Liminal Chapter 3: Illness, a pokémon fanfic

You wake up the next morning with a splitting headache.

It's worse than the other headaches you've had. Your brain throbs and you can barely see straight. You don't want to move, that's how bad the pain is.

You don't want to see Nurse Remedy, but you promised Meteora that you'd go to the infirmary when you woke up. Besides, you are growing tired of these migraines.

You see that everyone else in the room is still asleep, so you keep quiet. You get on all fours and you hobble out the bedroom. You're thankful that it's easier to balance yourself on four legs instead of two.

Mercifully, the infirmary isn't far from your room. You only need to walk down a couple of hallways to reach it. When you enter, you find that there are already a few Pokémon here and laying on the fur beds that rest near the walls in neat, articulate rows. Everyone here seems to have minor injuries like sprained legs or burns, nothing serious like bleeding. It seems that your headache troubles would fit right in here.

You hear movement near you, and you turn to see an Audino walking toward you. She wears a neckerchief with the sigil of a Chansey egg etched onto it. You imagine this is what nurses wear to distinguish themselves from the other Pokémon that work in the guild.

Since you're both of similar height, she doesn't seem intimidated when she stops before you.

"Welcome," she says with a pleasant tune to her voice. "I presume you're here for medical treatment."

"I am," you answer.

"Then you've come to the right place! I'm Nurse Remedy. Can I have your name and team name?"

"Lyssa from Team Invictus."

"Team Invictus, you say? I didn't realize they had a Zangoose on their team now. Are you new?"

"Yeah, I joined not too long ago."

"Ah, I see. Well, it's a pleasure to meet you, Lyssa. Now, what can I help you with?"

"I've been getting a lot of headaches for the past couple of weeks. They usually go away after an hour, but I've had about seven of them as of now and they're very annoying. My leader said you could do something about it."

"Hmmm, headaches. Is there a reason for them? Have you hurt your head recently?"

"Not that I'm aware of."

"I see. Hmm. Can I look over you for just a moment with my feelers? It'll help me figure out what might be causing you pain."

"Go ahead."

The Audino nods before grabbing hold of one of the appendages dangling from her ears and unrolls it. She then presses it to your arm. It feels weird, like a furry tentacle. You try not to move as the nurse assesses you, silently gauging your health and heart.

After a few moments, she pulls her feeler away and lets it roll back up to her ears.

"Well I can most certainly see that you're in pain," she says with an empathetic smile. "Goodness, that headache nearly knocked me off my own feet. However, I'm not seeing any particular reason for the pain. You have no signs of head trauma, and you have no underlying illnesses."

You're disappointed, but you don't dare say that.

"I do have something that might make you feel better though," she then says. "However, I need time to prepare it. Would you mind taking one of the beds and waiting there for a little while? Laying down might also help with soothing your head until I come back."

You nod, and Nurse Remedy disappears elsewhere inside the infirmary behind closed doors. You look around, searching for the nearest open bed. You eventually spot one that seems to be made from Flareon fur. You make your way over before flopping onto the soft fur. It feels warm against your own fur, as though it were a living Flareon. It feels so comforting that it actually does make your headache ease down, if only a little.

"Oh hello there, Lyssa. Wasn't expecting to see you here."

You abruptly sit up to the sudden, familiar voice. Laying in the bed next to you is Gallows. She's smiling at you in a way that's meant to be friendly, but the sight of her exposed canines makes your fur stand up instead. She stops smiling once she sees your startled reaction and crosses her forepaws.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to scare you," she says. "I was just surprised to see you here."

"It's fine," you say as you brush your claws through your tail in an attempt to settle down. "I wasn't expecting to see you here either."

"Yeah, well no one really expects to be in the infirmary. My horn's been acting up all morning and it's making it hard to see straight. I can barely stand without wanting to fall over. I came here to see if Nurse Remedy could give me something to numb the horn down a little."

"Is there a reason why your horn is being that way? Doesn't that mean something catastrophic is supposed to happen?"

"Well yes… but there's more to it than that. What counts as a 'disaster' to it can sometimes be something as petty or insignificant as the market running out of heal seeds right when I get there. Which is exactly what I keep seeing in my visions as of this morning."

You're surprised to hear that. You would have thought Absol horns were more selective on what they perceived. Yet apparently, even an inconvenience could count as a disaster to an Absol. You can't imagine how annoying that must be.

"What brings you down here?" she then asks.

"Another bad headache like what I had last night. It hurts a lot more than the one I also had last night though."

