Disclaimer: Pokémon and its related properties are copyrighted to The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, respectively.
Warning: Minor gore warning.
A Yearning for the Mud
Chapter Thirty Five – A Place The Gods Forgot
Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute,
and yet relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself
and yet never escapes itself. - T.S. Eliot
As fast as his petrified legs would carry him, his heart pumping blood back through his limbs, his nerves firing impulses to his brain, Wallace threw himself toward a marble staircase. With his frantic eyes scanning the landing strip behind him, he failed to notice a gap in the staircase, the result of several slabs of marble falling away. His foot struck the edge and without time to comprehend, he fell and slammed onto the cold floor beneath.
The impact radiated throughout Wallace's left side, awakening the dying pain in his side. He rolled to his back, cupping his midsection, holding back tears as the most unfamiliar of pains, what he guessed had to be a bruised or broken rib, throbbed throughout his chest. A deep breath in worsened the pain, gagging Wallace and bringing tears to his eyes. Everything hurt. Following the ambush in the bathroom, Wallace face was a map of cuts, bruises, and crusted blood while sections of his body below his neck ached for different reasons. The phantom pain of chains lingered on his ankles and wrists, his bottom ached from days spent confined to a stone bench while his legs, arms, and chest pulsated with memories of fists that marked him with oblong bruises. All gifts of four days with the Orphans.
Gritting his teeth while sucking in shallow breaths was all Wallace could do to keep from crying out and exposing his location. As he forced his eyes open, his stunned gaze fell to the opening he'd fallen through on the underside of the mansion's main staircase. Odd warped scorch-like marks marred the underside of the staircase, like swirls of translucent paint with the gap at its center. His eyes dropped to the missing slabs beside him, stacked over the body of James.
The sight caused him to sit forward, his upper body snapping up as he cupped his mouth. Wallace's eyes tracked from the curve of the Orphan's ribs to the slope of James' waist that thinned to naught then disappeared in a wide and spreading blood pool. The weight of the marble slabs had slammed so hard onto James that what hadn't flattened, burst from his stomach. The way a child might stack and confine laundry to the area of single chair seat, a gory and glistening tangle of intestines piled on his stomach.
Wallace gagged behind his hand at the smell as his eyes seemed to hone in on the smallest details, rivulets of blood leaking from the innards.
"W-Wallassss."
A sputtering wet hiss drew Wallace's attention to James' face. The boy's pale face looked void of all color as he lay in the pool of his death. Blood, brighter than he could have imagined, boiled from the Orphan's lips as he tried to speak. Wallace narrowed his eyes on James' face, whose eyes struggled to focus. One seemed to fix an inch away from Wallace's face while the other roved off-center, searching for Wallace as it verged on rolling to the back of his head.
Torturing himself by studying the mass of James' innards, Wallace realized though they had spilled out, it was possible that nothing had severed and like a decapitated creature whose feet remained moving, James' wasn't ready to give up.
A spastic motion drew Wallace to the sight of James' hand, his fingers clutching a Poké Ball. He watched as James' knuckles lifted from the ground, the shaking of his hand growing with intensity the higher he attempted to raise the ball.
"Garrchh," James breathed, his hand hitting the floor as his fingers started to tremble.
Wallace reached for the Poké Ball, the echoes of a battle ricocheting through his mind. He hadn't seen it, but he heard the sounds of the battle that brought the marble slabs down onto James throughout the mansion. His fingers hovered inches from taking the item from James as his eyes fell on another stack of broken marble lying behind the Orphan. A place under the stairs that, in James' current condition, would have been an impossible task for him to find with his misalligned eyes.
The body of a garchomp lay several feet from James, posed as it the pokémon had fallen over, asleep, with his hindquarters in the air, though the marble slabs quashing its head said different. As James' lower half had become flattened, the garchomp's neck trailed off into a flat mess of scales and blood beneath two thick chunks of marble.
Wallace clutched his shoulder, the phantom weight of elgyem's missing body aching in a different way than any physical pain could ever hope to.
"Wallace, if you want to know about us, I can tell you, but first I'd have to show you the existence of human life on the blade of a knife."
Wallace shuddered, a presence in the air causing him to flatten to the floor as a voice called out to him from above on the stairs.
"You might think that human lives exist on a linear surface, like, hmm, the back, dull, edge of a blade. I mean, it's a flat cold surface, easy for someone to drag their hand across, it looks appealing. So I can't blame you if you think that humans exist equally, capable of making a smooth transition from the base of the blade to the tip, but you'd be wrong."
Clicks on the marble above gave Wallace an estimate of his follower's steps and gave him time to scurry to the acute angle of the steps. He laid himself in the shadow of the dead garchomp's body, the rank and feral stench of its head, popped and smeared across the floor gagging him.
"Life does exist on the knife, but not on the dull back. Life is played out along the saw-toothed cutting edge of the blade. Our lives and stories are nestled vertically within serrated grooves. There exists a hierarchy, one you have to conquer if you desire a chance at a quality life. But what the humans who live along the notches fail to realize is that their life exists under the curve of the blade, and that there, at a top, on the insurmountable pinnacle, are others."
Wallace cupped a hand to his mouth as he watched a figure leap over the gap in the staircase and continue its descent to the ground floor where he heard their movement stop.
