Chapter Eleven

James was still too much in a daze to say anything, so Latias "said" it for him. "We'd better get you some dry clothes. That Team Rocket uniform does nothing for you."

"Since when do you know anything about fashion, Latias?" Kate teased. "I seem to remember a couple of Team Rocket agents criticizing you for what you wore in your human form. Before you'd learned telepathy, no less, so you couldn't answer them back."

"Please don't bring those two up," sighed Latias. "It's a painful subject."

"You mean Annie and Oakley, right?" James put in, clueless as usual.

Latias sighed audibly, making a sad cooing noise. Kate and her pet creature both turned around and gave James withering looks. James shrunk back, realizing his faux paus and hoping that Kate was serious about not turning into a cloud of dust again. "Sorry."

Kate's expression changed drastically, much to James' relief. "Oh, that's all right. I do that to people all the time. I talk too much, at least that's what people tell me. Do you think I talk too much?" She didn't wait for an answer. "Well, you wouldn't know, since most of the time we've spent together so far was while you were unconscious."

Kate's creature nipped her sharply on her left ear, taking a good-sized chunk out and leaving a trickle of silvery-looking blood. Kate twitched her ear and reformed it by pure will, retracting the fluid and reshaping her minor appendage to how it was before. "Ow. Guess that was Brucie's way of telling me that I DO talk too much."

James tried not to stare. No matter how weird things got around there, he had to remember that they could always get weirder, and also that they probably would. "Um, just how long was I unconscious?" he asked, staying as close to Yamask and as far from "Disintegrate Kate" as he dared. "And how do you know my name?" Had he spoken in his sleep, or did his reputation precede him, or what?

"Oh, I knew you were coming sooner or later," she said offhandedly. "Aslan just didn't tell me when."

And that was when the other shoe dropped.

"ASLAN?" James burst out, unable to keep his surprise locked inside him. "You KNOW Him? I mean, KNEW Him?"

Kate looked deep into his emerald eyes, searching for sanity and truth. She was half successful. "James, honestly... you don't think all this happened by coincidence, did you?"

"Do you know about the dream? If it WAS a dream?" James was in full-on panic mode, which happened quite frequently. "What happened to Aslan, and WHAT HAPPENED TO ME?"

"Well, we should probably sit down..."

Kate and Celebi offered James a ride back up to the library on Latias' back while Kate explained things, a ride James accepted once he found out that Kate wasn't riding with him. The strange female shapeshifter instead morphed into a larger, pinker variant of her pet creature, Brucie. She was still beautiful, but James didn't trust her. After all, Jessiebelle was beautiful too, but not on the inside. And who knew what was on the inside of a creature like Kate? Something wet and silvery, probably. Was she a Ditto? A Mew? A freak?

James felt somewhat guilty for being so prejudiced, since Kate had after all saved his life. He just didn't want to like someone who'd accidentally smothered him in dust and then electrocuted his butt. Particularly considering that the dust had reached every square inch of his body, which, while completely unintentional, was still a serious violation of personal space. And while Kate was clearly just as embarrassed about the situation as he was, that didn't keep her from constantly mentioning it.

"If you apologize to me one more time," James had finally snapped, "then I'll probably give myself a reason to apologize to you. Now quit rambling and tell me something worth hearing!"

He did learn some valuable things, though. The world he was currently in was the Between, also known as The Wood Between The Worlds. The pools that he'd kept falling into while wearing Yamask's mask each contained a different dimension, thus Celebi's term "Pandimensionality" for the collective universe. James himself had been summoned, not simply by Aslan (whom James was relieved to hear would most certainly be all right, since He'd conquered Death forever long before the Poke-world was even created), but by Aslan's Father, the Emperor-Over-Sea. James had asked what kind of Pokemon the Emperor was, but had only gotten loud scoffs and disbelieving stares from his companions until Kate finally explained that the Emperor wasn't actually a Pokemon at all (although He could take the form of Pokemon; Latias had mentioned that Raikou and Ho-Oh were the ones most commonly associated as symbols of Himself), but the all-powerful Being that had created all things.

"You mean Arceus?" James had asked.

Kate had snorted. "No, Arceus emerged from an egg, remember? Someone had to create the egg Arceus hatched from. That Someone was Emperor-Over-Sea."

