Hello to all of you that are reading this. This is a fourth installment to a series I've been writing for years. If you're new, I recommend you start with the second story (Through the Aura), because, in my opinion, the first one is inferior in quality to my later writing, and you don't need to read it to follow the plot of that story. Or better yet, go read Masks Within Masks if you haven't already. That's a work I'm writing currently, and I think it's better quality than this, which I finished about a year ago. I haven't posted it until now because I'm super lazy with stuff like that, but whatevs. Enjoy, and feel free to leave reviews. I'd definitely add some polish if someone makes a good suggestion.

Also, if you've gotten this far and somehow haven't noticed, Shakespeare and I share something in common: characters die off like fruit flies. There will also be descriptions of blood, mild body horror, and a bit of light romance, so you've been warned. That M's there for a reason.

Without further ado, enjoy!

Dusk Brawler

Part Four of the Sinex Saga

By Bardothren

Chapter One: Too Swift

Bass chords bounced off the padded walls of an enormous basement. The floor had a circular arena of bare concrete in the center, rimmed with cheap, dirty carpet. Long tables heaped with snack food and bottles of soda flanked the arena, and man-high speakers hung in the corners. The basement had no windows, and the only way out was through a heavy padded door with a thick bolt lock that could be moved from either side of the door.

The basement was crammed with rowdy teenagers, wearing torn clothes, open shirts, and bearing red cups filled with soda as they wrapped arms over shoulders and watched the pokemon brawl. The two trainers stood at opposite ends of the circle, shouting orders at their rattata and zubat as the pokemon scratched and bit one another.

The music throbbing from the speakers shook Samuel Milone's bones, but it couldn't shake his concentration as he watched the clash between a zubat and a rattata. The zubat had an aerial advantage and used its supersonic frequencies to irritate its opponent, but Sam could tell it was tiring rapidly. Its wings trembled, its ears drooped, and its attacks grew sluggish. The rattata, on the other hand, became numbed to the supersonic and held its ground, waiting for the zubat to drop within its grasp. And once it did, the rattata's trainer ordered it to pounce, and the rattata clamped the zubat between its jaws. With one swift bite, the zubat fell limp.

The announcer threw a dirty white towel into the ring, and the two trainers withdrew their pokemon. "Charlie's zubat is unable to battle. Tyler wins the match!"

Through all of it, Samuel Milone had a journal out, and he scribbled notes and diagrams into it. From the zubat's upward momentum to the rattata's preference for its right front leg, Sam noted every quirk of the two pokemon and strategies to exploit them, scribbling sentences into his journal.

His eevee also watched the match. Sam smiled and stroked the fur atop her head after he finished writing. Her tail twitched, and she clawed at the floor.

"Not yet, Luna," Sam told his eevee. "We haven't gotten our matchup yet."

When two more trainers stepped into the ring, Jaunty Joe Rizoni offered Sam a plate and sat down next to him. He wore a gaudy gold jacket and a thick set of knuckledusters. His dirty-blonde hair was slicked back with enough gel to make it glitter, and he wore a thick set of Oakleys. His jeans were sanded down at the knees so his pale kneecaps poked through, and his thick, rubbery shoes squeaked with each step. His belt had a thick strap of pokeballs, each one with names painted on in gold print.

Sam looked at the plate, piled high with cheese, crackers, and sausage, and turned it down. Joe shrugged and picked out the sausage, mashing four thick slices between his yellowed teeth. "You're up next, Sam," he said. "Tyler's using three pokemon. A few people bet on him, but nothing much is on the line. You'll get the usual commission."

The next battle went very quickly – the poochyena stumbled, and the nincada finished it with an x-scissor to the neck. Samuel noted the speed of the insect's lunge before standing up, stretching his arms over his head and smoothing out his plain black t-shirt.

"Right. Let's get started." Sam walked towards the ring, and Luna followed behind him. Luna sprinted into the center of the ring and crouched, ready to pounce.

Jaunty Joe walked up to the ring and shouted over the music, "Last chance to place your bets! Payout's ten percent for Sam, eighty for Tyler! Anyone feeling lucky tonight?"

