Firing Blind

Sorry for the late update, boys and girls. If you feel like being a good person, review and make my day awesome.

0

I spotted Di some ways removed from the main action, but she was by no means safe. A woman with a knife in her hand was striding up to her, movements jerky. Something glinted on the little girl's face; tears, maybe? All at once I was a figure of action, my gun out of my pocket and aimed at the woman's head. A bang- the silencer must have been removed- and everything froze. The woman dropped to the floor, blood gracefully arcing from her skull like a fountain of death. The warring Pokemon halted their battles at the sound of a fired gun. And the dragon roared furiously at me, fire blazing through the air at a tremendous rate. Oh well, I thought. At least I'm free from debt now. No spiritual unrest for me when the flames roasted me at temperatures hitherto unknown. Shame I had no thermometer on me.

Then the funnel of heat froze in it's tracks. A blue, pulsing energy was holding it in place, preventing the attack from reaching me. Was I dreaming? No, Di was looking as surprised as I felt, and even Artemis had blanched with the sound of Athena's cold, commanding voice. The fire, as if under the control of arcane forces, soared at a ninety degree angle into the air, before plunging back to it's source- the gaping mouth of the green and red dragon. It was nothing but a smoking corpse in twenty seconds. The other enemies blinked almost simultaneously at the loss of their singularly most feared comrade, then dropped to the floor, all the fight dying from their eyes. It really was that easy, with both Pokemon and human, I mused internally. Kill their de facto leader, and the rest followed quietly. It was just a matter of discerning who the leader actually was.

0

"So you didn't think I needed to know that there was someone trying to kill us all?" I asked, voice as steady as a glass of water in an earthquake. Athena attempted to placate me, being the only one with the ability to communicate effectively with me.

"Need to know basis, remember?"

I probably could have shattered a diamond with my bare hands, if I'd been holding one at the time. As it was, the only thing in my grasp was my trusty gun, and that was far too precious to me. "That was my life, your life, her life," I gestured wildly in the general direction of Di, "On the line there. And you say that I didn't need to know that?"

Her eyes abruptly flicked towards me. "Your debt is repaid now. The agent was definitely going to do her best to kill Diana, and had she not died of a sudden cerebral haemorrhage induced by a gunshot wound, Diana may well have died."

It took me a few seconds to recall what grounds she was distracting me with. I had indeed prevented the little girl's death, but the adventure was becoming interesting. If there was one thing I never passed up, it was a chance to test my gun against new and different targets. Maybe one day I would vaporise the brain of one of those bladed creatures. The eyes of both Athena and Artemis widened as I considered this. Odd, I didn't know that... whatever Artemis was could read minds. I grinned to myself. My mind was made up.

"I'm staying." Athena had a resigned expression of acceptance on her face, while Artemis shook his head slowly, as if saying "What an idiot" over and over again. Elegance seemed to be bemused by my decision, head cocked as far as her neck would allow, but Di surprised us all.

"Yay!" she shouted. Every head in the immediate vicinity, even Earthquake's (who had stubbornly stayed out of the argument altogether), turned to face the girl. "What?" she muttered, shrinking back into the scaly hide of Elegance, in spite of the weird expression on the blue reptile's face.

0

After five minutes of increasingly heated discussion, the three Pokemon gave up trying to convince me that the journey ahead might end up killing me- in fact, they said it probably would. Earthquake had sensibly retreated to his ball, seeing that he was unneeded in the argument. From what I gathered, Artemis was set against the very concept, Elegance was concerned about the dangers of a gun, and Athena was rapidly undermining all of their problems with me, contradicting every grunt or snarl with a witty reply, most of them bearing little connection with the last remark. Of course, I was missing out on two-thirds of the speech, so maybe it made sense to the other two.

In the end, Artemis had a sour frown plastered on his face, while the Feraligatr remained utterly expressionless- she'd probably have been a living hell for both psychoanalysts and poker players. Athena was slightly uplifted by the outcome of the debate, and I supposed she was one who enjoyed winning.

"Let's go, then," she somehow sung with her mind. Then again, if your only method of communication was telepathy, you probably learned how to use your mind like a physical voice pretty damn quickly. We complied, the scarlet bug grudgingly, and we'd gone something like five miles by the time that the sun set. I was still somewhat caught on the decision that I'd made five miles beforehand, and so I hadn't noticed that the rest of my group had stopped as soon as Athena had observed that the sun was setting.

The land here was a lot more unruly and wild than those cheap movies about young trainers painted it. For one, the grass was sharp. It was okay if you fell on the flats of the grass, but even coming into contact with the tips of the blades was enough to cut the skin. There were also tonnes of vines, not one thick enough to swing on, but all thick enough to strangle you if you weren't careful. Both Elegance and Artemis knew Cut, and Athena could use this weird psychic variation of the attack that dealt more damage but couldn't harm a certain element, so the vines were no problem, but naturally I was isolated from them. And either they couldn't hear me for all of the vegetation between us, or they had intended for me to wander off and die in the first place. Call me paranoid, but I strongly suspected the latter.

0

I must have been romping through the undergrowth for at least an hour before I found the pillar again. This time, it was firmly fixed to the floor with rocky 'roots' of a sort, and there was no tornado dividing us. I was understandably nervous as a result. It's surface was mossy, and there was a strange hum in the background, partially soothing my nerves. Partially.

