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chapter x. these violet delights

There were some days where I really just felt like throwing in the towel and quitting. I'd just gone through hell in the forest, what with losing my starter (both of them), having a froslass try to eat me (alive), getting lectured on death by an irate shopkeep who had undoubtedly saved my life (before I made him hate me), and, yeah, trapping myself in an apocalypse and marking myself out to be a horrible human being (several times). And now it appeared that there was no other option but to go further into the haunted tower, which was really something I didn't want to do, what with the dissolving people. I had a sentret who hated me and a metapod who couldn't even escape my arms, versus a haunted tower, and I couldn't help but think about how unfair everything was. If I just threw everything on the ground and quit, how bad would it really be?

An incessant, sarcastic voice in the back of my mind pointed out that if I threw Gaia on the ground, I would probably break her and she would die and I wouldn't like that.

For good measure, I tried the door behind me. It was securely locked, and the knockers refused to budge no matter how many times I pulled at them, significantly less calmly than I'd been when I'd tried to enter. I tried to focus. Facts. I liked those. Sprout Tower was apparently filled with creepy sages that could teleport and were probably possessed by ghosts who had taken a marked interest in my fate—ghosts that had been repeating the same incomprehensible advice since I'd started. And yes, there didn't seem to be much of a way out. What could possibly go wrong?

I should've stayed in the forest. I should've done so many things differently. But the only way out was through. I began taking purposeful steps toward the spiral staircase in the back corner of the room, unsure of precisely what I was trying to accomplish.

"Poddd."

"Yes, Gaia," I said with a sigh. "We're going to go poke around in the haunted tower."

I made my way to the middle of the room, drawn by the gently-pulsating light of the bellsprout. The Tower, while architecturally flawless, smelled like must and was caked in a fine layer of rattata shit. I scraped my foot along the floor experimentally. There was a lot of dust for such a prominent landmark, and all two of my steps were already creating visible prints in the ground. Iris's tracks skittered across the ground to her feet, occasionally criss-crossing a pair of similar tracks that I figured were rattata, but other than that, the dust was uninterrupted. How long had it been since anything higher than my knees had set foot here?

{Cap, I sense danger ahead.}

Iris's voice in my mind made me pull up short. I glanced up ahead at my sentret, who was chattering away at the ground, but even though I could hear the excited murmurings—"sent, sent, treetttt!"—I could still hear her voice resonating in the back of my mind. Telepathic field. We weren't alone.

A ghost or a psychic-type nearby. Haunted or Rockets. I wasn't sure which was worse. I spun around, searching the wooden rafters and dusty beams for some sort of clue, but the dimly-lit interior of the Tower yielded nothing. I gritted my teeth, and then, possibilities exhausted, I tried the frustratingly obvious: "Who's there!?"

A chuckle. {But please, do stop plagiarizing Hamlet by calling that out to ghosts in the dark.}

I didn't recognize the voice. Iris sank into a fighting stance, her tail bristling until it reached twice its original size and hung over her body like a shield, curled in an s-shape. {Leave us be,} the sentret growled, baring her two tiny fangs as her eyes darted around the room.

{Or what,} the voice—it was smooth and surprisingly mellifluous, with the consistency of melted butter, and that knowledge did nothing to mitigate my fears that I was conversing with a Bond villain—asked, {you'll scratch me to death? Surely, little sentret, you know better than that.}

"We don't mean to harm you," I said slowly, looking around the room as I tried to locate the source of the voice and failed. It wasn't like I could've hurt a ghost if I'd wanted to. "We were just taking refuge in the Tower, and now we'd like to go." Pause. I added in a quieter voice, "Please don't possess me."

{I get the feeling that would quite a ghastly feeling for both of us.}

That hadn't quite been the response I was expecting. "Sorry, what?"

A leering grin burst out of the nearby wall, solidifying into a dark blob of haze with a face. The blob whirled a little more, darkening and becoming more tangible, until I could recognize large, piercing eyes and fangs sprouting out of the purplish nebula.

I tightened my grip on Gaia and took a step backward, one eye casting toward the staircase, but I had a sinking feeling that we wouldn't make it before the ghost caught up to us. Add to that the fact that he could walk through walls and I couldn't, and I didn't see this ending well for any of us.

{I've been trying to tell you,} the ghost said lazily, revolving in midair before hovering directly in front of my eyes. His leer widened, but I was fascinated by those white, blank eyes. {I didn't possess anyone here. Possession is nasty business.}

Gaia spoke up for the first time. {Who did, then?}

The ghost cocked his head to one side in a motion that might've been a shrug, if he'd had arms. {I don't know, ma chérie. If his body does not remain where you saw it, I wouldn't call it possession in the first place, as we cannot possess a something that does not exist. An illusion, perhaps. If I were to hazard a guess, however, I would peg the perpetrator as the same ghost that haunts Falkner.}

"The same ghost that—" I began, but then cut myself off as a look of horror began to dawn on my face. "There are more of you here?"

