PKMN2K10

by Mr. Dynasty

After a crushing defeat, Ash returns home to rediscover his ambitions as a trainer. Friends and foes both new and old surround him on all sides, but can he find the way to forge ahead and emerge victorious, even as the world grows darker and ever more sinister around him? Language/Violence

26. Chapter XXVI

Disclaimer: I do not own Pokemon.

Chapter Summary: When all is said and done between Ash and Sabrina, who walks away the victor? What will Holiday find when he investigates upon Doc's findings? And how will Roxie's promised date come to an end?

A/N: Alright folks, it's the end of an era. Let's do this!

---

PKMN2K10

Chapter XXVI

"Make or Break"

As agony poured over her, Sabrina reeled both mentally and physically. Even detached from her physical self as she was, she was anchored to that body that now writhed and contorted. Even if she could somehow make it back, it would be a retreat to a sanctuary that would soon twist itself apart. She had no avenue of escape, and no possible respite.

Sabrina screamed with the fear of the dying, as the vengeful thing somehow constrained her, trapping and binding the immaterial presence of her with it's great sweeping command, venting its elemental anger straight into her with an impact that felt as though it would shred her apart.

How had this force escaped Ash? His inert mind should have kept it from being expressed outwardly at all! She'd taken great pains to ensure that he couldn't harm anyone when this took place. How had this happened?

It was not a question she could devote much to. Her detached mind was a pitiful vessel stretched to bursting, expanded to new understandings of what excruciation could be, unbound the constraints of what any physical duress could ever could become. Hers was a special hell. A mental anguish beyond what the body could tolerate, and beyond what any mind but hers might ever be capable of understanding.

And for a moment, she totally and utterly surrendered herself to it.

But as layers and layers of her were peeled away, flayed from the whole, it revealed a core of innermost control, that had hardened and tempered itself in anticipation of a moment just such as this. That fragment of her knew that there was escape, and that it could only be found forward and outward outward.

"I will survive!" cried a tiny logical splinter of herself, a calmness amidst the sea of chaos that filled her. The voice was borne of ultimate purpose, ultimate importance, and would brook no obstruction to it's designs, not even those that were symptomatic of her own destruction.

Sabrina had to get where she was going. Her purpose was clear. She would hide herself in the only place that had ever kept this force restrained, until she could carry that out. She would survive. She fired herself through the dark, like a cruise missile, ripping away from the terrible grasp only by the grace of her sudden burst of speed and resolve where all else was dying. It was not a clean escape. The huge presence dogged her path, straight back to where it had come, always just behind, implacable, faceless and damning. Sabrina, as cognizant as she was, held no fear. Her urgency was tamped by another, more potent force.

She penetratively re-entered Ash's mind and scrambled down many hallways, looking for someplace deep, someplace secret. She couldn't double back or turn around, because behind her, everything was being torn apart, and scorched by the same heat and light that had evaporated her two strongest contemporaries Strength and Scorn as though they were nothing. She knew where she needed to go.

Down, down, deep into the subconscious. There she would find safety, security, and if all went as planned, which Sabrina knew it would, she would find allies, either willing or unwitting, amongst those she'd imprisoned there.

---

Haunter puzzled at the activities of Humans. Human activity was strange. Just when he'd thought he was mastering the particular sort of smile that was necessary-not a wide toothy one that Haunter himself might've shown, because these seemed patently false to Humans, but one just jocular enough to insist the wearer was having a good time-and the strange, full-body undulation Humans called dancing-something he'd needed considerable practice at, since he did not have much of a body to call his own-there was a new behavioral complexity added to the mix.

Haunter tried not to let his frown show on any of the four bodies under his puppeteer's command. It was taking a considerable amount to keep them all balanced as they were, each sitting on the shoulders of one another in the shallow end of the heated in-ground pool. They'd shed most of their clothes in the case of the Humans, and since pokemon were almost always naked, it didn't seem that unusual, in Haunter's mind. Sodden clothes must've been uncomfortable anyways. But this seemed to attract a fair deal of attention, which Haunter was unsure how to handle.

It had been easy to mix with the crowd when his thralls were only part of it, but when they were at the center of it, it put a fair deal of pressure on him. Sabrina had stressed how important this favor was, after all, and of all the Humans he could think of, he liked Sabrina the most.

Like him, she was devious and tricky, and she could appreciate the subtleties of a good gag. He liked those qualities more than anything. Still, he had a hard time understanding the point of this particular prank. Humans, for all their quirk and flatness, could construct practical jokes that were hellishly labyrinthine. Especially Sabrina.

Still, Sabrina had been clear that he was not to attract undue attention in the course of his objective, and here he was garnering a great amount of it, as more and more onlookers poured out of the rear sliding door.

But it wasn't their interest in Ash, Ditto, Duplica and Pikachu that made him nervous. He knew he wasn't doing anything wrong where they were concerned. At least not explicitly. He'd seen several pairs of naked humans here. Some far more naked than these two! He knew what this place was. Or at least, he had a notion. It was some kind of breeding facility, obviously! Haunter himself didn't know much about that sort of thing, truthfully, but he'd heard other pokemon talk about it. It didn't take a Metagross to understand what was going on.

Still, maybe it had more to do with something that he wasn't doing. Haunter gauged the slowly amassing crowd, who all seemed to be fiddling with their gears, or poketches, for whatever reason. Humans were strangely invested in those little devices, he'd noticed. Not that Haunter knew what was so great about them. Still, if he was going to fit in, it made sense that he do as they were doing.

He undertook the great effort that was required to see that the tower of human and pokemon bodies clambered through the water without drowning themselves, toward the pile of clothing that had been left at the tiled edge of the pool. He fished about with their clumsy hands, feeling as though the extra, rubbery digits that Human hands possessed, along with their lack of ability to phase them through solid objects must've been terribly infuriating at times.

He finally managed to procure the devices in question, juggling them about into the proper hands, those of the two humans, and then commenced his best approximation of purposeful use. It did not amount to much. Haunter was very clever, but the complexities of Human symbolism and script were meaningless to him. The brightly lit screens were just washes of uninteresting color holding pips of shape and form without obvious purpose. Again, he tried not to let his frown show. Instead, he moved his own body this time, transparent and invisible amongst the crowd, learning what he could to better improve the act.

It seemed like they were all pointing their little devices at his four captives in the pool, and for a second he wondered if maybe he should have them point theirs back toward the crowd, but that didn't follow any Human logic he was aware of.

Haunter pondered. What was this called? When Humans made little flat copies of the things that were happening, so that they could remember them later? He realized that was what was happening. Everyone was taking pictures of his four thralls. Well, at least of Ash and Duplica. He was fairly certain that nobody was all that interested in Pikachu and Ditto. They were just normal, run-of-the-mill pokemon. Cute, perhaps, but otherwise they certainly weren't noteworthy.

Could the minor feat of acrobatics have been at work here? Surely it wasn't that impressive that Ash could carry them all on his shoulders. He wasn't especially large, but he was very strong for his size, being almost entirely muscle. Duplica was on the short side as well, but she was very evenly proportioned and well balanced, so there should've been no great wonder to her ability to balance atop the boy's shoulders.

Fortunately, a very helpful man at the edge of the pool, squatted down, and more or less explained it to him, as he snatched the gear from Ash's fingers. Haunter was careful not to let his curiosity spill over onto Ash's otherwise blissful entertained visage, as he listened.

"Even at a fucking whore house, as soon as some bitch takes her tits out, everyone loses their minds." Holiday, hissed, as he looked at the boy, who was obviously still so fucking high that he wasn't even aware of what was going on. Holiday even waved a hand in front of the kid's placid face, triggering no response. The topless slut on his shoulders wasn't any better off, either.

Not that Holiday really gave a damn what sort of debauch Ash found himself in. That had more or less been the point of everything happening here tonight, however out of his control it had gotten. He was irritated for another reason.

He looked from Ash's stolen gear in his left hand, back to the xtranciever on his right wrist, and gave it an evaluatory shake. The data he was getting was off the charts. No way it was right.

He'd written the program himself, at first annoyed that this search for "energy spectrometer" app on the transceiver store had turned up nothing. Not that there should have been one, especially, since that sort of equipment was both very costly and narrowly useful, but he was getting pretty fucking tired of having to do all the high-end brain-work around here.

He'd spent the trip back from the Pokemon Center doing some quick searches for the os source tags that dictated which values of light were captured by the transceivers built-in camera, and altering them so that they were well above the spectrum of visible light that they would normally need to capture for the purposes of photography, changing the control integers of its focus mechanism so that the lense would refract incoming light, rather than reflect it onto the sensory array, and writing an assemblage of code to create a workable interface that would compile the information into an analytical table. Crude, but in essence, a workable spectrographic analyzer.

Still, he must've fucked it up somehow. Whenever he pointed it around in the air, he got static. Blips, maybe, but nothing major. When he pointed it at Ash, he may as well have been pointing it at the sun.

The readings were in the exajoules, which was ridiculous, since the water in the pool hadn't flash-boiled into hydrogen plasma, and so far as he could tell, nobody's skin was slipping off their body in the face of this unseen radiation source on par with a runaway nuclear power-plant.

He almost, almost wished, just for a meek portion of a second that Doc were here, so that he could ask some questions, but then he remembered that Doc was dead to him, and so he spat on the ground instead. This was a scientific experiment, not show-and-fucking-tell. He'd specifically ditched Doc and doubled back here just so that he could in fact run these readings alone, without having to worry about preconception on Docs end spoiling his findings.

Hell, to hear Doc tell it, the kid was some Human Legendary, here was an elemental force of nature given physical form. He wondered what element of nature Humans embodied exactly. Looking around him, he figured it was probably some element of Voyeur.

"Ah, well," he said, with a shrug, holding up Ash's gear and using it to snap a picture of the boy, and the enthusiastically naked young woman on his shoulders. "When in Rome and all that shit, right?"

He scrolled through the contact list, looking for the most damaging person he could possibly send it to, and with a whistle and a spiraling finger when he'd found just such a person, he did so. When he was done, the Admin tossed it back to Ash, who made no attempt at all to catch it, and from there it fell straight into the drink. It sank to the bottom, it's "message sent" screen flashing white just a few times before the device shorted out and powered off.

Holiday left the back yard through a gate set into the twelve foot hedge that granted a measure of privacy to the outdoor swimming area, and walked back toward downtown. He checked over the program again, even though he knew it was right. Hell, even if it was right, there was nothing more that a test like that could tell him. He would need resources that only the boss could provide. The results were troubling. Deeply troubling. But what more could he do without a laboratory?

Which was going to be an interesting conversation. He held his hands up into the sky questioningly, and played out his own end of the dialogue, with Arceus as his witness. "Hey, uh, Boss? Well, listen I know you're super-nervous about this thing you've been hiding in your basement for whatever fucking reason, and you think you might need to fortify your defenses with this psycho-interferometer device I said I could get for you, but hey, um, my dick-for-brains partner sorta, kinda, um, yanno, smashed it like a fucking plate-glass window.

"And look, I know you were having doubts about the guy to begin with, and you nearly blew my fucking brains out the last time you even suspected I wasn't one-hundred percent on the level with you, but could you maybe, I dunno, let it slide this time? Maybe you could not lock the guy in a dark room somewhere and see that he's slowly and painfully skull-fucked into a vegetative state by three ex-cons and their Tangrowth, or whatever it is people like you do to people that get in you way?

