The Mirror-World Menace

CHAPTER 5

The air crackled and sizzled as tremendous bolts of lightning flew back and forth between the two electric Pokémon.

They were each somewhat resistant to their own type of attacks, and they continued to blast away, neither of them doing tremendous harm to the other. Stray arcs of electricity sprayed out in all directions, filling the air with ozone and shattering rocks in their immediate vicinity.

"Keep it up!" Ash encouraged, although he was losing confidence himself. His own Pikachu was weak to begin with from the earlier fight with the Charizard, and he could tell that Red's Pikachu clearly had the upper hand.

Before long, Ash's Pikachu was on the verge of collapse. His thunderbolt attack was weakening, and Red's Pikachu was pressing its advantage, pummeling its opponent with ever more powerful electric jolts. So intent was Red on his impending victory that he failed to notice the giant shadow looming above him until it was nearly too late.

"What's that?" cried Jaymz, and everybody looked up.

Reaching almost fifty feet in the air above them was a truly enormous metal serpent. Its steel scales gleamed in the sunshine as its metallic eyes glared at them. Ash pulled out Dexter. "Steelix," the pokédex declared, "the Iron Snake Pokémon. The steel-type evolution of Onix."

The Steelix looked at Ash and Red in turn. Sniffing the air, it suddenly let out a huge roar and came barreling down right on top of Red. The Team Rocket agent barely had time to dodge out of the way before the monstrous serpent slammed into the rocky ground where he had been standing. The enormous impact knocked everyone off their feet. Ash felt as if the whole mountain had been rocked.

Weakened by the impact, the cliff edge started to break apart, bits of it falling everywhere. Red's Pikachu, who was the closest to the edge when the Steelix appeared, gave out a sharp squeal of surprise as the earth beneath it suddenly broke away and began falling down the cliff face. The Pikachu scrambled up the toppling rocks, trying to find a secure footing. Just as it had nearly reached stable ground, it finally slipped and fell headlong off the cliff's edge.

Ash's Pikachu gathered up his last bit of strength and bounded across the shaking terrain in an effort to save the other Pikachu. He leapt forward and grabbed his counterpart's tail with his front paws, while finding a foothold around a rock with his rear paws. The ground all the way up to the rock where Pikachu was clinging crumbled away and fell down the cliff, leaving the two Pikachus dangling precariously off the cliff's edge. Hanging face downwards, they were presented with a terrifying view of the great expanse below them, while the enormous boulders that had broken off the edge seemed to shrink into tiny specks as they plummeted to the depths below.

Meanwhile, the Steelix started twisting its body furiously in the rocky ground. Sand, pebbles, and bits of ground-up rock began flying everywhere.

"Take cover!" Brock yelled, as everyone shut their eyes to keep out the stinging sand. "It's a Sandstorm attack!"

The strain that the Steelix was putting on the earth was too much for it. The mountain terrain above them started cracking, and large rocks and boulders began rolling down the mountainside towards the area where Brock, Misty, Jecy, and Jaymz were standing.

"Go, Onix!" yelled Brock, throwing out a pokéball. The rock serpent materialized and immediately lay on the ground in front of them, trying to use its body as a barrier to block the onrushing avalanche. As the first boulders came upon it, Onix pushed back against them with all its might, straining to keep the crumbling mountaintop from falling onto its master and his friends.

Pikachu's grip on the rock between his rear paws was weakening. He couldn't support the weight of both himself and the other Pikachu, to whom he still was holding onto tightly with his front paws. He could feel himself slipping off the rock, slowly but inexorably. Just as he was about to lose his grip entirely, something grabbed him by the tail and started pulling him back from the cliff edge. Pikachu turned around. It was Ash. "Pikapi!" Pikachu shouted in relief.

"Don't worry, I've got you buddy," Ash reassured, a hand over his eyes to keep out the blinding sand. He started to pull the Pikachus to safety with his left hand, then stumbled himself as the ground beneath his feet began crumbling away. Ash and the two Pikachus started to fall over the edge, and Ash gasped as he scrambled to grab hold of a stable rock in the cliff face with his right hand. The three of them ended up dangling from the cliff edge again, and Ash tried not to look at how far there was to fall as he held firmly on to Pikachu's tail.

Red found himself facing the Steelix alone and decided to take the offensive. Launching out two pokéballs with lightning speed, he called out, "I choose you, Blastoise and Venusaur! Stop that Steelix!" The two confident-looking Pokémon stepped out to confront their steel enemy. The Venusaur shot out a dozen razor-sharp leaves, each over a foot long, which flew towards their steel goal with deadly accuracy. The knife-edged projectiles were no match for the Steelix's diamond-hard skin, however, and they shattered upon impact with no apparent damage to their target.