{Imagine that, little human and her pokémon friends. There are dead in the world, and more than one.}

That hadn't been what I'd meant, but I couldn't help but remember Bates's words—ghosts were the remnants of slain pokémon. I wondered if this ghost remembered who he used to be, if the witty lines he quoted were actually remnants of his past.

When I thought of it like that, it became a hell of a lot harder to antagonize him.

{Leave us alone, and straighten your tongue,} Iris hissed back, the rest of the fur on her back bristling as well. The sentret, clearly, didn't share my sentiments. {Or I shall straighten it for you.} It was actually pretty interesting to hear her speaking in a language I could understand. I felt a little less dejected now that I could see that she seemed to growl angrily at everyone and most of her comments were death threats—but to everyone, at least, not just me.

{You're quite loud. I don't like you,} the ghost said to her after a moment, and then turned back to me. {There are many ghosts in Sprout Tower, some more malignant than others. Very few will be as welcoming as I, and I frankly couldn't care less about what you do here.}

Well. I didn't want to stay here any longer. Further up and further in. I took a step forward.

Iris shook herself and took a step forward.

The ghost took a step forward. Well, not a step, but a little bob in our direction.

I stopped taking steps forward. "Are you following me?"

{Perhaps.}

Things were a little convenient. A little too convenient, if you asked me, but I wasn't exactly complaining. If I needed a ghost-type to set up a telepathic field and I just so happened to be locked in a tower filled with ghost-types, then I would laugh and make lemonade, as the saying went. "Is that a yes or not?"

{I may stick around to see how the world ends,} the ghost said, sensing my unasked question. {I can sense much death on you, ma chérie.} He paused thoughtfully. {But I do not foresee myself leaving this tower. Now that I have awoken, I merely wish to see what disturbs the peak.}

Oh, yes, that was a far better option.

{If you do anything to hurt us, I'll—}

{For the love of gods, you'll what, little sentret?} the ghost asked, lazily drifting down to poke Iris with an incorporeal glob of energy. {Kill me? I'm dead already, and even so, I'd like to see you try.} The smile vanished for just a moment, just one, just enough time for his fangs to show cleanly beneath the threat.

I blinked and instantly began regretting every decision that had gotten me to this point. "I'm going upstairs," I said loudly, unsubtly moving my leg between the hissing sentret and the ghost. I started shuffling to the stairs, which was a lot harder when I was trying to keep Iris from flaying our guide.

I couldn't help but notice that the spiral staircase was also a work of art, as was everything in this tower—although it was becoming more difficult to notice, given the nagging ghosts that I could swear were behind me. Elegant and airy, it was a nice change from the wooden paneling, and kind of a homage to the brass of the door, all spirals and curls.

Iris vanished up the railing in a swirl of sable fur, ignoring my half-hearted cry for her to stop, that we should stick together.

"Sent," she called down distantly—out of range, I figured, by which point I had remembered that: first, she didn't particularly like me, and second, she was a scout.

That left me standing on the bottom floor of a haunted tower, clutching a metapod with a gastly orbiting my shoulders.

Gastly. I remembered now. Those were the ghosts in Ecruteak that enjoyed hiding in people's shadows and sucking out their souls.

The second floor of Sprout Tower, we discovered, was Gaia's.

We wouldn't understand it at first, but I think I should've known from the very beginning.

{Do you know why snow falls so slowly?}

I ignored Gaia's non-sequitur at first, momentarily confused, and I looked around, because the entire floor seemed to be a non-sequitur. The central bellsprout pillar was the same, climbing from the floor and disappearing high into the ceiling while casting a sickly yellow glow on the room, but everything else was different. The floorboards were replaced with a wide expanse of shallow grass and a few saplings. The air smelled fresh and crisp. In fact, short of the giant bellsprout stalk in the center of the room, we could've been in an idyllic meadow.

I peered back down the stairs, where a guilty-looking gastly looked back up at me. The stairs looked perfectly normal. And, if I craned my neck out far enough, I could see the perfectly-normal wooden floorboards beneath us.

So then why in the world was I standing in a meadow?

The trainers started appearing then, drifting into view from behind the pillar. They kept their heads bowed so I couldn't see their faces, but more and more of them came, shuffling through the grass like little ants. One of them, a trainer with dark hair and a red vest, appeared beside me, a pokéball in his hand and a small, golden electric-type that I recognized as a pikachu perched on his shoulder.

"Hello?" I managed to ask tentatively, but none of them answered. Were they all like the sage? I turned to ask the gastly for some sort of clarification, but found myself staring instead into the blank face of the red-vested trainer. He had the same wide, expressionless eyes that the gastly had. The pupils were too vacant, the whites too reflective.

Startled, I reached out to touch him with one hand while keeping the other firmly wrapped around Gaia, but the boy vanished as soon as my fingers passed through him, and he dissolved into the same thick smoke that had masked the sage from my view downstairs. I bit back a scream as I stared at my hand in shock, looking at the fingers, but when I tried again, another trainer dissipated as well. Black smoke whirled around my hand from where the trainer had once stood, and, before my eyes, the haze reformed back into the image of the same trainer with his pikachu.