No one came forward. Joe glanced around the room before raising a fist in the air and shouting, "Alright! Let's get the main event started!"

Tyler, a kid with crew-cut hair and ragged jeans, sauntered to the other side of the ring. He tossed a pokeball into the ring, calling out a rattata of his own.

"Alright rattata, speed up!"

The rattata ran circles around Luna, moving faster and faster until it became a blurry purple circle. Luna stood still, staring forward and waiting for orders. Sam waited for the rattata to reach its maximum velocity before giving a command.

"Use swift!"

Luna flung a torrent of stars forward, and they flew into the circle, slamming into the rattata with its own momentum. A star made the rattata tumble forward, and Sam ordered Luna to lunge at the opening. With a mighty smack, Luna sent the rattata flying across the ring, knocking it unconscious.

The announcer made the call and asked Tyler to send his next pokemon. Out came a spinarak, scrunching its abdomen into a baleful scowl.

"String shot!"

Sam called for a swift, and Luna's stars hissed and sparked as they burnt up the string. The spinarak answered with a poison sting that Luna leapt over. While she was in the air, Tyler ordered his spinarak to lay webbing on the floor. The spinarak spat out a thick, gooey coating, and Luna landed right in the middle of it.

"Alright, now tackle!" Tyler shouted.

"Sand attack!"

Luna kicked up webbing from the floor, spattering it across the spinarak's eyes. It reared up and wriggled its legs in vain attempt to clear its vision.

"Pull yourself free with quick attack!"

Luna moved far slower with her feet sticking to the floor, but with a gooey twang, it snapped free of the web and slammed into the spinarak. It rolled halfway across the ring and landed on its back. It scrunched and wiggled, but it couldn't roll back over. With another quick attack, the spinarak fell still. Luna ran in a circle and pushed her hind legs up, moving into a short handstand before rolling forward.

"Come on Tyler, this is too easy," Sam called. "Luna needs more of a challenge than that."

Tyler called out his final pokemon, a machop. It emerged from the pokeball with a somersault, coming up with its hands poised to strike. The crowd clapped, but no one cheered.

"Machop, karate chop!"

"Dodge left!" Sam shouted. Luna moved, but her feet stuck to the floor a second too long, and the machop's strike slammed into her front leg. She hobbled back, her paw raised into the air. The crowd leaned in closer, and a few people started cheering Tyler on.

"Do it again machop!"

Sam surveyed the field and saw a path through the webbing, leading to a dead end. "Three steps back, then jump right!"

Luna danced back, and the machop's attack swiped her ears to the side. Then she sprung right, wincing when she landed on her paw. Tyler grinned when he saw Luna trapped by the webs.

"Okay machop, finish it with low kick!"

Sam waited for the machop to shift all its weight to its left leg. Then he shouted, "Roll forward and right!"

Luna tucked in her head and barreled into the machop's load-bearing leg. The machop, off balance from starting the kick, teetered forward and fell face-first into the sticky floor. It tried pulling itself up, but the more it struggled, the more ensnared it became. Luna gave the machop a wide smile and crouched low to pounce.

Sam turned to Jaunty Joe and said, "Shouldn't we call the match? That machop's never getting out." Luna looked up at him, and she sat down, turning her head away in a mild tantrum.

"Don't you dare call it!" Tyler shouted. "I can still win! Machop, get up now!"

"Well, the machop's still moving," Joe said, "so it can still fight. You might as well finish it."

Sam clenched his hands. "Fine. Luna, swift."

Luna yelped and flung a barrage of stars into the machop's back. With Sam's hand signal, she stopped. The machop gritted its teeth and tried to rise.

"Are you sure you want to keep fighting?" Sam asked.

"My machop's tough!" Tyler said. "It'll get up, just watch!"

"Fine. Keep going Luna."

Another volley of stars pounded the machop. This time, when the barrage ended, the machop didn't try to stand. It reached towards the edge of the ring and tried to crawl through the sticky web.

"Your machop doesn't want to fight anymore. Just give it up."

"No! It's not over until it's over! I'm not giving up no matter what!"

