Panne opened her eyes, and was struck with the uncertainty that she was awake at all. The cabin was just as dark as the back of her eyelids, but the creaking sounds and the churning of the waves assured her that this was real. The tingling feeling on the back of her neck advised that they were being watched somehow. She froze, listening for anything that seemed out of the ordinary for the chaos, but only heard Vallion's listless snoring. The longer she waited, the more was wrong that she couldn't quite put her finger on. The cacophony somehow sounded duller than before. The floor rocked in a pattern she couldn't quite get used to. Even the air smelled more stale than usual.

Her fingers traveled into the pack beneath of her and felt for the wand she had packed. She moved slowly, as if a sudden movement might set off the predator that stalked them from the shadows. When she conjured a flame at its tip, the light seemed far dimmer than was normal. At first the Braixen blamed the strange migraine for weakening her powers, but soon noticed the swirling aura that persisted so subtly in the shadows. The whole cabin had filled with fog.

"Val!" she hissed, sitting upright with a jolt. "Get up. Now!"

A grunt of dissent rose up from his chest. "Ugh, why? I just got to sleep..." A sigh fell from his mouth, which only served to blow the mist around. "Is there something-"

"Yeah, there is! Look!" Panne waved the wand in front of his face and revealed the murkiness that surrounded them. The Servine half-gasped, then went silent. "See? The Spiritomb's totally here! And feel the waves for a second. They're not all coming from one direction anymore, we're getting tossed all over the place! And you can't even hear the rain anymore! We're in the-.." she trailed off. "We're in the eye of the storm."

Vallion carefully came to an uncertain stand, his vines unfurled and ready. His nervous expression was barely visible in the gloom. "Then what do we do?"

In spite of her own instincts, Panne turned her back to dive into her equipment once more, and eventually found the glassy orb she'd buried in a protective wrap of cloth. "We need to wake everyone up. If they're not already awake, or dead. God, I really hope it hasn't gotten to anyone yet. We'll use this luminous orb to alert everyone all at once. And this ship isn't quite as big as the floor of dungeon, so smashing it should light the whole thing up. Hopefully that'll be a good enough warning."

There was no time to waste. With a single nod between the two of them, Panne raised the orb high up above her head and threw it against the wall with all her might. The shattering thud sent a hail of shards back at them, and after a brief delay, a blinding flash of light. The cyan glow softened in intensity as it spread throughout the ship like an infection until everything was coated with a faint luminescence. Tiny swirls of convection appeared in the mists as if to express frustration in its own worthlessness. She took a deep breath and turned back towards the Servine, her knuckles tight around the blasting wand.

"Let's go."

An eerie silence, completely unlike the circumstances, had fallen over the ship. Panne stuck her wand out the crack in the door before she fully opened it, then gestured for Vallion to follow. The halls were glowing, alright, but it wasn't nearly enough to pierce through the fog out here. They'd bought themselves a few feet of sight and that was it. Worse yet, the sensation of being watched only intensified from both ends of the corridor. With Val close behind-very close, nearly touching-she shouted out in the hopes that someone would respond. Just like on Revelation Mountain, the mists made it sound like she was screaming into a pillow. As she feared, no one heard.

They started to creep along towards the front of the ship. And they kept going. And going. And going. And as soon as they reached twenty something feet past where the edge of the Viridian surely should have been, they stopped again. Everything all looked the same.

"What the hell?" the Braixen hissed between her teeth. Vallion said nothing, staring back at the faces that formed in the mists. Not only were the waves more disorienting than ever, but her head seemed to spin with an unnatural dizziness. And of course, then came the stinging sinuses. She gagged with her wand pointed out at the farthest point of her extended arm. It was already in her heads! How in the hell did it manage to turn forty feet into eighty? They were walking in one direction! She grabbed Vallion by the vine and pulled him along, desperate not to get forcibly separated in the case that the Spiritomb could still do that.

"How is this even possible?" Vallion said, struggling to keep his composure. "What's it even doing to trick us like this? And why isn't there anyone around freaking out about it? There was like twenty people on this ship and we haven't seen anyone!"

Panne spat up a ball of mucus and grimaced. "That's what I'm saying! Hey, anybody! Somebody! Wake the hell up already!" She approached one of the cabin doors that shouldn't have existed in the first place and banged on it. When there was no response, she tried to pull the door open and come inside, but it was like trying to yank a boulder out from underneath a mountain. It would have at least budged if there was some sort of lock on it, but the handle may as well have been connected straight to the wall. Her stomach plummeted. "Come on, don't you dare say there's no one but us left! Please tell me there's someone else still here!"

