Chapter 14: Smoldering - Part 2
Risa hit the floor of the maze room, feeling the cold and crumbling stone dig into her knees and elbows. She winced and curled up on herself, pulling her bloody knees and elbows in as she regressed into a fetal position.
The strange letter-shaped pokemon kept slamming against her, screeching and glowing and emanating strange, sphere-shaped wisps. The wisps hit her back, burning and freezing and everything in between.
Spots splashed up against her closed lids, and she whimpered. Her mind seemed to be going blank, and nothing around her seemed to help.
All around her were the letters.
Heat was nowhere to be seen.
All she could see was letters, the crumbling brown stones, and...her backpack, which the letters tore at when she fell into the room. One of the straps was ripped, making it easy for the bag to slip off her shoulder and onto the floor where it lay.
She slowly and feebly extended a hand towards it, and the letters didn't seem to notice. Pulling herself along the gravely floor to it, she managed to put both hands on the bag. Her mind didn't seem to follow along as she unzipped the backpack, pulled out the book, and held it up to the swarming letters like a shield.
Then they all screamed and fled, just like that.
As realization dawned in Risa's mind, she brought the book down, trying to figure out what happened and what to do next.
But she didn't have to wonder about the latter, because before she knew it, Heat was hurling himself out her, shouting: "RISA!"
She blinked as she felt his warm body clutch at her arm. "Heat?"
"Yes, it's me! Those letter-things are WEIRD," he said, crawling into her lap. "What's going on? Where are we?"
Risa stared at him, confused. "I - I don't know."
Heat sighed, then looked at Risa's book. "Did that make the letters go away?"
"Uh, yeah," Risa said as she looked at the book in her hand. She barely remembered how it got there, much less whether or not it made the letters go away. It was as if she'd been in some sort of trance. "I guess it...kinda...did."
"I think that book is weird."
"Y-yeah, maybe," she began to smile, "or maybe you just don't know any word other than 'weird'. You use that word a lot. I think - heheh - 'I think that word does not mean what you think it means'."
Heat looked up at her strangely when she started to giggle. "Um, I think it means what I think it means. It means something's weird. Duh."
Risa just waved her hand. "Never mind, never mind."
Then silence fell over them. Finally: "So, smart one, how are we getting out of here?"
"...I...don't know."
"...Idiot."
---
"Okay, so, you get the plan?"
"I get the plan."
"Are you sure you understand the plan?"
"I am sure I understand the plan."
"Are you really sure? 'Cause you're not really so good at -"
"I GET THE STUPID PLAN. Can we just get this over with?"
"Fine." Risa slipped the book back in her bag and zipped it shut, though she wore the bag backwards, along her stomach, for easy access. "Ready?"
"Ready," replied her blazing cyndaquil, hunched down in what he assumed was a "battle position".
Then they waited for a moment, and then the letters came back.
Heat began blasting embers up at them, trying to pinpoint one to attack and weaken. Risa shrieked as they attacked her just as much as they attacked her pokemon, and tried to swat them away with no avail. She just closed her eyes, flailed around, and waited as best she could.
"NOW!"
Risa opened her eyes, ripped open her bag, and whipped out the book, holding it in one hand above her head. Once again, the pack of letters shrieked and began to dissipate, running off to other corridors. During the chaos, she used her other hand to grab a pokeball.
"Here!" Heat yelled from a little ways away as he tried his best to pin down a struggling, burnt letter D. "Get it, get it!"
Risa jumped forward, still holding the book above her head, and dropped the pokeball on the letter. It disappeared inside the ball, and the ball wriggled for a considerable amount of time before stopping.
Meanwhile, all the rest of the letters had left, leaving Risa and Heat in a silent, crumbling, rune-covered hallway.
"Did we get it?" Heat asked, sniffing the pokeball.
His trainer sighed, sinking down next to him. "I - I think so. I, uh, guess we were right about them being some kinda pokemon," she muttered, picking up the pokeball. "I hope it doesn't, like, attack us, or something. You know, when we let it out, or something."
Heat shrugged, the adrenaline of the battle already starting to wear off. "Whatever. I already beat it up once, I can do it again."