"That's where my life started, under the curve of the blade, in a land of serration where I crossed paths with a professor, was handed a starter, and filled my mind with dreams, though the images that filled my head were geared more toward blood and bones than battles and badges. And then there's you."
After moments of stillness, Wallace heard footsteps clicking past the staircase, approaching his hiding spot. He pressed himself harder to the ground, hoping his presence would go unnoticed behind garchomp, despite the sight of James and his fallen pokémon being capable of garnering anyone's attention.
"At your end of the blade there was fortune, opportunity, and love, and at mine was death, loss, and betrayal. Those of us from the bottom longed for a life anywhere in the middle of those two extremes, but that's not how life works. The rich can't exist without the poor, the pinnacle cannot exist without polarizing the nadir. The gods can't favor one without shunning another."
The moment the high black heel of a boot came into sight on level with Wallace's line of sight, a door across from the staircase flew open and Chara staggered out. Wallace looked away from the boot to Chara, whose face looked flushed, his dark brown hair matted to his forehead and his chest heaving with intakes of air.
"They got away," Chara breathed, his attention on the figure who stood steps away from discovering Wallace's hiding place.
Another heeled boot joined the first, the thin legs of Wallace's pursuer, clad in skin tight black jeans, crossed at the ankles as they approached Chara. "It's okay," they said.
Peering past garchomp, Wallace watched a female reach out to Chara and caress his face, a pair of manicured nails pressing lines into his skin.
Chara's eyes closed as he pulled his face from her grip and flashed a look toward James. "What about him?"
"Get him out of here, he's going to stink up the place," the girl said, her tone relaying how she viewed James' death to be an inconvenience.
The hairs on Wallace's neck bristled as he listened to Chara's heavier footsteps approaching. "Who were you talking to?" he asked.
Wallace listened to Chara sigh, followed by a shuffling sound and a faint mechanical click. The origin of the sound hit Wallace a second too late as garchomp's turned red and the corpse vanished in front of him. Even if his body sprawled across the floor wasn't enough to garner their attention, marble slabs collapsing onto the floor ensured he didn't go unnoticed. Wallace watched Chara's eyes grow wide in surprise, only to narrow in anger as eyes met.
"Wallace," Chara growled.
Wallace's eyes flicked away from Chara as he pressed his hands to the floor, his knees bending and the rubber tips of his shoes bending at he prepared to run.
The girl had one hand cocked on her hip and the other to her mouth, her nail between her teeth as she smiled. Her skin, the color of warm honey shone under the mansion lights that cast highlights off her thick waves of pitch black hair. "Wallace, if you want to know about us, I'll tell you that we come from a place the gods forgot."
In the corner of his vision, Wallace saw Chara's hand vanish behind his back. Without waiting for a Poké Ball or knife to appear, he took off. Without garchomp in his path, Wallace vaulted over the stacks of marble with ease and took the gap between Chara and the girl as his exit.
Though his eyes locked on the door Chara had arrived through, Wallace pivoted to the right, moving behind the dark haired girl as he darted for the steps. He could hear the sound of Poké Balls breaking open on the floor as he clattered up the steps of the main staircase, taking the marble steps two at a time.
A metallic cry cut through the air and a strike against the steps that caused the stairs to hitch. Wallace slipped, his weight thrown off center by the attack on the steps as he neared the gap.
"Emma, another iron tail," the girl said.
Wallace's mind screamed at him to get moving as he climbed the steps on hands and knees and leaped over the gap, his chin smacking marble as he landed, his legs dangling over the gap. Scrambling toward the landing strip, Wallace struggled back to his feet and ran toward the right hall as the floor beneath him shuddered with attacks.
In the distance he could hear the girl calling out attacks, the walls behind him exploding and filling the hall with dust and chunks of plaster. His panicked eyes darted toward every room he passed in search of the hole Neo and Don's battle in the library created months earlier.
At the corner of the hall, to his left, a thin blue-white light sliced through the floor. Wallace flinched back as he watched the beam of light slice from side to side, tearing through the walls and the ceiling until the floor fell away. The sound rattled him as a cloud of grey dust billowed through the hall. Wallace shielded his face from the dust and grit as he watched part of the floor collapse several yards ahead of him. Through the cloud came the faint outline of a body as the girl came walking up the incline the fallen floor created. A glaceon stalked alongside her, its fur shining through the grey cloud.
The clip of hooves in Wallace's blindspot stopped him from turning backing, instead he tossed a look over his shoulder as Chara and a gogoat blocked one path of escape. Before either party could make a move, Wallace dove to the right and slammed through one of the doors, staggering into the mansion's library.
The sight of walls lined with books ignited the memory in Wallace's mind of the day he'd met Don. Spinning, Wallace faced the blown out section of the mansion, broken wood jutted out over the hole large enough for him to fit through. Without hesitation he ran for it and jumped.
In the seconds his body flew from the building the thought occurred that the fall could kill him, but that threat was a possibility. The threats inside the mansion were promises. As the ground neared Wallace tucked in his legs, bent his knees, and started to roll to avoid landing on his bad side.
Despite his preparation for impact, Wallace hit the ground like a rock. His plan to hit, roll, and keep running shattered as he landed at an odd angle, rolling just once before he flopped onto his stomach. The impact blasted through his knees and his right temple as his head smacked the ground. The pain from his rib radiated through his chest, leaving him flapping his lips for air. His lids fluttered down, the appeal of blacking out calling to him, but voices from above sent a burning fist punching into his chest.
