Oddball dreamed of fire. Fire, and screaming. He was in Pokenet, and he was in the Crystal Palace. There was fire, and there was no fire. There were screams, and there was silence. He saw himself in the lab he had seen before, in the Hall of Origin, with blood, and tools, and conveyors. He was in the caves outside the lab, surrounded by half-dead Pichus. He was running from Pokenet, and he was arriving at the Palace in that cold wintery wasteland.
All these thoughts tumbled through his head. His life was flashing before his eyes.
Yet... he could feel a presence. A horrible, terrifying presence.
His memories flashed around him. Directly in front of him, a fair distance away, staring at him, was a pair of glowing red eyes, emotionless. Blank.
He stared into them. He remained like that for an indeterminate amount of time.
Suddenly, the figure wearing the surgical mask was there.
Right in his face.
Silent.
He woke up.
Everything was wrong.
Oddball looked around, taking in his surroundings.
It was impossible. Nothing made sense. He reached out and touched a floating island that he could have sworn was eighty yards away. It was covered entirely in white tiles, and smelled clean. Too clean.
It disappeared. Oddball let his eyes wander, unable to control himself. Nothing felt right. The geometry was wrong. Angles didn't work like that. The ceiling was below and beside him, and the floor was perpendicular to that. He was standing in abstract. Everything was wrong.
He looked to the right, and saw another floating rock. He looked to the left, and saw the exact same thing. He turned ninety degrees and found himself facing the same direction. Ninety degrees back the other way turned him around. He blinked, and his eyelids closed from the center of his eye outwards. Everything was wrong.
He turned his head until he could find a hole in the small, messed up room he was in. He found it. It didn't move. That was right. He walked toward it, and found himself moving backwards. He tried walking backwards, and the room spun in circles as he moved sideways. The hole remained in place. Everything was wrong.
He tried walking towards the hole again. This time, it worked. Why did it work this time? He approached the hole, and it grew larger, engulfing his vision more and more the closer he got.
Finally, the hole filled his entire vision. He turned back to look at the room he had been in one last time, and it was no longer there.
He was floating in a void. All he could see was faraway patterns of blue and black, swirling like nebulae. He tried to walk, and found he was standing on something. Looking down, he found himself standing on perfectly normal ground.
He heard a roar. Turning around, happy to find he could actually do that correctly now, he thought he saw a smudge of black move across the infinite space, but it was impossible to be sure. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a rock on the ground he was standing on float into the air for seemingly no reason whatsoever. Taking a step, the entire ground angled upwards. The laws of physics had no place here.
He took a step back, and the ground angled back downwards. Taking another step back, it angled downwards further still, and Oddball slipped.
Panicking, Oddball closed his eyes.
He stopped falling.
When he opening his eyes, he was somewhere completely different. He was floating on a single white tile in a sea of floating white tiles, seemingly endless.
He heard a fluttering of cloth behind him. He jerked around.
There was nothing there. Breathing heavily, Oddball turned back around.
The figure with the surgical mask was there, far away in the sea of tiles. An extreme pain assaulted Oddball the moment he looked at it, and his vision blurred. He quickly looked away, getting the figure out of his line of sight, and he began to hop as best he could through the sea of tiles.
He kept running for a long time, hopping from tile to tile. Every so often he would check behind him, to see if the figure was still there. Sure enough, every single tie he turned around, there it was, getting closer without moving. Every time his head was filled with a terrible sensation when he looked at it, but he had to be sure it was still there, because the moment it wasn't, he was going to stop running. He was getting exhausted.
Thankfully, at least gravity seemed to work semi-normally in this area of... wherever he was. It didn't so much pull him downward so much as towards each individual tile, like they were the only things with gravity in this bizarre world. This made it very easy to land on them at least, although it was quite disorienting.
Suddenly, he leaped for a tile, only to find out it wasn't a tile at all. Landing on it, he found it had no gravity of its own, and he tumbled through the empty space, clutching onto the floating white square for dear life, before finally landing on another tile.
Finally getting a good look at it, Oddball found the not-tile to be a sheet of paper. On it were two words, scrawled in all capital letters.
YOU KNOW
Oddball was confused, and more than little off-put by the message, which he couldn't help but feel was aimed at him. You know? I know what?, he asked himself.