The Absol nods quietly to herself. She then keeps the silence between you two, either because she realizes talking would make both of your heads worse, or she has nothing more to say. You don't mind either way. You instead lay back down and tolerate the pain.

A few minutes later, Nurse Remedy returns with a small cup in her paw. You sit up as you slowly take the cup. It's warm and brimming with a strange, yellowish liquid. You give it a few sniffs and realize it smells a lot like flowers.

"It's chamomile tea," the Audino says. "Drinking it should help your headache."

Chamomile, right. You've seen this flower a few times. It always had a nice smell to it, but you never thought of eating it or taking its dried leaves and making a tea out of that. Why would you, as a strict meat-eater who can barely tolerate orans? However, there's no harm in drinking this concoction. It's not poison and even if it was, it wouldn't work on you.

You take a few sips of the tea. It has a sweet, honey-like taste to it.

"It'll take a few moments, but it should ease away your headache," Nurse Audino then says. "If it doesn't, we can try something else."

"Thanks," you say graciously.

The Audino rolls one of her feelers back and forth in her paw as she frowns thoughtfully.

"Are you under any emotional stress?" she then asks. "You seemed fine when I examined you, but I can't always feel emotions from the past unless they're actively interfering with your present."

"I don't think so. I've been a little stressed with all of this scouting work since I just joined, but not that much. The worst that's happened is that I was attacked by some dungeon denizen, but that was it."

"Yes, you did mention you just joined the guild. How long ago exactly did you join Team Invictus?"

"A little over two weeks ago."

"Ah. Well that could be the cause of your headaches. Joining a scouting guild means you're learning an awful lot in a short amount of time and adapting to a completely new life away from family and friends you once knew. This is especially true if you go into the dungeons and are attacked by the denizens. It's a scary, stressful experience. Your body could be reacting to this stress through headaches."

Again, you don't think you're stressed. Sure, everything is different and that's a little overwhelming sometimes, but you think you're dealing with it well. Especially because your teammates are so nice and thoughtful. They're helping make this transition easy.

However, you do realize the nurse might have a point. Maybe you really are stressed, but because you're so used to toughing things out and ignoring negative feelings, you're not really feeling stress the way everyone else does. Maybe it's manifesting as headaches instead. It would also line up with the fact that these headaches only started a little while after you joined the team.

You're not entirely sure what to think. All you know is that you want these headaches to stop.

"Maybe I'm stressed," you say simply. "What do I do about it though?"

"Well thankfully there's lots you can do," the nurse answers with a smile. "There's relaxation techniques, breathing exercises, meditating, all sorts of things. I can tell you all about them, if you'd like."

You would. And that's exactly how you spend the next half hour with the Audino after the tea has eased your headache. She teaches you about writing down your feelings in a journal, taking long baths at the end of the day, taking leisurely strolls outside after missions, and simply taking the time to have fun. After the conversation, you thank her for taking care of you and she gives you a bag of dried chamomile leaves to make your own tea if you don't want to come down to the infirmary.

You thank her again and take your leave, ready for a new day. You hope your team hasn't woken up yet. You don't want to worry them.

You barely make it into the hallway when you feel a presence behind you. You stop and turn around and are surprised to see it's Gallows standing there. She had claimed she could barely stand up straight because of her horn, yet she shows no sign of weakness in her stature.

Something strange flickers in the Absol's eyes. It's something you can't put a name on, but you know that it's something dangerous.

"Lyssa, I have a strange question for you," she says, her tone level, yet there is an eerie undertone to it.

"Yes?" you ask as you ignore the hairs rising on your neck.

"You'll have to forgive me for eavesdropping, but I overheard you telling the nurse that you were attacked by a dungeon denizen. Is that true?"

"I was, yes."

"When you were attacked, what did it do to you?"

"Huh?"

The Absol frowns and steps closer. You resist taking a step back in return.

"What did that Manectric do to you when it attacked?"

You're taken aback. You don't remember ever telling the nurse that a Manectric bit you. You had just said it was a dungeon denizen. You don't know how it's possible that Gallows knows what species that thing was pretending to be.

But you still answer, just because the shock of it all forces the words out of your mouth.

"It bit my arm. It tried to attack my neck, but I killed it before it could."

Gallows doesn't say anything as she keeps her dark red eyes on you. You feel your claws shooting out of your paws and you desperately retract them. You two continue to stare at one another, neither saying a word, until at last, Gallows looks away.

"I see," she says matter-of-factly.

