Tales from the Guild Kagebatan: Team Tag

by Psycro4

When Rebecca awakes to find herself in a new body with no way to return home and a little brother to protect she must try to work things out in a much smaller form than desired. Unfortunately for her she has no reason for being in this world at all.

Tales from the Guild Kagebatan: Team Tag, the Lost Pair

"I' m home!" called out Rebecca as she walked into her living room, only to trip upon a Zigzagoon and fall into a Mightyena. "And in pain," she weakly added.

"There you are Ziggy!" her younger brother, Freddy, yelled as he ran up to the Mightyena and caught it in a death embrace.

"I don't get what you see in those things Freddy. They do nothing but lie around and eat our food," Rebecca groaned as she pulled herself off the floor.

"But sis…"

"No buts!" she cut him off and stormed to her room.

"Hopefully she'll see one day, huh guys?"

"Goon!" "Yena!"

-The Next Morning-

'That was a good sleep! The animals didn't bother me at all and I couldn't even hear my brother whine during the night.' Rebecca slowly rubbed the sleep from her eyes, basking in the refreshment of a full night's sleep. As her eyes opened she stretched her feet and hands into the air. The red gloves she was wearing were extremely comfortable, she'd have to remember that for future days. She shook her head feeling the air rush past her ears, ahhhh, fresh air, so refreshing in the morning. '...Wait, I don't wear red gloves, my windows are not open, and why can I feel my ears so well!' Suddenly someone was shaking her back and forth to get her attention, she looked up into the face of a giant blue and white mouse that seemed to like subtraction a bit to much. She nearly fainted once more.

"Mrs. Plusle? Do you know where we are?" the mouse asked in perfect English.

Rebecca actually did scream until the words and pitch of the voice registered. "Freddy?"

"You are awake! How did you know my name Mrs. Plusle?"

Rebecca sat up. " Is this some kind of joke to you! Take off that costume and drop the act. I know it's you Freddy and if you take this one step further I am going to tell mom."

"Rebecca? Is that you?"

"Of course it's me, who else would it be?"

"You look just like a normal Plusle to me."

"Plusle? What's that? I'm serious..."

"It's a Pokemon, you should know that."

"You dressed me up as an animal and dressed yourself up, how sweet. Now tell me how to get out of this costume."

"I look like a Pokemon?" Freddy noticed that his hands were covered in blue. He reached up and felt his ears, bending them over for a better look. He waggled his tail growing ever more excited at the prospect that he might also be a Pokemon. "I'm a Minun! That's so cool!"

"No, pulling pranks on your sister is not cool at all."

"But sis, I'm not actually doing this. We actually are a Plusle and a Minun as far as I can tell."

"You're telling me that I, for some unknown reason, just magically turned into an animal for no reason whatsoever?"

"I think so."

"Well that's so stupid. Just get this straight, as your older sister I will make sure that I will figure out what happened to us so we can change back as soon as possible."

"But I want to..."

"No buts! And neither I nor you will devolve..."

"Salvete amici!" a new voice broke in. The voice had a slight Italian accent and came from a green and white dog with a red neckband that seemed to be...flying? "Flor et ducis tuus sum."

"What is she saying sis?" Freddy asked nervously in a low voice.

"How should I know? It's probably nonsense anyway. That thing can't even put a sentence together when we might have a chance of understanding it."

"Hercule! Tu es caudex! Ego puella et ego heres regis sum!" the new animal outraged.

"I don't think she liked what you said about her..."

"Minime, haudquamquam! Id re capis!"

"How would you know? It's just a stupid animal."

"Caudex nesum. Sed es..."

"Can you tell us where we are Mrs..."

"Flor. Voce me Flor. Brightstone Cavernam estis."

"So we're in Brightstone Caverns?"

"I still don't think it is speaking intelligible words."

Flor gave a death glare to Rebecca. "Ita vero, homonculus," she nodded to Freddy, "Quid nomine es?"

