So yay! Part two! Hope you all enjoy!

Amy47101 does not own pokémon or The Awakening. All rights go to their respective owners.

o.0.o.0.o

The Awakening

o.0.o.0.o

When the door to my cell clicked open, the first thought that flitted through my doped-up brain was that Zoey had changed her mind and come back. But ghosts don't open doors. They will, on occasion, ask me to open one, so I can raise and interrogate the zombies of supernaturals killed by a mad scientist, but they never need once opened one for themselves.

I sat up in bed and rubbed my bleary eyes, blinking away the lingering fog of the sedative. For a moment, the door stayed open only a crack. I slid from the bed, tiptoeing across the thick carpet of my fake hotel room, praying the person on the other side had been called away and I could escape before these people started whatever experiments they'd brought me here to—

"Hello, Dawn." Mrs. Talbot, who I now know was a nurse named 'Mars', beamed her best, kindly, I'm-a-harmless-nurse smile as she pushed the door wide. It was an act I'm sure she'd worked on until she got it just right.

The woman behind her had chic black hair and a Hearthome suit. I imagined her as the mother of the nastiest girl in class. Which was cheating, because that's exactly who she was. Mother of Ursula Urara, the one housemate we'd left out of our plans when we'd escaped from Lyle House, and for good cause, considering she was one of the reasons I'd needed to escape.

Ursula's mom carried a Macy's bag, like she'd just been out shopping and popped in to conduct a few horrific experiments before heading to lunch.

"I know you have a lot of questions, Dawn," Mars said as I sat on the edge of the bed. "We're here to answer them for you. We just need a little help from you first."

"Jimmy, Onyx, and Paul," Mrs. Urara said. "Where are they?"

I looked from her to Mars, who smiled and nodded encouragingly, like she fully expected me to turn in my friends.

"I thought you had Onyx." I said, my voice slow and confused.

"We did." Mrs. Urara said, voice clipped and annoyed. "We had him but he broke out of the van we were transporting him in." she sighed, waving her hand through the air. "Can't trust underlings, if you ask me. We should have handled this professionally."

I'd never been an angry kid. I'd never run away from home. Never stamped my feet and screamed that life was unfair and I wished I'd never been born. Whenever my mom told me we were moving again and I needed to transfer schools, I'd swallowed a whiny "but I just made new friends," nod, and tell him I understood.

Accept your lot. Count your blessings. Be a big girl.

Now, looking back at a life of doing what I was told, I realized I'd bought into the game. When adults patted me on the head and told me I was so grown-up, what they really meant was that they were glad I wasn't grown-up enough yet to question, to fight back.

Looking at Mars and Mrs. Urara, I thought of what they'd done to me—lying to me, locking me up—and I wanted to stamp my feet. Wanted to scream. But I wasn't going to give them that satisfaction.

I widened my eyes as I met Mrs. Urara's gaze, my voice the perfect amount of cheeky.

"You mean to tell me you let Onyx, the boy who would get distracted by a Beautifly, escape?"

I think she would have slapped me if Mars hadn't lifted her hand.

"Yes, Dawn, we lost Onyx. And no, Dawn," she caught my look as another cheeky question formed on my lips. "We haven't found the boys," she said. A pause. "We're very concerned for Onyx's safety."

"Because you think Paul might hurt him?" I shook my head. "Honestly? I thought you'd be more worried about Jimmy."

"We are just as concerned for Jimmy, and Paul wouldn't harm either of them. Not intentionally, of course. I know Paul's fond of Jimmy."

Fond? What a strange word to use. Paul and Jimmy were foster brothers, tighter than any blood brothers I knew. Sure, Paul was a shapeshifter, but that mightyena part of him was what would stop him from ever hurting Jimmy. He'd protect him at all costs—I'd already seen that.