Sam lowered his head. Then he ordered another swift attack. This time, the volley continued for a whole minute. The crowd watched, open mouthed, at the fireworks display in front of them, and when it ended, they cheered. Luna strutted around the ring and purred under the attention

The machop didn't move. Bruises mottled its backside, and blood gushed out of its nose. Tyler swore at it as he called it back. The crowd moved towards Sam, clapping him on the back, offering him sodas, saying they always thought he'd win. Sam took a can of root beer and chugged it down, wiping away the sweet, brown trickle that dripped down his chin. Then Jaunty Joe pushed his way through, flanked by two beefy thugs from the football team.

"Nice one," Joe said. He held out an envelope, and Sam took it. "Haven't seen you on the ropes like that for a while. How about bumping it up to four next time?"

"Four?" Sam asked, loud enough for the crowd to hear. He held out his arms and spun around, glancing at every member of the crowd. "Just four? Let's make it five."

After all the winnings were collected, Jaunty Joe scheduled the next fight. He tried to get Sam in two weeks later, but Sam's exam made him bump it back to three. Sam walked towards home, striding beneath the harsh glow of the street lamps with large, even steps. He stopped at a pharmacy he hadn't been to before and paid for a potion with the cleanest bills he had won that night. Then he snuck into an alley, leaned up against a building, and sprayed the potion on Luna's leg.

"That was fun, right?" he asked. Luna gave him a nod and flexed her healed leg.

"Good. Hopefully the next fight will be more of a challenge." Then he looked at his watch and said, "Oh crap! I gotta get home!"

He called back Luna, tucked his envelope into his shirt, and sprinted down the streets. The city gradually transformed from old, grimy shops to a cleaner, more cultivated neighborhood of houses pressed together, separated by a tasteful ring of manicured lawn. Sam hopped over the gold, wooden gate in front of his house and dashed through the door.

"Oh, you're back late!" his mother said. She was putting dishes drenched in curry sauce into the dishwasher. "How was the party?"

"Great! There'll be another one in three weeks. It'll be a nice way to celebrate finishing the exam."

"Wow, they sure like to party, don't they?" Sam's mother gave him a kiss on the forehead and said, "Be sure to wash up before bed, and don't stay up too late studying!"

"Okay mom!" Sam bound up the staircase, three stairs at a time, and swung his bedroom door open. Two windows split the room in two – on the left, curtains shut out the light outside, covering his bed with shadows. On the right, his desk had research papers and pokemon texts piled halfway to the ceiling, a cracked coffee mug crammed with pencils, a ream of blank notebook paper jutting from a desk drawer, and a sculpted clay mask, just large enough to reach past Sam's nose, painted with striking black and green lines. The window above his desk had the curtains thrown open, and the light from outside poured in. Two potted plants flanked his doorway, filling the room with the scent of moist earth.

Sam sat down, cracked open a text, and didn't stop reading until his eyes started to droop. Then he took out a penlight from his desk drawer, closed up the curtains, and slid under the bed. Beneath a loose floorboard, he had an old shoebox. The surface only held a few nostalgic childhood artifacts, but beneath a false cardboard bottom sat thousands of dollars, crammed together tight enough to concentrate their faint monetary odor. Sam crammed in his recent earnings, carefully slid the false bottom back into place, and crawled into bed. He called out Luna, cradled her in his arms, and drifted off to sleep.

Chapter Two: Setting the Stage

Inside Room 305, a third-story classroom of Palsitore High School overlooking the basketball court, nine masked students sat on one end of a long wooden table. Six other students, sans masks, sat on the other side of the table and watched with interest as the masked students spoke. A teacher, who wore a blank white mask and a pale robe, leaned against the wall next to the chalkboard.

A girl wearing a dazzling gold mask and a foppish Victorian hat spoke first, with a lilting British accent that evoked images of decadent balls and charming courtiers

"Madams, gentlemen, it seems we have a most dire problem facing us all." She slapped the chalkboard, which said 'Summer Play', with a handled chalkboard eraser. "The end of our juvenile acting careers is upon many of us, and we are in great need of a production that shall, er-hem, knock the socks off of everyone in attendance. It would be most gratifying to hear any suggestions from such gifted, talented professionals gathered here."