"Could it really have..." Just as the Servine began to trail off, the ship lurched almost too slowly in a disconcertingly new direction. Then, as if the Viridian had winced away, an incredible force smashed into the port side. Panne slammed into the wall with a frightened yelp, only to realize that that wall had very nearly just become the ground at the angle the ship was at. For one chilling moment she was completely convinced that they would capsize, but as the seconds stretched on gravity managed to correct itself, and the boat came back down onto its bottom with another bone-rattling crash.

When Panne finally got her bearings again, she was alone in the corridor. Up and down, just the cyan glow and the mist, pulsating erratically as if to taunt her. But- but she'd seen Vallion fall with here, where could he have- How could it just-

"Val! No!" she shouted at the top of her lungs, the echo of her voice eaten up by the fog. The Braixen started to run. She ran despite the sway of the floor that caused her feet to trip over themselves. She called out despite the constriction of the Tempest Looplet that had reacted to the adrenaline coursing through her. She held her wand ablaze despite the insistent throb that radiated across her temples. There might come a time when she'd fail to protect Vallion, but as long as there was breath in her lungs, that day would not be today, and sure as hell not to this thing!

The first figure to appear in the darkness ahead nearly got blasted apart. Panne hesitated long enough to piece together the shape of the silhouette. While not exactly as ecstatic as she would have been to have found Val again, it was certainly enough of a relief to not blow a hole in the side of the ship. "Oh thank goodness. Hey! Jirachi, over here!"

The shape turned towards the sound of her voice, the leathery wings of the psychic type gracefully drifting through the air. "Panne! What's going on?! I saw everything light up, but there's this stupid mist everywhere and I can't see through it!" And not for lack of trying, as she saw that Jirachi's third eye on their stomach was wide open, shifting rapidly from left to right.

"It's the Spiritomb! It's messing with all of our heads, and I don't even know who's left! I- " she paused, an immovable lump in her throat. "It took Val right from under me! We have to find him before it's too late!"

"But I've been trying so hard just to find anybody at all!" Jirachi glanced out into the hallway behind them. The luminous orb was beginning to wear off, slowly giving inch by inch back to the menacing fog. The clock was ticking.

"Just- Come on! He's still gotta be on the ship, right? It's going to take a lot of time to actually suck his soul out!" With Jirachi just behind her, Panne rushed from door to door in the never-ending hallway, banging and pulling and swearing every few steps. None of them even budged. It had gotten to the point that she wasn't entire sure if this wasn't all a dream, but what could possibly feel realer than this? The darkness crept closer while the orb's effects waned-entire minutes had went by in what seemed like a mere thirty seconds. And still, aside from the moaning body of the ship and the distant winds, there was was hardly a sound.

Then the Braixen fell. While running towards the next illusory cabin, her foot went forward and simply didn't connect with anything. She twisted forward and tumbled down what certainly felt like stairs, barely catching herself a few steps down. Jirachi shouted out from behind her, then seemed to appear out of thin air nearby. Though it was just barely too dark to see, Panne recognized this as the entrance to the lower hull, where the mechanisms to propel the ship forward were supposed to be. The supernatural smoke seemed to be at its most intense down here, and after squinting she could finally see why.

Vallion whipped around towards the noise of her falling, exchanged a brief look of terror, and was engulfed by a surge of rolling blackness.

A gasp stuck in her throat, stopped in its tracks by the knowing squeeze of the Tempest Looplet. Panne lunged off of the stairway and swung her flaming wand in one motion, landing among the hollow wooden pillars through a traveling wave of flames. The impact of the fireball blasted the shadow back by only a few feet. She got to her feet and raised her arm in preparation of another swing when a silvery flash manifested itself on the monster's surface. It shimmered for a few seconds, steadily increasing in its intensity until the flashes illuminated the whole spirit cloud like lightning. Jirachi cried out as a terrible scraping noise filled the air. The Spiritomb's body convulsed and quivered from the attack, reluctantly releasing Vallion as part of its liquid form was severed from the whole, cleaved in two by a drill of metallic particles.

"Get away from him!" Jirachi shouted as they zoomed across the ceiling. Vallion's very readily slithered away and back behind Panne's legs to recover and cough. She postured herself above him, her stance as wide and immovable as possible to fend against the pounding waves outside.

