something to eat too," said Seren as he sat on the floor and folded his legs, "You don't want that guy drinking on an empty stomach."
"He doesn't seem happy."
"Of course he's not happy. Now he has to work."
"What is he even trying to do?"
"His best – which isn't very good," he replied without an ounce of humor.
Marlo rolled her eyes, "No, I mean – to what end?"
Seren put a handful of chips in his mouth and washed it down with another swig, "I don't know, and I really don't fucking care."
Marlo was sorry she had asked. It was often said that The Collapse changed people. Indeed, optimism did not come easily to survivors of the apocalypse. Society as anyone had known it crumbled to dust, and with it fell countless lives. Every survivor had lost almost everyone they had ever known. Trauma drove men mad and desperation turned them evil. Marlo wondered what Seren and Dormer had been like in their old lives.