the point where i finally admit to myself that i have absolutely no idea how long this arc is gonna end up being
Pikachu's not here is the first thing Dawn notices.
The second thing she notices is Palkia.
Until she met Brock, Dawn didn't think of herself as religious. Brock asks her questions sometimes about the trivia he reads in his travel guides, and they always trip her up because she didn't think they were things that had to be explained to anyone. What's the significance of lakes? Why are the columns in museums fluted the same way across the region? Why do calendars keep track of the lunar cycle?
(Ash is Kantoan too, but he doesn't ask those questions. Brock said once, to Pikachu's enthusiastic agreement, that this is because Ash is a bad example for anything except Ash.)
By Sinnohan standards, Dawn's not unusual. It was only common sense to stow a Mesprit charm in her pencil bag when she decided to talk to the older kid she liked back in school, like it was common sense to buy one of Cresselia's feathers to wear for a good night's rest the night before an important pokémon contest. She believes in the prevalence of the trinity and Cresselia's benevolence and the hidden land where Arceus stood when it brought about creation because those are facts of the world.
Organized religion was tied so closely to the way the old kingdoms governed that the Indigo League thought they had to stamp it out entirely to conquer the region. The thing is, though, that the Sinnohan concept of religion was too different from the invaders'. Like Alola and Unova, Sinnoh has traditions of asking their gods for favors – real favors, not Kanto's weird business of building shrines in the middle of nowhere and asking their legends to pretty please stay there and don't bother anyone. The three regions that made up the League at the time couldn't wrap their heads around it. Hoenn in particular was utterly appalled.
Though they tried, they couldn't destroy what they didn't understand. Enough survived under different names that, centuries after the unification of Sinnoh, a ten-year old girl who failed her mythology module in school (though it was from truancy, to be clear) still knows her home's legendaries by heart, what they can do and how a human should convince them to do it.
Dawn knows Palkia as the god who can't be convinced. Can't be bribed. Can't be threatened. Can't be negotiated with at all. Humans and pokémon have tried. It doesn't go well. The best way to manage Palkia is to get out of its way and repair the damage after it leaves.
Alola can back Sinnoh up on that claim. Dawn has never learned the details of the story, but she's heard the really important parts: Palkia riled up the Alolan pantheon somehow, the Alolan pantheon confronted it, and now the archipelago keeps track of wormhole sightings in its weather reports right under the temperature and the chances of cloudy skies.
The dragon of space is as much natural disaster as it is pokémon. That's the role it takes on in the old myths. In what legends it appears in, it's neither villain nor hero but instead the obstacle whose sudden entrance instantly derails everyone else's carefully laid plans. It's not undefeated – people have driven it off before. But not easily. Not without cost.
Even beyond its strength, it has reasons for appearing where it does, and stopping it from doing its work results in crises like Alola's.
Meanwhile, letting it do its work results in widespread damage, unless its friendlier counterpart Dialga, protector of time and the second of the two dragons under Arceus, is on hand and willing to try talking it down.
Dawn saw Palkia in the air on the way over. It would've been impossible to miss even if it wasn't fighting the pokémon Ash was looking for, but, since it was, its appearance also came with a revelation, and a sinking feeling: Darkrai really is the one responsible for what happened to the town. Palkia wouldn't have come after it otherwise.
But Palkia is just as much in the wrong. It doesn't need to go this far to make Darkrai stop. Dawn and Ash and Piplup have come across giant, still-widening holes in the ground, opening up not to earth but to the same angry clouds that make up the sky, and they've seen buildings shattered and smoking and flooded, the bricks melted to slag and blown across a city block. Festival stalls halfway to vaporized, trees cracked and toppling, lampposts torn from the ground and crumpled from water blasts. It's made the town into its battlefield.
Maybe Palkia's being so free with its attacks because it understands it won't hurt anyone. Dawn wants to think that, she does – but she's a practical sort. Wishing alone won't change a thing's nature. Not for Palkia, and not for Darkrai either. She knows their stories.
No one is in immediate peril just yet, though, so Dawn sets Piplup on the ground, then snatches her water from her bag and downs the bottle. Ash copies her. Both of them have sweat dripping down their hair and clothes. They ran two miles at close to a sprint over ground littered with debris, and Dawn carried Piplup when it couldn't keep up. At least their camping supplies are off with Brock by the lake. Dawn wouldn't still be on her feet otherwise. She crouches and shows the bottle to Piplup to refill, and the dust swarming thick in the air scratches inside her throat as she pants. Staravia, not tired at all, lands on an exposed wooden beam peeking out of the blasted ruin of a wall.