"Why? Well, because he has this real interesting idea about that Ketchum kid, that you might be curious about. Uh, no, I can't actually prove any of it, and no it doesn't actually help you with your problem at all, but I mean, I've got an interesting little infographic on my transceiver here. What does it mean? I dunno. I'm pretty sure it's wrong, actually, but Doc said it was persuasive."

He let his head and arms hang the rest of the way back. It was going to take a goddamned miracle to sort this out.

---

Sabrina screamed like a bullet down the long dark causeway of the mind, until she crossed that massive threshold to where she knew she could not be followed, and slammed the great heavy door behind herself, pressing everything that she had against it, praying that it would hold.

And in a rush, just as she knew it would, the nameless power tested itself against that portal with weight and force that shoved her back a step. She raced to close it again, throwing herself against the door, trying to keep it sealed against her attacker.

In here it could not take her. Out there it was powerful beyond measure, but in here, there was no power. There was only chaos, only wild thought. Rules and governance from the outside were nothing, no matter if those laws were physical or mental. Here, even she was at the mercy of the tide.

She placed both hands on the door, feeling the heat and pressure outside fade, and knowing that it did not signify retreat. Sabrina could not leave this way, lest she find it waiting for her patiently for her. She frowned as she held the door fast, thinking.

She was not allowed to think for long. A hand slapped down over hers, shocking her from her consideration, and she knew just who it belonged to, before she even followed it back up the arm to it's source.

Being a facet of Ash, Ambition looked much like him, but unlike Abdication who was a sad, measly thing, Ambition was all superlatives of a different sort. Ambition lead the other facets, and it was not hard to see why. He was the core, the firmament, the unshakable foundations that all of Ash had collapsed back down to when the grand structure Adventure had built collapsed in on itself. Ambition alone had possessed the will to rebuild. To collect all the others, and hoist them back up high again.

Ambition had done this by being hard in all the ways that none of the other facets could be. He was all of Ash's resolve, all of his drive, all of his can-do and go-get smashed into one rock-hard geode of a facet. For that, he was imposing, huge, built after model of his father, whom all children saw as the model for god. Sabrina looked up at him, feeling truly small. His rough skin was baked gypsum against her pale alabaster, and his hair was gleaming onyx that framed a frown etched into the strata of his face like the oldest geological records of pre-history.

Ambition's back stretched mountainously to inspect his oversight, and every word that came out of his mouth sounded like it fell like lead at his feet, and those sandstone eyes suggested he expected you to carry them away and be damned thankful for them.

Ambition scowled at the sight of her, and the state of her did not impress him. Ambition knew she did not belong, and stocked little patience for that which did not fall within his acumen. His hand overlapped hers, hard and blameless. "You don't belong here," he said, his voice free of accusation. His word was truth, however hard it might've been.

Sabrina realized what he was doing and both her hands flew to the door, desperate to keep it shut.

"Don't," she urged, even as he began to twist her hands back to the right, with one single-handed grip on the mechanism. "Don't let it in."

Ambition's frown somehow became even more grave. "You let it out. You brought it here," he pronounced, laying guilt firmly where it belonged. "If I open this door and it burns you out of this place, It would only serve you right."

Sabrina felt the the heat through the door as Ambition kept right on turning, pulling the latch with a strength she could not match in this place. His was a strength implicitly of Ash's making. Here, even in this place, where so much was uncertain, and so much was in flux, his domestic powers fully overruled her foreign ones. He would best her, the light and fury would seep in at his behest, however so far it could, and she would burn at the doorstep of her intended sanctuary, like a vampire refused entry before dawn.

And he had nearly done just that, before another voice interceded on her behalf.

"We don't know what it will do if it gets in here," said that other voice. "Everything out there is safe, for the most part. It can't do any real damage with everything shut down out there. Nothing we can't fix anyways."

Ambition stopped, but hand still remained inexorably glued to the doorknob as he made his rebuttal. "We can't fight it. If we try, we risk one of us being destroyed, and I won't allow that. Our best option is to turn her over to it, and let it take her. She's clearly what it's after."

Sabrina wanted to look over her shoulder, to see who the other voice was, but she was a facet of purposeful nature, not inquisitive. Her focus remained on countering as much of Ambition's strength as she was able. Besides, she knew that it could be only one fact that spoke with so much authority as to countermand Ambition.

Adventure's insistence was pure, and evocative, and softened even Ambition's rigidity. "Maybe. But so long as we don't open that door, we don't need to find out for sure."

The lead facet did not bend in his assessment of Sabrina, so much as he allowed that he might've been incorrect in his remedy. With the same hand he'd tried to reopen the door to the conscious mind, he peeled her from it, prying her out into the open like she had no more power to resist than an unruly child. She spun to face Adventure directly now, Ambition clasping her arm tightly. "She can't stay here. She doesn't belong. If we don't throw her out, this place will start falling apart, and we'll all be out there with that thing again, like we were when Ash lost control of it the first time. You remember what that was like."

Adventure did not wilt in the face of that threat. Adventure did not wilt in the face of any threat. He was not hard in the way that Ambition was, no, but he was all of Ash's passion, his wanting, his creativity and spontaneity in one. He craved excitement, and newness. Lightning surged through his veins. Ambition was static and reliable and sturdy and unflinching, but Adventure was strong for all the opposite reasons. Adventure was dynamic and rapacious, and not only curious and inquisitive, but wise because of his endless satisfaction of those qualities. He balanced like a Sceptile on the pads of his feet, and spoke his oath with confidence borne of what seemed like equal parts pride and certainty. When he shook his head, a long black stream of jagged hair spilling from beneath Ash's trademark cap beat back and forth like a Zoroark's mane. "I can get her out. A different way."

Sabrina remembered, now. Adventure was a deposed leader here, newly dethroned by Ash's recent personal self-revelations and it was the reason he walked talked and acted with the demeanor of an over-familiar houseguest. Adventure did not overtly begrudge the new authority, but neither did he revere it overmuch in the way the others did. He must've known how to get along better than anyone, especially here after all, for there were parts of this mind that he knew and understood in a way more legitimate than his peers. Ambition and all others were refugees, in this, the closest thing to pure unfiltered imagination, the rawness of Ash's abstract and creative mind, while Adventure considered himself sojourner.

Nobody was truly master here, anyways, not even Ambition. Imagination was a safe place, but it was also a wild place, where all rules were off the table.

Ambition did not snarl in frustration, as he let her arm go and allowed his course to be swayed. Ambition saw only goal and the route to realization. She had to go. Her being here disrupted the effort to re-establish control over the body, and Sabrina couldn't be trusted after having driven them to the brink in their moment of weakness, even besides. This was her comeuppance for putting them here in the first place, but letting in the thing outside in the hopes that it would obliterate her and nothing else was a dangerous notion to entertain, he could see that. His authority was not utilized for it's own sake. Ambition was not so much a creature of ego as Adventure was. He could concede.

"Do you need any of the others to help you?" asked Ambition

"No," said Adventure at once, as though to suggest such a thing was pitiful. Adventure needed nobody. He had run the entirety of things on his own, and he could certainly do this much by himself.

"Go then. Take her." Ambition allowed, gesturing with a finger.

Adventure did not grasp for her, or lead her, so much as make it impossible for Sabrina to stay behind. Instead, he spun away, not favoring her with more than a slant of his neck. "This way," he said, with a smirk in his voice. Adventure knew that he was irresistible, and so he bent no effort to sweeten his offer. In him, suddenly anything was possible, and Sabrina followed, face flush. That was Adventure's power after all, the charm and draw of all things unknown.

Only now did she begin to realize where she had actually been standing during Ambition and Adventure's argument. Their feet stood buried in the snowy peak of an enormous mountain, so high in the air as to have dwarfed any on earth of which she was aware. They stood at it's very top, on a flat rock not more than fifty feet across, looking down for miles and miles, as if viewing the entire world below from space itself. Up here, the blue skies tapered to black all around them, giving way to the twinkling of stars. Up here, they were not alone, either.

Ambition watched them from behind, and Adventure walked out ahead, but all around there were others. Many others. Every facet she had dug out, forced into exile, pushed from the conscious mind, stood around her, close and claustrophobic. Some leered, others smiled at her passing, but few let her go unnoticed. Their eyes felt heavy on her, and she walked a bit closer behind Adventure, trying not to stare back at them. Every one was a reflection of Ash, for better or worse, and she could only wonder what some of their names were.

Ambition cleared his throat, and all of them looked away at once, under his powerful direction, going back to whatever task he'd put them to. Some observed, while others tinkered, seemingly with an assortment of things. Scraps of what they'd managed to bring with them when she'd annexed their true home, perhaps, but curiously, amongst all of the minutia which she could scarcely identify, all of them seemed to hold one item that was identical to that of their neighbor.

"You all have the same handkerchief," She whispered to Adventure, whose own bright yellow device was strung around his neck like a scarf.

She'd only meant for him to hear it, of course, but here her voice seemed to carry quite freely. "Why wouldn't we?" every member of the collective answered in unison, as though she'd shouted her observation.

"It's lucky," said Adventure, whose smile was debonair and intentionally leading.

"It's useful," called Ambition, far behind now, but still able to hear, apparently. His notion of it being utilitarian was unsurprising.

At once they all chimed in now, citing their individual respect for, or observance of a quality it held until there was a cacophony all around her. It wasn't until a smaller, more modest facet spoke that she could make out any one sentiment amongst all the others

"Someone important gave it to us," said this final fragment of Ash, whom she might've mistaken for Abdication on demeanour alone, except for the fact that she could see nothing of his face. He was turned away from them, and oddly, remained so, even as they passed him on the left, as though he were revolving with equal speed so that he remained facing directly away. On impulse, Sabrina slowed and altered her trajectory slightly, but he matched the measure with a crook of his neck, granting her only a partial glimpse of flushed cheek.

She frowned, but Adventure now beckoned her along, and they strode to a jutting edge of the rock, looking down across the world, like its observant gods looking down from some imaginary Olympus.

Adventure took her hand as she came beside him. The act itself was free of tenderness somehow, as if she were more suitcase than living thing.

Without waiting for her to ask, Adventure detailed his plan. "So, we leave the same way anything does. We go through a dream." He pointed down, over the detailed landscape as he spoke. "This is where they all come from, and the conscious mind is where they all go. It'll boil up and bubble out, and most of the time, the mind stops it there."

He made two fists and rammed them together. "Locks it away. It's something we built for Ash a long time ago. He has nightmares, you know. Used to have bad ones, when he was little. Night terrors. Abdication and I put together a kind of defense mechanism," Adventure paused, reflectively. "Though, now I suppose it's up to me to run it."

"Now, a dream comes up, It gets contained. Locked up so tight even Ash forgets about it. He still dreams it! You gotta have dreams, after all. Once he wakes up, though, wham, there it is, sealed up tight. Eventually, it just sort of dissipates, filters away, sinks back down into here, along with everything else." He explained

Her expression must've conveyed her confusion, because Adventure sighed. "The dreams have kept getting worse, ever since it the whole "Chosen One" thing happened the first time, but really they've been bad for a while." He shook his head. "Anyways, We'll follow a dream up, and then when it pushed into the conscious mind, I'll open the containment from the inside, and then you'll be free. Granted, so will the dreamstuff that comes with us, but there it is, in a nutshell. Simple." When he finished, he gave her a tug, and placed one tentative foot over the edge. "So C'mon. Let's go."

