Chapter 35: The Scourge of Hoenn
"...You're sure you don't remember anything from that night?"
"Yes. Quite sure."
"The names 'Virgillia' - er, I mean, 'Lady Virgillia' - and 'Mara' don't ring any bells?"
"Not at all."
Priscilla sighed, shaking her head. When she woke up that first morning after leaving Mauville City, she had expected to find herself inside a grand-yet-unmistakably-evil mansion in a heavily wooded area of southern Route 111.
That was, in fact, where she found herself...
...Minus the mansion.
Not to mention the fact that Mara and Lady Virgillia were nowhere to be found and the only evidence Priscilla had of meeting them was locked in her own memory. Even though Steel supposedly experienced the same terrifying meeting and dinner, he remembered none of it.
His account of the nights' events pretty much amounted to: "We needed to find a place to camp, so we went a bit off the road and fell asleep in the woods. Then we woke up and went on our way back to Mauville City to regroup."
Nor did he remember it at a later date. When Priscilla went back to Mauville, she had the nurse at the Pokemon Center have a psychic pokemon check his memory, just in case he was lying or too traumatized to access his memories of meeting the Lady and her espeon companion.
But the psychic in question, a rather powerful looking grumpig, found nothing other than what Steel had already told her. When the grumpig asked if he wanted to check Priscilla's memory, she refused - the idea of a psychic poking around her own memory frightened her more than Steel remembering different events.
She made sure to bring another pokemon with her - Swift, the taillow that usually stayed with Haley, in case they got lost.
Their trip to Lavaridge went smoothly. Swift helped get a birds' eye view when Priscilla inevitably got lost again, she caught her needed pokemon without too much difficulty, and the tram up the side of Mount Chimney didn't break. (Although, she did have some nasty flashbacks to Cianwood City while riding the tram, and decided that from then on, she never wanted to have to use the tram again.)
But no matter what, Steel never remembered that night again.
---
Rustboro City Gym Academy Blogs:
Field Trainers:
Shannon Nguyen
Date: June 2
Subject: Fourth badge!
Hey! :) OMG you guys...guess what? I just won my fourth badge! I'm so excited, because that's half of the badges in the entire Hoenn region. I still can't believe I beat Flannery.
It was such a weird fight, and I was SUPER nervous going into it because I had a brand-new team and didn't know what to expect. That's right! I had a brand-new team! It was a three-on-three battle, and my team was this:
Shang (sandshrew - male - level bracket: 20s) Destiny (numel - female - level bracket: 20s) Richter (machop - male - level bracket: 20s)
I thought I was going to be really badly off because I was sooooo stupid and didn't train up a water-type pokemon. I was thinking about using Winnie, my wingull, but she wasn't in my reserves and I couldn't get her in time for my battle...but that's okay to whoever's using her for summer training. :) I did fine with Shang, Des (short for Destiny, haha), and Richter.
Flannery used her slugma, numel, and torkoal. (Duh...) Basically, she sent out her slugma first, who poisoned Shang, so I had to recall him. Which sucked, because Shang was totally going to win...then Des went up against her numel, and Des wasn't doing so hot (LOL), so I took her out for Richter. Then Flannery sent out Torkoal, which is her BEST POKEMON, and Richter had no type advantage.
So I beat Torkoal with speed, agility, and super amazing martial arts. ;)
Oh, and the whole thing was in the hot springs, since I'm a girl, and it was kind of a hot day already. It was my first time fighting...naked...haha! I mean, I'd been in a hot spring before, but never for a gym battle. So that was weird.
Anyway, tomorrow I head back south so I can challenge Norman at the Petalburg City Gym! I'm super excited, especially since I've already trained Richter up a bunch. So he's staying on my team. I might train Shang some more, too, but he won't be on my team against Norman. I'm totally scared for going up against Norman, since his only weakness is fighting-types and his pokemon are CRAZY GOOD.
Oh, but Des isn't going into my reserves, so if you want to train her, just say so! She's awesome. :)
Yeah, so that's about it. Talk to you guys again soon!
Love, Shannon! :) :) :)
Priscilla sighed. "I hope that bit about the hot springs doesn't label me as a prudish Sinnohan..."