As for Onyx, I wasn't sure. Onyx had an all around cheeky and goofy personality. He'd make Paul mad in a heartbeat. Though Paul would normally just leave things alone when it came to Onyx, I don't think he'd be to happy being stuck alone with him. Even so, Onyx seemed pretty experienced in the world, what with a mother who abandoned him and a father who neglected him. He'd be fine in the world alone.

My skepticism must have shown on my face, because Mars shook her head, as if disappointed in me.

"All right, Dawn. If you can't spare any concern for Onyx's safety, maybe you can for his health."

"W-what ab-bou—" My stutter cropped up most when I was nervous, and I couldn't let them know they'd struck a nerve when it came to the wellbeing of goofball, brother-to-all Onyx. So I tried again, slower now. "What about his health?"

"His condition."

Apparently I wasn't the only one who watched too many movies. Now they would tell me that Onyx had some rare medical condition and if he didn't get his medicine within twelve hours, he'd spontaneously combust.

"What condition?"

"He has diabetes," Mars said. "His blood sugar levels need to be monitored and regulated."

"With one of those blood testing things?" I said slowly with a furrowed brow, thinking back. Onyx had always disappeared into the bathroom before meals. I'd thought he just liked to wash up. I'd bumped into him once coming out as he'd been shoving a small black case into his pocket.

"That's right," Mars said. "With proper care, diabetes is easily managed. You weren't aware of it because you didn't need to be. Onyx leads a normal life."

"Except for one thing," Ursula's mom said.

"Yeah, the flareon ears and tail would totally throw him off track." I responded, not at all liking the woman. She shot me a pointed look, then reached into the Macy's bag and took out a backpack. It looked like Onyx's, but I wasn't falling for that—they'd probably bought a matching one. Sure, she pulled out a black T-shirt I recognized as Onyx's, but he'd left behind a whole closet of clothing at Lyle House. Easy enough to grab stuff from there.

Next came a pad of paper and pouch of colored pencils. Onyx's room was filled with his sketches. Folders upon folders of them. Again, easy enough to—

Mrs. Urara flipped through the sketch pad, holding up pages, even allowing me to take it. Slowly, I took it, flipping through it, and seeing a sketch of a light-haired girl with glasses and a boy with multi-colored hair. On the back pages were neat, even letterings of a certain girl I know. Jade's handwriting.

Their work in progress. He'd never have left that behind.

Finally, she laid a flashlight on the table. The flashlight from Lyle House—the one I'd watched him put into his bag.

"Onyx slipped going over the fence," she said. "He had his backpack over one shoulder. It fell. Our people were right behind him so he had to leave it. There's something in here that Onyx needs much more than clothing and some silly collaboration."

I wanted to point out that it wasn't silly, their ideas were actually quite good, but she simply continued. She opened a navy nylon pouch. Inside were two vials, both filled with clear liquids.

"The insulin to replace what Onyx's body can't produce. He injects himself with this," she pointed to the one with a red cap. "Every time he eats," he pointed to the silver one. "And every night."

"What happens if he doesn't?" I said, not knowing a thing about diabetes to know what would happen.

Mars took over.

"We aren't going to scare you and say that if Onyx skips a single shot, he'll die. But since we cannot be sure what he is eating, and since he can't eat, he may suffer from two majorly life-threatening conditions for diabetics. Diabetic ketoacidosis or hypoglycemia. By tomorrow, he'll be vomiting. In about three days, he'll lapse into a diabetic coma."

He took the pouch from Ursula's mom and set it in front of me.

"We need to get this to Onyx. To do that, you need to tell us where he is."

I had no clue where Onyx was. I had no idea where to find him. But I did know that he's search for Jade, or remain close to where Jade was.

And Jade was with me.

I didn't tell them this, I agreed to try.

o.0.o.0.o

"Dawn!"

I stirred in my sleep, figuring it must have been a drug induced dream. Rolling over, I tried to settle back into my pillow.

"Dawn! Dawn, wake up!"

I groaned. Something filtering to my senses. It smelled like cleaner… Not the lemon cleaner of Lyle House, but rather, chemical clean… like in a hospital…

"DAWN!"