She tried to dig her feet in, to resist being impelled to leap, but he didn't let go, and so she was dragged off with him. The world below, which had seemed quite distant before, yawned outward it all directions, sloping away in curvature, as though she were plummeting toward the convex side of a great blue and green bowl.

She emptied her lungs down at the earth, which approached her rapidly, lent the illusion of slowness by it's gargantuan scale. Even the clouds seemed impossibly far, and she was well out of screams by the time they loomed closely.

A continent-sized cloud-formation enveloped them like a down-pillow. The fine mist of water vapor buffeted her face, but she felt Adventure grip her hand tightly, and when she was able to open her eyes he tugged sharply, drawing her attention away from the massive grid of land below, toward another shape that approached them laterally, rather than from directly ahead.

It seemed tiny and distant at first, but being that it was traveling perpendicular at speed, it suddenly leapt into hugeness and presence, all four engines roaring. A sleek, shiny airliner, finned and sharpedo-like, seemed ready to knock them from the sky, but Adventure was somehow able to snag a hold of it, with his free hand. As it was, the transition from one-hundred miles straight down to five hundred miles in a lateral northerly direction didn't feel so uncomfortable. It didn't even jerk her arm straight off, as it should have.

She had to remember that this was the imagination, and that anything was possible here. Adventure tugged and jostled her up and over the wing, where they approached the departure door and let themselves inside, escaping the turbulence and sound into the otherwise quiet cabin.

Looking around once they had shoved the door closed behind themselves, Sabrina thought perhaps that their arrival had set some emergency protocol in action, but bizarrely, it seemed as though everyone were queueing very politely to disembark. They followed the line of people, her in confusion, Adventure with subdued impatience. She peeped through the porthole windows as she jockeyed along, find that the plane had somehow landed and taxied to a complete halt on the tarmac within the span of the half-minute they'd spent getting inside.

Adventure reached high into an overhead compartment, and produced a change of garb that fell onto him like a changeover. He emerged from the rounded rectangular hatch and paused on an old-style gangway which led down to the runway, of the type that were no longer used. She came out beside him.

A whole crowd was gathered, and they roared at the sight of Adventure, now clad in the fur-coat and sunshades of a playboy champion, as he stood over them like a god upon his gleaming dais. He descended the staircase with such disregard that she might have confused him for Arrogance. Autograph books and longing hands were extended toward him, and he deflected them, contemptuously. "No autographs. Don't touch. Make way." he chanted, in refrain as though it were a long-practiced and tiresome sequence.

Just when it seemed like they would close in from all sides and overwhelm Adventure, a deep shadow fell over the runway, darkening the area, but as everyone looked up, it passed as quickly. It wasn't until a few seconds after, that a huge explosion rocked the area. The crowd dispersed in a stampede, disoriented and frightened, as more gouts of fire and rumbling booms shook the airport around them.

Sabrina took in what was happening as Adventure pulled her along. High overhead, massive bombers buzzed, their distant drone punctuated by the whistling of falling ordinance. Heavy shells collided with the runway, the grounds, parked aeroplanes, everything, blowing them to collective hell.

Ash snatched the radio from a passing air-traffic coordinator, and put it to his face. "Get me the Thunderbolt!"

A voice on the other end gave it's crackled response. "Roger that, Ace. You're cleared for takeoff!"

He tossed the radio aside and pulled in a different direction, toward an arched hangar. She could see a stubby, squat attack aircraft in the hanger, it's fuselage painted a bright yellow, it's two intake turbines an alarming red, though it's open bay door.

They never made it. A massive burst of fire and concussive force destroyed the building before they made it within one hundred yards, as ordinance rained down onto it from above

Adventure snarled, and redoubled himself, a thin trickle of blood seeping from his hairline. "Fine. We'll do this the hard way."

He took out his pokedex, and pushed a rapid sequence of buttons, then, with a hiss, the pokedex changed shape in his hand, folding and reconstructing itself in an odd way she'd never seen before. When it had become a t-shaped device, which he held like an air-pump plunger, and pressed one more button with his thumb. It pulsed with as much with foreboding as it did with LED-light.

And then there was a rumble the likes of which dwarfed the falling shells, and the upheaval of force seemed to be on several orders of magnitude more intense. She was thrown to her backside, as it seemed the whole of the landscape before her was being blown into the sky. She looked on in awe as the dust and debris arced back to earth, and she began to understand that nature of what had occurred by what was revealed. The ground had not been blown apart.

Something had emerged. Something truly massive.

A huge, metal pokemon towered toward the sun like a skyscraper, it's yellow chassis reflecting the lights of sky above and fire below with equal severity. It's enormous limbs curled aggressively, suggesting demonstrable strength. Between two brown and aggressive-looking stripes that seemed to comprise the tail art of this insane war-machine, she could make out huge block letters, each nearly thirty feet tall which read: "PKU UNIT 01"

Two bombers banked aside to dodge it as it sprang up from the earth, but a third failed to veer in time, and blew up in sudden impact with the elongated ear-fins of the massive machine. The fireball of aircraft fuel, seeming tiny by comparison, hardly scratched the paint-job.

They raced into a hatch on it's leg, and were whisked upward in a high-speed elevator ride to a cockpit just behind it's eyes. Once there, Adventure began to wreak devastation on the bombers, swatting them out of the sky.

Another upheaval like their own, revealed their true adversary however. A massive steel totodile loomed on the horizon, crawling from the sea like the emerging edge of some great continental shelf. They made for eachother like earth-leveling titans, their strides carrying them what seemed to be miles at a time.

They faced off, and the PKU was overpowered by the mecha-Totodiles radioactive breath-projection, hard lances of lavender flames licking at the hull. Nearly overloaded, Adventure got the massive robot back to his feet. The look on his face said that it was time to raise hell.

He reached for a lever, marked "Attack Mode", and engaged it. The LCD indicator changed to reflect the new setting as "Balls to Walls." Guns appeared, but Totodile did not seem worried, So Adventure engaged it again, this time to: "Grossly Irresponsible Violence" more guns appeared, along with what appeared to be laser-weapons but still, Totodile did not react. He tried "Suicidal Frenzy," which produced two large dynamos that elevated from the PKU's shoulders, and while Totodile did pay them heed, Adventure evidently felt that reaction was not suitable, he engaged it again to "End Times" so that several physical bladed weapons appeared, along with more even more guns.

Totodile now began to look concerned, but it was too little too late.

When Adventure put it into "Supernova of Death" mode, Totodile backed off some, so Adventure cranked it up one gear further, and gave chase. This mode, which was apparently beyond even the wonders of futuristic super-technology to adequately define, was called simply: "?!"

When Adventure and his mecha-Pikachu caught up to the Totodile, there such a course of utter devastation as she had never imagined in all her life, and even she, exposed to such hideous events as she had been in her life, covered her eyes. Eventually the whirring and jerking and crashing and smashing and blasting and burning and bashing settled out into a pattern of rising and falling that grew slower and gradually calmer as things went on. It became so relaxing in fact that she might've imagined she were on the ocean.

When she dared to peek again, she realized that she was not on the ocean, but in fact, riding on the back of gentle, placid creature. A real pikachu this time, though even this one was still somewhat bigger than normal. Tauros-sized, she and Adventure both sat atop it like a beast of burden, its furry paws padding along at a leisurely pace.

That was the way of things she supposed. It was in the nature of imagination to be distracting. Adventure turned in front of her, to spare a glance over the gleaming pauldron of his knight's armour.

"Are you alright?" Adventure asked. She almost expected he would tack on a superficial "M'lady," given his era-of-chivalry garb, but he didn't. Instead he smiled, tucking a huge lance into the crux of his shoulder, and then bucked onward.

They were challenged along the road, quite a few times, and though to Sabrina the offerings seemed lacklustre compared to the giant robot struggle, Adventure's enjoyment of them did not seem at all diminished. He tilted with many a darkly-armoured adversary, and bested them with laughter that was not at all vindictive. Even when he was once unsaddled, jilted sideways in his seat so that Sabrina was suddenly Pikachu's only rider, she could hear him laughing from the dirt below like a child.

It was easy to see why Adventure liked it here. It was also easy to see why Adventure was some of the best that Ash had to offer. He was competitive, and he liked to mix it up just as much as Ambition did surely, but he was not in it for victory or glory. Adventure did what he did for simple enjoyment's sake. He was pure and unadulterated in that regard.

She helped him back up into his saddle, a task made easier now that he had been knocked loose of his breast-plate, with the ghost of a smile on her face. Behind it, though, she was thinking. When the challengers faded into the backdrop, and their distant goal loomed out of the forest ahead, he asked what was on her mind. The castle ahead was far away, after all, and would be at least as likely to still be there when they arrived as it was to transform into a giant grapefruit, so she figured she had time.

"Why did you stop leading the other facets, Adventure? What happened?"

Adventure, who had been all grins and exuberance, seemed suddenly able to smile only wanly. "Ash decided he wanted someone else in charge," he said simply. She thought he might leave it at that, but he went on after a minute or so. "It's a shame, really. I liked being the defining quality. It was fun. The other facets liked and trusted me, which is probably why they let me keep doing it for so long, but the truth is I was no good at it. Too selfish, I guess. I spent too much time steering Ash in directions that only benefited me, playing around in here, doing that sort of thing, you know?"

Sabrina didn't say anything, which must've prompted greater explanation, because after another minute or so, he went on for a second time.

"I don't exactly love my new role, as such, but Ambition is a much better leader than I was. He can be strong willed sometimes, but he listens to what the rest of us tell him, and he cares about all the other facets of Ash. He wants satisfaction for all of us, me included, even if I am on the back-burner for now. If Ambition seems harsh or demanding, it's only because he wants Ash to be happy."

"Oh?" Sabrina asked, hoping for more detail.

"I was too easy-going. I see that now. I'm actually glad that Ambition is the defining quality now, in my own way. For a while we were afraid that Acrimony would be the one to take over. It's hard for the others to say no to Acrimony, sometimes. He doesn't speak up much, so when he does, the other facets really listen to him. Although, it's just as likely that Amity could have clenched it, I suppose. He's plenty likeable, but the problem is that Amity doesn't know when to say no. Ash knows that."

Sabrina, remembering something, asked another question that had been on her mind. "What about the other facet I saw back at the door?"

"Who? Attraction?" Adventure stopped short, bottom lip pinned under his top row of teeth. "Sorry, he actually doesn't like it when we mention his name. He's a relatively new facet, so he's pretty shy. That facet has no real voice to Ash as of yet. He's new. Personally, I think he has some pretty powerful ideas, but I know I'm pretty much the only other facet of Ash that would ever act on them. We're all too busy."

Sabrina smirked, thinking she might have a pretty good idea of what that facet embodied, exactly. But just when she hit the apex of her satisfaction with the realization, Adventure cut her to the quick. "Who leads where you come from?"

"Sacrosanctity." Sabrina said numbly.

"Wow," Adventure said, blinking. "Sounds tough. Is she good?"

"She always gets the job done," Sabrina noted. "But she doesn't give a damn about any of my other facets." Strength and Scorn were only two such at Sabrina's disposal, even though they were powerful. She had many others, just as Ash did. All of them just as demanding, no matter how much more cruel they were than these gentle, understanding facets which Ash possessed. Kowtowing to them all, as Ambition did, would surely rip her apart.

