Through the Aura
Part Two of The Sinex Conquest Saga By Bardothren
Chapter 1: Alex Bayson
Police barricades surrounded the hole discovered beneath a large sandstone boulder. Dozens of sightseers gathered around to watch a radio crew, accompanied by a squadron of police officers, delve into the ruins.
A roserade, wearing a flowing black dress and holding a microphone in her petals, spoke into it as she walked into the entrance. "This is Alex Bayson, reporting to you live from the ruins uncovered earlier this morning by an excavation team searching for oil. The technology we've seen so far indicates that this predates known civilization, and it may provide a valuable insight into the lost history of pokemon. I have with me my cameraman, Sikes, and a large escort of officers in the event we run into anything alive down there. I will be giving you all the news as we explore the ruins."
Sikes, a bibarel, tinkered around with his camera's lens and smoothed out his dusty suit while the officers checked their guns and added fresh batteries to the electric torches. Four officers jumped down the hole, then Sikes passed down his camera equipment and jumped down after them, landing on his rear with a loud thump. Tracey followed, keeping the cord on her microphone from tangling in the rocks as she jumped.
"How much cord do we got?" Alex asked up the hole.
"A thousand feet. We couldn't get anything longer.
"Alright listeners! Here we go!"
The expedition team turned on their electric torches and searched the ruins room by room, prying open each door to look inside. Sikes waddled around, setting up his camera and taking shots of each room, while Alex reported everything they saw.
"This first room looks like a bedroom, but the beds are far too small for a fair number of pokemon. Hold on, there's something in one of the beds, some bones. A machoke maybe? No, the ribs are too small. It looks like a human skeleton, and it has to be centuries old, if not more. All the other beds are empty, but it looks like they were slept in. On to the next room!"
Alex posed next to the flat-screen TV as Sikes snapped a picture of it. "Here, we have what looks like some sort of… device. It looks like a painting, but it's blank. The surface seems to be glass, yet it's black. It also has buttons, maybe it turns on? It doesn't seem to work, so I guess we will never know."
"Hey, there's a set of stairs over here!" one of the officers said. "Should we take a look?"
"Let's finish up the rest of the upper floor first," Alex told them. "We'll save the best for last."
Alex went through the kitchen, poring over the boxes and cans sitting in the shelf and commenting on the pile of dishes sitting next to the sink. They tried prying open the door with a circular yellow sign painted onto it, but even with crowbars and superhuman strength, the door wouldn't budge. They rifled through a closet filled with human clothes, the medical room, and a gym before reaching the stairs.
"Here's hoping we have enough cord. Onward with the expedition!"
Two officers went ahead, followed by Sikes and Alex, with two officers facing the rear. Alex felt the cord tug at her hand just after she reached the bottom.
"Uh oh, looks like I'm out of cable. We've reached a cavern at the bottom, and although it's pitch dark in here, I can smell moisture. Perhaps there's a pond nearby, or an underground river. We'll send Sikes ahead to take pictures."
Sikes followed three officers into the cave, while the fourth remained by Alex, swinging the torch around to illuminate the ceiling.
"It seems that this cavern is coated with tiny white crystals. Perhaps this cavern held a mining operation long ago. Officer Nolf, could you please share your opinions on this place?"
"It's quiet," the officer said. "We better not stay too long or the torches will run out."
Sikes set his camera's tripod onto the floor, and he said, "Hey, Alex! We found something! It looks like some sort of crystal coffin!"
"A coffin? Can you open it?"
"I don't think so, but I can see a pokemon inside. I've never seen anything like it before."
"Did you hear that, listeners? Perhaps we've found an ancient pokemon predating known history! We'll have to wait for Sikes' photos for further confirmation."
Sikes shouted, and his camera clattered on the stone floor. The officers with him leapt back and drew their pistols.
"Sikes, what happened?"
"It opened its eyes! It looked right at me! Alex, I don't think that thing is dead!"
A resounding crack echoed in the cavern, and the crystal coffin split in two. The blue-haired pokemon inside stood up and stretched his arms.
"Freeze! Move and we will shoot!"