Turned around and dazed, Wallace threw himself onto his feet and ran. The trees and shrubs surrounding the mansion all looked the same, but the mansion's siding, the way the features and windows tapered off, told Wallace he'd picked the right direction.
Cutting through the air with his arms, Wallace sprinted past the front of the mansion, the sound of the front door opening drawing his attention for half a second. With nothing but the empty clearing ahead of him, Wallace glanced back in time to find the front door opening and Willow emerging from inside.
"Wallace!" she cried out. "Run!"
After a fleeting look ahead of him, ensuring his path hadn't become obstructed, Wallace looked back again, to find Chara on the front steps, dragging Willow by her hair to the side as the girl and her glaceon stepped outside.
"Blizzard."
Wallace ground his teeth as he pushed himself to run faster as the glaceon's cry filled the clearing. Like the first hint of winter, cold bites of air nipped at the back of Wallace's neck as he left the clearing and dove into the tree line.
The idea that the trees could conceal him kept Wallace going, leaping over tree roots and avoiding pitfalls as the encroaching chill brushed his arms and raised his flesh into bumps. Finding a path of desire ahead of him, Wallace followed a beaten trail in the forest, praying it would turn the hard soil under his feet into soft sand, as the bushes and grass on his sides began to turn white, dusted by winter's kiss as the forest sounds turned to static, tree branches and leaves becoming encased in ice as the glaceon's long reaching blizzard spread across the island.
As winter's coating passed Wallace, frosting the ground under him, causing his hurried steps to crunch with every footfall, Wallace watched the trees thin ahead of him and the golden sand of the beach spread out on the horizon of his vision.
Wallace burst from the tree line, a prisoner passing the bars of his cell and trampled down the beach, his legs splashing through the incoming tide that sucked his feet down, slowing him as the water swallowed his waist. As Wallace's feet dragged through the sloping shore, the water's chill that rivaled glaceon's blizzard encased his body in ice before he started to swim, a trying process as his natural reaction was to high tail it out of the water, but instead, Wallace pressed on.
At first he started slow, cutting his arms through the bay water and away from the island, but his slow progress seemed to be an invitation for an attack and so his nerves kicked in and his arms thrashed through the icy water that threatened to drag him under every time he slowed. With every violent swing his arms made through the water Wallace could feel his fingertips numbing, his lips tingling as puffs of his breath filled the air.
The sapphire blanket of water that lapped the shores of Shalour City's cove broke as a head of ash blond hair disturbed the surface. Pale limbs cut through the water, laggard, but moving with purpose as Wallace propelled himself across the sea.
The water moved in fluid and rhythmic waves that lapped over one another soundlessly as Wallace swam toward the shore. As the summer sun crested the Tower of Mastery, its rays turned the water to blue steel around him. With brown eyes like a predator, the bridge of his nose sliced through the water, parting the sea in front of him as his head bobbed, water streaming from his face.
A glint of sunlight caught a wash of blue scales beside him, Wallace's totodile's tail swished through the water, keeping Wink swimming in time with his trainer as other water-types swam alongside them. Pokémon three times as big as Wink swam below Wallace, but Wallace held form, his legs and arms moving in tandem as he neared the shining white sand beach. To his right, beside Wink the water broke, a curved snout prodding the surface as water glided over cerulean scales and spikes of red spines cleaved through the water. Two gleaming yellow-orange eyes emerged from the sea above a mouth lined with teeth made for tearing flesh.
As he neared the beach Wallace took in a lungful of air through his nostrils then made a slow dive, his dark eyes catching pokémon cowering near the bottom of the shore as the horde scaled pokémon dove behind him. Their presence acting as a deterrent to any wild pokémon that might have considered attacking.
Wallace folded his arms to his side and kicked, pushing himself further down until he touched the sandy bottom and pushed off. Kicking his way back to the surface he saw Wink thrashing in pursuit of a luvdisc, his jaws yawning wide open as he neared his prey.
Wallace broke the surface, feeling the water break above him and slide down his face as he walked up the shore. The feeling of water sluicing off his body and the sea pulling at his limbs was disheartening, the lingering grip of a dear friend inviting him to stay a little longer.
As he cleared the sea, Wallace watched Wink dart up the beach, jaws surprisingly empty of a luvdisc and head for a pair of beach towels spread on the sand. In a pair of blue trunks that contrasted his red towel, Andrew laid out under the Kalosian sun, arms folded behind his head as he stared at the sky, at least Wallace assumed so, a pair of sunglasses kept Andrew's true object of attention a mystery.
"Enjoy your swim with feraligatrs?" Andrew asked as Wallace crawled onto a blue towel under the shade of an umbrella where Wink had taken root.
"Yeah," Wallace said, propping himself against the umbrella pole that he tapped with his finger. On the underside of the umbrella spinarak sprung to life, untangling himself from the web of silk and spokes to descend onto Wallace's head. "Enjoy your skin cancer?"
Andrew plucked his glasses off and tossed Wallace a look as he sat up and nodded down the beach. Aside from the two of them, several other trainers were sunbathing while families played in the sand, but close to the water Wallace watched one of Pearce Production's employees, Jason Bahr, playing in the sand with a hippopotas and elgyem.
Wallace draped his arms over his knees as he watched hippopotas spew sand into the air that elgyem gathered with his psychic powers into standing columns that began to form impressive walls while Jason ran back and forth from the sea with a bucket of water for stabilizing the structure of their castle.