As she suspected he would, Adventure sighed at that, but what he said seemed at odds with his displeasure. "I'm beginning to see how that might not even matter. If one facet gets the job done, then that makes the whole happy. Doesn't matter how, right?"

"Right," Sabrina lied. Sacrosanctity did ensure that all came to pass in the way that it should. That may have satisfied her ego in a basic way, but what she derived from that had never really been happiness. Just a sort of self-perpetuated fulfilment in a task that was now accomplished.

She braced herself then, trying not to let these sorts of thoughts distract her from what must be done. Now, she knew, was the time to make her move. "Adventure?"

"Yes?"

"We can stop here. We've gone far enough. I've made my decision."

Adventure arched a brow. "We still need to find a dream, don't we?"

It seemed, almost at once, as if his words had caused some switch to be thrown, and the light and sound display going on all around them, faded. The woods through which they marched, became gray and skeletal, no more the lush forests they'd traversed earlier. The subtle sway of Pikachu beneath them vanished, and they were suddenly alone, standing in a fixed position, static for what felt like the first time.

She shook her head.

Adventure turned, plainly himself, and left to his own devices. He frowned, confused. "Why not?"

Sabrina smile was slow, and sad, and she reached out to take his hand. "I brought my own nightmare with me."

His eyes narrowed, as she clasped his hand, holding it palm up before her, and placing the tips of all her fingers in the nest of it. His look was suspicious, but not angry. He was scrutinizing her, rather than sizing her up. When he spoke again, his words were devastatingly close to the mark. She would have reared in surprise if it wasn't already a moot point.

"You're not Sabrina. You're a facet," Adventure said, knowing it was true. She might've thought that he was the psychic as well, were his next accusation not so far off the mark. "You're Sacrosanctity."

Sabrina laughed, then. Laughed so hard she thought she might cry. It was all so silly, really, this charade. Now was her moment, made manifest. This was the move that would ensure she swept into fully solidified power, inside Sabrina. All other facets would be weak, following her return, and her preeminence would be deeply enhanced by her success.

The sharp, hard stinger of her fingernails slammed into his hand like a crucifixion nail, and she poured her cruel venom into him. He crumpled at once, falling to his knees before her, hand still elevated as if in silent offering. Creeping dark lines weaved down his arm as his blood turned coal black. He couldn't even fight back, he could only murmur and sweat as she destroyed him.

She leaned forward to him and whispered a response into Adventure's ear. "No. that's not my name."

Not her true name, anyways. It was the name Sabrina, and Sabrina's other facets had always known her as, but Sacrosanctity had only ever been a name that she'd pretended. A guize, with which she'd hoodwinked the rest of Sabrina into following her without recourse. Her control over Sabrina was subtle and delicate as of now, but it was self-reinforcing, for one simple reason.

She had made Sabrina do all those terrible things by convincing her she could do no other. Sabrina could not be lied to, or misled, because nobody alive had the power to conceal the truth from her. Nobody, at least, excluding Sabrina herself, and she was the part of Sabrina which did just that.

She was the facet that cherished deception, and destruction even more than Scorn. She was the facet that loved control and dominion even more that Strength. She was the rotten core. She was the manipulator, the vindictiveness in Sabrina that spared no one, not even Sabrina herself. She was the liar of all liars. She was a deception so deep that not even Sabrina knew. She, was the true anathema of Sabrina's heart.

She told him her true name, that she had hidden since Sabrina was very young. She told him who she really was. "My name is Sabotage, and I am the one who calls the shots."

It was true. She had set up all of this, down to the last detail. She had fooled even the depth of Sabrina's perception, and blinded her to the danger of awakening Ash's power. It had been subtle, and slow, and not even Sabrina had realized the mistake before it was too late.

For Sabotage, this was a very old game. How many times had she done this? Let Sabrina believe that she was acting as she must, as the future dictated, as her powers demanded, and as her sight had foreseen? Sabotage's influence was such that she had led even Sabrina, mighty and godlike, to her own ruin, time and time again, by forcing her to believe she could not avoid it, or blinding her to it until it was too late.

"I am not a facet of Sabrina. Not truly. Sabrina is more like a facet of me than anything." Sabotage declared, smile growing. "Sabrina is the dolly that sits in my lap, and pretends to make the noises that I supply her with."

Adventure groaned. "No Facet is that strong."

"Oh, maybe not here." Sabotage assured her. "But when you're as deep-seated as I am, in as fucked up a person as I help to comprise, you can accomplish almost anything. I lie to Sabrina, because deep down she wants to be lied to. I hurt Sabrina, because deep down she wants to be hurt, because she knows she deserves it."

"After all, Sabrina did not want to make you a guardian...but you will be, because of me."

"She did not want to hurt herself, or you, or anyone tonight... but I did, so she did it anyways."

"She did not want to give Red the advice that eventually led to his death... but I made her."

"She certainly did not want to kill and consume the psychic energies of her parents, either...but do you see them around?"

"And the best part? I did it all without her even realizing it was me."

She swept aside his damp bangs, and kissed his boyish lips in farewell, knowing that this was the last time she would see him as he was. Even as she did so, his eyelids fluttered. "You can't...you can't do...thhhhh..." His stubbornness was for nothing, though. The last of her sickness took hold, he slumped hard, and every part of him fell limp and lifeless, his final word dying with him. He caved in, crumbling to a heap before her

But she was not finished with him yet. Sabotage pulled him to his feet again, molding him back into shape. He was hollowed now, but she would breathe something new into this vessel. This was her man. No longer Ash's facet, but instead, a facet of her own creation. Not blue-eyed Adventure anymore, now her red-eyed agent-provocateur.

Hers was a delicate job, requiring delicate tools. Her fingers, black and sharp, spread like the wide-splayed branches of winter trees, splitting and dividing, over and over and over, until they were no longer ten pointy fingertips, but a thousand needle-thin flagellum that gathered and stitched and bound his constituent parts back together, even as they braced them back into form.

As she rebuilt him from scratch, she told him the tale she'd brought all this way. The special nightmare she'd carried here just for him to hear. A story about Ash, meant for his ears alone.

"You will vanquish a warrior, a marauder and a king.

But you will have no conquest, no plunder and no crown.

Instead, you will face sickness, exile and purgatory.

"You will fall on the brightest day of winter, alone.

You will stand on the darkest day of summer, legion.

But in the spring, a man of nothing will light the match that burns your savior hollow.

And so autumn will see you fall again, and harder for your trouble.

"A woman of blood and iron will hate you enough to love you.

But in the end it is a woman of iron and tears who will love you enough to forsake you.

"Ultimately, the world will know three destroyers.

A Man, An Illness, and You.

One is vanquished through attrition.

The other, by triage.

The last, can't be beaten by anything but itself.

"Good lives will trade for yours during this fight, and still more will be required.

So the world, again, will turn to Ash.

Trembling for a savior either in you, or from you.

Though some will insist on both.

"In the very end, only one thing is certain.

Two must walk the final path together, among all others.

Yet only one can return, saving everything and losing it just the same.

"I brought this nightmare not just for you. This is the secret you will keep until your opportunity comes. When the time arrives, and you know the moment is right, you will seize control from Ambition, and lay waste to everything he has worked for. You will take the helm, and steer Ash on a new course. Not now..."

She smiled grimly, giving her new creation his name. "But very soon, Anarchy."

She left him there, and continued on into the distance alone, where she fully intended to escape and return all on her own. Her facet would supress any memory of tonight that lingered in Ash, and that problem would take care of itself. After all, there would be mending of another sort to do once she'd returned home. These many-pronged hands of hers would be put to good use. After all, by design alone, Sabotage had her fingers in everything.

---

Duplica woke in a heap, her eyes frustratingly out of focus no matter how much she blinked them. She went to reach for her bedside table, thinking that she must've lost her contacts at some point, and hopeful to find her glasses tucked there. Frustratingly, she did not find them, nor did she find the table. Instead, she rammed into something pliant and heavy, which at first seemed very odd, then quickly lapsed into the realm of alarm.

She didn't shriek, since that would've been plain stupidity. She was a madame. It wasn't that unusual that she found someone in her bed. Typically though, she remembered who and why. This she didn't recall at all. He-and Duplica was sure it was a he, which added a whole new layer of mystery to the discovery- was all sleek and firm under the covers, and she was not at all displeased by the look down his back she was presented with as she elevated the bedclothes between them and took in all there was to see.

It wasn't until she leaned over the mystery man, and tried to get a look at his face that her displeasure began. "Oh, Arceus!" she gasped, clasping her bedcovers to her nudity, face alight with a blush that was more shame than anything. She shook him gently, and he roused, eyes possibly more bleary than her own.

Duplica expected to have to explain some things to Ash, and she expected the conversation to begin, as it probably would've with most boys his age, that one: he was never to breath a word about this to anyone, and two: that he would be deader than dead if he had so much as an inkling to even look smug about bedding a woman several years his senior.

But the conversation didn't go how she expected because Ash was not at all like most boys his age. He sat up at once, looked at her, looked at himself, looked at where they were, and then did something she couldn't have imagined any pubescent boy doing when faced with the seemingly obvious confirmation that he'd made time with an older girl.

He started to cry.

It wasn't a really big cry, she guessed, but it was definitely a cry. His whole upper-body trembled, and his hands shook over the bundled sheets in his lap, and tears spilled out thickly across his bare cheeks like tree-sap. He was mostly silent, save for a raspy cough of a sob that would come out every so often as he sat there, eyes closed and lips smashed together weirdly.

She didn't know what to say, and so she repeated her earlier exclamation. "Oh, Arceus!"

Not really knowing it it was the right move or not, but having watched him hyperventilate for almost ten minutes now, to no result, Duplica put herself a bit closer to him, encircled his shoulders and tried her best to console him nonverbally. Her tactics were mostly those geared towards solicitation and, knowing that, she tried hard to make them as platonic as possible but Ash recoiled all the same. He sprang out of bed and took his clothes off the floor, trying to leap into his pants and depart before she could speak further on the matter, and make things even more terrible for him.

She finally muscled something out, just as he looped his belt on, and turned on a dime. "Nothing happened!"

She didn't know that was explicitly true. The night had turned out very strange indeed for her, and even stranger for Ketchum. She couldn't imagine what would've happened, certainly, between the two of them. The sheets bundled around her didn't give off that sex smell, and she couldn't really feel anything that suggested she'd had him, with concerns to her own body. Still, she couldn't exactly explain why they'd woken up stark naked in bed together, either.

He froze in place, and she could tell he was wiping his eyes behind his back, by the subtle motions of his shoulder-blades. She hoped he wouldn't ask her any questions about it directly, since she had no real information to give him. He coughed, thickly and said. "I messed up pretty bad last night, didn't I?"

Duplica felt herself tense. What should she say? "I-I guess you must've."

He sagged, and hard, then seemed to make this odd gulping sound, which she thought might've been the preamble to a deeper sobbing, but when he turned, with two fingers pressed to his lips, she hastily pointed toward the adjoining bathroom of her suite, where he dashed off to vomit, loudly and repeatedly.

She walked barefoot across the floor, wrapping the sheet around herself like a gown. She leaned toward the cracked door. He sounded like he was turning inside out in there. "Are you okay? Do you need anything?"

She got no response but more hurling.

Pikachu and Ditto, who had evidently also been somewhere beneath the sheets with them, now emerged, having been deprived of their bed-covers. Ditto pressed against her ankle, and Pikachu cautiously peered through the crack in the door. "...Pikapi?"