Ash gets his breath back first. He brings his hands to his mouth to call up to the darkrai watching them, but Dawn interrupts without thinking, grabbing his ankle. "Ash," she hisses. Her voice is low, even up against the silence that's no longer filled by Palkia's assault. She wants it that way. Palkia's either asleep or downed, which is bad, but Dawn does not want to be the first thing it hears when it wakes up either in case it gets the idea that she and her friends are here to fight it. She's proud of her team, but it doesn't shame her or them to admit that they can't go toe to toe with a pokémon even Champions won't face alone.
That Darkrai can is pretty worrying. Palkia has a couple of scratches here and there, the blood clotting in them clear like diamond more than water, faceted beneath light, and clean despite the dust settled across the rest of its pale hide. Those types of injuries Dawn would expect of any pokémon who's just come out of a battle, but there's also a dark, deep, jagged crater in Palkia's shoulder that makes her flinch. Darkrai's not playing by League rules. If the attack that did it had taken Palkia in the head...
She swallows, stands – Ash catches her when her legs try to give out – and asks him, "Don't you know who that is?"
He reaches for his pokédex, which is not an answer. Ash consults his pokédex most every time he meets a new pokémon, even when he already recognizes the species. It's because people are constantly discovering new things about pokémon, he's told her, and so the pokédex always has something new to tell him when he asks.
"Palkia, huh?" he says after a moment of reading the screen.
He might be older than Dawn, but he's not any taller. It's easy to lean over his shoulder and skim the text. Legendary pokémon, only known member of its species, ability to distort space, right, okay, but is there any context here? Any mention of how it only appears around spacial anomalies? Directions to immediately beat a tactical retreat and contact the authorities if you see it? Maybe if she scrolls to the right – but Ash is already flipping it closed and stowing it away, perfectly content with the summary blurb on the first page. If the circumstances were different he might keep reading, but he doesn't think he needs to, and in any case his partner has been missing for two hours, which trumps everything.
Dawn shakes her head. He doesn't understand. Piplup takes Ash's sock in its beak and tugs, getting him to look down, and with his attention caught Dawn says again, tighter, "Ash. Listen, Palkia only turns up when something, or someone, is messing with space. They were right. Darkrai's evil." Asking it for directions to Pikachu isn't a good idea.
"Messing with space?" Ash repeats, dubious, pointing a thumb at the frothing sky.
"Like space-time, not like outer space."
He gasps and turns wide-eyed to the tower in the distance with its pink- and blue-accented spires. "Okay, that one got me," he mutters, then he looks back to Dawn. "There's a pokémon that shows up when someone messes with time, right?"
Dawn blinks. "Should we be talking about that right now?"
He nods. Nothing else.
"Sure, Dialga does," she says.
"Is Dialga blue?"
"Yes," she says warily. Piplup, to the contrary, leans in like a particularly feathery sunflower to hang onto Ash's every word. A quiet warble bubbles in its chest and softens.
Ash is side-eyeing Palkia now. "Do you know what type it is?"
"Dragon and steel."
"Dragon and steel," he muses. "What is that weak to? Is it fire?"
"Where is this going? Is it anywhere I want to be in thirty miles of?"
"It'll all work out," he tells her apropos of absolutely nothing. Things have always worked out for Dawn since she became a trainer so she doesn't doubt him in the least, but also this conversation has been bulldozing through a lot of neon-bright warning signs.
"Dialga isn't actually going to come here, is it?"
"Maybe keep an eye out," Ash suggests.
He's not smiling, but he's not frowning either. He looks thoughtful. His starter is missing, he's standing in an evacuated town turned into a battlefield for legends, and he looks thoughtful. Dawn almost tells Pikachu to zap him to shock him out of his sleep talking or exorcise the spirit possessing him or reveal the doppelganger who's stolen his place, but the obvious problem with the plan keeps her from going through.
The spell doesn't last. He startles suddenly; then he shouts up, heedless of the unconscious dragon-god nearby and Dawn's frantic shushing, "Darkrai! Where's Pikachu?"