Wallace smiled, letting his mind replay similar moments in time he'd captured in his memories. He'd had a similar moment in Ambrette, gliding his hand across the glass tanks of the aquarium while Wink became fascinated with the different pokémon swimming freely inside. And again outside Geosenge as he and elgyem studied the stone pillars. His summer trekking across eastern Kalos had provided him with small snapshot moments in time when everything seemed, perfect.
"You're really going to give all this up?" Andrew asked, as if he could tell where Wallace's mind had wandered off to.
Looking away from Jason, Wallace found Andrew inspecting at the tops and undersides of his arms, apparently checking his tan coverage. "All this?" he asked, quiet, as he looked out over the sparkling blue waters surrounding Shalour City.
Andrew shrugged as he sighed and stared out to sea as well. "This life, a simple life, where no one is hunting you. If I were you I don't think anyone could pay me to go back to that school." Andrew's head turned, but his eyes lingered on the sea a moment longer before he fixed his eyes on Wallace. "You were kidnapped, held captive for four days."
"And I survived," Wallace said, cutting in as he often had to when Andrew decided to bring up his confinement by the Orphans.
"Which is more than enough reason to keep surviving," Andrew said, shrugging. "You don't walk through hell just to remember you left something behind and turn back around to go get it. Have you even been watching the news or reading the reports the University has been putting out? Nine months and they still have no clues on the Orphans. Nine months and nothing. These aren't people the authorities are capable of dealing with, that says enough."
"If you're worried about me just join me there," Wallace said.
"I can't," Andrew squinted as he averted his eyes and dug his fingers into the sand. "Arlette. I don't think I could handle being where she – I can't go there."
Wallace looked back to the castle building team, focusing on elgyem. He imagined that over time Arlette's relatives had cleared out her room on campus, meaning aside from the courtyard dedication, nothing physically would remain of the girl when he got back. But the elgyem she bred for Andrew remained. "I understand," he said. "Which is why I gave you the company, and you'll have Jason, so you won't be here alone. I mean, he's not me, but he'll fill the void I guess," Wallace said, grinning as he watched Jason stumble on another trip from the beach and his bucket of water go flying, splashing elgyem.
"Our friend is back," Andrew said as he slipped his glasses on and fell back on his towel. "I'm starting to think she likes the view."
Wallace looked past Andrew to find Detective Fujioka standing at the start of the beach, looking as out of place as anyone could. Wallace watched the detective fan herself, sweating under the summer sun from her poor choice in beach attire, thigh high socks, a skirt, and a draping shawl that covered her upper half. Wallace watched her fidget in the heat, swiping strands of her dark hair from her forehead.
"What does she want?" Andrew asked. "I'm tired of seeing her. She followed us from Lumiose all the way here."
"She's a friend." Wallace got to his feet, brushed his hands on his trunks, and headed up the beach to her. The closer he got the more the detective looked relieved as she walked away from the beach, toward the shade provided by the walls surrounding the Tower of Mastery. "You look uncomfortable," he said.
"It's hot, it's very hot out here," Minako said, swiping her forehead again.
"Maybe you should dress like you're coming to a beach then," Wallace said.
"I'm on duty, I can't be seen in a bikini," Minako huffed. "Anyway, I have an update for you, on Sonai Enterprises."
Wallace filled his lungs with an intake of air, bracing himself for whatever punch to the gut the detective would deliver about his father's rival company and their connection to the band of orphans they controlled.
"Good news first," Minako said, squinting against the sun. "They filed for bankruptcy again, the clients they snaked from your father seem to be leaving, this could mean good things for Pearce Productions. I thought you might be happy about that."
"That's good for Andrew," Wallace said, though the ups and downs of his father's company didn't concern him anymore. "Anything about the Orphans?"
Minako shook her head. "Not much, a lot of what we already knew. Sonai took it upon themselves to start funding outreach programs to aid undeveloped towns and regions in getting more children started in training. These handouts weren't free though, sometimes they returned to collect. Sometimes they took children under the pretense of a work-train program. In exchange for their services and money Sonai would employ children to work for them. Somehow through this program the Orphans were formed. Still no clue on how they were chosen, or by whom."
"Okay," Wallace said, licking his teeth, the lack of a break in the case leaving a bad taste in his mouth.
Minako held her hand out and began counting off on her fingers. "Chara, James, Willow, mystery boy, mystery girl, am I right?"
"James is dead," Wallace said bitterly, unable to brace himself for the sight of James' flattened lower-half flashing through his mind. His last words, sputtered cries for Wallace to check on his garchomp hissed through Wallace's ears.
"Right," Minako said, nonchalantly as she curled her middle finger in, only to stick it out again. "What about the girl with the glaceon? Is she the mystery girl?"
"I don't know," Wallace said. "The way Chara reacted to her, the way she commanded him, it was different than the others. Chara always seemed like the leader, but he was like a servant compared to her."
"So then Chara, Willow, mystery boy, mystery girl, and mystery leader?" Minako said. "Three individuals left in the dark. Are you about ready to head back to school?"
"Yeah, I'm packed, the school is expecting me, my travel arrangements are finalized," Wallace said. "No going back now."
"You're not going back to Lumiose before you leave?" Minako asked.