Then she leaves. You try to follow after her, but somehow, she's much faster than you. By the time you stand where she once was, she's already fled somewhere far away and retreated into the vanishing shadows of the guild.

When you come back to your bedroom, your team is just starting to wake up. They ask where you had been and you tell them how you finally visited the nurse. You omit to tell them about what had happened with Gallows, but you will later. You want to pick out a mission first before the best ones are taken.

All four of you head down to the bulletin board and scanned through all of the papers. A majority of them are scouting missions of course, which gives you quite the variety of options to choose from. One paper asks a team to enter Black Bog and bring back as many Passho berries as possible, each running at fifty Poké. Another asks for a team to collect five feathers from the Skarmory denizens of Dagger Mountain. Yet another asks to collect three Heal Seeds from Emerald Jungle.

As you've come to realize over your time on Team Invictus, item retrieval jobs were the main assignments in Scouting Guilds. Teams did not rescue Pokémon that had wandered into dungeons for the most part. That was a rare occurrence, as Pokémon were told the moment they hatched to stay far away lest they lose themselves to the dungeon. Though the denizens weren't real Pokémon, they could still hurt you, and they would kill you without hesitation. Everyone, even the most dim-witted of Pokémon, heeded those warnings and stayed far away from the dungeons.

Only scouts entered dungeons and gathered precious items that seemed to appear within the labyrinths or were elusive otherwise, such as the case with the Combee honey your team got on your first mission. Hives still existed in the real world, but they were becoming harder and harder to find. Something was killing all the Combee and their queen and the only ones that seemed left were the ones within dungeons.

The mission your team decided upon for the day was collecting a Thunder Stone for a family of Pikachu. You would be getting this stone from the Mt. Crackle dungeon since for whatever reason, the dungeon tended to produce these stones. It was a short dungeon, only a mere ten floors tall and home to mostly electric-types. Everyone agreed it would be an easy mission, as none of you had any electrical weaknesses.

The journey to the mountain is a couple of hours. When you and your team arrive, you take in the mountainous dungeon. It looks to be made out of several yellow, jagged rocks that have been fused together hazardously. It makes the dungeon look less like a mountain and more like a vertical nest of spikes. You even think you see some bodies impaled on spikes further up the mountain, but they're too far away to know for sure.

The dungeon's summit is buried within a black storm cloud. Occasionally white bolts of lightning fire from the cloud and streak across the sky, but there is no sound. There is no rumbling beneath your feet. There is only a strike and a flash, then nothing.

There is a single, dark hole at the base of the mountain, the entrance to the dungeon. You peer into it but cannot see anything inside. However, you do hear something from within. Something faint and barely above a whisper.

You feel someone's breath against your ear as they whisper something in your ear. There is no one standing next to you, but you feel them. They've crawled out of the dungeon and they're with you. They're surrounding you and wrapping their ghostly tendrils around your body, holding you tight as they endlessly whisper these words to you.

You should be scared, but you're not. No, there is something soothing to this voice, to this entity that now engulfs you. It reminds you of when you felt protected and sheltered as a young kit by those who loved you. It reminds you of home. Yes, home.

"Hey Lyssa!"

You blink and suddenly the presence is gone. You look around, as though expecting to see where the entity has fled, but of course they are nowhere to be seen. They have vanished and taken their voice with them.

You can't comprehend what has happened. You try to think about it, but then realize you don't remember what the presence was even saying. It was as though it had plucked those words directly from your memories.

"Hey! You okay?"

You turn and see Meteora and the others staring at you. They're all lined up and ready to take on the dungeon. You open your mouth to explain what just happened.

You don't remember what you wanted to say. That's strange. What did you want to tell your teammates? Why do you suddenly not remember?

Oh, that's right. You remember now.

You wanted to tell them about what happened with Gallows. You know she's friendly, but that encounter was deeply unsettling. She looked more like a dungeon denizen than an actual Pokémon.

What were you thinking about just now?

You shake your head. Everything's fine. Nothing's the matter. You don't even remember what you were worried about.

You've been keeping your teammates waiting. You should stop stalling and get on with the mission.

"Sorry, I think I blacked out there for a second," you say. "Are we going inside now?"

"We sure are!" Meteora says with a big smile. "I'm taking the lead, Grey's right behind me, and you're taking the rear! That sound good to you?"

"Yeah, it's fine."

You take your position behind the Furfrou. As you do so, Camellia walks up to you and looks into your eyes with a shy smile.