Ash still didn't answer, but with deep retching. Duplica glanced uncomfortably at her bureau, and the clock thereon. "Do you need me to take you home? I don't have anywhere I have to be until-"

She was cut off by a loud and sudden scuffling, as Ash emerged, his eyes swollen and bruised, but gait alarmingly firm. He gathered Pikachu from the floor abruptly, and sprang forth, "My badge battle. I have a battle with Sabrina today! I have to go!" he said in a rush, scrambling around the room to collect his strewn belongings.

She tried to settle him when he almost tripped, band began to sway back and forth, looking queasy. "Look, just sit down for a second. Let me get dressed and I'll take you."

He did seem to relax a bit at that, and so she stepped off into the walk-through, and clothed herself in her typical, casual outerwear. Nothing elaborate, just the same old star-print t-shirt and baggy blue jeans she'd always favored. As she came back into the room, tugging her brown trainers over-heel, she noticed Ash was patting around in his jacket. "Lose something?"

"My pokegear."

Duplica shrugged helplessly. "No telling where it is, really."

Ash's frown deepened, but he nodded acceptingly.

"If it turns up, I'll let you know," she promised. "Come on, lets get you to this battle."

Ruefully, Ash stood, and tried to homogenize himself into some solid semblance of a trainer. Duplica didn't think he did an especially good job of it, since he still looked half-dead, and that was the half of him that wasn't hung over. She didn't comment on it though.

---

Sabrina had come back to her body in successive portions, each wave of consciousness bringing to light a new source of unease, that progressively rose through a sort of hysteria, until she finally realized what she was seeing, what she was feeling.

The horrible power that Ash had unleashed did not begin and end its retribution on her disembodied mind.

Her body was flipped on the bed, twisted and battered, and all but broken. Pain flared in every joint and hollow. Every muscle strained tightly as if still caught in the cramping grip of that awful energy. Only a single hand emerged from the tangled covers, lifted and frozen in plaintive agony, as if begging for reprieve that had yet to come.

She couldn't move, and she couldn't scream, and she could scarcely breathe, so rather that scream out in the pain and misery and honest-to-Arceus fear that she felt, she just moaned, and cried, like the frightened little girl she'd tried so hard not to be for past several years of her teenage and young adult life.

Everything hurt, everything burned, and she wasn't sure if she would live or die, or even which she more desired at the rate things were going. How had she survived this? Everything seemed broken, and her limbs, locked and rigid would not even answer her call. She finally, finally managed to gasp out a real sob, against a chest that felt like it was cast in stone. Once she managed that, it was much easier to scream like she'd wanted to at first.

She howled like a wounded animal, because that was what she was. She didn't pity herself. She deserved this, she knew. She'd had this coming. If not for Ash, then for all the others, who'd never had so much as a chance at meaningful retribution against her.

Arceus, there were so many others. Minds she'd crushed or consumed. Bodies she'd shattered or shredded.

Archer...

Domino...

Her parents.

She screamed into the pillow until her throat felt like it was ground meat. She tried never to think about them, but she cursedly couldn't scour out her own memories in the same way she could Ash's. She couldn't drive off those thoughts and they came in with a vengeance while she laid her helpless and broken.

She, most horrifically, remembered how complacent they had been, even down to the last minute of their lives, trying to reassure her that everything was okay, even as they faded, even as she swallowed up all that they were and more.

She heard their voices, just as she often did in her sleep.

"You're a good girl."

"It's alright, sweetheart. You're almost finished."

She fooled herself into believing that they were right, sometimes, knowing that adding their psychic powers with her own was the only way to prepare for the coming change. She had seen it, they had seen it. Hell, even the Guardians with their limited powers, had seen it, but...

Deep down, she knew she was a monster. A devil. She was Giratina made real and to stand on two legs, and she would never be anything else.

Because Sabrina knew, more than anything else, that all of this must continue. She couldn't die here, even if she wanted to. She had a role to play, and she could neither deny it or sidestep it in order to lay here, mangled and morbid. She had to gulp the tears and the misery and the pain and get out of bed. She had to climb, hobble, crawl if she must to the Gym, and she had to start now if she was going to make it there in time to fulfill her special casting in this masquerade. She must, absolutely, be there before Ash woke up and came for what she owed.

She called out for Haunter, and though it was a pitiful, hollow noise that came out, the Ghost Pokemon heard her across the vastness of Saffron, and came to her at once. Together, they got her upright, which was more a feat of the mind than anything else, as her body remained too twisted and dismantled to move of its own volition. Instead, they worked her body like an awkward marionette, as though they two children driving an old jalopy, one turning the wheel, and the other working the pedals.

She clambered to the door, and set off.

---

Duplica tried to take it easy on the drive over for his sake, but it was hard to drive slow in the sort of car she owned. Money from her business was plentiful, and she'd pipelined the majority of her profits into the sleek foreign supercar she'd purchased just a few months after things took off here in Saffron. It was all cherry red and chrome on the outside and mostly engine on the inside, with two bucket seats and a steering wheel comprising the remainder. After the third stoplight in a row where the car screeched to a halt, she resolved to slip her right shoe off and use the greater delicacy offered by putting bare sock to the accelerator, in order to hedge against him puking inside her car. It didn't strike her as likely that Ash had anything left to yack up, but she lowered his window just in case.

They pulled up under the dark-hued umbrella of the Saffron-Gym's oddly-shaped dome, and Duplica reached across the console, to put a hand on his arm. "Hey look," she began, feeling him tense tightly in the seat, much to her disappointment. "About what happened..."

He blurted out just the same words she'd been considering saying to him, his voice high and tight with anxiety. "Please don't tell anybody."

"I won't," she was quick to promise. She squeezed his arm a little, wondering if there was anything she could say to reassure him.

She couldn't think of anything before the silence grew awkward and she was forced to wave him off him off, giving him the V-for-victory as he ascended the steps on two wobbly legs, Pikachu taking up the point position.

Duplica felt miserable, laying back in the seat of her car, and letting Ditto slip into her lap from where the pokemon had been coiled around her shoulders. "...He doesn't stand a chance."

"Doesn't look like it," said another voice that was far too close, far too suddenly. This time, Duplica did yelp. Roxie slid neatly into the passenger seat, as if she'd only been waiting to get in behind Ash, and closed the ascending door with a soft thump. "Over a fuckin' barrel that kid is, eh?"

Duplica fumed. "You know you're really a piece of work."

The rockstar shrugged. "Yeah. Some say so."

"You kinda fucked Ash up, you know that?"

"Oh, don't be such a pisser. Ash and I had a good time, he just partied a little too hard, is all."

"He woke up in bed with me this morning."

Roxie turned the corners of her pierced lip downward in appreciation. "Did he now? Good boy."

"He cried about it, Roxie." Duplica seethed, rearing from her seat.

Roxie sucked in a breath, but then snorted. "You were that lousy? I mean, fuck I've had to really coach you through it a few times, but to not even pop a cherry right, that is poor show, now innit?" She knew it wasn't wise, but she couldn't help it. It was just too damn funny.

When the mirth cleared from her eyes, Duplica seemed thoroughly unamused by her quip. In fact the stony look she was giving off set Roxie back on her heels a bit. She'd seen Duplica get tough before, and even downright mad on occasion, but this was something else. Something much different. It became rapidly clear that she was off the map, and that out here, there was nothing but danger. She guessed it stood to reason that there was a very hard side to Duplic somewhere. Certainly you needed to have one in the vice business, but all the same, it was a terrible thing to behold, as the small-framed girl suddenly became very overwhelming in presence.

Duplica pointed a finger, cold and sharp, putting it straight to Roxie's nose. "If you ever, and I mean ever again in your cartoonish, shit-pile of a life push something like that on me again, I will find you wherever you are, and I will take my recompense out of your fucking skin. I am not a nurse, and I am not your damn roadie. Your problems are yours to deal with, not mine. You fuck with me, that's one thing, you bring the money and we got no problems between us, but if you ever fuck with my business again I will push you into traffic, bitch. I am not your fucking friend, and after tonight I wouldn't want to be, either." She applied more and more pressure as she spoke, pushing Roxie's button nose flat against her face.

Roxie looked squarely intimidated, but Duplica felt like there was a bit more that needed to be added. Her voice dripped with acid as she went on. "And if you ever get Ash involved in this sort of crap again, I swear I will tie you up and go to work on your lady-parts with a lit cigarette and some nail-clippers. He did me a big favor a couple years ago, and now I have to fucking deal with him thinking I took advantage of him while he was in a bad way, because you dumped him in the middle of one of your benders-"

"Now wait just a fuckin' minute, you slag! I didn't put you inna fuckin' sack wiv 'im, now did I?" Roxie now returned the aggressive gesture, reaching out to tweak one of Duplica's ears sharply. "Don't you dare get all high-and-fucking mighty wiff me, when you're the one who couldn't keep her thighs togeva! You can piss and moan all you like about the coarse shit I've done, but if you fink you're gonna tell me off for putting forbidden fruit in front of you and not having enough fucking sense to keep your own two 'ands and 'oo knows what else off of it, you've got anova fing coming, you right stupid 'ore!"

Duplica twisted away, and rather than reach again, Roxie crossed her arms defiantly, both turning away from each other in the seats to glare out the window, neither being able to refute the other.

Duplica knew something strange had occurred last night, but for the life of her, she couldn't remember what in the hell it had been. Not that the excuse would make any difference to Roxie, since the ex-gym leader had seen her in far worse states.

She huffed, and sat back, reclining against the driver-side door. "When are you gonna grow up?"

Roxie snorted. "I'll 'ave you know, something very revelatory just 'appened to me a short while ago, and I've been giving the idea some real consideration as of the last few minutes. In fact, I was just on my way to get started when I happened to see the car. Now though, you've gone and really taken the piss out of it all, so I fink I'll just go back to living this cartoonish shit-pile of a life again, quick as you like. No bovva." She showed Duplica two fingers, in a standard Almian-style gesture that implied exactly what she felt in this moment.

Duplica sighed and her features compressed into a laconic frown. "What happened, Roxie?"

"Oh no, you seem much more interested in passing the blame on to me for jumping Ash's bones, so lets go ahead and sort that out proper, first."

"I didn't do anything. I just ended up in bed with him for some reason."

Roxie frowned her own frown now. "Some reason, eh?" She pretended to wave the notion away. "Oh, far be it from lowly me to judge what you put in, old girl." She thought about it, though, and some earnesty did creep back into her voice. "I mean, I dont even pretend to pitch for the same team as you, and there were a few times I thought for sure I'd have to rape him on the spot. Cute smile. Sweet demeanor. Big brown eyes. Gullible as all hell. Practically a nonces dream, that. Plus he's got that tight little bum on him, you know." At Duplica's bark of denial, she rolled her eyes. "Lets not kid ourselves, darling: You know."

"I don't know what happened-"

"I sure do. Bit of an expert on the subject, actually." Roxie scoffed. "Oh, don't make that face. It happens to the best of us, sweet'art. Sometimes you fall off the Rapidash, is all. It's nuffin' to be ashamed of." She rested both elbows on the console, vicious grin in full effect. "Tell me though, how was it?"

Duplica's frown widened, compounded by the sudden onset of shame. "Nothing. Happened."