I jerked awake, looking around the room, only to see the silvery outline of Marina. I stared at her and she blinked back, then smiled.

"Hey."

"What are you doing?" I whispered, only to realize I knew exactly what she was doing. We weren't in Lyle House. Paul was being hunted. Onyx's health was at risk. And they wanted us to help find him. Marina looked down, eyes glassy and sad.

"Did you hear… about Onyx?"

I averted my gaze and nodded.

"I never knew. Arceus, I'm so stupid. I should've known! Onyx is just never one to hide things like that, I'm surprised he did."

"Maybe he was instructed to." I murmured. "In case something like this happened. Something to use as leverage. He's so gullible that I wouldn't be surprised if he believed it."

"Jade's a wreck." Marina murmured, settling on my bed. "She didn't know. When Onyx dropped his bag, he wanted to go back, but she yelled at him. Said his sketchpad wasn't important. Said that we could just get him new things if he needed it. She didn't know and now she's a wreck."

Jade? Of all people who I thought would be disturbed by this piece of information, Jade was the least likely option. Even so, I could understand. Those two were close. Really close. So for Jade to realize that it was her fault that Onyx's health was in danger…

"They told her, and she took the news hard. Like, really, really hard." Marina said as she began wringing her hands. "Like, hard enough that she's still crying about it. I guess however she took it, or however they made it out to be, the poor kids on his deathbed and we aren't seeing him again."

"You don't think… she'll give them up, do you?"

"I don't know." she shook her head. "Onyx, maybe, but the others? I'm not sure. She really, really needs someone to talk to."

"What are we going to do?"

"That's where I come in," Marina smiled with a wink. "I'm a great actor, but they're going to trust you the most. So I'm going give you a little story to tell…"

o.0.o.0.o

In a good drama, according to Marina, the protagonist never takes the straight line to the prize. She must set out, hit an obstacle, detour around it, hit another, take a longer detour, another obstacle, another detour…. Only when she has built up the strength of character to deserve the prize does she finally succeed.

I suppose our stories were already fitting the time-honored pattern. Think about it. Dawn Hikari, sixteen-year-old Johana Hikari wannabe, her dreams of coordinating and upstanding the woman who was her mother shattered on the day she saw her first ghost and started living the kind of life she'd once imagined putting on the screen.

It was like that with all of us. Seeing ghosts, acquiring super strength, flareon and glaceon ears, night terrors of being out of the body...

No doubt after freaking out at school, in home, hurting people or what have you, all of us were taken away by the men in the white jackets and shipped off to a group home for mentally disturbed teens. Problem is, I really did see ghosts. And I wasn't the only kid at Lyle House with supernatural powers.

Jimmy could cast spells. Onyx could burn people with his bare fingers. Marina could leave her body and heal. Jade could make the temperature in the room drop. Paul had superhuman strength and senses and, apparently, soon would be able to change into a mightyena. Ursula…well, I didn't know what Ursula was—maybe just a screwed-up kid put in Lyle House because her mom helped run it.

Jimmy, Paul, Marina, Onyx, Jade, and I realized it was no coincidence we were in the same place, and we escaped. I got separated from the guys and, after running to my Mom—the person I had trusted most in the world—I ended up here, in some kind of laboratory run by the same people who owned Lyle House.

Now they expected me to help them bring in Onyx, Jimmy, and Paul?

Well, now it was time for these people to face their own drama. Marina told me that it was time to introduce a few obstacles of our own. So, in the spirit of proper storytelling, we came up with scheme and told Mars where to find Onyx, Jimmy, and Paul.

Step one: establish the goal. "I was supposed to hide while the guys stayed behind to distract you with Onyx's fire and Paul's strength, maybe meet up with Jimmy, if necessary," I told Mars. "Paul pulled me back and said, if we got separated, we'd meet at the rendezvous point."