Her words earned her a moderate applause from the unmasked audience, but not quite enough to drown out the sound of dribbling basketballs.

A boy on her left, wearing a silver mask, a cowboy hat, and a sheriff's pin, stood up and said, "I reckon' we could use sumtin' fun! It ain't e'ryday us youngun's get to say goodbye to gals as purty and easy on the eyes as yourself, so we might as well make it a fun mem'ry. Whadd'yall say?"

His thick accent earned him some applause, but a sudden barrage of basketballs pounding backboards drowned it out.

Another student, this one wearing a ludicrously tall top hat that bumped the ceiling, a monocle, and a petticoat stuffed with monopoly money, remained seated as he hit the table and said, "You imbecile! It doesn't matter how much fun we have, what matters is how much money we make! And nothing draws a crowd to our venues more than slapping Sam on every production poster and promising the greatest spectacle of villainy and wrong-doing the world has ever seen!"

The student's mercantilistic antics earned him enough applause to compete with the dribbling drills below. Sam cleared his throat, stood up, and pressed his gloved hand against the striking, angular black mask he wore.

"I cannot. How could I commit such a travesty against those I hold as dear friends? No, I cannot permit myself to take center stage, to steal the light of glory and leave you all shrouded in darkness, for what kind of friend would I be if I took the credit for all of your hard work?"

The crowd jeered at him, shouting "Boo!" and "Get off the stage!" Then they chanted "Bring out the villain!", louder and louder until Sam sighed, made a sweeping bow, and leapt onto the table.

"But what kind of actor would I be if I didn't take the entire spotlight for myself!" he shouted, filling his voice with manic, prideful villainy. "The stage exists solely to extol my virtues and should remain unsullied by shoddy, half-baked acting. The crowd demands my name, their very hearts beat in unison to the sound of my footsteps behind the curtain, and it shall be I, Samuel Milone, the greatest actor the world has ever seen, that shall so thoroughly enthrall them with talent that they shall roam listless for all their lives, never again to enjoy the wonders of this world, for what natural beauty could compare to my divine image? And should anyone try to take that from me," Sam said, placing his black-robed arm over his face and scowling from behind his mask, "shall plead for death after I am through with them."

The miniature audience and the other actors gave him a quick standing ovation. Then the club president pulled up her mask and wiped sweat off her brow.

"Okay, I've had enough of the masks. Let's take them off."

"Thank god," the petticoat-wearing student said. "I don't think I can hold this monocle in any longer. It definitely won't work for a performance. I do like the coat though."

The club president, Emily Rosario, pulled a clipboard out from under the table and wrote on it. "Alright, any other comments?"

"This mask's a little too tight," the cowboy student said. "It's scrunching up the bridge of my nose."

"Think you can fix that?" Emily asked the prop master. The short, bald student nodded, and Emily wrote another note. "Alright, what about you Ben? How's that blaziken costume?"

Ben slipped off the mask and three feet of spiky blonde wig. Sweat matted his hair down and dripped from his nose.

"Way too fucking hot."

"Watch your language," the teacher said.

"Could we put some holes in this thing?" Ben asked.

"It's a rental, so no." Emily answered. "What about you Sam? Flashy enough for you?"

Sam took off his mask and gloves. "Fine. I gotta go."

"Already?" Emily asked. "We just started the meeting."

The prop master said, "Cut him some slack. He's got that exam in two days, remember?"

"Of course I remember! I'm just giving him a hard time." Emily smiled at Sam and said, "Don't study too hard, okay? I wouldn't want to find you buried under a pile of books again."

Sam chuckled and said, "You won't ever find me under the pile I'll have to study. See ya guys."

Sam frowned as he walked away. He took his backpack, went down the stairs to the library, and sat down in front of a messy-haired, glasses-wearing guy. Only those two features were visible behind the wall of textbooks stacked onto the table, everything from treatises on durant colony architecture to records of staravia migration patterns, the genetic theory of butterfree wing patterns, cranial case studies delving into pokemon physiology, sunflora growth charts, and other titles printed in too small a font for Sam to read.