A blue glow filled the chamber, coming from the pokemon and the crystals in the cave. One officer panicked and fired his weapon, and the bullet slammed into a blue barrier surrounding the pokemon. The other officers opened fire, filling the chamber with flashes of blue light.
The blue pokemon lunged, knocking out each officer with a shimmering punch. Then he turned towards Sikes, who was cowering against a wall.
"No, wait, don't hurt me! I'm unarmed, see?"
The pokemon picked up the camera, turning it around in his hands and flexing the tripod's legs. He peered through the lens, turned the camera around and looked into the eyepiece. He set the camera down on its legs and walked towards the stairs.
"Hold it!" Officer Nolf shouted. "You are under arrest for assaulting an officer. Come quietly or I will shoot!"
The pokemon vanished and reappeared behind the officer, and then he dug his fingers into the officer's shoulder-blade. The officer gave a brief cry of pain before he fell to the floor. His torch clattered to the floor, illuminating the pokemon that stood before Alex. She couldn't look away from his pale green eyes as he walked closer to her.
Alex held up the microphone and stammered into it. The pokemon looked at the microphone and held out his hand. Alex looked at the microphone and quickly handed it to him. He crushed the microphone into pieces and dropped them onto the floor.
"Sorry about that. I can't risk the wrong people knowing I'm still alive."
"Who are you?"
The pokemon closed its eyes, and after a few seconds, it said, "You can call me Arkus. What year is it?"
"What year? It's the five-hundred and eighty-fifth year in the Era of The Father."
Arkus furrowed his brow at hearing the year. "I see." He walked up the stairs, and after looking at the unconscious officers, Alex followed after him. Arkus went into the refrigerator and opened two bottles of root beer.
"Here," he said, handing Alex a root beer. She twirled a vine around the bottle and took a sip while Arkus drained his bottle in a few gulps.
"I wish it was cold, but after six hundred years, I'm just happy it's still drinkable."
"So, you know what this place is? Who was the human in the bed? Do you think you'd be willing to participate in an interview?"
"I could tell you everything, but there wouldn't be a point, not after I erase your memories." Alex backed away from him into a shelf and Arkus said, "Don't worry, it won't hurt a bit. It'll be just like waking up from a dream."
"No! Stay away from me!" Alex waved her petals forward, scattering a cloud of orange powder. She ran out of the refrigerator, but Arkus was waiting outside the door. He placed a finger onto her forehead, and she slumped to the ground.
"That's better," he said, placing the roserade onto a bed. "Now for the others."
Alex woke with police officers and doctors standing over her bed, her shoulder being shaken by a burly makuhita.
"Wake up already!" the makuhita shouted.
"No, stop!" a doctor protested, holding him back with a leafy hand. "We don't know what kind of trauma she has experienced!"
Alex opened her eyes. "Trauma? What happened?"
"You don't remember? We found you all lying here in these beds," the doctor told him. We came down here minutes after your radio signal was cut off. Looks like something crushed it."
"My camera!" Sikes shouted from his bed. "My beautiful camera! I had one payment left on it, and it's smashed to pieces! Smashed!"
"It seems that you all have experienced some minor amnesia," the doctor said. "Can you tell me what you last remember?"
Alex held her flowers under her chin. "Well, I remember going through the rooms, then we went downstairs. Everything after that feels fuzzy."
"Just like the others. I'll need you to stay in Palsitore Central Hospital for a few weeks, just to make sure you don't experience any complications."
As Alex was carried out on a stretcher, she saw a faintly familiar set of pale-green eyes amongst the crowd, hidden beneath a white hood, but when she looked back, they were gone.
Chapter 2: Alicia de Renera
Palsitore's Central Library was a graceful stone angel nestled snugly in the midst of towering steel behemoths. It sat atop a small hill, with a wide set of marble steps leading up to the library's carved double-doors. The library's interior walls were scuffed so they wouldn't reflect the light of the steel-framed electric chandeliers, and the carpets were thin, deep-blue cotton. To the left of the door was a wide wooden desk. Aside from closing off the staff areas, it also housed the library's records and a chest of wooden figurines. To the right were the bathrooms and stainless steel drinking faucets in four different sizes.