"Hmn." Roxie said noncommittally. "Alright then, do ya one bet'a. Just tell me how big it was, and then I'll leave you alone about it. I warn you though, I did get a tiny peek, so I'm gonna know if you're lying, but it wasn't much I could really tell about it in the dark, as it were. Do us a favor and indulge one muffer's morbid curiosity, eh?"

"I will not," Duplica snarled, face turning scarlet.

"Awrite, awrite, tell ya what then, I'll just hold my hands up like this, see:" She held up both palms vertically, facing one another, about ten centimeters apart. "And when I get it right, all you have to do is tell me to stop. That way I get what I want, and you wont have to kiss and tell, eh?"

Duplica put two fingers to the bridge of her nose, and rubbed in defense of an onsetting migraine. "I'm not doing this."

Roxie, without really listening, slowly began to spread her hands apart, at first, wearing a coy smile. As the gap between her hands doubled, her smile became an appreciative curve of the lips, when it tripled, her eyes widened in shock.

"Seriously?"

Duplica said nothing. Slowly, Roxie's hands expanded further, to 35, 40, 45 centimeters, and beyond.

"Seriously?! Are you serious!?" When she looked down at her hands, and the gap nearly seemed comical, she almost choked trying to establish a basis for fact. "ARE YOU SERIOUS?!"

At Duplica's continued frown of dismay, Roxie shook her head. "This is just silly, I'm starting over."

Before she could, Duplica slapped her hands aside. "Roxie, you need to give Ash an apology."

Roxie frowned. She accepted that, but Roxie was not a person who tolerated being told how to behave very well. "No more than you do! Remember, I didn't wake up spooning the poor lad. I may have laid hands on his fanny a few times but no more'n that."

Duplica snarled. "Fine. When he comes back out, we set things straight, okay? The both of us." The madame huffed, and the leaned back into her seat. Not wanting to suffer the wait in silence, she plied for gossip. "So, what happened with this lady-friend of yours? I presume that's what has you so reflective. When's the wedding?" she asked, with more than a bite of sarcasm.

The way Roxie rolled her lips around, the way she smiled, perhaps a bit sadly, though, stole the air from underneath her, though.

"It's complicated." Roxie admitted. "I only say that because, well, you understand complicated. Better than anybody I know. This is complicated."

Duplica sat still for a while, but then leaned forward, and turned down the radio, rolling the tinted windows fully up to grant the story the utmost privacy and reverence she could manage. "Spill," she commanded.

And so, Roxie did, slowly, and quietly and-she believed-to Duplica's ears alone. Someone else listened in, however, already in the car, since long before the explanation had begun. Sabrina watched and listened just the same as if she were crammed between them on the console, even though she was standing just inside the old Gymnasium doors, as the conversation played out.

She listened as Roxie detailed their meeting with one another, in the exact opposite way that it had actually occurred. In fact, Roxies story was not at all like their date had proceeded. It bore no resemblance. It was a total lie. And yet, Sabrina knew that it would be. She, after all, had been the one to plant it there. Only she remembered the events as they had actually taken place.

Roxie had come just as she'd finished working her own damaged body into place to greet her, and wasted no time in shedding all pretense of what her designs for Sabrina were. There hadn't even any preamble to the quick and rough exchange between them, where Roxie's hands came to rest on her shoulders, and her legs propelled them both backwards to the wall.

It was a move that was designed to surprise, to disarm, when Roxie put her on the defensive, and sandwiched her to the wall, and though Sabrina had known, had seen it coming, she could no more push Sabrina away than she'd have been able to otherwise, when her knees pressed inside of Sabrina's own, and wedged them apart into a bow-legged stance. Sabrina even knew what came next when Roxie, mistaking her gasp of feigned surprise for truth, quickly changed in demeanor from lustful, to violent.

Roxie's hands slipped from her shoulders, to her throat, and the awkward stance of her legs was leveraged against her, pushing her up the wall so that they could no longer support her, and put the whole of her body-weight on Roxie's hardened bass-player's hands. No matter how foreseen it was, she still couldn't breathe. No matter how clearly she had known this was coming, her feet still dangled from the floor uselessly, and she didn't have the strength to fight off her attacker physically. Roxie wasn't a large or powerful woman, but her positioning was perfect and she had a lot of meanness in her to make up the difference.

"I know 'oo you are." Roxie hissed, voice suddenly drained of all its lustful colorings, and filled with purpose. "When Red came, and helped us destroy Team Plasma for good and all, I 'eard all about you. The Guardian that might've been, he called you. Did you know that?"

"Heh, of course you did." Roxie barked with what might've been laughter, or else a sob. "You know everyfing, right? You even knew why I really wanted to meet you. You probably even knew that I was going to get rough wiff you if I had half a chance, to show you I was serious." Roxie huffed with the effort. "Although, maybe this isn't really happening, and you're just tricking me into believing that I've got the upper hand while really, something terrible is happening to me. That's just your style, eh? All this shit wiv Ash, and the Radio Station? It's all just one big cabaret dance to you, innit? Well, assuming that's not the case, I've got no choice but to press on, do I?"

The Rockstar sniffed back another sob, when Sabrina's eyes began to dart around searchingly. "I know you've got a Pokemon wandering around here somewhere. Probably a Ghost type, seeing as how you kept tabs on Ash and I last night, knowing when to call and what to say and all that, right?" She whistled a brisk note over her shoulder.

An awful stench billowed in, as the door had crept open, and a great heap of refuse fell in through the open jamb, like an unseen receptacle had been overturned. Disgustingly, it reformed itself, clambering into a shape that was not native to Kanto: a large, clambering Garbodor. A creature more familiar, but no less pungent, a Wheezing billowed in beside it, noxiously. "Don't get any funny ideas about it at any rate, coz that's not gonna make a damn bit of difference. "

Roxie, too drunk to hold Sabrina up anymore, had let her slump back to the ground, but kept surprising command over the situation by kicking her feet wide apart and holding her firmly with more body-weight than Sabrina could throw off. Roxie had fished in the top of her dress with one freed up hand producing a large plastic bottle, and choked through the suppressed grief with a voice that reeked of ethanol, even though the stink of her pokemon. "I didn't fink I would actually meet you, even with the deal on the table, but now that I 'ave, I know I can't let this opportunity pass me by, Mankey's Paw or no. That's why I've got to go all-out. "

They looked at eachother then with eyes that had only resolution in sight, each saying, unintentionally the one thing that defined who they were.

Roxie said, "I only want one thing from you." holding up the immense bottle of rohypnol for her to see.

"I know." Sabrina managed, taking one slowly and labored breath.

Roxie thumbed off the lid with a flick and grit her teeth. "How hard are you going to make it for me to get it?"

Sabrina breathed a few more times. Not because she didn't know what to say, but because she needed to in order to keep herself from asphyxiating. She would give Roxie exactly what she'd come for. If she was desperate, or panicked or uncertain, than it only reflected the urgency of what she'd come for. When she found control of her arms again, she did not reach for her throat, in some feigned display of urgency or rear to strike back at her attacker. Instead, she hooked a finger over the lip of the bottle and used it to fish out a single capsule, which she laid compliantly to her extended tongue, and retracted into her own mouth.

It did not remain there for long, as she shortly passed it to Roxie, via single, gentle, open-mouthed kiss. "Not hard," she explained, drawing slowly away.

Roxies voice had caught in her throat then, just as Sabrina was sure it was catching in her throat now, as she told Duplica all the lies and fabrication that Sabrina had put there to fill in the hole she'd left behind. There had been no kind words exchanged, no romantic flirtations, or promises made, even though that was what she was no doubt telling Duplica right now.

Instead, tears had spilled out of Roxies eyes, as she swallowed the tablet, and all her bravado and threat melted into desperate pleading. She sank, then, like a child, down to her knees, spilling the bottle in a cascade of green tablets. It hadn't been the product of Sabrina's asserted dominance, but a conscious course of action, when the rocker slumped forward to press her face to Sabrina's lower abdomen and cry for everything she was worth.

"Tear it out," she'd begged tearfully. "Tear it all out, and just let me move on with my life! I can't keep going this way! I've tried, and it's fucking killing me! I can't! I just can't! Billy Jo, Holly, everything! Make me a fucking vegetable if you have to, just get it out! I don't want to remember them anymore!"

She would never recall the portion of memory that Sabrina had carved out of her mind, neither the good nor the bad. Billy had never been a part of her life, and neither had Holiday. Hers was a bittersweet request, but Sabrina had honored it, nonetheless. She didn't know whether it was a necessity born of weakness, or of resolve. Either way, Roxie could move on now, and that was what was best for the time being. In the future, who could say, but that was Roxie's to decide.

Sabrina, holding to the promise, had done what she'd asked, reaching down with pale white fingers to cage in Roxie's face as she sat kowtow below. She did exactly as she was asked, boring in though those tearful blue eyes and clearing away the mess inside her as best as she could.

She cleared it wholesale, like a house-fire, rendering every foul remembrance hollow, disassembling every regret to dust, and every longing to vapor. She wrenched out the sadness and tore out the doubt, and pulled out the hatred by it's root until there was none left at all.

But the job could not be done there, no. She would need to dig deeper still. If she left any trace of them, any remembrance at all, even if, especially if it were wholly innocent and fond, Roxie would very likely seek them out, only to have her fragile psyche destroyed all over again when sharp reality contrasted the memory she held so dear. Holiday, and Billy both, had to be completely destroyed in her thoughts, like a root-canal of the memory.

And so she kept ripping and tearing, back ten, back twenty years, all the way back to the very first time she'd met Billy, traipsing up the lawn of her third new home in three years, stealing glances at the neighbor-girl playing with her Lillipup, and wondering just how hard it was going to be to make new friends again, and not yet knowing just how easy it was going to be to be friends with Billy and her friend Nick.

She tore out every memory of that black-haired little pre-teen, standing across from a young, freckled version of Roxie, teaching her how to play bass-guitar, encouraging her to join the League when they had come knocking, even the one where they'd gotten lost in Jubilife during their first tour of Sinnoh, and held hands to stay together, and even then Roxie had considered telling her the secret she'd held onto for nearly two years longer.

She ripped out every memory of Holiday, from first to last, giving no preference to the young researcher who smiled and talked excitedly of his hypotheses to the dead-eyed engineer that seemed to exist in contempt of everything.

It had taken nearly three hours of constant, laborious mental exertion, but she didn't stop until Roxie was scoured clean of them, and sterilized.

Then, she quietly told Roxie what she would need to fill the gaps, as she emerged from the process, in a haze-like trance. "You came here to ask me for advice, because you feel empty, don't you?"

"Yes." Roxie answered, vapidly, head lolling. "So empty."

"You don't know why you should keep living the way you do."

"I don't." Roxie admitted.

"You want to move on, and find a new purpose in your life."

"I do." Roxie said, with the phantom of a nod.

"Your fame can help you."

"It can."

"All roads are open to you, Roxie."

"They are?" Roxie questioned, beginning to reel out of it. She shook her head. "They are."

Sabrina's red eyes blazed overhead, her voice tinged with psychic command. Roxie had come out of it a bit too fast, given a tolerance to mind-altering granted by a long history of substance abuse, so a little mental muscle was called up to combat it. "Quit the band."

Roxie swallowed the suggestion whole. It would've been her course anyways, Sabrina knew, but this would save her some time otherwise spent fighting herself. "I will."

"Find something new."

"I want to."

"You can do anything you want."

"Anything."