Shrugging internally, he scrunched the paper in his hand and looked up to continue running.
The figure was standing on the tile right in front of him.
Oddball screamed. His head felt like it was going to explode and his vision turned red. He frantically turned around and dashed in what he hoped was the opposite direction, silently begging that he would be able to lose it.
What was that thing?
For what felt like forever, Oddball dashed through the sea of tiles. He found other sheets of paper, each with an equally cryptic message on it. He didn't bother trying to make sense of them- heck, some of them was just random scribbles. He had six papers now, all scrunched up in his right hand. The sea of tiles continued. The figure still followed him, lagging behind as he ran, and appearing suddenly in a random place- typically close to him -whenever he found a paper. It was starting to make him a little bit angry, honestly, amidst the abject fear and terror. Why was this thing chasing after him, and why did it hurt him so much just to look at it?
He looked up, and the figure was standing on a tile in front of him again. He quickly averted his eyes, changing his trajectory. It had been doing that recently, too. Every extra paper he found seemed to make it more aggressive.
Slowly but surely, and painfully, Oddball eventually found another piece of paper. What perplexed him about this one was that it was completely black. Looking up from the paper, he was surprised to see that the figure was not in front of him. In fact, turning and looking around, it seemed like the figure with the surgical mask was nowhere to be found. He smiled. I finally lost it, he thought.
He looked back in front of him, and noticed something far off in the distance. Land! He dashed towards it, hopping from tile to tile.
He felt something. A dark feeling in his head, suffocating his mind. He looked behind him.
It was the figure, and it was moving.
Oddball's breath caught in his throat. He immediately turned back and hopped as fast as he could through the sea of tiles, but he could feel it closing in. The dark, suffocating sensation in his head intensified. It was catching up. The feeling was intense now. It was right behind him.
He landed on the floating island at the edge of the sea of tiles. On the other side of it was a sheet of paper. Without tinking, he dashed for it, and the floating island tilted up, as if trying to push him back towards the thing behind him. Oddball struggled with all his might. He couldn't even think now, the feeling in his head was too great. He scraped at the ground, now almost perpendicular to how it had been before, and finally reached the paper, grabbing hold of it.
Instantly, he was standing on flat ground again. He held the paper up to his face and looked at it.
It was the face of the figure with the surgical mask.
It was in front of him. He couldn't run. It enveloped him, swallowed him. Its dark body wrapped around him, choking the life out of him. He tried to scream, but nothing came out. He couldn't even open his mouth.
He fell unconscious.
Oddball woke up. He was wrapped in... something.
He tried to move, and found he was more than capable too. Squirming, he managed to free himself from whatever it was he was wrapped in, and he emerged.
The light burned his eyes, but once he adjusted, he could see...
He was back in the lab. The lab he had seen in the Hall of Origin. He was here again.
He looked down at the ground. He had been wrapped in a white cloth, like a bedsheet.
Looking around, the lab seemed to be completely empty. The table in the center where he had seen the figure before was bare, and there was no figure to be seen. The conveyor belts were not running, but they were still covered in body parts. He grimaced at the sight of them before slowly walking toward the table in the center of the room.
He didn't make it. As he approached the table, his head started to hurt again, the same way it had whenever he had looked at the figure in the sea of tiles. He wisely decided to avoid the table.
Instead, he climbed the conveyor belts as he had before. Careful not to step on any of the body parts, he made his way up to the vent in the ceiling he had gone through before. It was nice- this time, he wasn't rushed.
Okay, maybe "nice" was pushing it. The conveyor belts were still covered in body parts, and even just being where he was wasn't an optimal situation by any stretch of the imagination, but at least he wasn't being chased by that horrifying figure.
He made it to the ceiling vent and crawled through it. On the other end, he fell out of the ceiling into the last room he had seen before waking up in the Hall of Origin, the room he decided he would call the Capsule room. There were literally thousands of capsules in the massive room, so massive he couldn't see the end of it. As he walked through the room, he would glance into random capsules and see the pokemon inside. Cubone, Klink, Magmar, you name it. It was here.
He surprised himself with how calm he was. When he had last seen this room, he'd freaked out, simply shocked at the amount of pokemon there must have been, trapped in this room. Perhaps it was the fact that the figure was no longer chasing him.
