As her eyes had adjusted to the darkness of her prison, Candela realized that the reason the space felt so enclosed was because of an enormous black curtain positioned several yards in front of her. Other than that, the only things she could see were two additional stone chairs to her right. If it weren't for the shackles, they'd resemble thrones. Candela couldn't look at the empty chairs for more than a few seconds without the emotion welling in her throat.
Candela vacillated between rage and despair. She fantasized about letting Flicker roast Dr. Dillinger alive, but what good would that do? It wouldn't provide enough penance for what she'd done to the pokémon in her sick experiments. It certainly wouldn't bring back her friends. After it was all over, Candela would still be alone. Dr. Dillinger's pet. Would Professor Willow ever even know what had happened to them?
She heard voices beyond the curtain, but they were muffled and indecipherable. She wasn't sure how long Dr. Dillinger had been gone. Maybe an hour? She wasn't looking forward to her return, but she hated not knowing what came next. What made it worse was that she was starting to need the restroom, but didn't expect that Dillinger would allow her much of a leash for that.
The voices grew louder and the fabric of the curtain rippled. Candela balled her fists and waited for Dr. Dillinger's face to appear. Instead of the doctor, two of her grunts shuffled into the space, dragging something… a person? As they came closer, Candela's heart skipped a beat.
"Spark!" Her voice was ragged with emotion. He was limp, and the grunts were pulling him in such a way that she couldn't see his face, each one gripping beneath his arms so his heels dragged against the stone. What new horror was this? Was Dr. Dillinger not satisfied with merely murdering her friends? She had to make sure Candela saw the bodies? Her stomach clenched and she choked back nausea.
But then the grunts turned enough that she could see his face. He looked dirty and exhausted and a trail of browned blood stained the side of his head, but he was awake. He was alive. Spark's eyes met Candela's and he smiled, even though there was no reason to smile. Candela nearly forgot to breathe.
"Fancy meeting you here," Spark slurred.
He'd been paralyzed, but it seemed the effects were waning. Before Candela could get her thoughts in order, another set of grunts entered the area, hauling a similarly disheveled Blanche in the same manner. Candela tried to speak, but her mouth had gone dry. She watched helplessly as the grunts arranged Spark in the furthest chair to the right and Blanche in the middle one, only a few feet from Candela. Blanche leveled a poisonous glare at the grunt who snapped the restraints around their immobile limbs.
The grunts retreated wordlessly, and the three were alone and alive and together for the first time in what felt like centuries.
"Y-you… you're alive," Candela managed, the reality of the situation still sinking in. Her eyes burned with forming tears.
Blanche weakly turned their head toward her and smiled, but Candela could see the fear in their olive eyes. "It's good to see you, Candela."
Candela tried to smile back, but lost control of her private storm of emotions and began to sob instead. An immense weight lifted from her chest, and she succumbed to her tears, barely registering the surprised faces of her friends. She hated to cry in front of them, but it felt like she had no choice. Her sobs transformed into laughter as she tried to dry her face with her shoulder.
"Whoa, Candy, it's OK," Spark said, laughing a little himself. "We're here. We're all alive."
"D-don't call me that, you ass," Candela said, regaining control of herself. "I thought you were dead! Dr. Dillinger said…" She couldn't finish the thought.
"Dr. Dillinger says a lot of things, and most of them aren't true," Blanche said. They worked their jaw and twisted their neck, trying to hurry along their recovery from whatever had paralyzed them.
"What happened to you guys? Where were you?" Candela asked, wishing she had a hand free to wipe the remaining tears from her face.
"Oh, you know, playing hide-and-seek chess with a mad scientist. You?" Spark said.
"Reading that mad scientist's research journals," Candela said. "The things this woman has done…"
Spark must have read the pain in her face. "It's OK. We're gonna make things right. As soon as Blanche comes up with a plan. Blanche?"
"Working on it, Spark," said Blanche. Their fingers twitched, and they grinned at the tiny improvement to their condition.
"By the way, you two look terrible," Candela said.
"Thank you for that insight," Blanche said, still concentrating on wiggling their fingers.
"I didn't know sarcasm was in your programming," Candela said. She didn't have the words to express just how incredible it felt to banter with her fellow team leaders again. The tears started to well again, and she laughed to chase them away.
They were alive. They looked like hell, but they were alive.
Dr. Dillinger's muffled voice shook Candela out of her warm moment. She glanced at Spark and Blanche to see if they heard it too. Both sat rigidly, faces sober and attentive.