"Except," Sabrina hesitated, letting Roxie's face slip from between her fingers. "Well, you and I aren't going to work out, I don't think."

Roxie gave a very rock-and-roll sort of sneer, having come more fully around. "I 'ave that effect on women."

Sabrina smiled her own smile, but hers was not so smug perhaps, as it was bittersweet. "It's not personal. You have your road ahead of you, and I have mine."

"Sure." Roxie said, with a roll of her eyes. "It's just, well, I'd be lying if I said I've never had a relationship what started with break-up sex. But I don't fink I've ever not made it to the break-up sex, at least."

"You've never met someone quite like me, I imagine."

Roxie's smile became more mirthful. "True."

Sabrina waved, as Roxie stood, and withdrew her pokemon with only subtle confusion. "Ello? Wot are you lot doing out? Smelling up the place, is what, eh! In you go!" Stuffing the poke balls back under the hem of her dress, the Unovan turned at the door, and looked questioning. "Will I see you again?"

Sabrina tutted, almost wishing it could be different. She hedged, for Roxie's sake, even though she knew she was lying. "Doubtful."

Roxie, for her part, pretended she didn't know any better. "Ta, then, gorgeous."

And then down the steps she'd gone, with Ash hot on her heels up them, neither noticing the other as they went. Which put her precisely where she was now, holding Ash in her own arms, dead asleep, while she watched on at at the scene proceeding below. She'd caught him straight as he'd come in, both him and his pokemon, and pumped the last measure of her psychic strength into rendering the both of them unconscious. All that had stopped Ash from skidding across the floor on his face like his Pikachu had been her, and all that had likewise stopped her from being deposited on her ass was the wall against which she now slumped, body screaming with the effort.

She looked at him, feeling none of the contempt that she knew she ought. Ash was ignorant, and in truth, innocent for his part in the damage he had done to her. He had nearly ruined her body, burning her from the inside with the power he'd unleashed, and the repercussions would be long-standing and severe, of that she was certain.

But it was her own fault, she knew, not his. She'd believed that power could be contained by her machinations, that it would never have been able to breach the containment she'd conspired to set up against it, but that had all been proven naive now. Nothing could stop it, and only when it had wreaked its vengeance on her body had it seen fit to return to dormancy once more. She'd tempted fate, and lost. Tried too hard to move the inexorable strings that tied events together, and paid dearly for it.

She, like the Guardians before her, though they were wholly ignorant of what they were doing, had failed to turn Ash aside from what he was truly meant for.

She slumped slowly to the floor, knowing that she still had more to do if she was to hold up her end of things, but knowing she just didn't have the strength left to fulfill them in any sense other than the most basic.

Ash needed to face off against her for what was his, and walk away the victor. At his skill level, he could, certainly. It would not be the way it had before. Ash was no longer the novice he'd once been, and her with her so weakened and fragile, there was no way she could exert enough will on the outcome of the match to tilt it in her favor, even if she wanted.

But as it could, she couldn't even get out from underneath him, much less stand across from him for a full six on six. She wanted to just close her eyes and slip away from this pain and suffering of the body, to sleep, or deeper repose, but that would not do either. She gave up the facade of being in control for a while, and moaned for help.

Haunter appeared, slipping through her as easily as an exhaled gas, from where he'd been, helping keep her pieces in some semblance of working order. Without Haunter, she collapsed, shell-like and lifeless to the floor, able to do hardly more than murmur under the great weight that Ash put on her chest. Slowly, as Haunter too was exerted by the process, the gaseous Pokemon managed to roll Ash off and onto his back.

Haunter returned to her as Ash lay there, frozen and open-eyed, enabling her to eventually right her decimated body with a modicum of effort, and clamber into a somewhat superior position, she placed her hands to Ash's cheeks and forced a tiny falsified memory into his mind, the very last she was sure she could manage.

She gave him such a battle as he truly deserved, and as he needed: A six on six and then some, where Sabrina doubled down on every loss and then doubled down again, magnifying and intensifying the fight she brought to the arena only to be stomped mercilessly by whatever pokemon Ash brought to bear.

Every move she made was competent, skilful and inspired, with her Psychic pokemon giving it their all, but Ash had answers for every subtle misdirect, every coy execution, every massive display of force. His counter-strikes were devilish and his riposts, truly masterful. It became clear after a magnificent and grueling bout that his pokemon were in every way greater than hers. Still, she'd never withered, never diminished, never surrendered. She fought every losing battle as though on the cusp of ultimate success, and the end result, though it concluded in defeat, was a thing of beauty. A match worthy of the awe which it surely inspired.

After all, conceptually, she had modeled it after some of the fights she'd seen between Red and Blue...

It was exactly what he needed to fill his sails, to get him going, to help ease the soreness of this previous night's experience in his mind, and she would not deny him that. It was what she'd promised after all. The only thing she wished, for his sake, was that it hadn't needed to be a lie. Still, it would get things going, and what Ash sorely lacked, what he needed to get this whole enterprise in earnest motion, was only momentum. That she could give him, whether the inciting event was true or false.

She folded his fingers around a Marsh badge, remorseless about the fact that it was the last she would ever give. "Five to go."

For the last piece all that was left was the waiting. She let Ash climb to his feet when he roused, but did not join him, unable to do so while maintaining the suggestive control over him she barely maintained. She ushered them back through the door, and into the open streets of Saffron, then lay on her back, mustering only the energy to kick the door shut behind him before she fell into repose right there on the floor, determined to rest right up till the last moments.

Roxie and Duplica, conversation long since over, looked up the stairs from the street-level car below, eyes catching the movement, as Ash and Pikachu came staggering through the door, halted, and shook their heads in slight confusion, before dismounting two at a time, and taking off in a gleeful run.

"Gogogogo!" Roxie urged, and Duplica pumped the accelerator, catching up with the young trainer in no time, though she had to weave around a motorcyclist to do so.

Roxie popped the vertical door to step out onto the concrete beside her quarry, expecting that Duplica would do the same, but rather than that, Duplica only pivoted sideways, lifted one foot over the console and used it to kick Roxie squarely in her ass, for all slights real and imagined, and then pulled smartly away without so much as a how-do-you-do.

Ash caught Roxie before she face-planted, but it was only a momentary thing as Roxie wheeled and shouted curses at the departing sportscar, but got only a raised middle finger through the sunroof in response.

"Oi, you cunt!" Roxie snarled. "I thought we was doin this togeva?!"

"You owed me one, bitch!" Duplica could be heard to shout back, though just barely, over the roar of her foreign muscle-car rounding the corner and vanishing from sight.

Roxie harrumphed, still mostly ignoring Ash, which he did not appreciate in the slightest. "After I poured my bloody 'eart out and everyfing."

"Still making trouble." Ash said more than asked, with a subtle jut of the chin to Pikachu who promptly climbed up and onto Ash's shoulders. The act read as a redoubling of defenses to Roxie, who frowned a bit in response.

"'Oo, me?" Roxie questioned a bit irritated that she was now suddenly having to back-pedal to keep Ash in front of her, as he walked casually on, eyes disinterested.

"Just a minute, eh. I've got some things to say!" Roxie protested, revolving in place as he walked around her.

"Save 'em." Ash urged, and shoulder his pack.

Roxie did what came naturally at that point. Frustrated with her failures so far today, and not willing to chase Ash down, she coverly slid one leg of her own into Ash's confident gait, and let the hook of her boot catch him mid-stride. The result was a little overblown from what she'd expected, not accounting for how much of Ash's bravado was painted on over the devastation last night had exacted on his virgin body.

He hit the pavement flat on his face, and though she recoiled at the awful result of her actions and flew to help him up, it was not reconciliation she came away with. Instead, Pikachu, who felt for his own part, that he'd yet to do right by Ash in protecting him from all the nonsense last night had given rise to, flew to his trainer's defense with alacrity.

The thunderbolt hit her dead on in the face, flash-boiling the moisture in her eyes, scalding her sinuses, depositing her to the sidewalk in a seated position as all the muscles in her body snapped taut and then relaxed again, and leaving her to contemplate the stupidity of her actions in a more complete way than she might've on her own, without a fair amount of static still arcing it's way through the synthetic fibers of her dress, and one of her pinned-aside bangs slowly smoldering. She coughed out a lungful of air that tasted of ozone, and tried to uncross her eyes.

"Awrite, awrite!" she began placatingly, but that was only just a sample of Pikachu's anger over the matter. Once Ash was up and raring for a fight, there was a whole other matter entirely to be dealt with.

She was forced to roll heels over as another bolt cracked against the ground between her buckled knees. She was not cowed though, old reflexes kicking in which had lain dormant since the days of Team Plasma, and she flicked out her own pokemon just as she came up in a three-point stance.

Ash's face, heavily scraped from impact with the ground did not soften a bit as her Garbodor appeared once more, though Pikachu did recoil heavily from it's heavy and omnipresent odor.

Gambit played, Roxie waited, frown just as serious, eyes just as darkened as Ash's. "I don't think you want to do this, mate."

Pikachu, if anything, looked nauseated, though she didn't have a doubt that the little guy would carry out Ash's commands if he gave them. Ash though, was just beginning to smell it, and she needed that to happen before-

"Pikachu!" Ash roared, finger elevated in fury as he jabbed it forward...

The follow-through was somewhat less impressive, however, as Ash's deep inhale drew in Garbodor's impressive stink. He turned green, and his eyes watered intensely. Roxie could literally hear his stomach turn over in his gut. Roxie's stance eased as Ash raced to the nearest wall against which he could brace himself, and promptly vomited. She recalled her Garbodor with a grin she hoped was not too smug. Victory with nary a blow struck. Rarely was it so easy.

Not much came out to pool among the foundation stones but a long string of spittle and viscous bile, evidence enough that he was still very ill indeed, if only by way of showing he had nothing left to throw up. Roxie, with both hands elevated toward Pikachu to show that she meant no harm, walked slowly to Ash, and patted him once on the back before slumping down the wall beside him, knees bent in a very unladylike way, not caring if anyone got a peek up her skirt. "You'll live, yet, by Arceus."

"I hate you-uuugh," Ash gulped. "...so much."

Roxie laughed. "Aw, mate, you don't know the half of it. That's a long queue to stand in. You're right there behind Duplica, yanno, but even she's way back in the back of it."

Ash soured noticeably at the mention of Duplica, which made Roxie push forward, both in an effort to clear the air, and to bull on past what was obviously a huge source of consternation. "Oh, come off it. You're like the only teenager on the planet that wouldn't be pleased to find himself in bed with just about anything with tits and two legs, mate! Much less a pair of tits and two legs like that bird 'as, eh?"

"Well," Ash smacked his lips together an an obvious attempt to avoid being sick again. "I'm not."

Roxie blinked. "Wot, are you like...? Wow, Ash, do you fancy boys?" She asked with real interest.

Ash groaned. "Not that I'm aware of."

Roxie's brow flattened. "You you're just a good old-fashioned prude, then."

Ash looked like he wanted to say something, but just couldn't muscle it out without something following it up.

"What happened to the fun-loving Ash wot had his birthday in three different postal codes last night? Wheres the lad 'oo tried my dress on, and told me how much he liked to see two girls kissing?"

Ash huffed. "You mean when I was drunk and who knows what else?"

Roxie countered with a huff of her own. "Right. And I'm sure none of that was your doing, either. I suppose I put a gun to your 'ead, and forced you to have a good time, eh?"