The pillar and I were standing in a very small clearing, maybe half the size of the one I'd accidentally left the others in. As I took in my surroundings, shoots and blades of grass in between the trees I had entered through mutated into a thick and very firm wall of plant life. Behind me, narrow gaps were filled with leaves and vines, surrounding me. There was no fear, though. This time, the pillar was not overwhelmingly powerful or freaky, and there were no dustdevils. My world wasn't falling from my life again. Time stood still here. Then, a crack expanded in the rock, making a sound like a rusty door hinge. It continued to grow, criss-crossing and cutting through the mossy stone. A veritable spiderweb of hairline cracks and thicker ravines was covering the surface of the stone by the time that it all stopped and time went back to being static. At least, outside of the stone. Now, images were running through the different cracks, like a video put on fast forward. I caught a flash of light blue, purples and oranges, and a flickering flame. A creepy, disembodied grin leered up at the crack, before blurring into a mangled Spearow corpse. The compilation of incomprehensible images ended with a falling piece of paper, words scrawled upon it like a Spinarak web. It burst into quiet, subdued flames, and the ashes slowly faded from view. For some reason I couldn't explain, I sensed a great loss in the now-still pillar. I turned around, knowing that the vines would vanish at my touch, then blundered back to the clearing, a sort of mental compass in my head showing the way.

The party didn't seem to surprised or upset, and I would have been a fool to think that they actually cared whether or not I lived or died. That was cool, though. I could live with that. Although it was a little sad that Di didn't welcome me with so much as a lofty nod in my general direction. Then again, I didn't really want people asking after me.

"What happened?" pressed Athena. Ever since I had thought about talking about the Obelisk with the Espeon, she had irritatingly followed me everywhere like a pink Mareep. "Actually, it's called a Flaafy if it's pink." At least mind-reading was hard to control. Which brought me to another point.

"Why not just read my mind and find out?"

"I don't use my skill for that kind of thing," she muttered. I snorted, bringing up a mental image of the last three minutes. "And besides, I can't see what happened," she continued, ignoring me.

The parade of memory stopped short. "Say again?"

"I mean, I know that the memory is there, but I can't access it," she amended.

"Can that even happen?"

She considered the question. "Sometimes, if there's a dark-type in the memory, or a powerful psychic is protecting the person's mind. But it's only happened to me once before this."

"Whose mind were you trying to read?"

"Yours."

I turned from the discussion, trying to remember any memories I had involving dark-types. The only darklings I knew were Umbreon, which was somehow related to Espeon, and Murkrow, which I vaguely recalled had one or two evolutions. Now that I thought about it, Cubone might have been a dark-type too, with that skull thing going on.

"Cubone?" Athena sneered. "That is no more a dark-type than I am."

"What about... Houndour?" I asked, trying to sound casual. Either because Athena had gotten too used to reading lies in people's minds, or she wasn't watching me carefully enough, my casual tone worked.

"Certainly." The single, painful word chilled my spine. This time, she took notice. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," I said, abruptly.

"Very well," she conceded.

0

"Kchaa!" cried the Spearow. The bird was familiar to me, and not just because they lived everywhere in Violet. I knew that particular Spearow from a past experience. A past experience in the twilit world between life and death, fantasy and reality. I visited it in my dreams maybe once or twice a week, and I was back again, for the first time since Violet fell apart. For some reason, I'd been expecting it to have changed, just like the world outside my head, but as soon as I'd appeared in a barge that was hanging in a canopy of forlorn trees, I realised my mistake. The forest and the lake were the same as always, and the massive rock extending from the horizon was still shaped like a sword hilt. The same silvery mist hung in the air, damp against my skin, and blurring the line between leafless branches and the night sky. I took comfort in the alien and familiar surroundings, then turned to the Spearow.

"What is it?"

In a fluid transition, the bird became human. A tall, bald man with scarred cheeks, giving the grotesque impression of an ear-to-ear smile. He wore his patched trench coat, the torn jeans, and the Murkrow-coloured tie over a button-up shirt that could once have been blue, but was now discoloured with years of street living. I knew him, of course. Old Father Green, the once-greatest hunter in all of Johto. Before Pokemon poaching was outlawed in the Kanto-Johto region, he was the greatest trapper that had ever lived. All of his catches made it to his clients, and every aspiring marksman hoped to become just like him. He'd once had his eye on me as his apprentice, but I much preferred the assassination of humans to the wholesale monster slaughter. It just seemed a lot more humane, and I could be sure that each of my targets had no living family, or if they did, they'd find some compensation money in their mailbox. Eventually.

"So, you've found it." I froze. This was not the voice of the old criminal. "The Obelisk is in your hands. What will you do with it?"

"Who... who are you?" My voice was thin and choked, just like how I felt at the moment.

Father Green gave a low chuckle. "Your mind created me to act as its spokesperson, much like you created this world to escape the confines of reality."

"Or you could be Athena."

"I could," he said, "but do I sound like her?"

I shrugged, still unconvinced. "Di could have some other psychic on board."

"She could," agreed Green. "But regardless of who or what I am, you need to know this. You are in grave, grave danger, beyond even what your bestial friends tell you. Of course, you should continue on, but remember what you saw in the dying stone." Next to him, on the deck of the barge, words began etching themselves in the wood.

First you find the dying stone,

Look for, then through, the Spinarak's webs.

Answer me the question that hounds,

All of the living and all of the dead.

Forget not the answer locked within these words,

Yet fail to remember the quest.

I looked from the strangely binding words, preparing to ask a final question. Green was gone, but an atmosphere of loss, just like at the stone in the forest, remained suspended in the air, like a blanket of sorrow. All of a sudden, I felt like leaving.