"Hey… do you think I could hitch a ride on you for this dungeon?" she asks. "The rocky ground really hurts my paws. I'll be sure to keep a look-out in return though! "

"I don't see why not. Just be careful not to shock me. It would be a problem for both of us if you paralyzed me."

"Oh don't worry! I'll be extra careful about that!"

She then climbs onto you and settles herself on your back. She's thankfully not heavy, so you barely notice her on you. That's good, because you were worried you wouldn't move as quickly while carrying the Emolga.

"Alright team!" Meteora then announces from the front. "Let's get ourselves a Thunder Stone! We only need one, so the second we find one, we're leaving! Understood?"

Everyone nods in agreement. With that settled, all four of you then head inside the dungeon, stepping into the darkness that is the entrance.

The inside of the dungeon is not much different from the outside. The walls are made up of those same jagged rocks, but they seem longer, sharper here. You feel that if someone threw you into a wall, the spikes would penetrate your organs. You would die a slow, painful death as you bled out all over the dungeon, if a spike didn't skewer your heart or brain first.

At least the ground is fairly safe. It's the usual rocky terrain one would expect on a normal mountain, except there is no vegetation in sight. No life flourishes in this dungeon except the denizens themselves, who undoubtedly prowl within the shadows of the dungeon's various chambers.

Again, all of this should unnerve you, but it doesn't. For some reason, you find yourself at ease in this strange labyrinth. There is an uncanny coziness to be found here. You almost feel like you're at home.

"Everyone okay?" Meteora asks, snapping you out of your thoughts.

"It seems so," Grey answers as he looks behind him to assess you and Camellia. "Are you two ready?"

You both nod. Grey silently nods back at Meteora, which prompts her to move toward a long hallway in the near distance. You and Grey follow her, looking around the chamber as you do so for signs of any Thunder Stones. Though you will never evolve, you know what all the evolution stones look like. Most Pokémon do; it's common knowledge.

Usually it takes a diligent sweep of multiple floors to find even one desired item. Or, the item is found fairly quickly, but it's behind a horde of slumbering denizens. This is not the case today.

The moment your team leaves the corridor and enters the new chamber, they spot a Thunder Stone immediately. It's sitting right by Meteora's feet, as if it had been expecting her. She stops and looks around, as if expecting a trap of some sort. Nothing happens. She orders Camellia to pick up the stone and scurry back onto her head in case there's trouble.

Again, nothing happens. All four of you are standing alone in the silent dungeon, Thunder Stone in hand. There are no tricks to be had here.

"I-It feels like a Thunder Stone alright," Camellia says as she grasps the rock tighter in her paws. "I feel the electricity making my fur frizzle."

"Well I gotta say, I wasn't expecting us to finish the mission so fast…" the Tyrunt says as she gently swings the bag hanging from her jaw back and forth. "I can pull out an Escape Orb right now and we can all leave right now if you guys want, but it feels kind of wrong when we've barely been in the dungeon for five minutes."

"I don't see anything wrong with it," Grey says simply. "We found a genuine Thunder Stone early, that's all. I've heard stories from other scouts before. Wisp once told me the stairs kept appearing directly behind her team on every floor and the Sitrus berries they needed were always in the room they arrived in. They left the dungeon without even needing to fight a single denizen."

"Really? You never told me about that," Tyrunt chokes in disbelief.

"It was a story she mentioned while we were in line at the mess hall late one night when neither of us could sleep," Grey says dismissively. "It didn't feel important to mention."

"Well okay… how do you two feel about leaving now?" Meteora then asks you and Camellia.

"We should go now," Camellia answers immediately.

"I agree," you say in return. "We shouldn't be here any longer than we have to. We need only one stone, we got one, and now we're done. Let's go.'

"Alright alright, looks like everyone's in agreement," Meteora says as she unhooks the bag from her teeth and awkwardly digs into it with her short arms.

After a moment, she pulls out a blue orb that looks as though it has captured a shimmering white star within its crystal body. She throws the ball at her feet and it shatters instantly. A white light suddenly surrounds the four of you as you're enveloped in a strange energy.

You feel the orb drawing you out of the dungeon. You can feel it freeing you from the dungeon's clutches. You can barely even see the labyrinth anymore as white fills your vision.

And then the white light washes over you completely, whisking you away.

The light vanishes, and you're suddenly back outside the dungeon, right by the entrance. Your teammates are with you, all of them collecting their bearings from the sudden teleportation. You watch Camellia climb down Metoera's head and deposit the Thunder Stone inside the team bag, as well as help put the strap over one of the Tyrunt's massive lower fangs. Grey is busy shaking himself, as though doing so alleviates his stress.