Wallace pursed his lips and shook his head. "My things are being sent over already. Andrew and I are going to walk to Coumarine and I'll catch a ride from there, I've been saying my goodbyes on the way."
"Goodbyes?"
"Andrew's mother, Jason, this whole trip has been like a goodbye to Andrew," Wallace said. "And I need to call Izumi."
Minako's feet dug into the stone as she turned and practically slapped her forehead. "Of course, I forgot, Izumi. We need to talk about him. If you want my continued support in tracking the Orphans and the discretion of the Kalos police to your past actions, Izumi can't be involved."
"What? What? Why?"
"By digging into Sonai I was trying to track their transactions, recent ones at least," Minako said. "Expecting I'd find a pattern, like another team of Orphans, but instead I found a large loan of money sent to Lumiose to pay a year's rent for an abandoned store in the city, I checked the address and it's the same space Izumi is conducting his forgery business out of."
The heat of the beach clicked up several notches to the point Wallace felt himself swiping sweat from his forehead as Minako spoke, parts of her explanation falling on deaf ears as Wallace tried to replay every conversation he'd had with Izumi. "Is he?"
"No," Minako cut in. "I don't think he's working for Sonai. I've been following him too, he doesn't do anything odd. He travels out of the city from a house in Ambrette to work at the Forgery. Even with wire taps inside I didn't pick up anything to hint that he might be working with them. Like I said, Sonai made it a point to provide aid to people, it's not a stretch to imagine Izumi needing funding and seeking them out. I think he spoke to someone at Sonai, was given the building, and probably equipment by them. I'm guessing that's how Sonai knew about you, as Wallace Peters that is. The computers Izumi uses in his office are all Sonai products, they have access to all his files."
"Are you sure that's it?" Wallace asked, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Minako nodded, her eyes stern and focused. "I did my homework on this, I wouldn't have waited to tell you if I thought he was a direct danger to us," Minako said. "But his connection to Sonai, on top of his illegal practices make him a noose around our necks. Cut him loose, or he's going to get us in trouble."
"I'll think of something," Wallace said.
After leaving the beach, Jason headed back to Lumiose while Wallace and Andrew made a trip back through Shalour, walking the curved stone paths of the tiered city with their sand dusted feet as they headed for the Pokémon Center. Following the opening of the automatic doors, a particularly shrill nurse's voice greeted them. "No shoes, no shirts, no services!"
Wallace wasted no time in arguing with the woman and threw his top on and stuffed his feet into his shoes while Andrew made a run for it, darting past the front desk and heading for the barracks to the back of the building. The nurse fired a withering look at him as he passed her, sheepishly following after his devious friend and earning odd stares from the trainers inside.
The moment Wallace rounded the corner into the barracks, a brown pokémon with a tuft of red fur standing tall between its ears let out a happy yawp and scampered to him. Smiling, Wallace dropped to give the squirming litleo a scratch on her stomach.
"I missed you today, we all did," Wallace said as he watched elgyem drift down from his shoulder and sit beside lilteo, running his hand down the pokémon's fur like Wallace showed him how.
Wink's claws scraped the floor as he scurried in between Wallace's legs to hiss at the litleo, only for the dual-type to swat playfully at him.
"Have fun at the beach?" a voice from the corner of the room asked. Antionette shifted up on the top bunk of a set of beds, a sneaker in her lap as she worked to lace it.
"Wallace went swimming with a group of feraligatrs, again," Andrew said as he dropped his swim trunks and redressed in front of the Kalos Champion.
"Fun?" Antionette asked, her brows drawing up.
"It was fun, and relaxing, they're not dangerous," Wallace said.
"The word feral is in their name, and it was only fun because you have Wink with you," Andrew reminded as he began to stuff clothes into a bag. "They'd turn me into pulled pork if I tried it."
"I finished your map," Antionette said, brandishing a folded sheet of paper. "It'll get to you Coumarine by tomorrow. Barring you don't make any more beach stops."
"We don't need a map!" Andrew said as he leaped up and snatched the paper from Antionette. He unfolded the paper and made a show of looking it over, turning the page in his hands several times. "I traveled Kalos on my own, I know this region like I built it."
"It's been over five years since you traveled Kalos and you are less than a year out of a repetitive coma, I think you should take the map," Antionette said as she finished lacing her shoe and slipped it on. Gathering up her stuff, Antionette tossed a small green cap onto her head before he squeezed Andrew's shoulder as she made her way to the exit. "If that's it I'll be off, being away from the League was nice, but they need me back."
"Of course," Wallace said, stepping aside. "Thanks for visiting and babysitting Mila for me."
"Not a problem!" Antionette said with a salute over her head as she departed.
After packing up their corner of the barracks the sun began to dip as Wallace and Andrew shrugged into their backpacks and left the Pokémon Center, to the head nurses's delight.
They wasted no time in heading for the road out of Shalour, hoping to make progress before the rain a television in the Center had warned about came, but spent minutes along the side of the road waving bye and chatting with some other visiting trainers they'd befriended. After wishing safe travels to a group of ten year olds, Wallace and Andrew faced the pathway that led into Route 12, but stopped as a round man crossing ahead of them started to run. Shoving and pushing a group of three children ahead of him, he snapped his neck in their direction and flapped his lips to the children who too cast looks in their direction.
"Sir!" Andrew called out, rushing forward.
Wallace cocked a brow up until he saw a Poké Ball bouncing on the path away from the man. Andrew swooped it up and jogged behind the man.