The paragraph about the hot springs battle had, in fact, been quite the understatement. Priscilla had forgotten that in Hoenn, communal hot springs weren't out of the ordinary. Just like in locker room-style showers, everyone bathed together.
When Flannery suggested they do their battle in the hot springs, Priscilla really wanted to say no - but then she remembered that she had to appear as if she was a Hoennese girl, and Hoennese girls loved hot springs. (Once she emailed Haley, Jessica, Natalie, and Emma about it, they all sent her squealing emails about how they wished they could fight their important battles while relaxing in Lavaridge's best hot springs. Priscilla didn't get it.)
And that was how she won her fourth gym battle without any clothes on.
"Okay, so...that's posted," Priscilla mumbled, pressing "publish" and logging out. "Now I just gotta go pick up Shang, Richter, and withdraw..."
She stopped, a sudden chill coming over her.
Priscilla twisted her head around to look behind her. She sat in the computer lounge in the Lavaridge Town Public Library, as the computers in the Pokemon Center were either in use or out of service. The library had its air conditioning on full-force, as summer days in Lavaridge could be brutally hot, but the chill seemed so much more...frigid.
That, and standing by the books was a boy she remembered.
He looked a few years older than he was when they last met - two years older, to be exact. She recognized him because of his familiar pale skin, light brown hair, and confident stature.
The dustox on his shoulder didn't hurt, either.
"Tanner!" she exclaimed, snatching up her backpack.
The boy in question - Tanner Hamilton - turned around, his foreign eyes giving her the once over. He frowned. "Do I know you?"
"Yeah! We met back -" Priscilla stopped, her enthusiasm fading away in an instant. If she told Tanner that she was the little starting trainer he met outside of Pastoria City two years prior, that would mean giving away her identity as a Sinnohan trainer. If anybody in the library overheard that she wasn't who she was saying she was, she could technically get arrested for fraud thanks to her contract with Rustboro City Gym Academy.
But she didn't have to continue, because Tanner snatched her hand and dragged her deeper into the bowels of the library, not stopping until they were alone in the dusty history section. He looked deep into her eyes and whispered, "are you from Sinnoh?"
Throwing caution to the wind, Priscilla nodded slowly.
She saw Tanner exchange a quick glance with his dustox, who she vaguely remembered as being his starter and having a name that sounded like "chrysalis". Then he looked back at her, his eyes steely and serious. "Where did I meet you?"
"Out - outside of Pastoria. I, um, had just started out, and -"
"You're the yanma girl?"
"Y-yeah, but, um, I don't train him anymore."
Tanner nodded. "What's your new name?"
"Excuse me?"
"You're not using your old name, right? Where are you from, now?" He sighed, brushing his finger against his dustox's wings. "I'm guessing you're, uh, you know...Puja Parekh from Lilycove City, or something."
Priscilla smiled weakly, pushing a loose hair back under her purple hairband. "Actually, I'm Shannon Nguyen, but I'm still from, um, Lilycove City. Um, who're you now?"
"Still Tanner Hamilton. My mom's Hoennese, and she wanted me to go to middle school here. I managed to arrive a month before Sinnoh got closed off, but a lot of my friends and extended family're still back there," he said, sighing. "It's really tough. I barely ever use my luxray and my buizel anymore, and I try to keep my ponyta on the down-low, too. People just get nervous when they see anything that could be from Sinnoh, you know?"
"That's why I'm Shannon now," Priscilla mumbled. "I don't even have my old team. They're with friends. Right now I'm training a sandshrew, machop, and lairon - except I gotta go pick 'em up."
"At the Pokemon Center?"
"Yeah."
"Cool. I'll come with. I gotta pick up my pokemon, too."
"Okay, let's -" Priscilla stopped, a dusty book in the shelves next to her having caught her eye. She pulled it out, staring at the cover.
The cover had an old, Victorian-style painting of a woman in a burgundy ball gown.
She had seen that woman before, though in a purple ball gown instead of burgundy.
Below the picture, the book's title sat in all its curlicued glory, just as she had seen it on the spine.
"Hey, Tanner?"
"Yeah?"
"Um, do you know anything about this person?"