The ghost spiraled in the center of the room like a black twister, but the outline of its body was blurred and almost indiscernible from the mists that surrounded them. The bottom of it spread everywhere. They stood in the creature, an ankle's height pool of icy water at their feet. It seemed to climb up the walls and soak into the ceiling, with fat droplets of itself raining down where the creature condensed most. The gurgling how it made by simply existing was muffled by the same deafening properties that kept their shouts concealed. It was the epicenter of the hurricane. A congealment of evil, writhing in hatred and wrath. It had digested the souls of countless individuals to gain its grotesque form.

Panne aimed her blasting wand where its eyes should have been. "Leave us alone, you freak!"

A thousand voices mocked her all at once, speaking over each other in an explosion of raw noise. The last few sparkles of the luminous orb petered out at the same time. The flame on the end of her wand was the only source of light left, and even it was stifled relentlessly by the mists. She heard the vortex churn from beyond the black, and just as Vallion's vine wrapped around her neck to pull her out of the way, a spiraling torrent of water blasted the stairs behind her with such force that the wood audibly cracked under the pressure. The droplets that bounced off the impact alone stung like dozens of stabbing needles. The Servine was sopping wet and shivering, but his eyes were wild with absolution as well as fear. Kill or be killed. This might be it, huh?

More silver strobes pierced through the Spiritomb's vapors. Jirachi's magic carved into the demon from the other side of the hull, briefly illuminating the majority of its mass. Panne shot a nod towards Vallion before she clamored up onto one of the mechanisms. As the Servine climbed through the columns with ease, she pulled herself above the muck below and took aim. The blasting wand and the Tempest Looplet both responded in kind to the swing of her arm, the recoil alone nearly knocking her off the perch. Streaks of embers traced off the main plume at incredible speeds as it enveloped the Spiritomb's core. Yet the flames only seemed to twist upwards with the current of the creature, suffocated by its viscosity and turned to smoke in the matter of seconds. The vortex angled towards them.

The two of them tried to jump from column to column like the branches of trees, but with so little visibility there was no way in hell Panne could dodge the tendril that shot up from the floor. It whipped around her neck and yanked down just as she'd managed to leap over, a single syllable of a choke barely leaving her mouth as her head bashed into the back of the column. Though Vallion made especially quick work of the appendage, the concussion that followed left the Braixen reeling for far too long.

"Get up! Hurry!" Her shoulders were held up by vines, but her head lolled to the side. Her scattered thoughts were mostly just barrages of negative emotions and urgency without much direction. "I can't do this without you! I don't know how! Come on, up!"

More metal grinding against itself, more startling flashes. The roar of a torrent, the sound of Jirachi crying out in the muffled distance. She breathed in. She breathed out. Her looplet squeezed, her eyes centered. Vallion picked her up in the utter darkness and pushed her against a mechanism for support. "Alright, alright! Give me a second, that messed me up bad!"

Of course, the Spiritomb wasn't about to give any of them a second. A sound Panne hadn't quite heard before came from deep inside the gloom as she attempted to relight her wand. It was almost like a bubbling, but seemed to reverberate from far too many angles around her. Once there was finally fire in the air again, she saw the Spiritomb's vortex lose nearly all of its spin. Then the ship tilted slowly beneath them as it rode the beginnings of a terrible wave. There wasn't even time for a swear to leave her mouth before it collided with the Viridian and knocked them onto to the wall. The wall became the floor. Gravity shifted beneath them, and all the water followed it.

Crash. The entire demon and all its weight washed over her. It wouldn't have been much different from getting hit by an ocean's wave if it wasn't so devastatingly cold, but the way the Spiritomb reformed with her inside felt much worse. Her arms found a solid pole amidst the storm of sensation to grab onto, which they unconsciously held for dear life while the living currents pulled with all their might. The Viridian rode on its side for what seemed like an eternity before slamming back down onto its belly and causing Panne to smash against the hard wood.

This thing was totally unstoppable. Its power was so great that it could steer an entire storm right into them and control it from the inside. Where was the hope in winning? How were they expecting to fight back against something like that? It was too much of a problem even when it had only eaten a handful of poison types, and now it was a goddamn natural disaster. How much stronger had she gotten since then? What had she done to prepare to protect Val? Her claws dug centimeters into the pole, carving fissures in the wood as she slipped inch after inch.