"I feel like you were sent to us, you appeared so soon."

"Common' it's just a coincidence. There is no way it could have known."

"Ita vero. Fui. Ducis tuus sum. Vene mecum." She nodded to Freddy to follow. "Iterum quid nomine es?"

"I think she wants us to follow."

"OH NO WAY! I am not following any animal out of this place just to be eaten." She finished this statement only to notice that her brother was already following the creature and trying to strike up a conversation with it. She quickly stumbled after them to catch up.

"What are you?"

"Shaymin sum."

"I've never heard of Shaymin before."

"Non commues sunt."

"Oh! I forgot to introduce myself! I'm Freddy, and I am now a Minun. I used to be a human you know."

"Esne?"

"Brother. Get away from that animal. If this is real we are mice. Dogs eat mice. It just wants to eat you."

"Minime! Nobis Shaymin non corpes cenamus!"

"I have no idea what you just said but it can't be of any significance whatsoever."

"Lighten up and make the best of this sis."

"Best of what? We're stuck in a place full of vicious, mouse eating animals as mice, we have no idea how to get home, if we aren't..." she was cut off by the sunlight as they emerged from the Caverns, where the Caverns were bright, the outside was nearly blinding. All except for Flor covered their eyes to protect from the harsh glare.

"Wow! It's beautiful!" Freddy exclaimed overlooking where they had emerged from. They had emerged from the top of a mountain at the foot of which rested a large city. The city consisted of may different shops, the function of which could not be determined at a distance. In the middle of the city was a large building constructed out of living trees. All around the the city the forest thrived. The cave entrance was a clearing into the same forest, thick underbrush covering the ground in all directions, wild flowers and vines struggling to find purchase in the bark of the trees.

"Vene Kagebatan in media urbis. Iam hunc. Vene currans." With that Flor flew off from where they were to the building in the center of the city.

"Now that that thing is gone we can find our way back home."

"But sis, I like it here. And Flor seems nice enough."

"You like what here? We have done nothing but wake up and walk outside."

"But the view is amazing here, we can't see anything like this at our house. We're even Pokemon! We can see the world as it was meant to be seen like this. Did you notice how much your hearing has improved?"

"Well obviously it did. We have these enormous ears."

Flor alighted on the ground next to them. "Cur non ies? Nihilominus vene mecum." She motioned for Freddy to follow her into the underbrush and down the mountain. She turned to Rebecca, "Eldaste videre te cupit." She started to lead the two without another word, Freddy following eagerly. The forest seemed to respond to Flor's presence and shielded her, and by extension Freddy, from the briars and other natural hazards. Rebecca, lagging behind, had her fur becoming caught on many of the same briars.

"Where are you taking us?"

"I probably don't want to know," Rebecca muttered darkly, narrowly missing another vine.

"Eldaste capio vobis."

"Eldaste?"

"Probably another dog. There's probably a whole tribe of those things where its leading us just ready for some mice for dinner."

"Minime, homuncula, parva quanta est. Sed dominus Eldaste canem et Lucario est. Eldaste cenantem, in triclinium corpus non est. Iterum puella sum. Voce me puella, puer et res nesum."

"We get to see a Lucario? Cool!"

"Ita vero. Eldaste est Lucario."

"What's a Lucario?"

"Cerulian et niger canus est."

"It's a really rare Pokemon that the champion of Sinnoh uses."

"Sin-noh?" Flor tried the unfamiliar word out.

"The purple thing that comes out of a rock?"

"No, it's the blue one with the apen...apendi...apepn...things that look like the champion's hair thingies. The one that follows her around."

"Quid Sin-noh est?"

Rebecca seemed to freeze up. She remembered the posters of the champions in her brother's room. The he had just described was the most intimidating dog on them. "We are going to see a large, intimidating dog and are being led by another, slightly less intimidating dog... we are going to die."

"From what?" Freddy asked, oblivious to his sister's panic.

