Chapter 8 – Phasing Forward, Looking Back

The doors to DeLeo's office opened, and Esaax let the human usher him out. The wobbuffet found it slightly harder to move than he was used to. His muscles were oddly tense, his tail flicking about restlessly, but his bones almost felt as if they could just melt away. Ah crap, don't tell me I'm getting sick…

"Esaax?"

The voice from down the corridor drew Esaax's attention. He looked and found Jen skittering his way.

"It's time to go," Jen said once he came to a stop. His eyes widened. "Wait… did you get to talk to Mr. DeLeo in private?"

Esaax was too distracted by his increasing unwellness to respond at first. "Oh .Yeah," he finally managed.

DeLeo smiled down at the snorunt. "It was great to meet your friend, Jen. And I think I managed to make a real breakthrough for his benefit. Thanks very much for bringing him."

"Oh, uh, no problem," Jen said, still sounding slightly bewildered. "Thanks for helping him," he added. He then bade DeLeo farewell and led an increasingly pale Esaax away.

DeLeo watched them leave, working his tie between his fingers with something of a faraway look in his mahogany eyes. It's gonna be all right, Esaax, he thought. Soon you'll have your old life back. Both of us will…

- o -

Esaax was riding back to Syr's house with Jen, and he was now genuinely sick. It felt like someone was rearranging his insides, and clumsily at that.

Jen noticed Esaax's condition at the next red light. "You don't look so good," he said.

"Nnnnrrrrrrr…" was Esaax's reply, and it was the last thing out of his mouth until he and Jen were a block away from Syr's house, when Esaax threw up over the side of the car.

"Oh…" Jen said as he pulled into the driveway, then stepped out to inspect the mess. "Guess you'll need to have that checked out… ewww…"

"Haven…" Esaax managed to croak out, "now…" He'd hoped to never return there, but he couldn't think of anywhere else to turn to. Something was very, very wrong with him; he wasn't sure any other place had the resources to help him.

"Okay, okay, don't worry…" Jen said. He was about to get back into the car when the front door of the house opened. Syr slithered out and looked about ready to say something, but before the arbok could say a word, Esaax was violently sick again.

Syr shot a distressed look at the wobbuffet, and then at Jen. "What… what's going on? When'd he get so sick?"

"Just a few minutes ago," the snorunt answered. "It just hit him out of nowhere."

"Haven…" Esaax groaned again.

Syr nodded. "Don't worry," he said, as much for his own benefit as for Esaax's, "we'll get you there right away." He leapt into the backseat, while Jen got back behind the wheel. "Hurry!" Syr said.

The three of them made a beeline for the Haven, with Esaax vomiting twice more and developing tremors along the way.

- o -

Forty-five minutes had passed since arriving at the Haven. Syr was coiled up in a waiting room, anxiously awaiting an update on Esaax's condition.

He heard footsteps and steeled himself for whatever news might be coming his way, but it was only Jen approaching, having just returned from getting the car washed.

"Is he going to be all right?" the snorunt asked.

"I don't know yet," Syr answered. "I'm still waiting for the nurse to come back." The end of his tail curled and flexed fretfully.

At last, Teresa entered the waiting room, and Syr met her gaze in a near-instant with hope and dread surging through him all at once. "How is he?" he asked, struggling a bit to keep his voice from cracking.

"He's stable, for now," Teresa responded. "He actually came right out of that fit almost as soon as we'd gotten a hold of him. He might still relapse, though; we'll need to keep him here until we can be sure of exactly what he's experiencing. He's in no hurry to leave anyway, trust me. He's almost too weak to move at all."

"So… you still don't know what's wrong with him?" Syr asked.

"I'm afraid not," Teresa replied. "We still have some tests to run through, the results of which will hopefully give us the answers we're looking for. Unfortunately, that will take time."

Syr's head lowered, his hope extinguished. The wait for answers wasn't over after all. "Maybe it really was too soon to let him out," he said. "That psychic sickness, the one he was in here for to begin with… I think it's still there. I saw this strange, multicolored aura around him just hours ago, and he's been like the living dead ever since…"

Teresa's expression turned troubled. "No such aura ever appeared while he was here, not even once. Adn's methods should have triggered it if it were still possible for it to be triggered."

"Is Adn here?" Syr asked. His eyes and his tone begged for the answer to be yes.

"Not at the moment, I'm afraid," Teresa said, and she sounded genuinely sorry about it. "But I'll speak with him as soon as he gets back, all right?"

There was a moment's delay, but then Syr sighed. "Okay," he said, sounding defeated. "Just… please, take care of him. Please," he said, looking imploringly into Teresa's eyes.

"We'll do everything we can," Teresa tried to assure him, then turned and left.

As Syr watched her go, he dearly hoped that everything that the Haven's staff could do would be enough.

- o -

Esaax lay in bed with his eyes closed, still suffering the aches and nausea of his mystery illness. Though miserable, he was about to fall asleep out of sheer exhaustion.

As such, he almost failed to notice the presence that entered his midst then, emerging from the wall just above his bed. A dark bluish-gray gengar now hovered over him, clutching a flat, black stone whose edges had a silvery sheen.