In the back, to the left, were twelve round tables, each with four chairs of varying sizes, and another twelve chairs with bendable metal lamps. To the right, ten wooden bookshelves, each ten feet high and spaced six feet apart, held so many books that the shelves sagged and creaked every time a book was added. One time, a shelf broke, causing an avalanche of books that made the shelf tip over. Alicia would've been crushed were it not for the vigoroth sharing the aisle with her.
Alicia smoothed out her white librarian's uniform as she searched through a pile of returns and marking them down in her ledger when a man in a white cloak entered the library. She caught a glimpse of his pale, green eyes before the hood's shadow obscured them.
"Weird clothes," Alicia whispered to herself as she checked for overdue books. She found a set that hadn't been returned and circled them with a red pencil. "A new fashion from Yvenna, maybe?"
She plucked a printed letter out of a drawer, wrote the tardy borrower's name and address on it, and slid it through the mail slot on the far wall. She checked the return bin for more books before loading the returns on her cart and wheeling it out into the aisles. She started with the Z's and wound her way towards the rear of the library, returning the books, checking their distribution, and shuffling them around to even the load on each shelf. Every time her long, black hair got caught on a shelf or under the wheels of her cart, she hissed and gently untangled it.
As she rounded the corner of the B section, she saw the white robe again. She tried to look closer at the man's face, but he slipped away when she rolled the cart into the aisle.
"Oh dear," she whispered to herself as she shelved the remaining books. "I don't want to be rude, but I'd get in trouble if I let another human into the library. I suppose I'll have to ask him."
Alicia peeked through the shelf of the bookcase. The man had a stack of books next to him, and he was flipping through the pages of a book in his hands. Alicia wiped the sweat gathering at her brow and walked up to the man's table.
"Um, pardon me for asking this, but I need to make sure humans aren't using the library. Could you please show me your face?"
The man looked at her and raised his hood. He had the green, angular face of a grovyle, and his headleaf was tucked under his hood.
"Ah, sorry to bother you. I'll let you get back to reading."
Alicia returned to the front desk and helped an elderly medicham check out a book on gardening. Once she finished updating her ledgers, she stared out at the tables. Though she tried not to pay the grovyle any mind, she noticed that he flipped through each book before setting it aside. She debated asking him if he was looking for a specific book.
"I mean, it would take him a long time to go through the entire library, about six weeks at his pace. On the other hand, he should know that there's the card catalogue in the back. But maybe he hasn't been to a library before, but then again, there's a library in Yvenna too. Is he from somewhere else? For that matter, I've never seen a grovyle with that particular eye coloration. It's also odd that he keeps his headleaf tucked under his hood. Isn't that uncomfortable?"
"Pardon me miss," a granbull said, "but you're mumbling again."
"Oh my! Sorry, I'll get you checked out right away."
Once the granbull left with his books, Alicia glanced over at the clock on the wall.
"Wow, it's three already? Time for a break."
Alicia went into the back room and took her lunch out of the ice box. She ate her mixed berry salad and sausage links at a frenzied pace, shoving the food in her mouth, mashing it up, and gulping it down with a swig from her water bottle.
After she finished cleaning her face, she returned to the front desk and took out the box of wooden carvings. The box was sorted into three columns, one finished, one started, and one blocks of wood waiting to be carved. She rifled through the unfinished works as she looked around the library.
"No, Mrs. Albury isn't here," she mused to herself. "Mr. Tannensatz isn't either. Hmm… oh, Ms. Iver is here! I should finish hers."
Ms. Iver sat in the far corner of the library, hunching over a book. Her floppy, fluffy ears were tied back in a gentle bow behind her head, and the tufts of fur around her hands were neatly trimmed back. The wooden figurine held a similar posture, and most of the body was complete, but Alicia had saved the ears for last, hoping that Ms. Iver would sit closer to the desk one day. The ears needed detailed work, which Alicia couldn't do well without a better view of Ms. Iver.