She held up the book, allowing the other trainer to get a better look. He shrugged. "Yeah, that's Lady Virgillia. It's probably a book about her."
"Why does it say 'Lady Virgillia: The Scourge of Hoenn'?"
"Because that's the title."
"Yeah, I know that. But why's that the title?"
He shrugged again, his dustox ruffling her wings at the unwelcome bobbing motion. "Probably because she killed tons of people."
"Killed lots of - wait. How old is she? Is she still alive? Where is she?"
Tanner looked at her quizzically. "She died, like, over a hundred years ago. Maybe two hundred, I forget."
Priscilla shoved the book back into the shelf, not wanting to look at the portrait of Lady Virgillia on the cover any longer. "Um, let's go to the Pokemon Center now."
"Don't you wanna check out that -"
"No." She shoved past Tanner and stomped out of the history section, her eyes locked on the door. "I'm not gonna let ghosts run my life anymore."
Tanner's dustox took to the air, giving her trainer a strange look. "No idea, Cryssa," he said after she chattered her confusion at "Shannon's" strange actions. "Maybe she's just scared of ghosts."
---
Priscilla gulped as she saw Norman's slaking. Sure, he looked lazy and wouldn't attack every turn, but he was so big.
"Richter," she said, glancing over at her machoke. He flexed his muscled and returned her worried look. "Let's, um, try and end this quickly?"
"Try - ma?" he repeated. Priscilla had only begun to understand him two days before, but his tone of voice was unmistakable. He felt just as nervous as Priscilla did about going up against the normal-types.
Mostly because Priscilla's strategy was mostly offensive, and Norman's team was crazy good at offense, themselves. She watched one of the gym battles before her, since Norman usually fought outside, in the streets of Petalburg City (unless it rained too heavily). The girl, a young, thin, Eastern Hoenn girl, had a machamp. Not a machoke like Priscilla, but a fully-evolved machamp.
He went down in one hit to Slaking's hyper beam.
Now Priscilla and Richter stood in the middle of a pedestrian street, staring down the same gym leader and slaking.
And neither felt too confident. After all, Priscilla's main strategy didn't involve much room for defense - Steel was her only real defensive wall, and that wasn't saying much, as she hadn't trained him enough for him to evolve. The small lairon would stand no chance if Norman's slakings decided to use hyper beam.
Richter knew that Priscilla was depending on him, Hideyoshi, or Torra. Hideyoshi, while a fully-evolved hariyama, wasn't as well-trained as Richter, and not as fast. Torra, while fully-evolved, fought in a style that Priscilla still hadn't gotten used to.
Which meant he had to defeat Slaking before Priscilla needed to switch him out for Hideyoshi, Torra, or (in a worst-case scenario) Steel.
"Vital throw!" Priscilla ordered, racing ahead towards Slaking and Norman, just slightly behind Richter. Following Vrinda's advice, she made sure to train alongside her fighting-type pokemon, trying to pick up their style of fighting while she helped them grow stronger. Richter's machop-line style was fairly easy to figure out and start to learn, and Hideyoshi's makuhita/hariyama style seemed fairly logical.
It was Torra that she had trouble with.
As Richter grabbed onto Slaking's body and tried to throw him, Priscilla hung back and tried to flex her arms along with Richter. The better she could understand and feel how he was fighting, the better she could judge his situations and try and come up with new strategies.
She also ducked her head, trying to examine both Norman and Slaking from the same angle. Norman was known for quick battles, knocking his enemies out in the first couple of hits -
"Let go!" she yelled, jumping back in unison with Richter, who was able to see her backwards-shifting weight and respond to it faster than her orders came out.
So when Slaking fired his hyper beam, Richter only got hit in the side, not the stomach.
The beam sent him sprawling, hitting the side of one of the gym facilities with an angry thud. Priscilla dashed over, relieved once she saw that he was barely conscious.
"You can return," she said, zapping Richter into a pokeball before he had a chance to respond or - worse - fall unconscious. "I'm using Hideyoshi now!" she yelled, releasing her hariyama.
Both hariyama and trainer slammed their feet into the ground, doing a parter energy-charge-up that Hideyoshi taught Priscilla the day before. By grounding themselves and retaining balance in unison, they would feel more confident in battle.