Step two: introduce the obstacle. "Where is the rendezvous point? That's the problem. I don't know where it is. We talked about needing one, but everything was so crazy that day. We'd only just decided to escape, and then Paul was saying it had to be that night. Paul and Jimmy must have picked a rendezvous point, and forgot they never told me where it was."

Step three: map out the detour. "But I do have some ideas—places we talked about. One of them must be the rendezvous point. I could help you find it. They'll be looking for me, so they might hide until they see me."

Rather than escape this place, I'd let them take me out by using me as bait. I'd list places Marina and I'd never discussed with Jimmy or Paul, and there would be no chance they'd get captured. A brilliant plan.

The response?

"We'll keep that in mind, Dawn. But for now, just tell us the locations. We have ways to find the boys once we get there."

Obstacles. To Marina, they were an essential part of the storytelling process. But in real life? They suck.

After Mars and Ursula's mom had gotten my list of fake rendezvous points, they left, giving me nothing in return—no answers, no clues about why I was here or what would happen to me.

I sat cross-legged on my bed, staring down at the necklace in my hands as if it were a crystal ball that could provide all those answers. My dad had given it to me back when I was seeing "bogeymen"—ghosts, as I now knew. She said the necklace would stop them from coming, and it did. I'd always figured, like my mom said, that it was psychological. I believed in it, so it worked. Now, I wasn't so sure.

Had my dad known I was a necromancer? She must have, if the blood ran in her family. Was the necklace supposed to ward off ghosts? If so, its power must have faded. It even looked faded—I swore the bright purple jewel had gone a indigo-ish color, like the red was fading from the purple. One thing it didn't do, though, was answer my questions. That I had to do for myself.

I put the necklace back on. Whatever Saturn, Jupiter, or Mars- or as I know them, Dr. Pluto, Miss Van Curd, and Mrs. Talbot-wanted from me, it wasn't good. 'Good doctors' don't lock up kids they want to help.

I certainly wasn't going to tell them how to find Onyx. If he needed insulin, he would get it, even if it meant breaking into a drugstore. Onyx wasn't above stealing, especially to keep himself alive.

I had to concentrate on getting Marina, Jade, and myself out. But this wasn't Lyle House, where the only thing standing between us and freedom was an alarm system. This room might look like it belonged in a nice hotel—with a double bed, a carpeted floor, an armchair, desk, and private bathroom—but there were no windows and no knob on the inside of the door.

I'd hoped to get Zoey's help escaping. My roommate at Lyle House, Zoey hadn't made it out alive, so when I first got here, I'd summoned her ghost, hoping she could help me find a way out. Only problem? Zoey didn't realize she was dead. As gently as I could, I'd broken the news. She'd flipped out, accusing me of lying, and disappeared.

Topaz, as of yet, has been unresponsive since I first summoned Zoey. I don't know if she's talking to her or what, but I'd called her multiple times in my head and she hasn't responded.

Marina could always try as well, but the astral projection had strange side effects, she says. Says she gets sleepy, sometimes hit with dizzy spells and sick. And she says she googled the term, and apparently, astral projectors are at risk of never regaining control of their body. Apparently, with their spirits gone, they're at risk for someone else, someone dead, taking over their body to restart their life. Ever since she found that out, Marina's been trying to control the astral projection, only leaving when absolutely necessary.

Maybe Marina was being paranoid, and rightly so, so I decided to let her believe that and pray that Zoey was okay. Hopefully, she'd had enough time to cool off. I doubted it, but I couldn't wait.

I had to try summoning her again.

o.0.o.0.o

I prepared for séance. As set pieces went, this one was so lame no one would ever believe it was actually a séance. No sputtering candles to cast eerie shadows on the walls, no moldy skulls forming a ritual circle, no chalices filled with what the audience would suppose was red wine but secretly hope was blood.

Did experienced necromancers use stuff like candles and incense? From the little I'd learned about the supernatural world, I knew some of what we see in movies is true. Maybe, way back in history, people had known about necromancers and witches and shifters, and those stories are based, if very loosely, on old truths. Heck, I think gijinka's were regarded as something of legends, messengers between the pokémon gods and humans, something akin to angels…

Sighing, I stared at my pathetic setup.

