Again, with the disclaimers that start just about every story on this site! Here goes...I don't own Pokemon. The only things I own here are my characters, my ideas, my account, and the computer I'm using to bring such a story here to you. Italics mean that they're thinking and bold italics mean a flashback or a Dimensional Scream (all will unfold later, dear reader...don't you worry).
So, without further ado...let us begin!
The dark gray sky, filled with unchanging clouds just as inviting, loomed overhead as a Pokemon and a human ran across the shattered, frozen landscape below, knowing that stumbling meant certain death and stopping now meant suicide. How long they had been running was anybody's guess...all the two knew was that if they didn't find a second wind soon they were as good as dead. The Pokemon was a Grovyle, and the human was a 13-year-old girl. Both were utterly exhausted, but determined to hide their weary states from the other. The girl looked back over her shoulder to see half a dozen Sableye still in hot pursuit.
"Grovyle, please tell me that we'll be able to lose them up here..." she panted, looking back ahead of her and barely missing a rock intending to trip her.
"As soon as we reach that cave, we'll lose them for sure," Grovyle replied. "They don't know any of the passages we do."
"Good thing, too. I'm tired of these gemfaces getting on my back all the time." The cave in front of them was a dark, gaping hole that looked less welcoming than anybody would have liked, but it was also one of the safest hiding places around. Grovyle dashed in first, followed shortly by his human partner, who deliberately stepped on an odd-looking rock as she did so. This rock, which was actually a switch to the door, caused a large amount of rocks to come cascading down from above, blocking the only entrance the Sableye were aware of. As a sort of bonus, it also made it look like the two had perished in a freak rockfall incident.
"I don't know how you managed to rig that, Anima, but it's a good thing you did." Grovyle said. The girl, Anima, looked up, her cobalt eyes sparkling in rare humor.
"Time may be frozen here, but that apparently didn't stop the Underground from finding out how to move those rocks up there." She brushed a bit of dust out of her short, scruffy hair, which was an almost-blonde brown. The Underground that she was referring to was a resistance of the human kind that had been, sadly, destroyed by Primal Dialga a few years ago. At age eight, Anima had been the youngest to join, and despite her age was soon shooting up through the ranks until she was second in command. Her natural leadership abilities, as well as her intelligence and courage, made her one of the most admired and well-known members of the Underground. Then, when Anima was no older than 10, disaster struck the Underground.
Another well-known member, and also one of Anima's closest friends, Blaine, had been the one to first propose ending Primal Dialga's rule instead of simply trying to damage it. At the time he was five years Anima's senior and, although had a reputation as a bit of a hothead, was respected by many, including Anima. He supported the girl like no one else did back then. Then, as plans changed and developed and once-foggy outcomes were made clear, everything changed.
As far as the Underground was concerned, it had been Anima's idea to go back in time and collect the Time Gears, bringing them to the Temporal Tower located in the past and thus preventing the collapse of Temporal Tower. At first, everyone was ecstatic about the prospect of ending Primal Dialga's reign of dark terror and finally getting to see the sun. Many of them had already started to search for Dimensional Holes, tears in time and space, that would lead to the past. But every plan had its consequences, and this one had one that lead to the main breakup of the Underground. Anima had reluctantly told her comrades this at a Council meeting, which both she and Blaine, along with six or seven other, older people, were a part of. Anima closed her eyes and remembered her announcement and, more importantly, the others' reactions to it.
"...and we'll be good to go as soon as we get that straightened out! Now...oh, Anima. Do you have something you need to say?" Blaine asked, noticing Anima fidget in her seat. As a ten-year-old in a room full of people at least five years ahead of her, she wasn't completely confident that their reactions would be pretty. But they had a right to know what they were getting into, and if they weren't going to agree with the terms and conditions then they should make way for someone who would.
"About this...you don't know what the consequences will be." she began quietly.
"'Course we do," a redheaded man in his early twenties, Zachary, said. "If we fail, we're executed by Dusknoir and his Sableye Squad. If we succeed, well...we still might be executed, but there'll be more satisfaction on our part." Anima shook her head, wishing that that was the case but knowing that it wasn't.