"Get away from us!" he shrieked.
What Wallace expected to be a simple return of a dropped item turned into the man yelling and shielding from the children from Andrew as if he'd offered them a greande "What's going on?" he asked, jogging to Andrew's side with Wink scuttling after him.
"I'm just returning your ball, sir," Andrew said, holding the ball in his direction. "Relax."
The man's eyes, a dark green, flicked to the ball before he looked back to Andrew and then to Wallace. "I don't want it, not from you, from either of you."
Wallace watched as the man's face lit up red to find elgyem casting a light at him, a low beeping starting in his chest. "Elgy, maybe you shouldn't – "
The man let out a high bawling sound as he turned back and hovered over his children, swooping them all under his arms and shuffling off the road and into the shadow of a building. "Stay away from us, heathens!"
"Who are you calling heathens?" Andrew demanded, trailing after the man.
"Wait, Andrew..." Wallace reached out for his friend, but his hand fell through the air as he became distracted by some of the other trainers. Many people had stopped their daily tasks to take part in watching the spectacle. "Andrew," Wallace said, his voice dying to a whisper as his eyes fell to the three young trainers they'd just spoken too, gathered in a huddle and covering their mouths as they cast glances their way.
The cries of the man were drowned out as Wallace tuned in to the voices of the trainers and visitors around him.
"Who are they?"
"Why is that man screaming like that, is he in trouble?"
"Isn't that?"
"That's Wallace Pearce!"
"He must be with Andrew, they've been on the news a lot this year, why are they here?"
"Elgy!"
A distorted warbling sound drew Wallace's attention behind him as something shattered on the stone pavement. On his blind side stood a woman with her hands held to her face and a shattered camera at her feet, Elgy's arms aimed in her direction.
"You broke my camera!" the woman yelled as she lowered her hands to her belt and pulled off an ultra ball.
"Andrew, let's go," Wallace said, rushing toward his friend who was still in the middle of trying to offer the man his dropped ball. Wallace slapped the Poké Ball from Andrew's hand and pulled him along. "Wink!"
"Totototo!" Wink rushed across the ground, hissing at people that ventured a step too far onto the path.
Despite Andrew's reluctance, Wallace shoved him into the stone gateway and straight through, not wanting to entertain the curious looks from the attendants inside who'd heard the commotion. On the following route Wallace let elgyem carry their bags over a small river that bled into the sea as he and Wink waded into the water and swam across, Andrew opting to do the same, his face twisted with lines of anger.
"You should have let me handle that," Andrew said as they pulled themselves up the opposite shore, grabbing his bag from elgyem. "I don't like being treated like some kind of, pariah."
"Yeah, that's not something you'd be used to," Wallace said as he looked ahead of them. Trees that filled the opposite shore had thinned out on the other side as a dirt road appeared on the path before them, winding across the route around and sometimes through patches of tall grass. To his left Wallace ran his hand along a handmade fence, thin columns of wood with odd shaped holes drilled through them that fit other sticks of wood. It wouldn't keep anything out, except maybe pokémon.
"It's a farm," Andrew said, coming to the fence and resting his hands on the wood. "Or was. It looks deserted."
Casting his eyes across the land behind the fence, Wallace had to agree. The fenced off area made the farmyard a box, with other smaller fences portioning the land into polygons. A barn, in need of a wood replacement and a paint job stood solemnly in the distance with the tongue of the Kalos flag flapping wickedly with the onset wind of a storm. Attached to the barn was small house, the front door missing and several windows along the front shattered or wide open.
The rain came quick. Though the smoky clouds rolled in slowly across the sky, the globs of rainfall pelted the boys from above, drenching them in the time it took to run across the farmland. Inside, rainwater dribbled from the roof and splattered the streaked linoleum of the entry before gravity pooled it in a sunken in section of the floor by the wall.
"This place is a dump," Andrew said with kick that sent an empty food can soaring across the room. "Has to be abandoned."
Wallace twitched his nose at the musty stench of the room. The carpet around the entry was stained black, possibly by foot traffic, but he noticed other stains that peppered the floor as Wink explored the room. A small brown couch, cluttered with newspapers and clothes sat against the left wall, the pile so out of control it spilled on the floor.
Crossing into the kitchen, Wallace followed a soft humming and dragged his finger along a countertop, his finger coming back with a hardy layer of dust and grime. A single light, from somewhere behind the house, shone into the kitchen, illuminating dark scuffs on the floor and curious stains under the windows. A silver pot sat on the stove, the lid sitting askew. Lifting it off, he found pasta that had congealed together in the pot. Picking up on his hunt for the humming, Wallace wandered to a large white refrigerator, the recognizable sound of a whirling motor confusing him.
He pulled on the door and was met with pale yellow light and the sight of a bare fridge aside from cans of alcohol and a black bag sitting far in the back. Balancing the door on his hip, Wallace reached in and pulled the bag forward, his fingers snaking through the opening until they touched something cold.
"Andrew," he said, gripping an object inside the bag that he pulled out, a smooth block of gold. Reaching back into the bag Wallace's hands passed over more blocks before he gripped a handful of what felt like marbles. Opening his hand under the light of the fridge, Wallace balanced at least a dozen small pearls on his palm. "Elgy, this stuff looks like it was hidden here," he said, his voice low.
"Elgy, el-el." Elgyem flashed his digits yellow, but then red and Wallace nodded in agreement.