"So where did the Emperor come from, then?"

"He always was," said Latias. "It's a pretty hard concept for any created being to understand, but Aslan and the Emperor have always existed."

"Hard concept?" Kate rolled her eyes. "You Psychic-types act like you think you could unravel the mysteries of the Emperor all on your own. It's not just hard to understand – it's impossible to comprehend a mere fraction of it."

"Then how do we know it's true?" asked James a little too smugly.

Kate was glad to wipe the smugness off his face. "Because the only other logical alternatives for the Emperor's existence are that the Emperor was created by something even MORE powerful – which still brings the question of where THAT something came from – or that the all-powerful and omnipotent Emperor of the Pandimensionality came into being out of nowhere at all and for no reason at all, which is, to the best of all knowledge, completely absurd. Once you've eliminated the impossible, whatever's left must be the answer."

"Whoa, that's pretty deep. But how do we KNOW that things can't just come out of nothing?"

She laughed, which came out as a harsh KAWKARRAAW! noise in her Archeops form. "Did I say that things can't EVER come out of nothing? Aslan and the Emperor created the entire Pandimensionality together out of nothing."

"But that's impossible!"

"Is it?"

James thought about it. "I mean, it's not logical."

"How isn't it?"

"Well, logically, everything comes from something, right?"

"And here we are again. Just because everything you know of comes from something else doesn't mean that everything that exists came from another source. For the Pandimensionality to exist, it needed a reason for being. That Reason was the Emperor."

"My head hurts."

"That usually happens when you contemplate quantum theology."

"Quantum WHAT?"

"Oh, look," Kate said, raising her now-birdlike head toward the cave ceiling, which was finally close enough to touch. "We've reached the entrance to the root tunnel upwards," she went on, pointing to a knothole. "I don't know about you, Latias, but I'm pretty darn tired. What say we take a seed pod the rest of the way?"

Talk about random. "What good is a seed pod going to do us?" asked James.

Celebi gave a high-pitched whistle, and James saw yet another wonder as a hovering boat-shaped vehicle appeared, apparently formed from an enormous Miracle Seed and complete with seats carved (or grown, he couldn't tell which – probably both) into the inside of its shell. It hung suspended from a hook on a thick vine serving as a cable, but one end of the vine seemed to be simply hovering in the air, glowing with magical energy.

"Oh, I get it," James chuckled nervously. "Seed pod." At this point, nothing should have surprised him anymore, but for some reason it did anyway.

Latias gently set James down into the pod, then settled in herself, changing into the form of a young human girl. Kate shifted back into her Flareon-morph form, then parked herself next to James, who quickly moved to the other side. Nothing made a situation more awkward than having to sit next to a girl who had accidentally wound up in his pants.

Celebi seemed to pick up on this, so she conferred with Kate a little in Poke-speak. Latias translated. "James, Celebi wants to know if you'd like her to wipe away any... embarrassing memories of your first encounter with Kate here. She's already done it with Kate, thank goodness."

James thought about it a moment. "So long as Kate's forgotten it, I'm good," he finally reassured them. "I just don't like the thought of not knowing about it." And he thought to himself, I can't let myself forget what that creature is capable of.

But Jessiebelle hadn't been what she'd looked like on the outside, and James was to learn that the same was true of shapeshifters, too, even for what was on the outside of the inside.

It's hard to say who was the most surprised at the results of Meowth's V attack: Abby the Machoke, or Meowth himself.

It started as a rumbling, kind of like a vacuum cleaner being run two floors away. VIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII. The electric field Meowth was imprisoned in pulsed as the VIIIIIIIIIIIIIII grew stronger, as if trying to fight against it. Meowth could feel every atom vibrating in his paralyzed body.

And then, unexpectedly, all heck broke loose as the electric field exploded into a volley of deadly sparks, cutting through all that stood in their way – including both the cave walls and Abby herself. The Machoke-Missingno screamed in pain, trying to shield herself against the blazing projectiles. Trying, and failing gruesomely.

Huh. Guess she ain't so immoital afta all, den.

The sparks also went straight through the floor, which Meowth instantly regretted. With nothing to stand on, the only thing Meowth the Missingno could do was fall straight down and hope to land on his feet, which he didn't.