"Uh-huh," Risa mumbled, getting out her Pokedex and translator. After running through the ball through both machines, she brought up the stats on her new pokemon. "Okay, so it's 'unown'."
"Wait - what? It's unknown?" Heat narrowed his squinty eyes. "I think your little machine-thing is glitchy."
The Pokedex-holder shook her head. "It's an 'unown', as in the pokemon...I guess. Um, and it's shaped like the letter 'D' -"
"I could have said that much."
"As I was saying, it's genderless, and it's the 'symbol pokemon' and a psychic type. Um, it also says: 'because different types of unown exist, it is said they must have a variety of abilities,'" Risa read. She looked up. "I wonder what that means."
Heat shrugged. "Don't look at me. But it was attacking with ice."
"Ice? But it says here it's a psychic type."
"Well, then it must be a stupid one, 'cause it was using ice. It was like...throwing little white rocks at me, and the rocks melted when they hit me and turned to water." He nodded sagely. "Ice."
His trainer snorted. "Wow, you are sooo smart."
"Shut up, idiot. Open the ball so I can talk to the stupid thing and show it who's boss."
"Only do that if it attacks us," Risa said as she carefully opened the pokeball. Once again, they found themselves looking at a strange, floating letter "D" with a large eye in the center of the letter.
It's single eye narrowed at the sight of them. "Who are you?"
Risa smiled shakily, a little unnerved by the fact that androgynous voice of the unown didn't seem to come from anywhere, as the unown had no clear mouth. "U-um, m-my name is Risa Miyamoto, and I'm a trainer from New Bark Town, and this is -"
"I don't care about THAT," snapped the unown. "What I want to know is who you ARE. What role you play."
Heat and Risa exchanged a confused glance. "What...role I play?"
"Yes," the unown said, clearly getting frustrated. "Why do you have that - that book." It motioned with its body towards the book Risa left on the ground. "Tell me who you are."
Risa slowly picked up the book, staring at it for a moment or two. "Um, I told you," she said quietly. "My name is Risa Miyamoto. I'm your trainer now. And -"
"How. Did. You. Get. That. Book."
"...I bought it." Risa glanced down at it. "At a book sale. It was pretty cheap."
The unown growled. "And you expect me to get directly involved with this?"
Heat sniggered. "Seriously? It's a book! Relax, idiot, or else you'll get a mouthful of embers. Again. Wait -" he frowned, "make that an eyeful, 'cause you don't look like you have a mouth. Weeeeee-eird."
"Heat, be nice," hissed his trainer. She then turned back to the d-shape. "So, um, do you have a name?"
The unown sighed. "No. I don't need one - I'm fine with nothing."
"Name it 'Nothing'. C'mon, do it! It'll be funny!" Heat whispered with an evil grin on his long snout.
Risa shrugged. "Okay...how 'bout 'Nanimo'?"
"I told you, I don't care," the unown, now Nanimo, snapped. "And don't call me 'it'. I prefer 'she'."
"But you're genderless," Risa said, checking back to her Pokedex screen. "It says so right here."
A small ice ball shot out of Nanimo's body striking Risa on the shoulder. "Silence! You're going to trust a strange contraption over my own opinion on my gender?"
"N-no..."
"Good! Then answer my first question." She floated closer, staring down her new trainer with her immense eye. "Why do you have that book?"
"I bought it at a -"
"I don't want to know how you got it. I want to know WHY."
Risa opened her mouth to answer, then thought of something. "Wait - why do you even care? How do you know anything about it?" She paused, then straightened up. "You do know something about it! Tell me!"
Nanimo growled again, floating around the corridor as if she were pacing. "I can already tell you're going to be infuriating to deal with. Now, you said your name was Risa, right?"
"Yeah, idiot, she said so already," Heat mumbled, but stopped talking when Risa glared at him.
"Yeah."
"What does it mean?"
"Um, it's made up of the characters for 'reason' and 'yarn'."
Nanimo stayed silent for a moment. "Interesting...yet you use that contraption to figure things out. Do you have an English name?"
Risa shrugged. "Um, well, my parents just said my English name would be Lisa."
"Meaning?"
"Like...what 'Lisa' means?"
"Yes. What does it mean?"