Suddenly, there was a roar. A long, dissonant roar, the same he had heard when he first entered this backwards world. Looking up, he saw a shadow move along the ceiling. It was huge, and bizarre-looking. At the front, its head was spiky and angular, like it was wearing a crown. Its body was thick and long, like a bulky snake. Six large spikes and six long arms, each tipped with a smaller spike, came out from its body, the arms from its back, and three spikes on each side. Additionally, four more spikes came out near the end of its tail, two to the left and two to the right, same as the spikes on the body. The arms waved back and forth as the shadow snaked along the ceiling.
Eventually, the shadow faded into nothingness.
"Was that...?" Oddball began. He could think of only one thing that shadow could have been. The deity of this inverse world, this torn world. A god of distortion, a renegade from reality, to whom the laws of physics were a joke, a rule to be broken.
Dooplex's last pokemon.
He ran forward, trying to catch up with it. Maybe, just maybe, he could meet with it without Dooplex around, and get some answers. What was this place? Why was it copying from his dreams in the Hall of Origin? Would the pokemon even be able to speak? Would it be civil? Oddball had no idea, but he knew that his best bet was to try and catch up with it.
So he ran. He ran and ran and ran, looking straight ahead, not letting his gaze wander to the capsules. The room seemed to go on forever. He marveled at how large it was, how many pokemon must be in it, all in capsules.
Eventually, he ran out of breath. He couldn't keep going. As he rested, panting heavily, another sensation came over him. An indescribable feeling, a feeling that told him with everything it had to look to the left.
He did, and he saw a capsule. He stood, and he walked to it.
Inside the capsule was a Pichu.
It was him.
Oddball stood like that for a long while, looking at himself. He was sleeping, or unsconscious. His body was covered in stitches, but he appeared unharmed. Oddball noticed a small notch in his ear. Reaching up, he felt it on his ear too. Perhaps it was a mishap from... whatever it was that was the reason his other self was covered in stitches. Did that make sense? Yeah, that made sense.
A hand rested on his shoulder.
Oddball turned around, and he was face-to-face with the figure in the surgical mask. He froze, his head exploding with pain, his vision blurring and fading. He couldn't move. He shut his eyes tight.
The pain subsided.
He opened his eyes back up.
He was no longer in the capsule room.
"Oh come on! Just when I thought there was starting to be some continuity in this place..." Oddball yelled to the open air.
He was on a floating island, seemingly the same he had found the last paper on. Suddenly, remembering the papers, Oddball looked at his hand.
The papers were gone. A cursory glance around the island told him they were nowhere to be found. He sighed.
Finding nothing to do on the small island, Oddball walked to the edge and gazed out into the abyss.
When he approached the edge, another platform appeared in front of him. Out of nowhere. Another rocky island, barely large enough to contain him, floated a short distance away from the island he stood on.
Resigning himself to the randomness of this dimension, Oddball hopped to the small island, and another island appeared a short distance away. Hopping to that one, Oddball looked back to find that the platform he'd woken up on had now disappeared. Looking back ahead, he saw another platform waiting for him.
He continued onward, hopping from platform to platform as more appeared, the ones behind him vanishing as he progressed. After several bounds, an island appeared that was slightly larger than the others. He hopped onto it.
A roar sounded out, very close. Oddball looked around frantically, trying to pinpoint where it came from, hoping to catch a glimpse of the creature he had seen the shadow of in the capsule room.
The thing did not disappoint.
Suddenly, a massive shadow rose from underneath the platform on which Oddball stood. It was pitch black and enormous, towering over the tiny pichu. From its back sprung six long, gangly arms, each ending in a spike. From its body came six spikes, three on each side. It was shaped like a snake, and at the top, its head was crowned in an angular, spiky crown, with additional rungs around its neck, just below the head.
On the front of the head were two shining, pinprick eyes. Blood red.
An incredible sensation overtook Oddball, filling his entire body. This shadow glowed, pulsed, with such power, it was like standing in the presence of a god. His entire body quaked, and he fell to his knees, and then his hands and knees, and then he was on his side, straining to look up at the shadow looming over him.