Priscilla then held up her palms and shot them forward in a demonstration of the attack she wanted. Hideyoshi preferred nonverbal commands, such as the demonstration of force palm instead of the vocal order for one.
He charged forward, thrusting his arms and palms forward to hit the slow-moving sloth. When Slaking didn't attack back, the hariyama slammed his palms down once again, shoving the slaking into the ground and paralyzing his torso.
Hideyoshi didn't see Norman's grin, but Priscilla did. She quickly pulled her arms back, folding them in and attacking backwards with her elbows as she stomped with her left foot.
Luckily, Hideyoshi noticed her order to retreat before Slaking released his supercharged facade attack, rolling into the hariyama and only half-crushing his legs before relaxing.
Priscilla ran forward and recalled her hariyama, releasing her third pokemon: Torra, the pokemon she temporarily traded Shang to Tanner for. Tanner had managed to get ahold of a torchic a year and a half ago, and since then, he trained her into a combusken.
When Priscilla had left Lavaridge Town, she agreed to evolve Torra into a blaziken if Tanner would evolve Shang into a sandslash.
Now Torra the blaziken stood tall next to Priscilla, reminding her somewhat of Vrinda.
"Stay back," Priscilla said, changing her tactics. "They're gonna come to us."
The blaziken, a haughty, serious girl, just shrugged. Tanner told her that Torra, the now-blaziken, was one of his best new fighters.
But then again, the only other new pokemon he had since he left Sinnoh was a zigzagoon named Zaggo, so Priscilla didn't really think much of the statement.
"I withdraw Slaking," Norman said from across the pedestrian walkway, causing a rumble of hushed commentary from the gathered spectators. "Vigoroth!"
Priscilla frowned when she saw the middle stage of Norman's signature line come out. She had a scowling face and drooping arms, but was as alert as Slaking had been calm.
And she was fast. No sooner had she appeared out of her Luxury Ball did Norman's vigoroth run forward, slashing across Torra's arm.
"Let's go!" Priscilla gasped, tugging on Torra's other arm once she kicked off Vigoroth. Even though Torra's right arm now hung limp, her legs were fine. She dashed into the crowd, followed by the agile blaziken, running into an alleyway. "C'mon," she said, scrambling up a pile of stacked wooden crates near a restaurant.
Torra only had to take one jump to land on the top, holding out her good arm to help Priscilla hoist her body up to the peak of the crate-mountain.
She turned to see Vigoroth snarling below, dashing over to the bottom of the crate pile.
"Um, Torra," Priscilla whispered, glancing over at Norman, who hung back near the entrance to the alleyway. "Wait. Wait for Vigoroth to start climbing."
Vigoroth gnashed her teeth, then put her arms on one of the crates and pulled the rest of her body up. As she began to scramble up the side of the crates towards Priscilla and Torra, Torra grabbed Priscilla around the waist with her good arm, kicked down on the pressure point of the top crate, and soared into the air.
When she landed a few feet away from the bottom of the crates, she deposited her trainer, then kicked another one of the bottom crates.
Norman's vigoroth only had time to yelp in surprise when the entire stack of wooden crates tumbled down on her, crushing her torso and pinning her onto the dirty concrete alley floor.
"Blaze kick," Priscilla ordered. The blaziken set the wooden crates on fire with a single kick, roasting the sloth inside.
"You win," Norman said from behind as he released a linoone and ordered it to use a surf attack. "Nice strategy," he added once the flames were out and he could safely return his pokemon. "It was a good battle."
"Um, thanks," Priscilla mumbled as she took the badge he offered and returned Tanner's blaziken. As she left the alleyway, brushing off her clothes, she noticed a familiar grinning face in the dispersing crowd. "Nate!"
She ran forward, throwing her arms around her rival. "Shannon! Dude, that was awesome!" he exclaimed, giving her a friendly squeeze. "So that's...five badges for you, now?"
Grinning madly, she nodded, showing off her new Balance Badge. "You have five badges, too, right?"