"From all these animals, that's from what!"

"Carnifex non sunt, videbis."

"And all they can do is mutter random gibberish..."

"...et ex silvam ducivi," Flor finished the sentence as they emerged from the forest.

"Look at this city! It's so bright and cheerful and it looks like even the shopkeepers are Pokemon. Isn't it so cool!"

"I bet they speak the same babble."

They were still following Flor through the streets to the center of the city, passing various gayly colored buildings, to where the large building resided. Flor was very obviously very irritated with Rebecca at this point. "Tempus est hic. Ventus sco!" Flor threw her head back and a blade of air knocked Rebecca into unconsciousness. "Gratias deos ago. Hic tacet."

"Did you just knock my sister out for no reason!"

"Minime." Flor shook her head before glowing brightly and shifting into her hedgehog shaped land form. "Freddy, sic tibi placet, eam mecum capis?"

"What?"

Flor pantomimed something on her back.

"Oh, you want me to carry her?"

"Ita vero," Flor nodded.

Freddy walked over to his unconscious sister and sighed, last time he had tried picking her up she was way to heavy and he had to call for his parents to help her up to her room. However when he bent down to pick her up she up she could be lifted easily! Perhaps it was from her small size or his newfound strength, but now he could easily carry her. When he followed Flor into the building he couldn't see very well due to his sister being in his face the whole time. Flor led him forward and to the right until Freddy lost his footing on some stairs he couldn't see and fell, and fell, and fell, and fell rolling end over end over sister over end on the way down. Eventually he rolled to a stop in front of an extremely large, imposing door.

"Magna portare magne duce porta est."

The door swung outwards on silent hinges.

"I'm scared..."

"Noli timere, parvus civis."

As the duo entered the hall, Flor carrying Rebecca on her back this time, the temperature dropped by a tangible 30 degrees fahrenheit, the stone floor giving way to ice that had grooves carved into it for traction. On the side of the corridor life size statues of Pokemon stared down at then. A Sunkern on one side, a Skitty on the other... The likeness was eerily striking and below each statue was a pedestal about a foot tall, also of ice, with two names carved into it, one above the other. Close to the end an ice sculpture of Flor rested on the left side, her land form standing next to a leaping sky form.

"Hey, this looks like you Flor!" Freddy ran over to the statue.

"Ita vero, me est." Flor walked alongside him and pointed something that he hadn't noticed before out to him, along the top edge of the pedestal was carved a quote: "AB ACTU AD POSSE VALET ILLATIO," presumably by Flor herself. Upon the pedestal was written:

Solo Vavance
Flor

"Non tempus est. Vene." Flor walked on.

At the end of the hall the path widened into a circular room covered in the same type of ice as the tunnel. Around the room near the walls statues also stood, each one seeming to be proud to be there. Amount the Pokemon in the room stood an Ampharos, an Electivire, and oddly enough a Pichu wearing a scarf and goggles. Flor placed Rebecca down in front of a pillar of ice that stood in the middle of the room. Upon the pillar was a plank of some kind of wood. The ice wrapped around the wood as if to grasp it and never let go, however the top of the table was completely clear of ice. Within the pillar a spherical glow emanated causing Freddy to feel energized when he stepped into range. In front of the desk, almost under it, a Glaceon lounged while a Lucario meditated upon it. Rebecca slowly came to consciousness in the glow while her brother looked at the engravings on the statues. On the statue of the Ampharos:

Team Kindhearted
Sergeant Maple

On the Electivire:

Team Warden
General Redwood

And on the Pichu:

Team 369
Captain Pine

Just as Freddy was going to move on to the next statue, a Magnezone, the Lucario's eyes snapped open. Afraid to be caught doing something he wasn't supposed to be doing, Freddy rushed back to Rebecca's side to help her up.

"Salvete Flor et amici," his voice was deep and he spoke as he should be listened to, the voice of one used to a position of power in leading armies. And yet he didn't shout, nor did he need to, the room was (relatively) small and his voice had more than enough body to fill it with a normal volume.