Darkrai's still quiet overhead, watching them with a narrowed, glowing eye and hearing every word said about it. It's doing scarily well against Palkia, but it doesn't look unscathed in return. Dawn's not entirely sure how she can tell, but she can. It feels different. Most of its body was an absence of color when she last saw it, a shadow for light to tiptoe around. Now it's simply black. Not to mention its scarlet collar is marked with angry scratches and scuff marks, not all of which are from Palkia.
"Ash – "
"I don't know what's happening, not really," Ash says, "but I think Darkrai does. I trust it."
It would know what's happening, being the one who caused it, she thinks with no small amount of hurt. Alice and Tonio and Ash and Brock believed in it.
Ash still believes in it. He must have – probably has – a reason. He's a terrible judge of character when it comes to people, but she can only remember a few times he's been wrong about pokémon, and those times were when a human rubbed him the wrong way and he projected it onto the pokémon. But dark types are the exception to a lot of rules. "Why are you on its side?"
"It doesn't want to hurt Alamos," he answers, confident as he's ever been. "It's got a home here too. And – do you know what it's spent the last few days doing?"
"Scaring people," Dawn says dubiously.
"Well, that, but it was also looking for unown."
"For what?"
"Pokémon who can shape reality."
He uses the plural, like reality warping is just a normal skill an entire species of pokémon should be able to do, and Dawn is briefly very alarmed until she remembers that if they were actually that powerful then she would have heard of them before. They probably only break reality a little bit. That's not scary.
"We didn't find any – I mean, I don't think we found any, Pikachu and Darkrai might have after I fainted, but even though we didn't find any the fact that it was looking for them means something, doesn't it? It thought it knew what the problem was. It was trying to fix things. It's not responsible for this. It's also," he adds, "not the one destroying the town."
It is not, Dawn concedes. She hesitates, turning the situation over in her head. Deliberately, the words slotting into place with weight, she says, "They can't keep on fighting."
Ash trusts Darkrai, but Dawn can't do the same, can't put her faith into a creature that Palkia is targeting. There's no middle ground to find there. So she reaches for the crossroads that they can always find a meeting point at: something needs to be done, and they're in a position to do it. A fact, a decision, and a plan of action all in one.
It doesn't matter that they don't agree on which pokémon is more at fault. Palkia and Darkrai's battle is hurting the town, so it has to stop. Both pokémon have to stop. Any more can come after.
Ash nods. "Yeah. Let's talk to Darkrai first."
Then suddenly, completely out of the blue, Dawn thinks that Pikachu is at the Space-Time Tower.
It takes Piplup's startled squeak and the belated realization that her thought-voice isn't nearly that deep for her to recognize the telepathy. By Dawn's feet Piplup glares up at Darkrai and fluffs its feathers out.
"Why aren't you together?" Ash calls.
Darkrai fails to reply immediately. The moments crawl by, measured by Piplup's slowly growing circumference and Dawn's quickly growing unease. "Darkrai?" Ash tries again.
"He's hurt."
Dawn feels her breath catch. Ash jolts, stumbles a little in place. "What. How?"
"Palkia," Dawn realizes, or thinks she realizes – she has no evidence, none at all, she can't name where the spark of fast-fading certainty came from. But the word is already spoken even as her mind turns from it, and the world is already responding.
"Yes," Darkrai confirms. "Alicia is at the tower."
Who?
Ash is done with questions. Staravia spreads his wings unprompted just before Ash takes off towards the tower, but the trainer barely makes it two steps before a swarm of lights converges on his pokémon.
A familiar swarm of lights. "Ash! Tell him don't attack!"
The stars burst around Staravia. The gust of chill air that follows the explosions reaches to the ground.
As soon as Staravia recovers his balance, he veers around and pulls his wings in to stoop. Ash's command pulls him hastily out of the dive, leaving him stranded in a hover, chattering with feeling at something hidden behind Palkia.
Piplup hurries to join the commotion, vanishing from sight once he circles around Palkia's feet. Ash tears his attention away from his pokémon, looking to Dawn for an answer. "That was the pokémon from the square," she says, raising her voice over Staravia's outrage. If the explosions just now didn't get Palkia to wake up, then Dawn not even yelling isn't likely to finish the job.
"Why did it – ?" Ash waves at the tiny snowflakes still glimmering in the air.
"It doesn't know how to talk, so it just fights instead, I think." That's the consensus the trainers who fought it came together with – though maybe that's a stretch to claim. Dawn corrects herself: it's the consensus the older trainers came together with, and one girl Dawn's age who petted her staravia the whole while and didn't look up from its head when she spoke. Dawn nodded along because their conclusion made sense, but she couldn't follow the path they took to reach it.