By the time Esaax's presently-compromised psychic senses realized there was a potentially dangerous, partly ghost-type creature nearby, the gengar had already vanished from the scene. The stone, however, had not—Esaax opened his eyes in a delayed and imperfect state of primal alarm just in time to see it drop from the air and land right on his face.

He would have shouted in pain and surprise, but the moment the stone made contact with his skin, a massive jolt fired through his body that took his breath away. An instant later, it was gone and replaced by an especially unpleasant feeling in his bones—a stretching feeling, as if someone had seized each one of his limbs and both ends of his spine and were pulling on them as hard as they could. It genuinely felt as though every part of him were being stretched out of shape, as if his entire body were being forcibly and dramatically elongated.

There came a second shock, much greater than the first, when Esaax realized that it was.

- o -

Not far away, in a large puddle of recent rain, the reflection of a long, blue face gazed up at its owner: none other than Ntairow Fade, who was finally near the end of a very long search.

She'd been forced by her clan's leadership to leave Esaax behind with the rest of the Evergray, but she'd never truly accepted the choice they'd made for her. Ultimately, she'd broken free from her clan, aided by a few fellow Fade she'd successfully convinced of the injustice that she'd been dealt.

Soon after she'd escaped, something new came into the picture. Something that had made her all the more glad that she was free to return to the Evergray and reunite with Esaax. That something appeared at her side now, another blue reflection in the water, resting on his long arms as he peered into the puddle with a large, perpetual smile.

"They're ready, Mother," the wynaut said.

He was her son, named Zerzekai. Tonight he was going to take part in the ritual of evolution—for about the fortieth time. Zerzekai seemed to fear evolving despite how earnestly he wanted to evolve; as such, every single one of his "transforming" battles thus far had ended the same way: cold feet and only two of them.

"The question is, are you ready?" Ntairow asked.

"Of course I'm ready! I know you're gonna be proud of me if I do this, and I bet Father will be, too!"

"We'll be proud of you no matter what," Ntairow assured him. "And your father's going to be absolutely delighted to finally meet you, no matter what form you're in."

When she'd made it back to Evergray territory, she'd been told that Esaax had left and was nowhere to be found. Upon learning this, she'd set out with her child in order to find him and bring him back to what she'd thought of as her new clan ever since she'd first spent time with them.

"But we already met! …Oh. No, we didn't. Not really…" Zerzekai reminded himself, sounding crestfallen.

The wynaut and his mother had made numerous return trips to the Blackthorn area in search of Esaax. On one occasion, while exploring and playing alone, Zerzekai had actually found him. He'd realized almost as soon as he'd laid eyes and oculon upon Esaax that he was looking at his father, but he'd lost track of Esaax after running to tell Ntairow about his discovery.

"He should have recognized me," Zerzekai said, and not for the first time.

Ntairow shook her head. "Different people's senses don't always work in the same ways. You know that."

Differences in the way senses worked was a subject Ntairow'd had a very personal sort of experience with herself. Having already experienced a change in her own, she'd chosen to subject them to another set of enhancing alterations in order to ultimately track Esaax down. She remembered that at the time, she'd found it oddly funny that she'd managed to find the fairly obscure thing that was required to provoke those changes so much faster and easier than she'd found Esaax, and she wondered if he would find that similarly amusing.

She also wondered how much it was going to take to convince him that she was indeed the same person he'd known and loved before. Ntairow wanted to believe it would be easy enough, but…

She loved the Evergray. She really did. Their laws were nowhere near as strict as those of the Fade. But there was a lot about not only the world outside their caverns but also about the secrets of their own kind that they had yet to learn. If, in his time outside of Evergray territory, Esaax hadn't learned that the course of action she'd taken in order to find him was even an option, she would have to enlighten him about it.

"We're ready whenever you are!" a voice called out from not too far away then. Its source was a linoone, with a zigzagoon standing at her side.

"Go on, then, if you're ready," Ntairow told Zerzekai. "And remember: no matter how this turns out, we will both be proud of you."

With a smile that was huge, even for a wynaut, Zerzekai rushed over to the linoone and zigzagoon and followed them to a larger clearing. The latter would be the one whom Zerzekai would fight (and defeat—the two normal-types had agreed to Ntairow's request for the zigzagoon to throw the fight after having been paid handsomely in berries).

And after the battle, regardless of the outcome, they would go to reunite with Esaax. As a shout from the linoone signaled the start of the match, Ntairow found herself reminiscing about the last night she'd spent with him…

FLASH.

Ntairow's reverie was abruptly shattered by something that seemed to explode inside her head, something that tore through the image of Esaax that she held within her mind and caused that picture to warp and twist.

Ntairow's heart froze. "No… it's not possible," she whispered.

A horrid scream stabbed into her mind then—a psychic scream. It rose up, but then faltered and changed, distorted and corrupted in a way that could only have been achieved by…

"Dear Night, no!" Ntairow stood, reeling as she fought against the harsh brain-noise of the psybane that had suddenly and impossibly blossomed into being. "Don't follow!" she called out to Zerzekai. But she could only hope and pray that her son had heard her and would obey, for she was already running full tilt toward Esaax and the horror that was befalling him. She suffered all the while as she ran, trying but failing to bite back cries of pain and clutching her head in her hands—in all four of them.