"You wanted results, didn't you? And I got them!" said Dr. Dillinger. A few moments of silence, and then she continued, answering an inaudible speaker. "Yes, it was a little reckless, but it was calculated… Yes, we have all three… Sir, like I said, they're all… yes… yes, OK… Sir, if I could… no, you're right, I'm sorry. No, don't hang up, I-!" Another pause. "Jackass."
The curtain swayed and Dr. Dillinger stormed into view. "Ugh, I should have put him on speaker. Don't you just hate micromanagers?"
Nobody responded.
Dr. Dillinger propped her hand on her hip. "What, not feeling chummy with me yet? We'll get there. Ooo, I know! It's not exactly an 'I'm sorry I almost killed you' fruit basket, but I'd be forever indebted to you for accepting these as an apology gift instead. Hypno?"
The hypno wandered out of the darkness, his arms laden with three gleaming metal rings. Dr. Dillinger took them and admired their sheen before she strolled toward Candela. Candela tried to pull away, but Dillinger deftly caught her under the chin to hold her head still. Candela glimpsed the geometric signature of circuitry on the inside of the circlet before the doctor snugged it onto her head. It fit tightly above her brow.
Dr. Dillinger spoke as she as she delivered the next circlet to Blanche. "They're not quite the crowns from the door, but they do carry a certain regality to them, don't they? And they suit my purposes so well."
Once Blanche's was secure, she moved to Spark. After she fixed the band around his head, she ruffled his hair affectionately. Then she stepped back, pulled out her communicator, and tapped it a few times. Candela jumped as the inside of her circlet shifted, mimicking the sensation of insects crawling in her hair. She felt something pinching her scalp, and she reflexively jerked her arms against their restraints in an attempt to reach the circlet to remove it.
"There! Perfect fits for everyone," Dr. Dillinger chimed. "Hypno, the curtain."
Dr. Dillinger typed something into her communicator as her hypno pulled on a rope to part the curtain. For all her technology, Candela found it odd that she'd use such a theatrical device to divide the room. Of course, the doctor did have a flair for the dramatic. As the curtain separated, a massive hall was revealed, lit by flaming chandeliers. Candela would have admired the intricately carved columns and sprawling ceiling more were it not for the crowd of Team Rocket scientists and their machinery taking up a considerable portion of the floor.
"What are they all staring at?" Spark asked.
The scientists appeared to be ignoring the three team leaders, directing their attention instead to something above and behind them. Candela craned her neck to see what drew their gazes, but her chair – or was it her throne? – blocked whatever it was.
Dr. Dillinger continued typing into her communicator, paused to giggle, and pressed something in the middle of the screen. Suddenly, Candela's head erupted in pain. Above her own startled cry, she could hear the grunts and whimpers of Blanche and Spark to her right. All of her thoughts were pushed from her head, replaced by a pulsing, raging, skull-splitting headache. She vaguely sensed the restraints on her arms and legs release, but she couldn't command her body to move.
Though she could barely open her eyes, Candela could see large, dark shapes being pulled into the hall in front of her. She tried to focus on them, but her vision was blurry and her mind was overpowered by the pain radiating from the circlet. Just when she feared she'd pass out, the headache relented enough for her to return to her senses.
"Nifty pieces of tech, aren't they? They transmit psychic waves, much like the attacks of psychic pokémon. They were prototypes for our human-to-pokémon communications system, but they failed, for obvious reasons," Dr. Dillinger explained.
Blanche shakily started to stand, but Dr. Dillinger waved her finger like a disappointed teacher and tapped the communicator again. Blanche gasped and collapsed back into the stone seat, their eyes screwed tightly shut.
"Please remain seated until instructed to stand," said Dr. Dillinger. "The show's just starting."
The three dark shapes in the middle of the hall became clear. They were shaped like the little cages that a flighty pet pidgey might be kept in, but on a scale suitable for a snorlax, and were covered in dark cloth. A cluster of researchers swarmed around the shapes, chattering quietly, checking panels on the sides of the carts that they'd been rolled in on. Candela knew immediately what they had to be, but also knew how impossible that should have been.
Dr. Dillinger snapped her fingers, and the scientists removed the cloth from the cages. The trio of legendary birds huddled in their private prisons, somehow both awe-inspiring and pitiful in their condition. The cages were too small for them, and they barely had room to adjust. Their heads were tucked close to their chests, and their eyes were mere slits.
They were never meant to be kept like this. Candela struggled to reconcile what she was seeing with what she remembered from meeting Moltres on the hill as a child. This was hardly the same pokémon. Its flames were weak and its body shuddered with every small noise that echoed in the hall.