Ash frowns just the way Brock did when they discussed it, expression trapped between discomfort and concern. "Oh, no, I hate that."
"What?"
"There's something horrible that people can do," he says, and then he stops, breathes in and looks Staravia's way. "I'll explain it later. Or Brock will, he'll be better actually." Back to Dawn now, his expression suddenly, inexplicably guilty: "I have to – Pikachu is – "
She pushes his shoulder. "Go. I'll figure out what it wants, you don't need to stick around." She's worried too – how hurt is hurt? – but someone needs to stay here, and she couldn't keep up with Ash anyway.
Ash nods, already turning. "Staravia, stay with Dawn!" he shouts, and then he's running as if he's never felt exhausted in his life.
Darkrai crosses its arms and watch him leave out of the corner of its eye. It's a weird situation, Dawn thinks. Between Darkrai and the strange pokémon, there's one she knows she can trust, but that's also the one she has to talk to right now so she can make sure it won't hurt somebody.
She finds it with Piplup trying to fuss over it and Staravia hovering in front of it with narrowed eyes. It's caked in grey dust except for a few rather large splatters of Palkia's blood. Its left sleeve is shredded, but Dawn can't even see what it looks like underneath because its arm is covered in its own drying blood.
It must have stayed at street level, where Dawn and Ash couldn't see it on the way over, but it obviously tried to fight Palkia too, and came off badly for it.
"You didn't have to do that," Dawn says, meaning the attack on Staravia. The pokémon doesn't understand, but there are still a lot of things that talking is useful for even after the words have lost meaning.
The pokémon tilts its head her way at her voice and subtly edges away from Piplup, who notices immediately and sets its flippers on its hips. Dawn's starter somehow actually enjoyed the fight back at the square and has wanted to make friends with its former opponent for a while now, since making friends is the best way to get a rematch, but the wild pokémon's shyness and giant ghost dragon protector have been handily foiling Piplup's plots.
Dawn swings her bag over her shoulder and finds one of the potions she keeps inside. It's not meant for anything much worse than a surface injury, but it should at least help with any pain and quicken the healing process.
The pokémon obviously wants something – it never followed up on its attack once it'd gotten their attention – but whatever that is can wait another thirty seconds. Hopefully. (Palkia is right there.) "Can I see your arm?" she asks, gesturing.
It doesn't react.
"Okay, that won't work." Dawn holds up her hand and sprays a scattering of potion onto her own palm instead.
The pokémon's heel scuffs backwards as soon as she presses down on the lever, and Dawn frowns and holds still. It might not know what a spray bottle is. "Piplup," she calls. She winces as she crouches down to meet her starter. She really wants to just sit on a bench for a few hours, but since that's not going to happen she'd really appreciate it if her thighs stopped whining about it.
She takes Piplup's left flipper and squirts a mist across the feathers. "See? It's fine," she says up to the other pokémon.
Staravia finally lands, the bird's feathers still ruffled and his expression still unhappy, but the wild pokémon doesn't back away. Progress! "And now the hard part," Dawn mutters. With way too much effort she manages to stand most of the way. She falters at the end, but before she has a chance to recover a gloved hand grabs her arm. "Thank you," she says on pure reflex.
The pokémon retreats the instant Dawn's steady on her feet again. Its hand stays raised partway as if it doesn't know what to do with it. Dawn holds the potion out to it. "Here – " she begins, but she breaks off as she realizes that she's not entirely sure if she means for it to come closer so she can have a look at its arm or if she means for it to take the potion itself.
This is a lot harder than she'd thought it would be.
It's also an interaction she would really prefer to be having in any place that isn't right next to Palkia.
Thirty seconds, she thought earlier. She's not a liar.
She does something rash then. Is making sudden movements around a skittish wild pokémon a very bad idea? Yes. Is it a worse idea than leaving one injured near Palkia? No, it's definitely not. "Piplup, Staravia, watch my back," she says, trying for gentle, and grabs the pokémon's hand.
Her grip is too tight – she fully expects to have to stop it from pulling away (though she doesn't have any contingency for if it ghosts) and is surprised when it doesn't even flinch. It lets her apply the potion, and when she lets go it brushes a finger again the already-sealing skin and brings it up to its mask.
