Authors Note: I suppose I should have done this on the first chapter, but I forgot. ^^;; Anyway, this fic was inspired by a college Astronomy class I took at Johns Hopkins last summer, so this is actually based on true facts, that's why I put it as sci-fi. I just twisted it to fit pokemon when I found an interesting name in my textbook and couldn't resist creating something off of it (as will be revealed in this chapter ^^;; ). Pokemon are copyright Nintendo and Gamefreak, but this idea and all the research behind it is copyright to me. ^^;; This isn't the last chapter, there's about two more to go, I'm almost done with the next one. Thanks everyone for reading! ^_^
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"Come," The elder beamed, grinning, and motioned with his paw to an empty spot on the desk beside him. "Come up here, and I will show you what you need to know."
The warm shafts of light piercing through the indoor canopy had faded and grown dim, and finally died away as the great chamber and its newborn forest were plunged into dusky twilight. Red and green pinpoints of light glowed and blinked in the shadowed room, and florescent strips flickered into life. The two umbreon had not yet noticed the change, however; their crimson and burgundy eyes drinking the darkness like it was day, and their minds held captured by greater things.
One in desperate need for an answer, the other waiting to give it and eager to begin the next step.
Sol stared a moment longer, once again stunned into wondering shock by Helios cryptic nature, and then coiled his legs determinedly and sprung like a lithe cat onto the desk before the eerily glowing monitor. Helio nodded in approval and clicked his black claws rapidly over the keys, expanding the image of the sun until it filled the entire screen, a brilliant fiery gold speckled with dark patches and molten flares.
"Have you ever seen a picture of the sun like this, Sol?" Helio inquired, his lashing tail-tip betraying his excitement.
"No.." He murmured, peering closer with a curious expression on his muzzle. With the white glare of the sun removed, he could for the first time see its mottled colors and liquid flames splashing from the surface into the invisible misty corona. A golden Lazarus of autumn fire. For a moment pain flashed across his face; this was the celestial body of flame that had cast him out of the light. The sun didn't want me... "It's beautiful."
"Very beautiful," Helio agreed quietly. The Keeper of the skies touched his paws to the board again, and reclined slowly as the image enlarged again. "Do you know what all the dark markings on it are, though?"
"Yes..the espeon clan used to describe it to us in the evenings when they visited," Sol replied distractedly, refering to an espeons ability to look directly into the sun, mirroring the umbreons night vision. "They're called sunspots."
"Good," he said, pausing a moment before continuing. "A sunspot is a mysterious thing. Remember, a few moments ago, when I told you that both umbreon and espeon evolved from the light of stars, there was simply less of it, and dimmer, for one of them? Keep thinking about that. In a way, it is the key to understanding our nature." Sol raised an eyebrow at this, but the elder ignored it. "A sunspot, when looked at in a picture such as this, appears as a small dark patch on the surface of the sun. Deceiving little phenomenon. You see, my child, it only appears dark in contrast to the rest of the sun. But when it stands alone..it looks like this."
The keeper clicked a single key, and the screen suddenly began to run through a series of photographs, each an enlargement on the one before from a new and stronger lens. The frames were narrowing down until it was a quarter of the sun, then a fraction, then a smaller piece, and in each one a dark sunspot loomed closer and closer until it dominated nearly the entire screen…then the frames changed one more time, and it was gone.
"What—where'd it go?" Sol asked, blinking at the bright square of fire and gold.
"You're looking at it. That is a picture of just the sunspot—and it looks just like the rest of the sun. A sunspot in itself is a very bright thing—most other objects at a temperature of about five thousand Kelvins are, after all. The background is brighter because it is hotter. That is the difference between a sunspot and the rest of the sun. Both are made of the same material, both are incredibly hot, but a sunspot is a cooler region of the photosphere—a layer of the sun. It ranges from 4500 Kelvins to 5500 Kelvins, from the center to the edge of it, while the rest of the photosphere stays at about five thousand, eight hundred. Are you following this?"
"I think so," Sol said uncertainly. "So its like how night and day are the same, there's just less star-light at night, while there's less star-heat in a sunspot."
"Exactly," he said, once again mildly surprised at the young ones speed. "Now then, tell me..what is the color of our fur?"
Sol blinked. Then he threw a look at Helio as though he were insane, and blinked again. "Black, of course. Oh, and gold, if you count the rings. What sort of a question is that?"
"A very deceptive one," Helio replied with a cryptic smile. "Look at your paw next to the picture on the screen, and next to my paw—very dark, isn't it? All umbreon are jet, midnight black. Darkest of all darks. You noticed this of course when you met them, didn't you?"
"Well, obviously."
"And did you look at yourself then? With them in light, I mean."
"What?" Sol groaned weakly, a pained expression on his face. "Couldn't you just state something directly instead of being mysterious about it..please?"
"It is better for me to show and guide you, and let you figure it out partly for yourself, than for me to tell you," he shrugged. "As I was saying though, colors appear different in their contrast to each other. The sunspot proves this. Look at yourself compared to an espeon, or me compared to a ray of sun, and we are quite black. But, look at us now compared to a true umbreon, without nights cloak to blend us together, and tell me what you see."