"Salve domus." Flor bowed her head slightly as a sign of respect.

"Great, another unintelligible animal," Rebecca darkly muttered getting to her feet.

"Oh, you speak English."

"Of course I spee... Wait, you can... You're able... Wha?"

"And you accuse me of being unintelligible. I indeed can speak English."

"Mr. Lucario?" Freddy ventured hesitantly.

"Call me Eldaste."

"What are the statues for?"

"Well, to answer your question you need some explanation of where you are. This is an exploration guild, or at least that is the official term. We work differently than other guilds in some ways, like having a communal item repository rather than separate banks for different teams. In a guild, and I'm sorry for boring you if you already knew this, a team is a collection of one or more Pokemon who take on missions together to help other Pokemon out in some way. We have three main types of team here, exploration, rescue, and bounty. Now back to your question. Each statue is the leader of a different team, the engraving is the team name followed by the name of the leader. The highest rank Pokemon have their statues in here. The lower ranks have their statues in the hall to my office."

"How can I understand you and not the meaningless babble that the..." Rebecca looked around the room for Flor, and, not seeing the distinctive dog form, assumed that she had left. She did remember that the hedgehog had spoken in the same sort of tongue. "...walking rosebush utters?"

"Flor here understands most languages but only speaks in a language lost to time."

"Quid aliquid nescit? In hic tempo cives linguam Latinae nesciant." Flor grumbled to herself.

"I sent Flor to you because I sensed that something had changed in Brightstone Caverns while I was meditating. The aura felt strong enough to be that of something alive, so I sent one of our best seeker teams, Solo Vavance, to find the source, which happened to be you."

"I can't believe this, I'm going to talk to an animal," Rebecca muttered under her breath after getting over the initial shock of having a Pokemon speak to her, then in a louder tone she addressed Eldaste. "So you guessed that we would magically appear from somewhere into that cave? If you were smart you would realize that sending a creature that only knows 'a language lost to time' is a bad idea. Why didn't you send something that could talk with us?"

"The reason that I..."

"Perhaps you even know how I got to the cave."

"Well I have some..."

"I don't want this! I'm in a new place, with no idea of what I have to do to get home! I JUST WANT TO GO HOME!" Rebecca sobbed.

"Wow sis, I didn't know you felt like that."

"Where do you live?" a soft voice broke in.

"What do you care! You just want to use us, and then eat us."

"Eat you? Wherever did you get that idea? I would like to help you home. I really am quite warm under this cold exterior."

"What?..." she broke off her sentence when she didn't see the Lucario staring intently at her as she had been expecting. Instead she saw the Glaceon looking at her with a small smile.

"Tell me where you live and we could possibly find it and return you home." Her voice was vastly different from the Lucario's, and yet also had an aura of power, but a different sort of power. The strength was that of a mother, kind, and yet at the same time asking to be respected.

Rebecca sighed. "We live on 312 Plurimus Lane Rustburough, Hoenn."

"Eldaste, have you heard of Hoenn before?"

"I may have traveled far, but even I cannot recall such a place Elpi."

"Oh you two are useless! It's one of the main regions, you know, Sinnoh, Kanto, Hoenn, Unova..." she trailed off noticing that Elpi was looking confused and Eldaste was looking worried.

"I think there is something you aren't telling us."

"I'm a Minun and she's a Plusle now!"

"Now!" Eldaste quickly turned to Freddy. "What were you before?"

"A human, I like this better though." Eldaste and Elpi quickly glanced at each other.

Eldaste turned to Rebecca. "I'm sorry, there are no humans here, and there never have been. However, akin to you, throughout time different humans have come here as Pokemon to solve a catastrophe. If this were so, however, I would not have sensed you. You just slipped through space-time. The only way to return you to you home is to find another anomaly to travel through."

"So we're stuck."

"Yes."