"You...don't understand. If we succeed, if we change history, then...something else will happen. Something that a lot of you are going to find truly horrible." Anima could feel the tension in the air rise to an almost unbearable level. Blaine and everybody else were looking at her with mixed expressions that she could not make out, but knew that they mostly revolved around fear. But she had to continue, because if she didn't tell them, who else would?
"If we win this fight, there will be a price we have to pay. A price that many of you might think is too high...in order to stop the collapse of Temporal Tower, we all have to accept one little detail." Anima was aware that she was stalling, but with something this big she felt that it really couldn't be helped. The truth slipped out faster than Anima could think of a possible way to sugarcoat it. "If we alter history, then we'll fade out of history! Fade to nothingness...as if we never existed..." The reaction was worse than Anima could picture it. But Blaine's reaction was the worst. He first turned pale and he shrank away from her as if she had just slapped him. But then, fury began brewing in his hazel eyes.
"You weren't gonna tell us, were you?" he hissed.
"Of course I was! There just wasn't time to, not then!" Anima said, stepping back towards the door.
"You're unbelievable!" Blaine yelled at her. Under any other circumstances, she'd see this as a compliment. "You knew the whole time, but you didn't say a word about it until now, didn't you?"
"Anima? Are you all right?" Grovyle asked, breaking through the memories dancing through her mind.
"Just...thinking, that's all. Nothing new there," Anima said. Grovyle nodded, respecting his partner's privacy just as much as she valued his.
"We might want to head deeper in. Dusknoir's probably going to come check to see that we really are dead, and you know what that means..." Anima stood up, brushing off her pant legs. They were worn cargo pants that had been blue at some point, but had faded to an almost-gray color streaked with dirt and covered in rips and tears, especially around the knees and the bottom of the legs, where the fabric scraped the ground. Being a constant fugitive in the future wasn't exactly the most glamorous position in the world, but Anima truly didn't care that she couldn't remember the last time she'd had clothes that were in reasonably fair condition. What did trouble her was the fact that her clothing had faded to different shades of gray...just as the world had done following the occurrence of the Planet's Paralysis.
"Good idea," she said. "Let's go." The two wandered deeper and deeper into the cave, which was lined with different crystals that would have normally been colorful and shining had it not been for the tragedy that was the stopping of time.
"Look at this!" Anima said suddenly, her voice filled with rage that had not been there before. Grovyle was a bit startled by the sudden outburst, but said nothing, only listening to Anima as she continued. "I'll bet this was one of the most beautiful places here...and now...it's gone forever."
"Not forever," Grovyle amended. "We'll fix it. Even though the stakes are high, we'll return things to the way they once were." Anima looked up at her best friend, smiling through the tears glittering in her eyes.
"You're right...sometimes it's just a little hard to handle, that's all. We're doing so much to prevent this from happening and in return we disappear. Not one Pokemon will remember our names."
"But-" Grovyle started. Anima good-naturedly cut him off by raising a hand.
"I know. It's better to think about the needs of the many than the needs of the few. I'll be fine; if you think I'm walking out on this, you've got another thing coming." Grovyle smiled.
"That's exactly what I was waiting to hear." They continued on until they reached a room with three towering crystals forming a triangle in the middle of the room.
"Do you think..." Anima began, not knowing what to think but only knowing that whatever this was, it was the key to something important.
"It might actually be what we're looking for." Grovyle said. "You remember that legend the elder told us a few weeks ago, right?"
"Not word for word..." Anima admitted. "But enough to know that you have to match something..."
"You don't remember it, do you?"
"No. I'm sorry..." Anima sighed, tracing invisible patterns onto the crystal closest to her. "I really thought we were on to something, too." Suddenly, a wave of dizziness washed over her, and she let out a gasp of surprise.