You look back at the dungeon again. You look straight into the gaping, yawning mouth that is its entrance.

Your chest begins to feel tight. You stand on your back legs as you clutch your heart, but that doesn't help. The tightness is only getting worse. Something is gripping your heart and lungs and it doesn't want to let go.

It tightens its hold. You feel your heart pounding harder against the invisible binds.

You abruptly turn away. You don't want to go back inside the dungeon. You want to go back to the guild where you belong.

Whatever is clutching your chest suddenly releases its grip. You gasp for air.

The presence vanishes. You can't remember what you were just thinking about. All you know is that you're anxious. You can't seem to get enough oxygen into your lungs.

"Alright everyone, time to go home," Meteora announces.

No one has noticed your escalating tension. Good, you don't need to worry them. You'll just do those breathing exercises as you walk home with your teammates. Nurse Remedy says everything she taught you will work for both stress and anxiety.

So you drop onto all fours and you follow your team back home. Mercifully, Camellia chooses to hitch a ride on Grey for the return journey, so she doesn't notice your calming exercises.

You breathe in through your nose as deeply as possible, and then exhale through your mouth a few seconds later. Breathe in through your nose, exhale out your mouth. You do this again and again, focusing on the hill you loved to climb back home as a kit. You focus on the grass that always enveloped that hill and the catmint that grew alongside all the green. You focus on the blue skies and the puffy white clouds that always reminded you of Altaria wings and how you wish you could always reach out and touch them. You focus on the wind in your fur and the soft noises of the-

You hear growling.

You stop and look around. It's hard to focus and everything is getting blurry, but you need to find whatever made that sound. It could be a starving pack of Houndoom ready to take you all on. You don't know why they're out when the sun isn't close to setting yet, but you mustn't let that distract you. There is a canine-like creature out there, watching you.

You hear it again.

You look to your teammates and none of them seem the least bit alarmed. They are still walking without much of a care. Even Grey, the most sensitive of them all, doesn't seem on high alert. His tail is in a neutral position.

Breathing is becoming harder now. You focus more on that hill you always loved as a kit. You keep thinking about the hill. You tell yourself if Grey isn't reacting, there is nothing to be afraid of.

You don't hear growling anymore.

You arrive back at the guild before the sun begins to set. Though the growling had stopped, it didn't ease the tightness in your chest. Not only that, but it's spread to your paws. They feel so stiff, so difficult to move. You don't even know how you walked all the way back like that.

You don't even go with your teammates to turn in the Thunder Stone to the guild. You tell them you suddenly feel tired and need to go lie down. You don't even wait for their reply as you scurry down the halls until you make it to your room.

Your claws have sprouted out of your paws and no matter how hard you try, you can't retract them. They make a painful scratching sound everywhere you walk, one that drives up your anxiety even more. You don't even do the breathing exercises anymore; you're just panting now.

You need some chamomile tea. That'll make you feel better. You don't know why you feel this way, but you need to calm down. You need to get better. You can't think like this.

You need to get better. You need to get better. You need to get better.

You take the dried leaves the nurse gave you and throw them into your personal stone water basin. You don't even bother warming it up with a fire breath or letting the leaves steep for a few minutes like Remedy told you to. You don't even strain the leaves. The second the leaves hit the water, you gulp down the liquid.

Except you don't.

The moment the tea hits your tongue, your throat clamps shut. You spit out the tea. You try drinking again, but like before, your throat closes up. You still try to drink, but your body revolts. It makes you vomit, makes you retch painfully.

But it's not just tea that comes out of you.

Something else works its way up your throat. Something pushes your esophagus open, widening it, forcing its way through even though it's much too big. You can barely breathe as whatever it is makes its way to your mouth.

There is a disconcerting splash, a very large splash, as if something solid has dropped into the basin. You open your tear-filled eyes and see what it could possibly be.

You drop the water basin as you scream and fall on your tail. The bowl smashes into dozens of pieces as you desperately push yourself across the floor with your clawed paws, scrapping up the ground as you do so. You smack into the wall, but you barely register it.

All you can do is stare at the thing in the growing puddle of tea-water. The thing that had been growing inside you.

You had vomited up a shrunken, shriveled-up Electrike half the size of one of your claws.

You hear the growling again. It's louder now. They're getting angry with you. And as you're huddled against the wall, you finally realize where the growling is coming from.

It's coming from your stomach.