It roared, and a wave of red energy exploded out from it. Oddball felt himself rising into the air, and his entire body went numb as the world went white...
Oddball woke up on cold ground.
He stood up, finding his body to be in perfect health. Looking around, he seemed to be in a very large, circular arena, at least twice the size of any of the Elite Four arenas. The ground was made of white tiles.
"Of course." Oddball said.
Far away from him, around the edge of the arena, was a tall, black, iron picket fence, that looked sharp enough that you could cut your eye by looking at it. Beyond the fence was a row of gnarled trees that were bent in such a way that Oddball figured they might have been growing out of the side of a cliff. Or perhaps the side of a floating arena, to be precise.
Past that was infinite space, the same nebulous blues and blacks he had been seeing throughout his trip through the backwards world. He thought he could see some islands floating out there maybe...? It didn't matter anyhow.
A roar. Oddball looked up, and the beast was directly above him.
Falling down.
Oddball scrambled to get out of the way, barely escaping before the monster landed in the middle of the arena, sprawled on the ground. Picking himself up off the white tiled floor, Oddball turned to look at the beast, finally getting a good look at it.
Its body was grey, shaped like a snake. Its underbelly was decorated with black and red stripes in different patterns along its Its head was adorned with a golden crest on its forehead, under which were two glowing red eyes over a slightly pointed snout. Around the bottom half of its head was some sort of golden mouth guard that spread out behind its head, and was pointed at the front. Around its neck were three golden half-rings that curled into spikes in the front.
Six spikes came out from the sides of its body near the front, and four more came from its tail. High above Oddball it floated, as it finally dawned on him what this monstrosity truly was, and his blood ran cold.
Giratina.
He remembered the legends. A god of entropy, of chaos, and an antithesis to existence. It was born alongside its brothers, gods of Time and Space, Dialga and Palkia, given life by the ultimate creator of Plit, the Pokemon god Arceus. Whereas Arceus, Dialga and Palkia would set about creating and keeping the world in order, Giratina was driven to do the opposite. He lacked the power to create, and so reveled in chaos and destruction, his jealousy of his father and brothers causing him to go mad.
Eventually, a great war ensued between Giratina and Arceus, but Giratina was soundly defeated. In his mercy, Arceus had chosen to take pity on his creation, and rather than smiting Giratina as he deserved, Arceus opted to create a world to oppose ours, a Torn World (or Distortion World, translations of the old legends weren't very consistent), and gave Giratina free reign.
Of course, there wasn't exactly much to do in the Reverse World, but Giratina didn't seem to mind. For all intents and purposes, everybody lived happily ever after.
Now, if you had told Oddball that morning that he would be meeting face-to-face with Giratina himself, well, he probably would have laughed you off. Oddball had never been a particularly religious guy, and he had trouble believing this sort of stuff. But this, this was irrefutable proof. Gods existed, and Oddball was standing right in front of one.
Now, the question was...
How the hell had Dooplex managed to catch this thing?!
Let alone Arceus, he thought to himself. Looking back, Oddball could barely even imagine what could have happened in the Hall of Origin while he was sitting around in a trance...
Anyway, the god of antimatter was right in front of Oddball.
It rose into the air and gave a mighty, bellowing roar. The fight began.
The first thing Giratina did was fly backwards. He stopped above the picket fence at the very edge of the large arena. Oddball took a moment to assess the situation before things got too out of control.
First of all, he had heard- though he wasn't certain -that Giratina was a Ghost-Type. If that was true, that meant Quick Attack would be useless. His Electric attacks would have to do. Patting his magical protagonist inventory down, he found his Eviolite and Revive Berry, still there, not lost in the Distortion World somewhere.
Suddenly Giratina attacked.
Using Outrage, Giratina sped across the arena from the edge near the fence, writhing spasmodically, heading directly towards Oddball. It bounced along the ground, never quite touching down, and each landing caused a tremor throughout the arena. Oddball couldn't get out fo the way fast enough with the added inconvenience of the tremors, and ended up taking the full force of the attack. He was knocked to the side, landing hard on the ground several meters away.
Oddball groaned, getting up off the ground. The attack had hit him hard, but he was still in the fight...
He looked up, and saw Giratina fly up the side of the arena, parallel with the picket fence. It flew high into the air, spinning and twitching erratically, before falling back down.