This time the glowing monitor abandoned the images of the sun completely, and instead a sleek, normal black umbreon took its place on the screen, caught in the instant of wincing as it strayed into a patch of sun. Lights came on around the desk, illuminating the two creatures and the close-up documentary picture Helio had borrowed.
"I'm afraid there are no real umbreon I could persuade to come here, so this will have to suffice," He shook his head. "Anyway, this is a picture of a true umbreon, one born at night, and in lighting just as bright as that which we are in now. Put your paw to the screen."
Resisting the urge to roll his eyes, still tugged at by the twinge of curiosity, he obediently lifted his paw and slowly pressed the soft pads against the cool glass. "And..this is supposed to do something?" The elder remained silent, and so Sol shook his head once in exasperation and turned his gaze back to the screen, calmly regarding his forefoot and the figure of glass. His eyes grew relaxed as he absently stared at the picture's midnight form, blacker than coal, black as ebony, as his soft gray paws rested against it.
Then it registered.
Sol shrieked and recoiled from the screen, wide-eyed in renewed shock, then hesitatingly held his trembling paw up again. Gray. He pulled his paw back and put it forward several times, as if it were an illusion he could dispel, but it stuck firm and true. The silky fur of his paw was dark, nearly black—but only when held up to a darker, truer black did it suddenly appear as a dark, dusty gray, a few shades too light to be that essence of blackness that was an umbreons fur. For the moon-star eevee varied in countless ways between individuals, but the furred pelts of all were the same, for they had reached the point where it could grow no darker. As he contrasted his color to that on the screen, Sol could not deny that his was lighter, that his was dusk gray in comparison. If umbreons were as the night sky, then he was the color of the night clouds through which the starlight shone. A lighter kind of shadow.
"You met the Umbreon clan at night, didn't you?" Helio said softly from behind, his voice filled with gentle sympathy. "You couldn't see it for what it was until now. It was the same with me for a very long time."
"Is—is this because of how we were reborn? Is that why we look like this? But why? How? I still don't understand…don't understand what we are." The young visitor was quiet for several minutes as his mind tried to absorb all he was learning and piece it together, twist it into an answer, but the secret would still not yield itself to him. A thought occurred to him, and he finally raised his burgundy eyes again. "You..you spoke of sunspots. How it was really bright, it just seemed dark in when compared to the rest of the sun. Night and day are one as the dark and light are one. But it isn't the same with us, we may be darker than an espeon, but we're lighter than an umbreon, our own kind. The analogy doesn't fit."
"No, it doesn't." He smirked slightly in amusement at the young creature's expression, then took a new tangent. "Because you're still thinking in terms of opposites. Night and day are made of the same stuff just as a sunspot and the photosphere are made of the same stuff. But what of dusk, and dawn? We proved they were the same by the fact that they never end, they bleed together. Twilight is the same as both, it simply has less light than day, and more than night. What if the sun was like that?" Helio paused significantly. "What if Eevee are like that?"
"What are you getting at? Why on earth are we still talking about sunspots?" Sol asked, confused. Helio had a very roundabout way of explaining things.
"Think, young one. An espeon is born when there is much starlight, an umbreon is born when there is little. And then…there is us." Claw touched keyboard, and the screen reverted back to a middle shot of the sun and the dark blotch marring the surface. "We are the edge of the shadow. Look at the picture again, child. At a glance it's just a dark spot, but if you look closer you'll notice a sunspot actually has two parts to it. The core, which is dark, and then a slightly lighter ring around it in which the gases are hotter than in the center, but still not quite as hot as the rest of the photosphere. So we have three grades of light; the brightest, the darkest, and a fuzzy area inbetween. Just like the cycle of the day. Bright, dark, and inbetween, it's all a matter of degree. The first is a mirror of the second. Isn't it funny how a star like this has three levels of light, the day has three basic levels of starlight, and eeveekind can be reborn by star in three ways?" Sol shot him a startled look as his eyes grew wide in realization and understanding, the concepts suddenly bonding together. Helio smiled and nodded. "Yes."
"Bright, dark, and inbetween—dusk. You mean…you mean we…"
"The reason I like to bring up the idea of sunspots so much," Helio suddenly interrupted, a knowing glimmer in his eyes, "is because I stumbled across a curious thing one day about them. The different parts of a sunspot, they have names." His voice lowered softly. "Do you know what the center of a sunspot is called in scientific circles? They named it the Umbra." Stunned silence echoed between the two, the young visitor held in quiet awe. "I find it fascinating, because the Umbra is made of starlight, just less than the rest of the star, and an Umbreon is born in starlight, just less than an Espeon is born in. Then we have the area between the two, the small gray ring made of more starlight then the Umbra, but less than the photosphere. A lighter kind of darkness, or perhaps a darker shade of light." His voice lowered again until it was no more than a whisper, his eyes shining excitedly in the dark. "They call it the Penumbra. And we, my child, are the Penumbreon. The third Eevee of Stars."
"Penumbreon," Sol whispered softly, trying the word out on his tongue and then smiling faintly at the way it somehow..felt right. A name, a kind. "Penumbreon."