With a sigh, Alicia rubbed her fingers together, conjuring a thin, dark blade between her fingers. She glanced up and saw the grovyle staring at her out of the corners of his eyes. Alicia hastily looked away and returned her attention to her project.
As she peered towards the elderly lopunny, she ran her fingers over the wooden surface, scraping gouges into the wooden block above the figurine's head. Sliver by sliver, the block was worn away into the shape of a fluffy bow. The end result was lopsided, as though it were blown by a gentle breeze, but she gave it a grin and set it in the finished box, alongside a croconaw and a furret.
"Alright, who's next?" Alicia asked as she rummaged through her works in progress. She plucked out the first one her fingers curled around and saw the face of Mr. Tannensatz.
"Ah, that's no good. I should start a new one then."
She looked around the library and her eyes first drifted towards the cloaked grovyle. She started to reach for a block of wood when she stopped herself.
"No, he wouldn't be a challenge, not with that cloak. Maybe I should try Ms. Ivan again? I did screw up her ears…"
She looked up again at the grovyle, and he had left the table to return the stack of books. He returned to the table with the stack from the shelf's second row.
"Wait, did he read through all those books? He couldn't have, he just skimmed them. Then again, there are some pokemon that can read really fast, like Father. But he's a grovyle, and grovyle can't read that fast. No, he's just skimming."
Alicia glanced over at the clock and saw that it was already five. She snapped her fingers, and the dark blade shattered into dust. She grabbed the microphone under the counter, pressed the button next to it, and spoke.
"May I have your attention, everyone. The library will be closing in five minutes. Please return your books where you found them or check out in the remaining time. Thank you again for visiting the Palsitore Public Library, and have a pleasant evening."
Five patrons were in the library when she made the announcement. Three returned their books and left, Ms. Iver checked out the book she was reading, and the grovyle remained seated, leafing through the final pages in a book on algebra. Alicia walked around the counter and approached the grovyle's table.
"Excuse me, sir? The library is closing, and I'm afraid I have to ask you to leave."
He didn't look up from the book. Instead, he skimmed through the last few pages, placed his stack of books back on the shelf, and walked towards the library's exit.
"Have a good evening, sir!"
The grovyle stopped and turned his head towards her. Then he kept walking without giving a reply.
"Huh. Does he not know how to speak? He can read, but he could still be mute. Or he could be rude. Probably the latter."
Alicia dusted off the tables, starting with the grovyle's table. After she cleaned all the tables, she took the rag and shook it outside. A brilliant blue strand, glittering in the sunlight, caught her attention as it drifted towards the ground. She plucked it out of the air and held it to her eyes.
"That's strange, where did you come from? Some kind of thread?" She rubbed the strand between her fingers and told herself, "No, that's a hair, but what could it have come from?"
A gust of wind blew the hair out of her hands. She watched, holding a hand over her eyes as the strand floated over the library.
"I guess it doesn't matter. Now, what was I doing again?"
She collected her lunchbox from the icebox, checked the library for stray books, and locked up. She hopped onto the trolley, clambering up to the second floor and holding on to the railing. She watched the city crawl by, pokemon walking down sidewalks, humans washing windows and sweeping the streets, steel buildings that cast shadows over the city and reflected sunlight off their windows.
Alicia clambered off as the trolley rounded the corner of her building. She walked through the glass doors and took the lift up to her floor. She fished for the key in her pocket and unlocked the door. As she walked inside, she stepped on an envelope.
She turned on the lights and inspected the envelope. The black wax it was sealed with sparkled beneath the light bulbs. She pried the envelope and read the message inside.
"Oh no, not another one. And I still don't have a fiancée, mother's going to be furious."
She threw her dirty dishes in the kitchen sink, rummaged around her icebox, and took out a half-eaten chocolate cake. She crammed the piece in her mouth and rinsed it down with sink water, and then she went into the bathroom. As she washed the frosting off her face, she noticed a sliver of wood sticking in her hair.
"Not again." She wiggled the sliver around until it slipped out of her hair. After she checked her hair for more debris, she brushed her teeth, threw off her clothes, and slipped under her covers.
"God damn it, mother," she said to her pillow, "Why do you have to be such a bitch?"