"Yep. So whad'ya think?" Nate asked, brushing his brown hair out of his face. Priscilla noticed that it had become long and shaggy, noting that he hadn't had a haircut in awhile - neither had she, in fact. Her own brown hair had grown out of its layered cut and fell past her shoulders, ending in thousands of dried split-ends. "What are you gonna do for the rest of the season?"
The younger girl sighed. "Man, I dunno. There's like, two weeks left." She looked up at Nate. "What are you doing?"
"Dunno. You wanna travel somewhere?"
"Where?"
"We could hang out in Oldale, then take a ferry across the river and go back to Mauville or Slateport. Ooh! Or we could go up to Rustboro and take the tunnel over to Verdanturf!"
"What's there to do in Verdanturf?"
"I dunno, contests?"
"Contests are stupid."
"Yeah, but they're something to do. You wanna head to the Pokemon Center? Get your blaziken fixed up - how'd you get one, anyway?" he asked excitedly as they started to head down the city streets towards the 'Center.
Priscilla opened her mouth to explain (but leave out the part about meeting Tanner in Sinnoh), but then stopped. "Hey, Nate?" she began, deciding to change the subject.
"What?"
"Do you know anything about Lady Virgillia?"
Nate frowned. "She's that lady who killed a bunch of people, right?"
"Um, I think so. Do you - do you know if she had an espeon?"
The boy shrugged. "I don't think so. Espeon don't really live here. They're more, like, Kanto-Johto pokemon, not Hoennese. Why?"
"Just - I, um, saw a picture. Of a woman that, um, looked like Lady Virgillia - or, like, that's what the caption said - and she had an espeon next to her. An espeon named," she glanced up at Nate to see if he showed any flash of recognition, "Mara."
His confused, not-that-interested expression didn't change. "Nope. Never heard of anything like that."
"Do you think that Lady Virgillia could be a ghost?"
Nate looked a bit taken aback by this. "Why, you wanna go to Mount Pyre and see if she's there, or something? Dude, I don't think she'd come back as a ghost. When they executed her, I'm pretty sure they tried to make it so she'd never come back. She was pretty scary. There's a statue of her in Lilycove City - you've seen it, right? Cuz that's where you're from, right?"
"Yeah, um, I've seen it..."
"Ooh, but they say that if you get her mad, she'll make sure to kill you from beyond the grave!" Nate added, his maniacal grin back. "And some say she was a witch with evil powers!"
"That's stupid. Witches don't exist."
"Yeah, tell that to one when you're about to DIE."
Priscilla groaned, lightly punching her rival in the shoulder.. "So, um, Verdanturf. Are we going, or what?"
---
Meanwhile, thousands of miles away - and even more kilometers, once you got back into the regions that used the metric system - Lyrisa found who she was told to look for. In fact, she stood outside the building housing the person, using their body as an original from which to copy with her own.
"So strange," she whispered to the night, leaning against the building and looking at her left hand. "Beatrice, you've really made things interesting."
Holding in her urge to cackle madly, she thought back to things in Hoenn - Mara, Pentyl, Badr, Nasu and Hallas, and Zenith and Nadir.
Not to mention Mara's companion.
Lyrisa sighed. As far as she knew, Priscilla was still alive. As far as she knew, Darcy and Zenith's interfering with Priscilla's life had made her important enough to keep alive.
She couldn't help it. After turning into Priscilla's mother and holding her close, she couldn't let Priscilla die. "My little girl," Lyrisa whispered, placing her hand on her stomach. She knew the torso she had copied could create and bear a child without any real problem.
Then why was it that she, a copy of the creature thought to be the pokemon from which all modern species of pokemon had evolved from, couldn't give birth herself?
"Heh," she hissed, looking up at the night sky with a sick, sick smile on her face and thinking back to the past. "But I'd do anything for you, my darling daughter."
The sky didn't answer, but she could remember the little girl looking up at her with big eyes, a tender image from so long ago, asking her why.
"Because I'm your mother."
Lyrisa then had to stop thinking about her "daughter", because then she would have to think about how those big eyes, once filled with curiosity and happiness and love, had disappeared.
Why had they disappeared?
"Because I'm your mother."
---
Author's Note: I just want to thank everyone who's reviewed - Poltergeist's now has 100 reviews! :) Thank you, thank you, thank you so much. It really means a lot!