This was sacrilegious.
"I can see the disapproval in your faces," Dr. Dillinger said, pacing in front of the team leaders. "It's terrible seeing them like this, isn't it? But they don't respond well to pokéballs. Finding Moltres' roost and baiting the others with its distress calls was the easy part, relatively speaking. In fact, Moltres had been right here, under our noses, all along! But that's another story. Capture was a nightmare, but once we managed to contain them in our network of caves, all we had to do was wait for you three to put the pieces together and come knocking."
"What did you do to them?" Spark asked, his voice strained from resisting the psychic waves.
"Patience!" Dr. Dillinger barked. "I'm generously sharing the details of my nefarious exploits with you, so it's in your best interest to sit back and shut up while I do so. Understood?"
Again, nobody answered. Dr. Dillinger grinned pleasantly.
"Good," she said. "Now, it's not so much what we did to them as what we did to you, but we'll get to that. My team has spent years poring over the hieroglyphs in this mountain, and we've made some fascinating discoveries. For example: Articuno, Zapdos, and Moltres will, in rare circumstances, bond with a human in need of their strength. It's something that can't be forced – believe me, we've tried. And then I remembered something that Willow had said to me back when we were optimistic new graduates. He told me about a couple kids in his town who claimed to have seen two of the birds. I'd almost forgotten about it until I heard about his assistants and the none-too-subtle symbols he'd picked for their teams."
Candela cursed the professor under her breath, even though there was no way he could have known about Dr. Dillinger's project. Right? Just how close had they been?
"When you came running to the rescue on Articuno's heels, I knew it had to be you. Based on the records we've found in these caves, I theorized that your bond with the birds would be strengthened via extreme emotion, which appeared to be the catalyst of previously recorded bonds, including the last known one. I couldn't have predicted just how strong that connection would be," said Dr. Dillinger. Candela hated how pleased with herself she looked. "I mean, take a look at this."
She skipped toward Spark. "Hey there, Sparky," she purred. "Everyone, please direct your attention to Zapdos. I think you'll be quite tickled."
Spark yelped as Dillinger delivered a sharp kick to his ankle, which Candela now saw to be wrapped in the orange scraps of his missing coat. Zapdos squawked and tucked its corresponding leg closer to itself, though there was no visible injury to it. "Tickled" wasn't the word she would have gone with. "Appalled" was much more appropriate.
"Isn't that incredible? It's how we've managed to subdue and cage them," Dr. Dillinger boasted.
"Congratulations on being completely evil. Are you done monologuing yet?" Candela growled.
Dr. Dillinger rolled her eyes. "Nobody appreciates a good build-up these days. Fine. You want your big finish? Stand up."
When they hesitated, Dr. Dillinger pressed her communicator, and Candela's brain was once again consumed by the agonizing psychic pulses. As the pain subsided, she stood, almost without meaning to. She couldn't take another blast from the circlet. Her friends stood as well, wobbly and breathing hard to power through the last traces of paralysis.
"Come," Dr. Dillinger commanded, and though Candela hated herself for complying, she stepped forward.
Dr. Dillinger twirled her finger, and Candela obediently turned, wondering if she could lunge for the doctor while she was distracted with something else. But her mind went blank as she saw the object that had drawn the scientists' attention before.
The stone seats were definitely thrones, and hovering behind them was a bright, spinning star. Fire licked from its center, but so did swirls of snow and darts of electricity. It was silent and stable, like it had been hanging in the air for millennia, and would continue for millennia more. The orb had a diameter of about five feet, but its presence filled the space now that Candela had seen it.
"Isn't it something?" Dr. Dillinger murmured.
"What is it?" Blanche asked, their face bathed by its supernatural glow.
Dr. Dillinger pressed something into Blanche's hand. "It's a door, my dear," she said. "And it's time for you to open it."
§
AN: Whew, it's been a weird week for me! But it's always a weird week for me. Anyway, I just wanted to note that insects are definitely a thing in the pokémon world, in case you wondered. They're mentioned in certain pokédex entries and you can even see a pidgey eating a regular old worm in one of the early episodes of the anime. So when Candela feels insects in her hair, I'm not breaking the rules of the pokémon world. And that's all I have to say about that, Your Honor. Hot milky. I mean, not guilty. (And I can't say this enough: Thank you all so much for your kind words! I can't describe how much it makes my day when you respond to a new chapter. I'm so happy you're enjoying the adventure!)