It took Oddball a second to realize he was aiming for another pass. He barely got out of the way by using Quick Attack at the last second, but he ended up brushing Giratina's writhing, spiky body, taking a small amount of damage after all.
Oddball was surprised when he heard an angry roar from Giratina. Had he hurt Giratina with that Quick Attack? Whipping around, he could see nothing on the rapidly moving beast as it went up into the air again, coming down for a third pass.
Oddball quickly dashed out of the way before any of the tremors could knock him off balance, and watched as Giratina's Outrage finished, and it crashed unceremoniously into the picket fence
Except it didn't. Giratina curved up the side of the arena, and then came back down for another dive.
Barely escaping this time, Oddball's mind raced. Giratina wasn't stopping. Did he have to stop it himself, he wondered? His mind wandered back to the angry roar Giratina had yelled out when the Quick Attack had brushed against it.
Did he have to... hit it... with Quick Attack?
It was a long shot, but it was the best he could think of. When Giratina came by for another swing, Oddball dashed headlong towards it, and Quick Attacked the god of chaos right in between the eyes.
That definitely did something. Giratina roared in pain as it lost its concentration (or at least as much concentration as was required to writhe violently across a battlefield) and crashed unceremoniously into the picket fence at the edge of the arena. Oddball beamed before charging the fallen deity.
As he pummeled the confused creature with Quick Attacks, one question nagged at his mind, however. It was why Giratina seemed to be hurt so badly by Quick Attack. Heck, if Giratina was a Ghost-Type, he should have been immune to Normal-Type moves! And he couldn't have simply been another type, either, because no type was weak to Normal-Type moves...
He quickly decided it didn't matter as Giratina roared a primal roar, rising its hurt body high into the air. Oddball quickly scampered away, taking a spot in the center of the battlefield as Giratina floated hiiiiigh in the air, far out of reach. He doubted he could even reach him with a Thunderbolt up there...
Suddenly, something hit Oddball from behind. Quickly getting up and turning around, he found himself face to face with a miniature-sized version of the dark silhouette form Giratina had taken before.
That is to say, Oddball found himself face to face with several dozen miniature-sized versions of the dark silhouette form Giratina had taken before. There were a lot of them.
Oddball panicked and tried running the other way, only to discover the same thing. He was completely surrounded by these shadows of Giratina. Like... Shadow Sneak, times two-hundred. Actually, now that he thought about it, this probably was Shadow Sneak, and Giratina was just cheating to make an army out of the shadows. Grimacing, Oddball shot out a Thunderbolt at the nearest one, and it burst into a puff of smoke. He came to a sudden realization.
What if Giratina was cheating Shadow Sneak together with Double Team...?
Two could play at that game.
"Double Team!" He shouted. Another copy of himself slid out from him, and the two of them each shot a Thunderbolt, killing off two more shadow-Giratinas. He used Double Team again, and another clone slid out from himself, making three! This continued until there were six Oddballs, in a circle, facing outward. This proved to be an optimal strategy- none of the shadow-Giratinas could even get close! They did notice something strange, however. If they killed a group of shadow-Giratinas all at the same time, any shadow-Giratinas nearby would also be hurt as the shadows exploded violently, sending a wave of energy through any nearby ones...
Eventually, Giratina got fed up with this nonsense. This was going nowhere. Time to assume direct control.
The Oddballs were surprised to see a shadow-Giratina that was different from the others. This one was a dark red color, and when they tried to hit it with their electricity, it would defeat it, but it would not explode!
Quickly, the Oddballs devised a plan. Splitting up, they began to round up shadows, like Mareep on a ranch. Rounding up all the shadows they could around the dazed super-shadow, they unleashed the most powerful electric attacks they had- Thunder in all cases -, upon the group, creating a powerful chain reaction, and an even more powerful explosion.
A roar came from above. The red shadow had been utterly destroyed, and Giratina seemed to be taking damage...
This continued for some time, the six Oddballs rounding up shadow-Giratinas around whatever red shadows appeared, creating large chain explosions and hurting Giratina quite a bit. At one point, Giratina began to summon Draco Meteors, which was a huge problem at first, instantly wiping out three of the six Oddballs, but after that, their power weakened considerably.