In the meantime, Brock watched nervously as his Onix was weakening. "Keep pushing!" he encouraged, but he could tell it was hopeless. Onix was holding up several times its own weight in rocks that had fallen from the avalanche, and there was no way it could hold on for much longer. The rock serpent finally slid down the mountainside, crushed under the weight of the boulders it had been trying valiantly to keep in place. Brock, Misty, Jaymz, and Jecy started to run for it, but there was no way they were going to get away from the onrush of rocks.

Psyduck took this moment to pop out of its pokéball, and it looked at Misty with its usual blank look. "Psyduck!" Misty yelled. "Use your Confusion to propel the avalanche away!" She wasn't very hopeful, but it looked like the best chance they had.

"Psy?" quacked the duck in uncomprehending bewilderment. Misty sighed in frustration; it was no use.

So intent were they on the incoming rocks that no one noticed the little Togepi still in Misty's arms. Merrily, it waved its tiny paws back and forth. Back and forth, back and forth, Togepi's arms started to glow as its secret power was unleashed.

They screamed as the first boulder came right on top of them. Misty hid her face as the giant rock's shadow covered them completely.

Misty waited, but eventually realized that too much time had passed and that the boulder should have crushed them already. She looked up timidly, and gasped in surprise to see the entire avalanche of boulders hurled up high into the sky and away from them. She turned to Psyduck. "Did you do it?" she asked, not really sure. Psyduck quacked mildly, completely ignorant of what had just happened. Togepi merely giggled to itself.

Brock recalled his exhausted Onix, then looked around. "Where's Ash?" he inquired.

"Oh no!" Misty gasped, pointing. "He's hanging from the cliff edge!"

Ash was in trouble. He could feel that the rock that he hung to desperately, his only point of support, was starting to break away from the cliff face. Almost in a panic, he looked around once again for some kind of a foothold but found none. And he couldn't grab onto something else or any of his pokéballs without letting go of the Pikachus.

Jaymz didn't waste a second. "Go, Bellsprout!" he shouted out while releasing a pokéball. The Pokémon materialized at the cliff's edge. Bellsprout extended its vines and wrapped one tightly around Ash's wrist. Just at that moment, the rock Ash was holding onto broke away, and he and the Pikachus were left dangling from Bellsprout's vine as the rock fell, disappearing into the distance.

Bellsprout pulled, strained, and planted its roots into the ground as firmly as it could. The weight of a boy and two Pikachus was more than it could hold, and the tiny plant was beginning to be dragged off the edge.

"Come on, Bellsprout!" yelled Jaymz to his Pokémon. "I know you can do it! I have faith in you!"

Jecy threw out a ball of her own, and her Lickitung appeared. The pink creature started over to help Bellsprout, but stopped in its tracks as the plant Pokémon started glowing.

"Bellsprout!" it called, as its body shone brilliantly and started to change shape. "Bellsprout ... bell ... bell ... Weepinbell!"

Jaymz gasped. "My Bellsprout...it evolved!" he cried.

The now evolved Weepinbell was much heavier and stronger than it had been as Bellsprout, and it easily pulled Ash and the Pikachus back up towards safety.

Just as Ash's Pikachu was being pulled to the top of the cliff, he lost his grip on his counterpart's tail. Red's Pikachu screamed as it began tumbling down the cliff face. Out of nowhere a long, sticky, pink tongue shot out and grabbed the falling yellow Pokémon. Like a bug stuck on flypaper, Red's Pikachu dangled from Lickitung's giant tongue as it was pulled back to the cliff top. Lickitung deposited the Pikachu, now slimy with sticky saliva, on the ground in front of it.

Red's Pokémon were meanwhile locked into battle with the Steelix. The Blastoise shot a powerful surge of water from its twin mounted cannons. The place where the water touched the giant metal serpent's body appeared to stiffen up, as if rusted in that area. The Steelix roared in rage as some of the huge metal ribs that made up its serpentine body would no longer move freely. Now all the angrier, it rammed its body forcefully on the Blastoise's back, smashing into the giant turtle's shell and knocking it out in one blow. Before Red's Venusaur could even react, the Steelix picked up a boulder the size of a house and dashed it onto the hapless plant Pokémon's head. The Venusaur rolled over and lay still.