"I wouldn't have taken it that far!" Ash insisted. "If you'd have listened to me when I said I didn't want to, I could have played your stupid dress-up game, and that would've been the end of it!"

"Wot, and let you flake out on the best night of your young life?"

"Best? Best?! What are you, retarded?!" Ash said, with deep circles under his eyes. "Look at me!"

"These sorts of things are important, in a young mans life. The lessons you learn are formative, yanno?"

"Try scarring. I woke up naked with a total stranger. That is not my idea of a good night!"

"I'm sure I'd believe that if it wasn't coming from someone who was wearing my knickers last night."

"...What?"

"Oh, if you don't believe me, I do have pictures."

Ash blinked a few times, struggling to remember. He'd hoped he wouldn't, but he did. "Auuugh."

"Look, sweet'eart, I'm not gonna say you didn't get a little roughed up. I'm not even gonna say that we didn't do some things that are better left unsaid." At this, Ash groaned again, but Roxie moved on with a grin. "But there's no reason at all to pretend like you didn't enjoy at least some of it."

Ash slumped, though this time it was in resignation, rather than regurgitation.

"I don't even know why you're so upset over Duplica, anyways. She's the biggest fuckin' dyke-in-denial I ever met. She puts on this act like she loves the cock, but that's all for show, Ash. She couldn't even tell me what your dick looked like, for fuck sake. No way she went farther than second base. I mean, Handjob maybe but it would have had to've been under the covers the whole ti-"

Ash, ready to accept defeat, but not quite ready to accept this level of profane conversation, particularly with regards to his own sexual encounters, real or imagined, waved her away. "Just shut up, Roxie."

Roxie let her head thump against the brick, and let go of a sigh. "Awrite, Ash." She bit her lip for a while, wondering if maybe his call for silence excused her from what she'd intended to do. Deciding that it didn't she spoke up promptly.

"Sorry." Roxie said quietly. "Yanno, for letting things get so far out of hand. I don't regret going out and doing it really, but maybe I should have reeled it back in a little sooner. You'd probably still have a hangover from 'ell, but maybe you'd 'ave woken up in your own bed, eh?"

Ash sighed deeply, and shook his head. "I feel like we got guns pulled on us, at some point, but that can't be right, can it?"

Roxie pulled her lips to the side, deciding it best to lie. "Nope, must've dreamed that bit, mate."

Ash grunted, slipping back off his haunches and coming unsteadily to his feet. "How did everything go with Sabrina?"

Roxie, having just gotten over the sting of recounting the near miss, said one word. "Bollocks."

"Sorry it didn't pan out, Roxie."

"Aw, that's awrite, mate. You gave it your square best, and that's all I asked. 'Fanks anyways."

"Seems like a pretty raw deal, though. You gave up a lucrative contract, and ended up getting nothing out of it anyways."

"Wot? Those dickheads back at the Radio Station, you mean? Come off it, mate. Those blokes were Rockets all along!" Here, she hesitated a bit, before guiding the conversation in another direction to cover her earlier fib. "They can take that contract and bugger it up their arse. Besides, million quid 'ere, million there: That's a small price to pay for a shot at true love, mate."

"How d'ya know it would've been true love?"

"Are you fuckin' wiff me again? I never can tell wiff you Kantonese-types."

He shook his head no.

Roxie thought for a moment about the lies that Sabrina had made truth in her mind: Sabrina's sanguine irises, and that stunning face she'd first seen staring back at her from the crowd. About those high cheeks, suspicious eyes, and pronounced philtrum that gave her a nearly avian appearance; prototypical characteristics of the more traditional sense of Kantonese beauty, and traits that she doubted anyone would've appreciated half as much as she did.

Mostly, though, she thought about how Sabrina simply struck her as someone she could put faith in not to be anything the people she had to deal with on a regular basis. The slimy record-execs, and the club-managers, and the things that you had to do and say to work out a way to feed yourself between taking money from one to hand to the other before everyone had their cut of it, plus the fucking fans that only wanted her to write songs about being a fucking bitch, or flaunt herself in front of them like a piece of meat. She thought about how, next to that, Sabrina just looked fucking...normal. Safe. Sweet. All her very real beauty aside, Sabrina had first seemed like...

Like...

Comfort. That was the best way she could've put it. If she could've been any other person, and it could've happened any other way, she'd have thrown herself at Sabrina, just to be wrapped in those arms and shielded from everything. To just have her lips kissed without any tongue shoved between her teeth, and her hair stroked without being pawed all over, and to be talked to like a lover and a friend, instead of worshiped like an untouchable rock-goddess, or fucked like a whore. Sabrina didn't fit in, and neither did she, so in each other, perhaps, they could be complete.

Arceus, she thought, this life is killing me!

She didn't realize how much of her notion was total fabrication, and so the thought of it almost made her want to cry, but she had decided long ago that she didn't want to be one of those kinds of rock-stars, so she turned the curl of her lip into a sneer instead.

Ah, it doesn't matter. Ash wouldn't understand anyways, she thought. Even if he would, it's over and done with. Instead she just said the crudest thing that came to mind.

"You're jokin', right? Are you really gonna stand there and tell me that you 'aven't seen the balcony on that woman?" She made a gesture as though clutching two beachballs, and struggling to hold onto them. "Boy, you really are the genuine article aren't you? Someone really needs to bust that cherry of yours."

Ash just looked confused.

"Well don't look at me." He seemed to get it then, or at least, come as close as he was ever going to, and rolled his eyes. The gesture seemed to cause him some pain, though, as he clutched at the side of his dome.

"You doin' alright now? Still got that headache, I see."

"Last night was pretty rough."

"And you don't even remember the really fun bits."

---

Roxie believed that she and Sabrina had shared words, flirted, but ultimately parted amicably, with interest in one another, but no practical way to make it work.

Ash, in his own turn, believed he had met with her, battled for what was his to claim, and crushed her in a full six on six.

Which meant that all the major components were in place, and there was only one thing further to handle. Luckily, this thing too would come to her.

Two hours later, she stood up and met Riley at the doorway, just as she had met with everyone else. Sabrina was the "she" referred to in the letter Riley had received, she knew, and here she was, nodding her assent. An offer denied years ago, to a Guardian far greater than any who now claimed the mantle would now be accepted.

They did not share too many words as they departed, and she was content with that. She and Haunter would need all their strength for the journey on foot to Rota.

Sabrina abandoned the gym in the light of the setting sun, made purple and murky from the city air, and she knew she would never come back to it. She didn't feel anything. Her strike last night hadn't been to soothe her pride, but to return things to balance. With Archer dead, she ruled here, and with her gone, the field was equal again. She did not feel satisfaction, or displeasure at the idea. This was simply how things were supposed to be.

So it confused her when Riley asked a question: "Why are you crying?"

Sabrina touched her face. The wetness on her fingers felt almost surreal. It had been difficult, throughout her life really, to show emotion. Part of it came from knowing that no matter how she felt about something she foresaw, she was powerless to change it in any significant way. Having the gift and living her life the way she did had made her cruel, perhaps sadistic in the eyes of some, but it was all simply the course of events playing itself out as it must. Smiles and frowns both came hard, in truth, when they didn't matter. Still, here she was, tears noiselessly streaming down her cheeks, over something she could not alter, and could not prevent.

She hadn't realized that a small part of her mind had been watching someone at a distance, until Riley had spoken. She ceased her clairvoyant watch over Ash as he marched westward out of town toward Celadon.

"Do you cry when bad things happen, Riley?" Sabrina asked simply, deflecting. She shouldn't have let him bother answering, since they both knew good and well that he did, but she did anyways.

"Sometimes," he replied, after a moment of confusion. "It depends." When she did not reply for a long time, Riley eventually answered her question in a more direct way. "S-sure. I cry sometimes."

So did Sabrina, though she was usually done crying about an event long before it actually happened. For her, the act was just as futile and empty. Arceus had given her foresight, yes, but not an ounce of omnipotence to go along with it.

She could foresee ill events, but those events, like all others, took place according to some ultimate design, of which she was either a part of and custodian to, or had no say in whatsoever. No force in existence seemed to have the power to change that design. Even her, having witnessed it all beforehand, and singularly armed by that circumstance to alter their course, had never been able to change anything she foresaw, and she'd tried many, many times.

Red's death, the inevitable consumption of her parents, all of the terrible horrifying events stretching out fore and aft. She was bound by those events, just as she had been beholden to them. The design always played itself out, whether she wanted it to or not. She'd tried. Oh, Arceus, how she'd tried to save them! The gears of fate turned on regardless, circumnavigating her efforts, no matter how great, sometimes even using her to their ultimate purpose in spite of them!

The cruel truth, undeniable and immaculate, was that if she ever seemed strong or powerful, it was because she was rowing with the tide, and not against it. In the game of life, Sabrina was a powerful piece-queen of her color, perhaps, but she was a piece on the board just like any other.

Even that would have been easier to tolerate, if this great game, this universal machination had any significance that she could perceive. The sad truth of it was that, as far as she could tell, nothing had any meaning beyond simply preceding that which followed it, enabling the process to move forward like the hands of a clock, and it was her unique misfortune to see it all playing out ahead of time.

Though her abilities were greater than any other, she was only the foremost component in the same inexorable machine. Even worse, the illusion of choice, provided as a pittance to some, so that they might find at least a little comfort and sanity in their pointless existence at least so long as it lasted, was not given to her.

Sabrina wiped the last tears away, and then shrugged after regaining herself. "Do you know why people cry, if tears do not solve anything?"

Riley frowned, and worked his jaw. "I..." He fumbled, at a real loss. "I don't think anyone cries because they believe it will change anything. I suppose it's just because...they feel sorrow. It doesn't matter if it changes things. Sometimes you just have to cry. I don't really know why."

"I don't know why, either," Sabrina concluded. "But I feel the same."

Sometimes you had to cry to keep yourself from falling apart. It was just like how sometimes you had to laugh to keep yourself from going mad. A boy and his Haunter had taught her that one, some time ago, when it had all seemed too much for her to bear. She'd fallen into a black period of self-hatred, turned on her parents, lashed out at everyone in desperation, just to feel as though she could do something, anything to change what must inevitably come to pass.

Ash and Haunter had not been able to change the future, not a whit. But they had brought a unique and special thing back into her life, and that was laughter. Somehow, in spite of it all, that was enough to get by. Laughter didn't change anything really, but it did make it immeasurably easy to bear. If it made her akin to a Houndoom baying at the moon, then that was just fine.

A slow leak was better than a sudden rupture, after all. Sometimes, you just had to play the game. Pretend it was all meaningful, or at the very least, not meaningless. That was why she would cry now, even if it seemed insane to. It would be better than facing it all at once when the time truly came for tears, and she did not doubt that it would come, because she could see it already, looming ahead, more vast and terrible than anyone could really yet grasp.

She reached out again with her mind, and watched Ash go, knowing that she would see him again, but knowing that he would be so different from the boy she saw now as to be a totally different person. It was a cruel joke, that would play itself out with or without her, so she saw no choice but to have a hand in it's punchline.

Life would toss him and turn him, flip him upside down and turn him inside out in the next year. He would sink so low, and then rise so, so high, and in the end...

Well, sad as it was, there was nothing she could do to change that.

---

A/N: I just want to say thank you again to everyone who's been supportive of me and this story over the years, both long-time readers, and new! Ill see you in 2015!

Also, Happy Birthday, P*A!