Risa thought for a moment. "Um...I don't know. There's no character or anything for it...since it's English..."
After a few moments of silence broken only by Heat's mutterings, Nanimo sighed. "Well, I suppose it's good enough for now. You said I'm your pokemon now, right?" Risa nodded. "I'll go with you, though I want to make it clear I don't want to. I also want you to know that this book you purchased is one of the most horrid objects I know of." She swiveled her eye to look at it, then recoiled. "And you don't seem like the kind of person to get out of it alive."
Risa gulped, though she didn't quite know why. Her new pokemon had only been on her team for a few minutes, and now she was already saying Risa would die because of a book. "What - what do you mean?"
Before Nanimo could say anything, Heat interrupted with a loud shriek of: "WEIRD THINGS! WEIRD THINGS!"
And, sure enough, another unown cloud descended upon them.
---
An hour later, they had defeated the cloud. Risa had been hit with more kinds of circling aura spheres than she could think of, and sported burns, bruises, and everything in between. None of them were that bad, but she still felt sore all over, even when she applied salves.
Heat, on the other hand, seemed to be doing pretty well. Begrudgingly, Nanimo helped him pattern his ember attacks to match the unowns' onslaught of hidden powers, exploding some of the spheres before they hit anything. She also yelled at him about how to dodge the attacks, when to run and when to take the offensive, and where to aim for.
They spent the rest of the day walking along the corridors, Heat being their primary offensive strike against the wild pokemon. While Heat did seem to be getting stronger - and so did Nanimo - there was one problem.
There didn't seem to be a way out.
"It's your fault, you know," Nanimo said when Risa realized she'd just spent an entire day down in the maze. "You were the one who brought that book."
"You won't even tell me what this book is!" spat the girl, sounding more impatient than she felt. All she wanted to do was get out of there, find a Pokemon Center, and curl up inside a nice, warm bed. She didn't want her new pokemon to know that, though, and didn't really feel like confessing to Heat that she didn't like "beating up all the weird things".
Nanimo glared at her again. "We do not speak of it. It's going to destroy you, you know," she added.
Risa groaned. "You keep saying that! Why do you keep saying that? You never say anything else, so I don't believe you."
"Yeah," Heat said after blowing a mouthful of embers at a lone attacking letter "B" unown with a grass-type hidden power. Needless to say, it didn't stand much of a chance. "Stop saying Risa's gonna get destroyed. She won't get destroyed! Not when she's got me!" He puffed up his chest in pride. "Future champion, most awesome unown-beater-upper of all time. I'm so awesome."
Their unown teammate scoffed. "That attitude won't save you, although you might not be in as much danger."
Rolling her eyes, Risa put her backpack down and started taking out camping supplies.
"What are you doing?" Nanimo demanded, floating above Risa's head.
"Getting my sleeping back out," she snapped, doing just that. "I'm tired, and it's nighttime, anyway. I'm going to sleep."
Nanimo stayed silent as Risa took off her shirt and shorts and put on pink pajamas, though she growled when Risa put the grimoire next to her pillow. "You're doing that to spite me, aren't you?"
"Yes," Risa said, laying a hand on the cover of the book. "I'll keep it out until you tell me more. I know you know more than you're saying."
Heat sat near Risa's head, trying to stay alert in case another unown cloud ambushed. The dim light in the corridor flickered when he stretched and moved his back flames, but even through it all, Risa could see Nanimo staring down at her as she closed her eyes to go to sleep.
"It will destroy you unless you find a way to become important," Nanimo whispered. "If it doesn't think you're important, you're going to die just like all the others."
Risa squeezed her eyes shut, willing herself to go to sleep.
"That sunrise will never happen. You'll be dead. And it will be all your fault."
Fifteen days left.
---
Disclaimer: I don't own Pokemon. I also don't own The Princess Bride or the quote from it.
Author's Note: I'm having my wisdom teeth out on Tuesday (so two days from now), and I'm not sure how that's going to affect my ability to write. I'm going to TRY to get another chapter up tomorrow, but after that, it might be a week until I write again. I'm just not sure. So just be aware...if I don't respond/update, it might be because four teeth got ripped out of my mouth.