Metal flashes brightened the hull once more, but much fewer in number. Jirachi was still trying to distract it even now. They'd probably be killed before long if they kept pissing it off. A tendril found time to spring from the swirling waters, looping around Panne's face and prying her from the pole completely. The vortex gladly accepted her into its dizzying spin. She tried to expel flames from her throat to keep the demon at bay, but heat meant absolutely nothing to it. There was always a method to the madness. Its meticulous and calculated consumption of souls made it completely immune to her. Splinters and shards caught in the currents battered into her like projectiles, but were very much buried beneath the numbness that the icy pain inflicted upon her.

The Spiritomb spun her in its acidic body for a few moments before it reared up and spat her into the supportive beams above. Panne clattered against the ceiling, barely aware of the pain it caused, before she returned to the unforgiving ground. A heavy crate had caught a majority of her fall, but it might as well have been the floor anyway. Only by the light of Jirachi's flickering attacks was she able to see through spinning vision the thing that had defeated her so utterly. Even Vallion was still standing, his silhouette limping through the pool as he slashed again and again. He was always so much stronger than her. She had her bursts of power, but Vallion never seemed to figure out what a limit was. How was he ever supposed to rely on someone like her?

"...Hey..." The first good breath of oxygen in Panne's lungs was wasted completely. Her fingers closed around Val's scarf. Gritting her teeth in pain just to raise her head, she tried again. "Hey! Hey, you slimy bastard! I'm not dead yet! G- ack! Get over here and finish what you started!"

Completely contrary to what she expected, the Spiritomb angled itself towards her. It ignored the vines that cut entire sections from its whole like a knife through butter. It ignored the metal particles from a glowering third eye that drilled into its liquid flesh. The demon lumbered over with the weight of all that centrifugal force and the weight of the entire storm on its shoulders. It loomed over her in such a way that she could finally see its face beneath all the water. Even while in the deepest depths of terror and despair, she swore she recognized those eyes from somewhere else.

And when it finally spoke, the very molecules of the air shuddered with power. "YOU." the souls growled in perfect unison. "WE WILL BURY YOU. YOU WILL BECOME A PART OF THE FINEST ASH IN THE ABYSS. WE WILL BECOME HUMAN AND ERASE ALL NOTION THAT YOU HAVE EXISTED. YOU WILL FINALLY CEASE."

"Go rain on a flower, you cunt."

The overwhelming mass of the Spiritomb reared back. Panne winced and reflexively grappled onto the crate she hung off of, both with her hands and with her damaged telekinesis. With the might of an entire hurricane behind the blow, it sent the box flying with her stuck to it. The crate should have crushed her as soon as she hit the wall.

The impact came instantly. All the wind was expunged from her lungs, and an immense pain wracked her back, but the crate had merely pinned her. There was a worse pain even yet that she didn't have time to think about. The pounding in her skull exploded forth so intensely that it was like the entire object pressed against her was compressed in just the space between her ears.

Then something snapped. Like a sudden pop-a dislocated joint that's finally replaced. The pain ended, and something else began.

The Braixen's legs, coiled up underneath the crate that was meant to end her life, kicked the massive object away. Her mind obliged and pushed the crate with the same degree of power that came at her. It careened through the air with a howl and smashed directly into the Spiritomb's body, shattering utterly on impact. The creature let out a surprised chorus as she fell to the floor. A great energy had taken hold of her body and given her the ability to stand back up. No, it was more than that. Broken and cracked bones clicked back together and fused. Torn muscles regrew their ligaments and went even further beyond. The pain was there, but the will was greater yet.

Panne lifted her arms to summon flame, but what came forth was not the great inferno she expected, but a meager stream of wisps bright red in color. They danced around her wrists almost whimsically in reaction to her pyrokinesis, her control so fine-tuned that overcompensation was inevitable. They finally reached the tip of her claw and shot out like a bullet towards the stunned ghost. As she had shaped it, she had felt the pressurized might that glistened from within the small flames. Breathe in, looplet tightens. The wisps penetrate the water's surface and persist. Breathe out, and let it be free. It was all completely natural.

As soon as she had let go of the flame, a barrage of loud pops came from within the Spiritomb. The glow of the fire grew and grew until it finally burst out the side of the vortex, resulting in a dozen crackles hitting the air. It roared and thrashed and squirmed in pain, and in the same fashion did the waves crash into the battered sides of the Viridian. There wasn't any time to admire her handiwork, however, as her own body was shifting and changing at a rapid pace. From the tips of her ears even all the way down to the shape of her toes, the ache of growth manifested itself in place of injury.