"What is it? Are you seeing something?" Grovyle asked, the hopefulness in his voice impossible to ignore. The vision was relatively short, and all Anima saw was a deep lake on the other side of a hidden tunnel under the crystals, and, more importantly, the glow deep below that could only be a Time Gear. Anima snapped back to reality and faced her partner, grinning all the while.
"Found one," she said triumphantly. "I'll find out how to get to it, but now we know it's there." Grovyle smiled back, the same feeling of triumph surging through him. Of course, it was a minor victory, one that wouldn't matter very much until they figured out how to reach the Time Gear itself, but it was a start. Anima took a worn map out of her pocket. It was old, yellowed, and had been folded and unfolded many times, sometimes with diligent care but most often carelessly folded in halves due to time constraints. Anima spread the map out on the ground and looked over it. It was an extremely rare map of the past, one of the only ones left and the only one that was in as good a condition as this. On it, over many different landmarks, were small red X's over some locations and four thick, black circles around various points on the map. Anima took out a black marker—another rare oddity that could still be found on the black market, if you knew where to look—and circled a point marked "Crystal Cave", making the fifth and final circle.
"One step closer," Anima said, putting the marker away and folding the map again. Grovyle looked around the cavern as she did so, not wanting to be taken by surprise in case there was a mild case of hostility down here...
He wasn't disappointed.
"Well, well, well, that was a clever trick you pulled back there. But did you really think it would work against...me?" A voice said from the door the two had entered from. A voice that was all too familiar. A voice that they would have preferred to never hear again, but knew that they would probably have to, anyways.
The Pokemon that the voice belonged to was none other than Dusknoir himself; agent of Primal Dialga, sworn enemy to Grovyle, Anima, and any hidden allies they might possess, and determined to take them out once and for all.
"Actually...no." Anima replied, her eyes sweeping over the cavern and looking for a way out. Grovyle caught her eye and nodded once, a movement so small that Dusknoir had no chance of catching it. Anima nodded back; she knew what the plan was.
"Well, I'm glad you thought so, because I would hate to see a little girl be so disappointed." Dusknoir's tone of voice suggested that he really wouldn't mind at all if Anima was to be severely disappointed, and—of course—he didn't. Anima shrugged, deliberately making the movement as careless as possible.
"Hey, I can dream, can't I?" she asked innocently.
"I suppose so...not that dreaming will do you any good." Oh, he's right there. Anima thought to herself. What will do me any good is acting on those dreams and making them reality...and we're closer to that than he knows.
"Now, Anima, just come with me like the good little girl I know you can be, and I'll make sure your death is as merciful as possible."
"You and I both know that that isn't possible." Grovyle snapped. "You'd lose your good relationships with Primal Dialga, and we all know that you can't have that happen." He flashed a quick look at Anima that, to her, asked a simple question. Are you ready? Anima nodded and, once again, the move was practically invisible.
"Give my regards to your master!" Grovyle said, whipping a Luminous Orb out of nowhere and slamming it into the ground. A bright flash of light followed, and Dusknoir couldn't help but cover his eyes at the rare sight of genuine, concentrated brilliancy somehow contained in an orb no larger than a Cheri berry. When the last of the effulgence had faded away, Dusknoir saw (to his frustration) that neither Anima nor Grovyle were anywhere to be seen. Swearing quietly under his breath, he rushed outside in case the two had slipped past him while he had been disabled. Besides, there was no other way out, was there?
As soon as he had left, Grovyle and Anima emerged from the ground, where Grovyle had used a well-placed Dig attack that Dusknoir had failed to notice.
"Well, that worked," Grovyle said. Anima looked around at the ceiling, looking for another escape route and finding none.
"Yeah, but I get the feeling that all it did was buy a little more time. Unless we can tunnel out..."
"Looks like we don't have a choice. Let's go," Grovyle replied, jumping back into the hole with Anima right behind him.
"By the time he gets back, we'll be long gone...oh, I think I remembered that riddle." Grovyle, who was about to execute another Dig attack, froze and whirled to face her.
"You did?"
"Yeah, and this is how it goes..."