Dawn considers calling Darkrai down too. But... does she really want to heal it when it's going to keep fighting if Palkia gets up? It's probably not far from its fainting threshold. She shouldn't change that.
"So what did you attack us for?" Dawn muses. She waves to get the pokémon's attention, then points out where its stars connected with Staravia. No response. "Hey, Staravia, can you go over there for a second? To where it attacked you?"
The pokémon turns its head to track the bird. There's a definite reaction as Staravia settles into a hover, but Dawn can't call tensing up an answer.
Suddenly, moving together, Darkrai flinches as if from a blow – for a bare instant its silhouette breaks apart into something thin and warped – while the pokémon on the ground bursts into motion towards the still-unconscious Palkia. Like a weird mammalian dragon claw, shaggy fur overtakes its uninjured arm. The talons its fingers become hit the pearl in Palkia's shoulder, but they skitter harmlessly across without leaving a scratch.
It backs hurriedly away, fur retracting, and now – and now Palkia stirs.
Here's what Dawn knows: Palkia can't be talked down from a fight, certainly nobody present (except maybe, maybe Darkrai) can beat it in a fight, Dawn has no way to make it stop fighting, and Dawn needs to make it stop fighting.
It's after Darkrai. If Darkrai isn't in Alamos, then –
But the thought doesn't make it any further, because that's when the pokémon kicks her feet out from under her, scoops her up before she can do more than yelp, and books it. "Wait wait wait – Piplup!" She flails against its hold as it jumps over the ice beam Piplup aims at its legs, because she's seen it do this before, she's definitely seen this before, wow is it uncomfortable being on the receiving end of it, and then the pokémon has the gall to just up and toss her. She just has time to see her landing spot – a pane of glass on the ground that used to belong to a large mirror – before she falls through it.
She hits the ground in a different dimension. She's on her feet in an instant, exhaustion lost to the wind, but the portal's already snapping closed. She gapes, heart thudding.
The doorway opens again. She leaps for it and crashes straight into a diving Staravia, whose momentum sends them both sprawling on the wrong side of the mirror.
She sits up as Staravia flutters off of her. "Piplup!"
Something's changed about this place. The strange views in the distance are darker than they were, as if the air in the stretches between them has gone murky. There's a vibration thrumming through the floating island that travels into her bones. Dawn knows it's not only her because Staravia is shifting on his feet too, wary.
And all of the doorways that stood open to Alamos are gone. The only portal remaining leads to the lake.
The ghost dragon hovers by the walkway with a half dozen of its window bubbles arrayed around it, each showing a different angle of Palkia clipping its friend with a water blast. The attack throws the pokémon clean off its feet – it lands well, quickly rolling back upright even with its shoulder newly dislocated, but then somehow Palkia's on top of it and it doesn't manage to avoid the next blow either. The god all but swats it aside.
This time it doesn't get up so easily. Or at all. While Darkrai catches Palkia's attention with a dark pulse, it pushes itself shakily to one knee, tries to go further and abruptly stops. Carefully, carefully it settles back down.
The tremors under Dawn grow stronger. She jolts with the realization that they're coming from the ghost dragon, who's growling, very, very loudly, at a frequency so low she can just barely hear it when she focuses.
She doesn't know how powerful this ghost is, but there's not really such a thing as a weak adult dragon. It's bigger than Palkia, too. It might be able to at least slow the god down. But it's still not making any move to interfere. Can it not make portals big enough for itself to fit through? Maybe it thinks Palkia is so much stronger than it that involving itself isn't worth the effort?
Trinity's sight, but she really hopes that's not why.
"Hey! Hey!" she shouts. Luminous red eyes turn her way. "Can't you do something?"
A bubble shimmers into being in front of her. She gets a slightly slanted view of Piplup firing a bubble beam at the literal god who in two strikes brought down the pokémon Piplup could barely touch. Thankfully, Palkia doesn't retaliate. It doesn't actually seem to notice at all. Dawn claps herself on the back for her foresight in completely failing to teach her starter anything about elemental resistances. Ignorance has never paid off more.
She's relieved that Piplup's keeping out of trouble (even if it's not at all for lack of trying), but that's also not what she was asking.
She bites her lip. Okay. Okay.
Maybe this isn't all a bad thing. She's shut out of the physical town, but she has clear access to its people again. Someone has to know what to do. She reaches out to stroke Staravia's feathers. "Go and find Brock," she tells him, and with a sharp nod he shoots off for the lake.