My method—if I can call it a method since I've only used it twice—came from trial and error and a few grudging tips from Paul. As a guy who was taking college-level courses at seventeen, being confident of his facts is important to Paul. If he isn't sure, he'd rather keep his mouth shut. But when I'd pushed him, he'd told me that he'd heard that necromancers summoned ghosts either by being at a graveside or by using a personal effect, like Zoey's hoodie, so I was sitting cross-legged on the carpet, clutching it.

I pictured Zoey and imagined myself pulling her out of limbo. At first, I didn't try very hard. The last time I'd focused all my power into summoning a ghost, I'd summoned two right back into their buried corpses. I wasn't near a grave this time, but that didn't mean there weren't bodies around somewhere. So I kept the voltage low at first, gradually ramping it up, focusing harder and harder until…

"What the—? Hey, who are you?"

My eyes flew open. There stood a blond boy about my age with the build, looks, and arrogant chin tilt of an expert battler. Finding the ghost of another teenager in this place wasn't a coincidence. A name popped into my head—that of another Lyle House resident who'd been taken away before I arrived, supposedly transferred to a mental hospital, like Zoey.

"Barry?" I said tentatively.

"Yeah, but I don't know you. Or this place."

He pivoted, scanning the room, then rubbed the back of his neck. I stopped myself before asking if he was okay. Of course he wasn't okay. He was dead. Like Zoey. I swallowed. He whirled back on me, putting a finger in my face.

"You tell me what's going on or I'll fine you!"

"What happened to you?" I asked softly. He jumped, as if startled by my voice.

"Is someone else here?" I asked, hoping he sensed Zoey or Topaz, beyond the pale where I couldn't see her.

"I thought I heard…" He studied me, frowning. "You brought me here?"

"I—I didn't mean to. But…since you are here, can you tell me—?"

"Nothing. I can't tell you anything." He squared his shoulders. "Whatever you want to talk about, I'm not interested."

He looked away, determined not to be interested. When he started to fade, I was ready to let him go. Rest in peace. Then I thought about Onyx and Jade and Jimmy and Paul and Marina. If I didn't get some answers, we might all join Barry and Zoey and Topaz in the afterlife.

"My name's Dawn," I said quickly. "I'm a friend of Marina's. From Lyle House. I was there with her, after you—"

He kept fading.

"Wait!" I said. "I c-can prove it. Back at Lyle House. You tried getting into a fight with Paul, and Jimmy shoved you away. Only he didn't touch you. He used magic."

"Magic?"

"It was a spell that knocks people back. Jimmy's a sorcerer. All the kids in Lyle House—"

"I knew it! I knew it! I swear, when I see those doctor jerks again, I'll fine them so bad they'll be in debt in the next life!" He swore under his breath as he rematerialized. "All that time, they kept trying to shove their diagnosis down my throat, and I told them where else they could shove it, but I couldn't prove anything." he hovered close to me. "I'm not normal. It's not normal ADHD. It's not something like that, I know it's not."

"You told the nurses what happened with Jimmy, didn't you?"

"Nurses?" He snorted. "Glorified security guards. I wanted to speak to the real boss: Cyrus."

"… Cyrus?" I asked, not recognizing the name. Barry rolled his eyes.

"The big man. The big bad boss. The 'head doctor'."

"I… haven't met him."

"Good thing too. Guys creepy. Real creepy." he shrugged. "They took me to see him at this other place, looked like a warehouse."

I described what I'd seen of this building when we'd arrived.

"Yeah, that's it. They took me inside and…" His face screwed up in thought. "A woman came to talk to me. A little old woman. Said she was a doctor. Bellows…? Fellows?"

Agatha. Agatha Fellows. My heart battered my rib cage.