The Braixen who had suffered complete defeat at the hands of this monster had died, and in her ashes rose the Delphox who would blow it to pieces.

The waters beneath the ship shifted in that foreboding way they always did before a rogue wave hit. Panne didn't give the demon a chance to retaliate, blowing another scarlet flame into existence and sending it spiraling towards her foe. She could control its release, too. This time, she forced the heat to expand in a circular motion opposite of the direction that the demon spun. It didn't do nearly as much to slow it down as she had theorized, but the resulting scattering of small explosions shook the very bones of the ship and tore open another chunk of the Spiritomb.

"Panne!"

Vallion called out from within the churning gloom. She glanced back and saw the black tendrils rising from the pool beneath her feet, wavering and cruel, ready to strike in a moment's notice. Her elongated dress of fur blew up in a gust of heat as she swiped her claws across the floor, creating a whirlwind of flames so forceful that it blasted even the waters apart. The few tendrils that managed to survive the attack were blown away with a few flicks of her wrists.

The light produced by her attacks soaked into the persistent murk. Embers spiraled up with the air and danced towards the ceiling. She saw the demon leaking its own body onto the floor, writhing and screeching and churning all the while. The vortex swelled up in a way that made the fire of the Delphox's hands flicker towards it. Immediately stricken with a foreboding feeling, Panne hopped behind a few broken columns and managed to dodge the torrent that shaved inches off the wall she was in front of. A dance began, trading water blasts for explosive flames as she circled through the obstacle course of the destroyed hull. Had the walls not been built so thick as to withstand storm waves, they would've probably cracked through by now.

Though the Spiritomb's esoteric movements made it almost unpredictable, she could read when it was about to attack. It wasn't entirely clear to her how, but in the heat of the moment, she could only really focus on dodging and returning the favor. A sweeping fan of flames turned into a line of a dozen small detonations. Singular bolts fired from the tips of her fingers tore open entire sections of the vortex with magnified power. Even the mechanisms she maneuvered over were less of a problem to her increased height. Her ears rang with her pounding heartbeat-strong, alive. Never had it felt this easy.

Vallion's emerald scales glistened in the darkness out the corner of her eye. He had pressed himself between the upper hull and a pillar, Jirachi's unconscious body in his vines and blood streaking down his face. Another two tendrils emerged from the floor in her hesitance, grabbing at an arm and a leg in an attempt to pull her prone. Her fire was extinguished by the water, the water erupted into a shower of steam as the heat expanded, and more of both filled the empty space. This tug-of-war repeated itself again and again. Her lungs cried out for air, but the Spiritomb was desperate.

The tendril that held her left arm down faltered for just a split second. Her wrist slipped away and joined with the other. A fresh breath fueled the energy in her claws as she carved a wide swathe of red into the black. The water receded from her feet and allowed her to take a step forward. Another plume launched straight ahead into the sound of a thousand damned voices screaming in pain. Another stomp advanced with a numb paw. Another brief gulp of air, ready to turn mere oxygen into vengeance. The vortex was right in front of her, but it couldn't consume her without first piercing the near-constant stream of compressed flames.

The Delphox had held a knife to the Spiritomb's neck. She visualized a hunter bounding after its prey, teeth gnashing and spit frothing, effortlessly crashing through foliage like a ship carves through the sea. Her mind brought the image to her fingers, crafting a smoldering maw of fire wide enough to hold the demon in its jaws. But the form of her prey changed. It sunk past the teeth and morphed around the head, too unpredictable for the beast to exist. The image faded from her mind as she lost control, the mirage subsequently melting into an unrecognizable glob of red flames. She didn't wait to put herself out of danger of the unfocused attack. The fire detonated all at once.

Panne was blown backwards with the first of the explosions while the Spiritomb in its unstoppable cyclone took the brunt of every blast. She smashed into a splintered section of column while the Viridian's whole body shuddered, many numerous booms overlapping each other at such a volume that she only heard the first few before the ringing grew too loud. Laying among the ruined debris of a once incredible system of machines, Panne could only just try to stay awake while a gentle surge of water rushed beneath her. The demon was clearly gone, but for whatever reason it didn't feel dead. Not with an attack as botched as that.