I was reminded of the way the gastly on the floor beneath us had formed.

I had to admit, I didn't consider myself the best subject for a haunted tower. Rather than reeling back in abject terror, some part of my mind was casually admiring what I was seeing and imagining how to best study this for science. I'd seen it before—when I'd first met Icarus, for example—where my rational brain didn't quite catch up to whatever else was going on around me, so I was instead left tilting my head to one side as I airily dissolved another trainer with a flick of my wrist. Why was this happening?

{It is merely an illusion,} said gastly said calmly, passing through four trainers at once and sending them all vanishing in spirals of black smoke. {I don't see why this is so hard for you to process.}

Gaia didn't hesitate. {Why this illusion, though?} There was a hard edge in her voice that I wasn't accustomed to, a kind of buried hurt that was slowly coming to the surface with each of the ghostly trainers that spawned around us.

The gastly didn't give a response for a long moment. {I do not know.}

{How can you not?} Iris shot back, barely visible from the haze of dissolved trainers languishing around her.

Unfazed by her outburst, the gastly calmly replied,{Some ghosts draw energy from the fears of others. Some resist their urges and find strength through other ways. Normally, the sages are able to keep the malignant spirits at bay. The balance has been disrupted for about a week, now.} He drifted through another trainer. {Personally, I find my companions who must actively inflict suffering to grow stronger to be lacking in imagination. There is already more than enough fear and pain in our world, if they only knew where to look. We all hide secrets.}

A trainer spawned next to me, staring with vacant eyes before making aimless circles around the bellsprout at the center again, and I ran through my options. We didn't seem to have any real leads, actually. The gastly was lying, or he wasn't. The Tower was a giant prank caused by a hungry ghost, or it wasn't. We were all going to die, or we weren't.

Another trainer.

"But why do you—or whatever ghost is causing this—think that a meadow full of non-aggressive people would cause massive fear? Am I supposed to be afraid of flowers?" I stared pointedly at the daisy at my feet before kicking it into a plume of smoke.

{I think this is mine.}

The smile faded from my face, and I slowly looked down at Gaia, who hadn't even moved to indicate the five world-shattering words she'd spoken.

{Yours?}

And for once, Iris sounded strangely sympathetic. We'd all stopped short: the gastly had stopped bobbing idly, I'd stopped crushing flowers, and even Iris was deflating a little.

{Mine.}

Another trainer. I didn't wipe it away into mist.

"Pardon me for asking, Gaia," I said quietly, glancing around as more trainers formed from the fog in the gastly's wake, "but why?"

{No,} she said, cringing away as the red-hatted trainer spawned next to us again. {The forest is full of bugs, and we all wish to be captured. Well,} she said, tilting her head to one side slightly as she considered it, {not all, but most, and I once dreamed of glory. On the first day that we met, you named me Gaia.}

I was really having a hard time seeing where this was going.

{I was captured many times before you, have lived under many names,} Gaia said, looking wistfully at the pokéball in the hands of the red-hatted boy beside us, whose hand had drifted up to stroke the pikachu's head idly. {These are all of my past trainers.}

"These are—these—you—" had this many past trainers? I almost asked, but cut myself off barely in time. There were at least two dozen trainers drifting around in here with varying numbers of gleaming badges pinned proudly to their lapels, the light not reflected in their unseeing eyes. She couldn't possibly—

{Sixteen, yes. Few people keep bug-typed pokémon on their main team. We have shorter lifespans compared to most pokémon, and, while we evolve quickly, we fall behind just as quickly as well.}

She'd still been a caterpie when we'd met. She'd had sixteen trainers before me and not a single one had even used her enough to get her to evolve.

{Often, trainers will release their bug-types back into the forest. It's quite common, so no one bothers to call them out on it, but we're mostly just glad to be on a team at all, no matter for how short. With you, I was able to grow strong enough to evolve. That is more than most of my kind ever get.}

I'd captured Gaia with no intention of having her on my main team after she became a butterfree. I'd planned to pawn her off as my starter, a flying-type, in the name of my survival, but battling with her had never been part of the plan. I knew that bug-typed pokémon were weak—perfect for children, they said—and I'd never imagined having to have one as a star battler. When the storage systems went back online, I might've even put her in the box if I ended up finding a stronger replacement.

And it seems like I hadn't been the only one to think this way.

The realization I'd had on my first night of training came back then: I was trusted with living, breathing lives. These were real pokémon with real feelings. Not like the figured I'd read about in my half-hearted attempt anatomy homework or in the history books. Somehow, we were supposed to work together and get through all of this. Even if Gaia was just a metapod. Even if I was fated for unfathomable darkness.

If this was a tower that revealed deep, dark secrets, maybe this floor was mine after all.

I remembered the words she'd said even when we'd first entered the floor. She'd known from the beginning. She'd known.

{I have high hopes that you are different.}

She was wrong, of course, and I couldn't say anything.

{Do you know why snow falls so slowly?}

I tried as hard as possible to swallow my guilt.

{Because it doesn't know where to go any more.}

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