"Hey Brandon," Sam said as he sat down, "Could you pass me some?"

Brandon Oak looked up from his book and straightened his glasses. "Isn't the drama club meeting today?"

"I left early."

Brandon pushed a pile towards him. Brandon pushed a pile towards him. On the hand atop the pile of books, on his left ring finger, glittered a slim gold band with a spherical blue gem embedded in the gleaming metal. The gem glowed softly in the library's fluorescent light. "You should stay. Once we graduate, odds are we won't see them again."

Sam shuffled through the pile until he found a text he didn't recognize. Then he opened it and glanced through the abstract outlining the metal composition of a metagross' claws. "We only get one shot at this exam. I'm not wasting it."

"Fair enough."

Twenty minutes of silence passed, broken only by the sound of pencils scratching against paper and the rustling of pages. Then Brandon passed a book forward.

"Here's something on sylveon ribbon composition and tensile strength. Interested?"

"No thanks. It's not that good of a read. Professor Ruskin wrote a more comprehensive treatise on sylveon that gets those points across better."

"But wasn't Ruskin wrong about the requirements for sylveon's evolution?"

"Not quite. He theorized the existence of a stone that housed the proper radiation, but he could never prove it. He also provided the correct evolution process."

"Huh. I should re-read it then." Brandon went digging through the pile of books, and then he pulled out a very thin, plastic-bound report. "Hey, have you read this one yet?"

Sam took the report and glanced on the cover. It read, in small, neat font, 'An Overview on the Projected Experimentation with Aura Infusion'.

"I haven't bothered. There's not enough data out there yet to make an exam topic."

"I'm not so sure about that," Brandon said. "My dad got a huge grant from Sinex to start working on it. They also gave him some DNA samples to work with. If there's going to be a breakthrough anywhere in a few years, it'll be here."

Sam flipped through the report and read its abstract. Then he handed it back to Brandon. "Maybe later. We better focus on more well-established areas of research. Speaking of which, where did you put that croagunk toxicology study? The medical research there's bound to come up in the exam."

"Oh, over here. It's a really good read."

Sam took the book and flipped through it. After reading the abstract, he skipped the research procedure and tore through the results, absorbing every scrap of data the researchers acquired. He took meticulous notes, writing down all the discernible trends, molecular structures of the most promising compounds, and potential sources of bias within the research. Once he was done, he set the book aside and hunted for another title, and he didn't stop reading until the sun had nearly set, turning the library a gorgeous vermillion mottled with all the various red-tinted shades of its covers.

Brandon took stacks of books that teetered over his head and set them in front of the librarian, offering an apology with each stack. Sam read for a while longer, until the last of the sunlight shrank away from his reading spot, and then he put his book back on the shelf.

Brandon was waiting for him outside the doors, leaning against a wall and typing on his tablet. When he saw Sam, he put the tablet away and walked up to him.

"Two days. Hard to believe, isn't it?"

"I guess so."

A minute of silence passed between them. Sam looked away, observing a slow, gentle drip from the tip of a water fountain. Then Brandon cleared his throat.

"I don't know if this is a good idea," he said.

"We've been over this. No one will take me seriously if you don't take the exam too."

"But that's just stupid! What'll you do if you don't get that money?"

Sam shifted his gaze lower, to a small puddle that had settled beneath the fountain. Every so often, its surface would ripple with a falling drop.

"Just take the stupid exam. And don't go easy on it either, you've got your own reputation to think about."

"What reputation? I haven't done anything, it's just my dad." Brandon ran a hand through his hair and said, "Look, they'll probably take both of us. If you don't get the scholarship from then… then how about a scholarship from me? I already asked dad, and he said he'd be more than happy to help you out in exchange for taking an intern position with him for a few years."

Sam gritted his teeth and said, "I have to go." He stormed down the hall, ignoring Brandon's shouts.

That night, Sam studied until dawn, muttering to himself as he read, repeating the same phrase over and over: "I won't lose to him."