"Forever."

"No, not forever. Just until we find another anomaly."

"Let's get looking then."

"We can't. The way that anomalies works that they are a instantaneous shift in space-time that transports all that is on top of it to another time and place. Sometimes, as you have experienced, there is a selective shift or matter displacement. The main way you'd get home would be by getting lucky. However we can try to temporarily stabilize an anomaly."

"So we're stuck forever."

"Cheer up." Elpi shook herself off and walked to where Rebecca sat in despair. "We all have some kind of problem. Just because yours is different than others doesn't mean that you get to be unhappy." She wrapped her tail around Rebecca and allowed her core heat to seep into it.

Rebecca snuggled into the warmth gladly, the freezing room having started to numb her body. "Well, what can I do?" she asked, sobs escaping from her body. "I can't go home, I'm stuck somewhere uninhabited by people, and my fate seems to just be determined by random chance."

"That's right, let it all out." Elpi urged while petting Rebecca's head with her left forepaw.

"I'm scared. I don't feel safe here and my brother has no caution."

"You can feel safe in this room. No one will be able to hurt you, I won't let them."

Freddy yawned, it had been a long morning for him. Being teleported to another world and hiking up and down a mountain will do that to you.

"Somne."

"Hmm?"

"She said 'sleep'. You are looking tired. Although unless you are an ice type, like Elpi, or extremely resistant to cold, like me, you might want to bundle up." Freddy curled up on the floor, attempting to conserve warmth in the frigid environment. Subconsciously his body shifted towards the nearest warm object, Flor. His body relaxed as he drifted to sleep, Flor following the same example. Noting the unconscious state of the two others Eldaste decided that Elpi could handle things on her own and returned to his meditation.

"I'm really scared for him, he doesn't understand what kind of danger we're in here. And what can I do? I'm stuck, essentially forever, here. I want to take care of my brother, he's not old enough to take care of himself yet."

"That's natural you know, caring for your siblings. The real question though is what does he want?"

"I suppose he likes being an animal, but we can't let mom and dad worry about us. What can I do? What can I do?"

"How about you start a rescue team? Your brother would like it and you could help others who have become lost find their way home."

"I still want to go home."

"I tell you what. I'll get Eldaste to try to contact your parents to inform them of your situation. You can make your happy be creating a team including him, and if you are in a team you will travel more, hopefully to find some way of stabilizing an anomaly. Even we do not know everything about inter-dimensional travel. The best ways to ask about that are extremely hard to find."

"Can you find them?"

"I can find them, however if I did they would not help you, they would help me. If I could I would ask them to help me by helping you but they would deny the request. I'm sorry but that is how they see things. Their philosophy is 'to be helped you must help yourself'. But I think that you could be a great team leader if you tried."

"You think so?"

"Absolutely. All you need is to find yourself."

"I think I'm feeling better now, thanks."

Elpi slowly unwound her tail and pulled the heat back into her core. "Just try not to call Pokemon 'animals', they tend not to like it. If you can call them by their name, all of us are 'people' too. We have the same emotions that you do."

"What are your names again?"

"I am Elpi, he is Eldaste, and the one over there is Flor."

"Thanks, could you get him..."

"Eldaste."

"...to contact my parents then?"

"Ask him yourself. Courage is a value."

*Gulp* "U...u...ummm...Eldaste?"

He snapped open his eyes and gazed into Rebecca's, almost as if he could see everything she was and would be. " Yes?"

"Could you...ummm...contact my parents?"

"I'll try an auma trace. Where are they? Try being as specific as possible. I don't want any random passerby to challenge our holograms to a battle."

"Holograms?"

"Where are your parents now? If all you have is a general location I can try to lock onto their auras."

"Sootopolis at a conference."

Eldaste closed his eyes once more. The orb of light began to glow. It grew brighter and brighter until nothing could be seen, just white light. Rebecca felt herself separate from her body and start to float away, and then, nothing.