Soon enough, Giratina's Shadow Sneak facade broke. One too many red shadows being destroyed had managed to break Giratina's concentration, and it fell to the ground, where the three remaining Oddballs wailed on its beaten body with Quick Attacks and electric attacks until it let out another great roar, firing off a humongous wave of red energy that spanned the entire arena. Both remaining Oddball clones were instantly destroyed, Oddball was thrown a good distance away and was hurt badly, and Giratina's body seemed to fade, starting at the tail and working up. Soon, only its head remained, with its six arms coming out of the back of its head and waving wildly. It emitted a roar, though it was more like a shriek, scratchy and hollow. It rushed after Oddball, summoning whole showers of Draco Meteors and firing off Shadow Balls every which way but loose. The shadow it cast on the ground grew and spread, forming more shadow-Giratinas that steadily spawned. And, finally, its body (which now consisted of its head), began to vibrate rapidly, and a strong gust of wind began to blow from it.
Now, onto what happened next.
"Double Team?!" Oddball shouted panickedly. He summoned a clone, but the heavy wind immediately blew it away, obliterating it in less than a second. Gasping, he set to scurrying away, Giratina's remnants in hot pursuit.
Oddball dodged Draco Meteors and Shadow Balls, sprinting as fast as he could around the arena, just trying to get some distance between him and the mad god. The shadow-Giratinas were creepy, but they were nowhere near fast enough to prove a problem for the pichu. Giratina followed, its six arms reaching as far as they could, trying to grab the pichu and presumably do horrible things to him.
Eventually, Oddball go a comfortable distance away from what was rest of Giratina. Turning around and standing firm, he fired a powerful Thunderbolt straight for Giratina.
Giratina countered with a powerful Shadow Ball, which pushed forward through Oddballs Thunderbolt, the pichu barely being able to generate enough electricity to fight it. Giratina fired more Shadow Balls, each increasing the size and power of the one Oddball tried desperately to push back. Draco Meteors came down nearby and shadow-Giratinas approached, forcing extra electricity to be wasted to destroy them before they could reach Oddball.
Oddball pushed as hard as he could. He needed more electricity! He needed more POWER!
His cheeks were blazing. His entire body was convulsing violently as he forced it to generate and channel waaaaaaaaaay more electricity than a pichu should ever be able to handle. His brain screamed at him to stop, to give in and die from the immense Shadow Ball, but Oddball ignored its warnings, pouring more power into his electricity.
Finally, when it felt like Oddball was literally going to drop dead from exhaustion and electricity overload, he gave on last push, surging his Thunderbolt forward that little extra bit...
And it pushed the Shadow Ball back at Giratina, which exploded in its face.
Normally, that alone would have been enough to finish the deity, but this time, for some reason, the Shadow Ball didn't seem to do much to Giratina.
But then Oddball's overloaded Thunderbolt hit.
Giratina roared and moaned as it took its last damage. Its head twitched spasmodically and it writhed in pure agony as it began to disintegrate. Its body flashed in and out of existence, and it finally breathed its last, the last bits of its head bursting into tiny particles of what might have been antimatter, which then scattered through the emptiness of the Distortion World. Obviously, the god was not truly dead- it would regenerate from the ambient energies of the Distortion World, but for now...
Giratina had been defeated.
All was silent.
Oddball collapsed on the floor.
Music for your listening pleasure:
The Distortion World: The Distortion World (Pokemon Platinum)
Giratina Appears!: Bogmire Intro (Luigi's Mansion)
Vs. Giratina! Part I: Boolossus Battle (Luigi's Mansion)
Vs. Giratina! Part II: Bogmire Battle (Luigi's Mansion)
Vs. Giratina! Part III: Catching King Boo (Luigi's Mansion)
Vs. Giratina! (Alt): Giratina Battle (Pokemon Platinum)
Pretty much the finale here! Just a short epilogue, and then an extra chapter that shows a bonus boss fight, and this story will be done!
First three Giratina songs are the songs for his three distinct stages. Boolossus for his Outrage stage, Bogmire for his Shadow Sneak stage, and Catching King Boo for his final stage. Giratina's original battle theme will probably work too, in the event any of the first htree songs disappear from the internet for whatever reason