After dumping the block and pearls back into the bag, Wallace wiped his hand on his damp pants and closed the door. "Andrew, I don't think this place is abandoned." Wallace rounded the corner of the living room and froze, alarmed by the presence of more than just Andrew in the living room.
"Hey." A tower of a man with a black hat and a bandana over the lower half of his face stood behind Andrew, one hand over his mouth and the other stroking the air at his side. The pair stood no more than ten feet away between Wallace and the front door.
The fluid movement of the man's fingers caught Wallace's attention as he realized he wasn't stroking the air, something was standing by his side. Following a dragging sound on the living room carpet, two crystalline eyes appeared in the dark, reflecting the light from the kitchen. An eerie inhuman smile that seemed to bleed through darkness spread wide and caused Wallace to tensed at the sticky wet sound of its cheeks sucking away from its teeth.
Refocusing his attention on the portion of the man's face Wallace could see he tried to take a guess at the man's age, older for sure by the growl of his voice, but he couldn't figure out if that mattered. Did the Orphans have an age cap?
"Sableye, say hi." A twanged voice said as a woman moved out from the darkness directly to Wallace's right. She was dressed in uniform to the man, black hat and bandana that concealed everything under the bridge of her nose, though a long blonde ponytail did hang down her back.
The sableye inched forward, its eldritch hand stroking the air as it clawed toward Wallace. "Ss'eyee," it hissed as its fingers twitched and seemed to move without correlation to one another.
A click followed by a flash of light blinded Wallace who threw his hands up to shield his eyes. "Ah! Who are you? What do you want?"
"Sableye, sugar, use shadow sneak," the woman said.
On the ground, Wallace watched the shadow cast by sableye in combination with the flashlight extend like a macabre painting on the floor until it connected with his shoes. What looked like millions of small extensions broke away from the main shadow, streaking across the floor.
A debilitating chill, like shards of ice scoring the flesh on his back, gripped Wallace stunning him in place as he felt the weight of elgyem on his shoulder grow heavier, before it vanished all together.
As fast as the chill took him it vanished and beads of sweat formed on his brow. Focusing on the floor he watched elgyem being carried off by shadows before he was held securely under the sableye's arm.
"Elgy!" Wallace rushed forward, but the woman's arm shooting out caught him in the throat, sending him sputtering and hacking to the floor. As the woman crossed in front of him Wallace saw the man kick at the back of Andrew's legs, bringing him to his knees before he shoved him to the floor and placed his knee in the middle of his back.
"Now, let's see what you've got on you," the woman said as she lifted a foot and pressed to the base of Wallace's throat.
Wallace gripped her foot, trying to throw her off balance, but her boot only pressed down harder as he struggled.
"Don't fight me, sugar," she said as she crouched and rummaged through his pockets, spilling spinarak and Mila's Poké Balls onto the floor. "No money?" she said. "How disappointing. These two might be a snack for sableye. Hey sugar, you know the legend right? You gaze hard enough to sableye's eyes and it'll steal your soul. Sounds like quite the experience, huh?"
Wallace gasped, violently shaking his head as he managed to slip his hand under the woman's boot, freeing his throat. Wheezing in a breath, Wallace yelled with as much strength as he could muster. "WINK!"
"What's a wink?" The man asked.
The sound of something barreling down the hall drew everyone's attention to the living room as Wink came thrashing into sight and launched himself at the man. Wallace watched with wide eyes as Wink's mouth yawned open, counting each of the totodile's teeth as they sunk into the crook of the man's arm.
The man in black yelped, falling off Andrew and rolling to his back, swinging his arm and sending Wink waving through the air like a flag.
"Ice fang!" Wallace yelled, giving the woman's foot another shove, using the moment of her distraction to throw her off balance.
The woman screamed as she pinwheeled back and slammed onto the floor as Andrew crawled across the living room and retrieved his bag.
"My arm! My arm! Get it off my arm!" the man screamed, flailing from side to side as the woman struggled to get to him.
Sableye stood clueless between the two rooms, its arm smothering elgyem before a ball opening lit up the room. Sableye turned and lowered its gaze to the floor as a dedenne darted into its path.
"Denny, play rough," Andrew said.
"Dede!" Denny chirped as it charged for sableye, leaping at the last minute and tackling the imp to the ground.
Wallace watched the three pokémon vanish under a blur of colors and before a glint of purple light broke out from the tangle of limbs and elgyem reappeared near the ceiling. "Elgy!" Wallace held his arms out as elgyem floated to him, burying his head into Wallace's neck. "You're not hurt are you?"
Elgyem shook his head before he turned and threw his arm out, all of his digits flashing before a beam of multicolored lights, like the tones of a rainbow melded into a ray, shot across the room, striking the woman in her side.
The woman gagged as she was lifted off the floor, her thin legs kicking frantically before she was propelled across the room and send slamming into the wall.
"Toto!"
A harsh sound from Wink brought Wallace's attention the man, standing now, without Wink on his arm. Instead, the water-type lied at his feet, unmoving. Wallace's eyes focused on the man's arm, hanging limp at his side.
"Stupid!" he yelled, lifting his foot over Wink.
"Denny, volt switch!"