Some amount of time passed. The huge pool left at the bottom of the Vidirian sloshed back and forth as the waves rolled beneath them. The Delphox managed to keep her head above the water for the time being, but didn't have the strength for much else. She heard Vallion slide down from his perch up in the wooden rib cage. He called out her name a few times, to which she could only croak back in response. There was still a considerable amount of swelling in her throat even after the looplet stopped squeezing. Not to mention the rainbow assortment of pains that afflicted almost every part of her body. Burns and chills, bruises and breaks, cuts and scrapes-everything she could think of. Ironically enough, her headache was completely gone.

The first sign of life all night came in the form of some frantic footsteps on the floor above. A bright red light meandered its way down the stairs, revealing that the mist had completely disappeared from the air. Ampharos shouted into the darkness. "Hey, is anybody- Oh god what in the hell?"

"Ampharos, down here!" Vallion had been wading around on the other side of the hull with Jirachi still above his head. He squinted against the new light and glanced straight towards the Delphox. "Panne! Panne, are you still alive?"

"Probably..." she managed to rasp out. More footsteps above. The others were finally coming.

In a single bound, Ampharos jumped from the broken stairwell all the way down to where Panne was slumped over, lifting her up on his shoulder in one fluid motion. "Alright, up! Easy now! You don't look like yourself right now. You...really don't, actually." He turned his head to the Servine. "You're still moving, right? Let's bring these two back up and check all your injuries!"

"WHAT." From the stairwell came the booming sound of disbelief. Clefable took one good look down into the belly of his ship. "What. Th' HELL. HAPPENED HERE? WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY SHIP?!"

"Worry about the ship later!" replied Ampharos with a huff of effort as he dragged Panne through the shifting soup of freezing water and splinters.

As it turned out, the cold was the only thing that was keeping her awake. Once the water began to roll off her fur and drip away, her consciousness followed it down.

...

The scene was patchy at best. A lot of pokemon had gathered around Panne, and there was a lot of noise. A whole bunch of frantic talking and hurried stomping. Someone was tending to her shoulder, and from the dull throb that radiated from that point certainly didn't inspire much confidence. She heard Vallion's voice pierce through the haze. He sure was talking quite a bit, huh? Explaining what happened with the Spiritomb, maybe? They sure did make a mess down there. And up here. And probably everywhere. Brief memories of the last hour flashed through her head like the dismantled tape of a film. If not for the commotion then she would have definitely assumed it was all just part a weird dream.

Mawile peered closely out the corner of her vision. "Hey, she's waking up! Everyone quit messing around!"

Then she became the center of attention all at once. They were somewhere inside the ship. Panne tried to rub at her eyes, marveling at how strange it felt to move her arms. Then she noticed that her arms were covered with thick red fur. Oh. Well that would make them feel different, wouldn't it?

"You gave us quite the scare, Panne!" Ampharos knelt down beside her. "Those of us up on the deck had no idea what was happening right below our feet! We couldn't hear a single thing happening down there, and in the eye of the storm we had to brace for the waves as best we could, so nobody thought to check. I should have known the Spiritomb would have tried to trick us like that! I'm sorry I didn't figure it out sooner!"

She shot a glance at Vallion, eyeing the red splotches beneath his bandages. He shook his head as soon as he caught her staring. "It's nothing. Don't worry about me. Jirachi's fine, too, though they're not going to be up for quite a while. It got them good."

"I mean, are we going to talk about-" Kadabra anxiously began, her foot tapping against the floor. "She's- she's a Delphox! When did that even happen?!"

"I guess..." Panne tried to say, but immediately had to clear her throat. Even her voice was deeper, too. Not that the fever helped. "I don't know. I hardly noticed it in the moment. Maybe I assumed it was the Harmony Scarf working its magic again. What mattered was that I could fight again, so I just did."

Ampharos shrugged. "I assumed it was the work of the scarves, too. But it's been quite a while since your battle, and you're still..."

A long hum came from the corner of the room, where Hydreigon had slotted his large self to fit in. A shake of his heads distorted the noise. "The leaves of the Tree of Life have many innate properties, a temporary burst of evolution being one of them. I don't believe this is the case here. Those leaves were already quite old by the time they were picked, so they shouldn't be able to retained that sort of power at all. Theoretically I suppose wearing them might help speed up one's growth to the next stage of evolution, but that's not too important to think about now. Panne is a true Delphox, whether the scarves had anything to do with it or not."