"So this woman, Dr. Fellows…"

"She wanted me to say Paul started the fight. That he threatened me, punched me, shoved me, whatever. I considered it. A little payback for all the attitude I had to put up with from that jerk. I'd just been goofing around with him when Jimmy got all up in my face and smacked me with that spell."

In the version I'd heard, Barry had been the one getting in Paul' face. Jimmy had a good reason for interfering, too—the last time Paul took a swing, he'd broken a kid's back.

"So Dr. Fellows wanted you to say Paul started the fight…."

"I wouldn't. I'd have to deal with the fallout when I went back to Lyle House and I didn't need that grief. That's when Pluto came in. He hauled her out of the room, but I could still hear him chewing her out in the hall. She kept saying Paul was a menace and that she believed what some Johanna woman said or something. The only reason Pluto kept him was because he couldn't admit he made a mistake by including Paul's type."

"Type?"

"In the experiment."

A chill settled in my gut.

"Ex-experiment?"

Barry shrugged.

"I think she said something about rounds… how Paul and other kids in that 'round' shouldn't have been allowed to leave the hospital. That's all she said. Pluto told her to shove off. He said he made a mistake with the half of them, but the other half was different. Paul was different."

Rounds? Others? How many rounds were there? Did Paul and I belong in a different round? If so, how? And by 'others', did Pluto mean other shifters? Or other subjects in this experiment?

"Did they say any—?" I began.

His head whipped to the side, as if seeing something out of the corner of his eye.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Don't you hear that?"

I listened. Hearing nothing, I shot him an odd glance.

"What is it?"

"Whispering."

"It could be Zoey. She—"

Barry went rigid. His eyes rolled. Then his head flew back, the tendons in his neck popping out, bones crackling. His throat convulsed and he gurgled. Instinctively I reached out to help. My hands passed through him, but I could feel the heat of his body, a scorching heat that made me fall back in surprise.

As I recovered, Barry went still again. His chin lowered and he rolled his shoulders, as if working out the kinks. Then he looked down at me. His once bright orange eyes were now glowing a dark red. The chill in my gut slunk up my spine.

"Frightened, child?" The voice coming out of Barry's mouth was a woman's, so high and light it was almost girlish. "Your instincts are excellent, but you have nothing to fear from me."

Topaz… Where was Topaz…?!

"W-where's Barry?"

She looked down at the body she was possessing.

"Do you like him? He is pretty, isn't he? All of dear Dr. Lyle's creations are so very pretty. Perfect balls of perfect energy, waiting to explode."

Topaz… Topaz!

In a blink, "Barry" was in front of me, his face coming down to mine, bathing me in scorching hot breath that smelled strangely sweet. Those red eyes met mine, the pupils slitted like a cat's.

"The boy and those girls can't help you, child. But I can. You just need to—"

Her eyes rolled back, darkening to Barry's orange, then back to red as she snarled.

"They're pulling him back to the other side. Call me, child. Quickly."

"C-call—"

"Call me forth. I can—"

Her eyes rolled again, her snarl deepening into something inhuman, a sound that made the chill in my veins harden to ice. I stepped back and smacked into the wall.

"Call me forth," she said, voice going ragged, deepening into Barry's. "I can answer all your questions. That girl you have as a guide… that other girl you've been trying to form a bond with… this boy can do nothing...Call me—"

Barry's image wavered, then popped, like a TV screen after the power cord is pulled. One flash of white light and he was gone. I thought I heard a knock at the door but couldn't move, just stared at the spot where Barry had been.

The door opened, and Dr. Pluto stepped in to find me plastered to the wall.

"Dawn?"

I staggered forward, rubbing my arms.

"Dawn?"

"S-Spinark," I said, pointing to the bed. "It r-ran under there."

Dr. Pluto struggled to hide a smirk.

"Don't worry. I'll get someone to take care of it, while we're gone. We're going to go for a walk. It's time you got a proper tour and a proper explanation."

o.0.o.0.o

And thus a new part to a saga begins.

Amy47101 signing off! ^.^