Wallace watched Denny detach itself from sableye before electricity haloed its body and it charged at sableye. A ball of yellow light slammed into the imp, sending it into an adjacent wall. Denny bounced off the floor and flew to Andrew who had his hands out. Andrew caught the dedenne and hurled it across the room again, Denny flying toward the man, another ball of yellow light forming ahead of it that crashed into the man and Denny tumbled overhead.
Dropping to a crouch, Andrew scuttled toward the opposite wall and retrieved Denny and Wink then came to Wallace's side, giving the sableye as much attention as a doormat. Andrew's hand gripped Wallace's arms, then shoulder, then the back of his neck. "Are you okay? They came out of nowhere."
"Fine, I'm fine," he panted back. "In the fridge, there's a bag of nuggets and pearls."
"Then they're not..." Andrew's head whipped behind them and then back to the unmoving pair. "They're thieves. They're not Orphans?"
Wallace shook his head and leaned over, resting his hands on his knees, but then dropped into a crouch, gripping his forehead. In his ear he heard elgyem emitting soft beeps of concern while Wink nosed his leg and nipped at the string from his shoes. "I'm okay," he said, swallowing a ball of fear clogging his chest.
"We should call the police," Andrew said, dropping his bag to the floor beside Wallace, the sudden thud of the pack startling him. "Sorry," Andrew said as he dug around inside.
In the time it took Andrew to explain their location and situation to the authorities, Wallace gathered the thieves into a corner of the room, stripping off their hats and bandanas to satisfy his own curiosity that he did not in fact know them. Leaving elgyem and Wink in charge of watching them, he retired to a chair in the kitchen until the police arrived. He remained seated through giving his statement and watched from afar as they escorted the thieves, a married couple stealing from marts along the coastal area of Kalos, out.
"It's getting late," Wallace said from in front of the kitchen window. The light that illuminated the grime in the kitchen came from a single light post several yards behind the house, not even the moon seemed to be able to shed much light through the storm clouds. "Do you want to stay here, or head back to Shalour? Coumarine is a ways off," he said, glancing to Antionette's map spread on the table.
Andrew sat on the floor, playing with a length of rope he found to drag across the floor for his dedenne. "We don't have to do this," he said, dropping the rope on Denny's head, the dedenne looking confused and insulted at the same time.
"What does that mean?" Wallace asked.
"This trip," Andrew said. "I know you did it for me. You could have taken the Badlands to Coumarine, or flown, or had Elgy take you immediately. I don't know if this was some kind of trip to make up for lost time, but you don't owe me an adventure." Andrew used the wall to push himself off and dusted off his pants
Wallace shrugged, averting his eyes to elgyem and Wink eating berries off a stack of paper towels. "I just thought, since we never did get to go off together as kids. And I don't know what will happen while I'm away."
"As long as you come back alive it doesn't matter what happens," he said, one hand clapping on Wallace's back as he pulled him in for a hug. "Be stupid, be brave, just come back alive."
"Right," Wallace muttered into his best friend's shoulder before they began to part, but Wallace dug in and held Andrew in place. "I want to help," he whispered.
"What?"
"You asked if I was going to give this up, my old life. I am, but I never told you why," Wallace said, his eyes focused on a sliver of light cast onto the floor. "It's because I want to help. When I ran, I did it for myself. I made a new life for myself. I lied to protect myself. And somehow I made it through hell, but in the process on rejoining the world, I set it on fire by introducing the Orphans to the people who tried to help me at school. And there's no one I can blame for that, but myself. A boy, his name was Dirk, is dead because of them, because of me. A boy, his name is Nat, he's burned beyond belief and he lost a pokémon, because of them, because of me. Arlette is dead, because of me."
Wallace gasped at feeling Andrew's hands tightening on his shoulders as he held him at arm's length, his blue eyes darting in their sockets.
"What?" he asked. "No, she fell. Wallace."
"She fell," Wallace said, nodding as biting his lip as his eyes burned with the onset of tears. "But she never would have made it to the roof if it wasn't for me. She was the only one who knew it all, and the idea of that, that she knew everything, that she pieced it together so easily terrified me. So I made her feel small, and stupid, and like she was worthless and that you never loved her, that what she'd based her life around, finding the truth for you, was pointless. I drove her to the edge, and I pulled her back, but it wasn't enough."
Andrew's hands fell from Wallace's shoulder as he backed into the living room and walked the length of the carpet. Wallace watched, unable to speak as Andrew grabbed his pack and opened it, spilling out his supplies. "Get your bag open," Andrew said.
They spent the next several minutes working in silence, laying out their combined supplies and piling most of it back into Andrew's bag. Things Wallace wouldn't need at school like a tent and other camping supplies were stuffed alongside Andrew's supplies, while packaged for the pokémon was divided up.
Wallace held Wink in the crook of his arm, though the totodile had packed on much weight in the past nine months and just hung there, happily, as elgyem touched the back of Wallace's head. "In just a handful of months I managed to ruin numerous lives, just by being there," Wallace said, catching Andrew off guard who stood across the house, leaning by the windows, bars of moonlight crossing his face. "Imagine what I could do if I put my mind toward helping them, if I put half as much effort into other people as I put into myself, imagine what I could do. I'm going to stop the Orphans, it's stupid and it's brave. But it's what I'm going to do." Wallace offered Andrew a smile and a short wave before elgyem made a series of low beeps and his vision flooded with purple light.
End of Chapter Thirty Five
AN: Annnd we're back.
Question of the Chapter #34: What do you think Wallace's sophomore year at school will be like?