Now defenseless, Red could only shake in fear as the enraged Steelix reached down and used its mouth to grab the boy by the back of his shirt. "Why does it want me?!" he stammered, flailing his arms and legs helplessly.

Meowth, who had been standing on the side listening, finally spoke out. "The Steelix is saying something about finding its baby ... why, the baby Onix is its baby!"

Brock nodded. "That makes sense," he declared. "Jaymz told us that Red had a baby Onix, and according to Dexter, Steelix is the evolution of Onix. So the Steelix is probably the Onix's mother." He turned to Red and called out, "Give up your Onix, and the Steelix will leave you alone!"

Red growled in frustration, and then opened the pokéball containing his captured baby Onix.

The Steelix dropped Red to the ground and wrapped its snake-like body around its baby in a loving embrace. The giant metal serpent turned around briefly to crush the pokéball in which the baby Onix had been contained, leaving behind a pile of plastic splinters. It then picked up its baby by the scruff of the neck and made its way peacefully down the mountainside.

"Good riddance," Red muttered under his breath, as if to console himself over his lost capture. He turned back to Ash. "Well, Ketchum, it looks like we have a Pokémon battle to finish."

Ash's Pikachu was quite sore from his ordeal at the cliff edge, but he picked himself up and painfully got into position. Red's Pikachu, however, refused to move. It sat defiantly facing away from Red as he hollered at it, "You worthless yellow rodent! Come over here and fight this instant!"

"Pikapikapichu," the Pikachu retorted in a huff.

Meowth translated, "Your Pikachu is saying that it refuses to battle someone who just saved its life."

"WHAT!?" Red practically screamed, now completely enraged. "GET OVER HERE NOW!" But the yellow electric Pokémon wouldn't budge.

"If Red's Pikachu refuses to battle, then Ash is the winner," declared Misty.

"That's right," agreed Ash. "Now give us Meowth."

"Never!" shouted Red, grabbing Meowth's leash and pulling on it until the hapless feline was nearly choked to death. "I don't care who won this battle, I'm keeping the Meowth. I have plenty of other Pokémon I can use to deal with you if you try to stop me."

"No, you don't," disputed Jaymz.

Jecy agreed. "Your Charizard, Espeon, Venusaur, Blastoise, and Onix are all unconscious or gone," she said. "That makes five. Your Pikachu makes six, and it won't battle. Since you can't carry more than six Pokémon, you are effectively out of ammunition."

Red, caught in his bluff, fumed for a moment, then let the leash go. Meowth ran off, crying with relief as he went to Jecy and Jaymz. "You guys came back for me!" he sobbed, a look of immense gratitude in his oversized cat eyes.

"Don't thank us," Jaymz replied, smiling. "Thank Ash."

Jecy picked up the cat Pokémon and gave him a warm hug. "Glad to see you back, Meowth," she said, grinning. "We missed you."

"Hold it right there!" a female voice called sharply behind them. Everyone turned around to look.

It was Officer Jenny, flanked by four large and mean-looking Golems. "Red of Team Rocket, this is the police. You are under arrest."

Red turned to his Pikachu, but Jenny cut him off. "Don't bother, buster. I heard what the girl said about your only having the one Pokémon, and since ground-type Pokémon are immune to electric attacks, even a Pikachu as powerful as yours wouldn't stand a chance against four Golems."

"NO!" Red shouted in defiance. "I'm Red of Team Rocket, the greatest Pokémon trainer who ever lived! I've never been caught by the police, and I will not be caught now!" Now in a madman's frenzy, he picked up his Pikachu roughly and shook it, screaming, "Do you hear me, Pikachu? I'm Red of Team Rocket, and I cannot be defeated! Now go out there and fight those Golems, you coward!"

The Pikachu had a look of utter surprise when Red picked it up so violently, a look that quickly turned into an appearance of enraged fury. "Pikapikapika!" it shouted back.

"It says it doesn't like being called a coward," Meowth remarked.

But the electric Pokémon decided to assert its opinion of Red's harsh treatment in a way that needed no translation -- by unleashing a tremendous electric assault against its own master. Sparks flew everywhere, and Red's cap was thrown off as every strand of hair on his head stood straight on end. The Team Rocket agent screamed as the powerful electric current passed through and around his body. So severe was the electric attack that even Ash, who had been shocked by his own Pikachu countless times, cringed a little at witnessing it.