"So you evolved completely naturally in the middle of the fight?" Mawile rubbed her forehead. "Geez, Panne! Could you cut it any closer? I don't want to turn around because I feel like I'm going to miss the next miracle you're gonna pull out of your tail."

"Hmph." With the worst of it behind them, Ampharos sighed and plopped himself down against the wall, nose towards the ceiling. "Normally an evolution would be a cause for celebration. With the circumstances the way they are, though, we're barely getting a chance to breathe, much less throw a party. We'll have to do something special when everything settles back down."

Panne idly pulled at all the new fur that was suddenly weighing her down. Didn't exactly help that it was all wet fur, did it? "Psh. Yeah, right. Like things ever settle down around us. You're going to take a nap in your big chair next week and half the school's gonna be built while you're asleep."

Things wound down. Understandably, Clefable was positively furious at what had become of his beautiful ship. The fairy would stomp around the deck, begin to say something, and grumbled the words away beneath his breath. The Viridian was in utter disarray. Not only were the complicated mechanisms below totally wrecked from the inside, but the impact of the rogue waves obliterated the wheel and instruments on the outside as well. That's not even counting the damage done to the sails in that time. Needless to say, the sailors were either anxious, irritable, or both.

Thankfully enough, the Spiriomb hadn't killed anyone in their sleep. Those below deck were completely put under its spell so that there would be no interference. With the exception of Jirachi, who apparently fell into their usual deep sleep and stirred only when something tried to put them even deeper. Though they took some serious damage from one of the demon's water blasts during the fight. It was terrible how little she could really do about that in the first half of the battle. Even for the disadvantage she was at, that was completely pathetic on her part. Vallion wasn't the only person she should have been trying to protect. Everyone was in danger from this thing, and this was only proof of it.

Learning to walk on strangely long legs, Panne made her way to the upper deck and let the rain tap her on the snout. They were still stuck in a storm, of course, but the winds and waves seemed so much more calm compared to what slammed into them earlier. The gentler waters were at least a chance for her to process all that had happened without too much trouble. She saw Hydreigon in the flush red light that Ampharos had produced. Her mind clearer and her bruises dulled, she approached the dragon.

"You," The Delphox began. Hydreigon quit fiddling with a knot in a rope and turned around. "Vallion almost died down there. You're supposed to be the Voice of Life, right? Powerful avatar of the Tree or whatever? Why didn't I see you in the hull with us? Where the hell were you supposed to be?"

The dragon recoiled. "What? I sensed the abomination was nearby, so I stayed topside in case it tried anything to sink us from above! I was operating under the assumption that it couldn't enter the ship without having to sneak by. I was apparently quite wrong."

"You idiot! Are you blind?!" The frustration started to well up again. When she looked at Hydreigon, she saw someone who could lie and everyone else would believe. Someone who didn't have to save Vallion if he merely played dumb. "Did you not see the entire ship light the hell up? I threw a luminous orb right into it! My exact intentions were to make everyone aware of the emergency going on! Did nobody see that at all?"

"There was never any change up here. It must have suppressed the light somehow," they said, so annoyingly monotone like they were just only just curious at the development and nothing more.

Her claws dug into her palms. "You talk like you don't even care! He was going to die! We were all going to die! How do you expect to turn in that favor when he's been slurped up by some giant ball of phlegm? Or did getting him these scarves count as the favor and you're just humoring him until he dies? Do you want him to die under your nose so you don't have to deal with it?"

Hydreigon backed up as far as they could go, their neck postured low and defensive but their eyes still so neutral. "I admit that I made a huge mistake in underestimating the abomination. And no, of course I don't just want Vallion to die! Why on earth would I want that? I just wasn't aware of the situation, that's literally all. Had I been aware of what was happening, I would have done everything in my power to save him."

"I certainly hope you would have. This situation isn't going to happen again, alright? For your sake, it won't." The Delphox turned away and started back down into the dimness below deck.

"...You have my word." Hydreigon said just before she went out of earshot.

Did she really have it? Was that promise something she could rely on, or was it just a convenient excuse until the next time they could simply 'not have been aware' of the situation? Panne groaned, unsure of what to make of their words. Far too often, she found herself not being strong enough to protect the one she loved. It's partly dumb luck and partly the help of others that she was able to make it this far. If this was a disaster she could prevent, why even hesitate to be paranoid? Why waste this second chance her body had given her?

Besides, anyone who was friends with Alexander couldn't be good.