Red's Pikachu finally exhausted its charge, and, jumping to the ground, it watched quietly as its master fell over. The Team Rocket agent was thoroughly singed all over, and bits of smoke were still escaping out of one of his jacket pockets. The electricity had locked his muscles into position, and he lay stiffly on the ground, arms awkwardly extended as if he were still holding the Pikachu. He was still alive but utterly defeated, he knew it, and he remained silent as Jenny walked up to him with the handcuffs.

"Officer Jenny!" exclaimed Jaymz. "However did you find us?"

Officer Jenny turned to Jaymz and smiled. "I've been tracking down Red ever since you reported your Meowth stolen. I've been waiting for an occasion where he was vulnerable enough that I could make the arrest. Having five of his six Pokémon eliminated seemed to qualify."

Brock meanwhile had entered his usual entranced state at the sight of Officer Jenny. Dreamily, he murmured, "Oooh, the Officer Jennies in this universe are even more beautiful than the ones in our universe." He started to go to her.

Misty sighed and reached over, placing her fingers on the one particular spot of Brock's ear that was guaranteed to cause significant pain when she squeezed. Over the years, she had had numerous opportunities to optimize her exact finger placement. Brock waved his arms wildly, making a last unsuccessful effort to catch Officer Jenny's attention as he was dragged away.

Officer Jenny completely failed to notice Brock as she was occupied handcuffing Red's wrists - a relatively simple task, as Red was paralyzed and couldn't resist. "You know, there's a large reward out for aid leading to Red's capture," Jenny declared, turning to Ash. "Are you the one who should be collecting it?"

"Uh, well," Ash replied, laughing and trying to sound modest, "actually it's Jecy and Jaymz who should be getting the reward."

Jecy started to protest, but Misty stopped her. "It's okay," Misty whispered. "Ash is a league trainer and he doesn't need the money. But you two can use the reward money to go to Pokémon Tech, the way you planned from the start."

Officer Jenny turned to the two young trainers. "So the reward goes to you?" she asked.

Jaymz and Jecy looked at each other briefly, forming an unspoken consensus between them. Then Jecy replied, "We'd like to donate the reward money to the Pokémon breeding center."

Jaymz agreed. "So they can restock their supply of starter Pokémon," he added.

Misty was puzzled, but Jecy reassured her. "We've decided after watching you three and gaining confidence in our own abilities as trainers that we really like the Pokémon trainer's life," Jecy told her. "We're not interested in going to Pokémon Tech anymore."

One of the Golems picked up the motionless Red and slung him over its shoulder like a sack. Ash and the others waved goodbye to Officer Jenny as she and the Golems took Red away to the police station. Then they made their way back to the inter-dimensional rift.

"Where will you go now?" Jecy inquired.

"To the next gym in the Johto league," Ash replied. "How about you?"

"Probably to Pewter City in our universe," Jaymz answered. "We heard that there's a really tough gym leader there who uses rock-type Pokémon."

"Or maybe Cerulean City," Jecy added. "The gym leader there supposedly uses water-type Pokémon."

Brock and Misty looked at each other for a moment, and then they both smiled. "I'm sure you'll do really well against them," Brock said.

Ash, Misty, Brock, Togepi, and Pikachu stood on their side of the rift and waved farewell to Jecy, Jaymz, and Meowth on the other. And as they waved, the rift itself started to close, as if on cue with their goodbyes. Ash caught a final glimpse of the smiling faces of their new friends as the rift sealed up completely, vanishing without a trace.

*

The celestial Pokémon rejoiced. Its faith in the providence between worlds had been justified. After carefully checking to make sure that each of the inhabitants of both universes were in their proper locations, the Pokémon closed the rift between them, and made its way to parts of the cosmos unknown.

EPILOGUE

It was a week later, but Ash had been in this situation before.

There he stood, dripping wet and holding on to Misty's Goldeen. Before him, Misty and Brock were staring at him looks of resignation. It reminded Ash of the way his mom used to look at him when he was a young child and had done something really foolish.

Ash closed his eyes and prepared himself for another tongue lashing from Misty. It did not matter that he really thought that the floating tree trunk looked like a Kingdra. She was sure to let him have it for once again diving into a strong current and once again needing to be saved.

"I know," he admitted painfully, "I should think about things instead of rushing into them."

"That's right!" Misty started, and then suddenly stopped, the anger mysteriously draining out of her. She smiled, and said in a more serene voice, "But I guess there's worse things you could be than too impulsive, Ash. Goldeen, return!"

As the aquatic Pokémon dematerialized into its pokéball and Misty walked away calmly, Ash stood, open-mouthed as water dripped from his hair. He shook his head in frustration. Sometimes he just couldn't figure Misty out.

THE END