I didn't actually think any of the gym leaders would be important in the story... but uh... now Volkner and Flint are. So... yeah. Stories are crazy. You plan it out like this, and then something comes along and destroys all of your ideas, haha.

Anyways, WHAT COULD THIS MEAN? What are the red marks around the Team Galactic necks and why are they also on the scientists' faces? Why do they have no emotions? It can't be, that it has to do with the plot of Pokemon Diamond and Pearl, can it? (what? A fanfiction having something to do with the plot of the game it's based off of? No way!)

OMG—Yeah, I love an interesting story too. I could never write this out to be a "fun adventure story" like all the other pokemon adventure stories where they just beat all the gym leaders and whatever. And thanks for your kind words! I like Lucaro too. He's a fun character. I mean, talking lucario. There is very little to not enjoy.

Chapter 8: We Seek the Fatal Truth

My new pal Flint and I leave Volkner safely tucked into a corner of the lab on this little cot we find. Flint whispers sweet nothings into his ear while I blankly stare at the wall. It is immensely awkward. Then he leaves a couple fiery pokemon by Volkner's side, and we head out to explore the rest of the broken-down laboratory. The signs on the doors are incredibly misleading, as most doors have legit zero labels and the rest of them have these hacked-on code-looking words like "d0cs" and "recx".

No other leads to follow, so we take d0cs and enter a darkened chamber. The floor is smattered with pages, and the light switch won't flick on. Squinting, Lucaro extends a palm and releases a small aura-ball that bathes the room in a blue glow. Flint's fuzzy brows raise; he mutters, "You have one smart lucario. Didn't have to tell him to do a thing."

From behind Flint's back, Lucaro mutters back, "Yes, I am smart because I did not have to take orders. I could plainly see that the room is without light."

To his grunt, the elite member turns around, his flame eyes piercing me. "Niri, you say something?"

"Oh." I cough. "Oh, no, just thinking aloud."

"Bout what?"

Great. I flush through my tan skin. "I'm wondering if the papers in here will tell us what happened to the scientists."

"Hmmmm..." Flint closes his eyes, head shaking slightly, making his giant afro wiggle. "What a boon that would be. I assume it has something to do with the chain-like weapon that Volky described. The one they wanted to... use on him."

"R-Right, right." It's a freaky thought. Can't begin to understand what that chain is. But first, my mind must account for something else. "Wait, Volky?"

"Heheh. Don't call him that to his face. He hates it." A sly grin creeps up Flint's lip.

I giggle. "Cute." Gosh, Volky's cute. It's too bad that he's clearly not into me or, uh, my type, but I guess there's not much to be done about it. Ignoring the quips Lup shoots at me from my pocket, I ask, "Flint. Um... how did you find this place? Why are you and Volky even here?"

Before he responds, he sort of gestures ahead. I take his hint and crouch over the ground, poring over sheet after sheet. Whoever threw them all over the tiles like this really wasn't thinking about the consequences. However, the further I delve into the mass of pages, the more I realize that I can't understand a freaking word on them.

They're encoded. It doesn't matter if the papers are discarded out in the open. Flint, picking up on this, mutters, "Shoot... they're smarter than we accounted for. Niri, try searching for other sorts of evidence. I don't think this is gonna help us." Then, once I get up and tramp along the chamber, tracking dirt over the rest of the documents, I catch his voice rising. "Volky and me, we were let in on some rumors from the villagers in Floaroma. Something about a missing father, an overworked friend, things like that.

"By the time we could get here, this is... well, you heard Volky." A soft sigh, and the scrabble of papers as Flint shuffles them around, as if hoping to conjure another clue. "I was checking the perimeter when he slipped in. I dunno how he did it. There were so many grunts around, a whole horde of 'em.

"We've been trying to solve the cases as we get them, but as you can see, we're sorta stretched thin." I duck behind a pair of filing cabinets, locating a hidden niche of supplies. Flint's voice reverberates along the metal corridor before it reaches me. "There used to be more of us. Maylene of Veilstone, Crasher Wake of Pastroia..." A wince. "Cynthia."

I gasp, stubbing my foot on a cabinet. "Cynthia? As in the Sinnoh Champion? Wh-What—"

"I don't know." His rushed, hushed response meets my exasperation with such calm that my throat shuts down entirely. "I don't know what happened to her. The other elites, they're all freaking snobs just in it for the title and the academia that supports their level of expertise. Fancy dinners and the whatnot. It's disgusting, but it's just so hard to become part of the elites that it seems we're stuck with those pompous asses—ah, 'scuse the language—those jerks who win the titles from their lineage. Cynthia, though—She's like me. We both came from practically nothing. I'm an orphan. She had a single overworked mother. It's... yeah, she's kinda like a sister to me. And I... Volky and I don't know what happened, but she's gone missing too. She's the first one who went missing.

"I don't know what Team Galactic's doing, but I'm terrified for Cynthia. The longer we take, the more I worry. Seems like they can get away with anything now that the Champion's outta their way."

Fighting my tightened throat, I swallow and rasp, "Flint, that's... I mean, that's the same with me. Layke was—we, I mean, I think he was kidnapped, and now I can't find him." Remembering myself, I sift through the appliances in the corner of the room, successfully locating a key-ring. Who just leaves a perfectly good key-ring in a pile of junk? Maybe they were in a hurry to hide it when Volky broke in.

I pocket the key-ring and emerge from the shadows. "I got a bunch of keys."

"What?" Flint stares up at me, his pale brow furrowed. "All the doors are unlocked already, though. What're we gonna do with a bunch of bunk keys?"

"Well, maybe they aren't for the doors?" I shrug, pulling it out and shaking it. Lucaro surfaces beside me from his role of guarding the door and checks the keys, staring into them with aura-rimmed eyes. The sprawling confusion across his blue dog face tells me just how much he knows. I snort and return them to my pocket before he's done looking at them, and he tosses a petty scowl my way. While Flint rummages a little more with the floor-paper, I stick out my tongue at the lucario. Flustered, Lucaro turns away.

Flint smacks his palms onto his dark cargo pants, his face in shadow. "We're not gonna learn anything from these, that's for sure. I wish they were stupid enough to leave out a way to decipher their jargon." He gets up. "Let's go look for some things to stick the keys into."

We exit "d0cs". Lucaro douses his aura sphere, joining us outside.

Little else left to do, we make the dreary progress of poking our heads through random doors along the halls in the hopes of summoning more secrets—or at the very least, a place to turn a bunch of keys. We discover a freaky generator-looking room with a bunch of glass shrapnel and blue goo spills on the ground, a shabby bedroom made up of old cots, a couple toilets, and then, finally, this room labeled "cam". Within "cam" lies a number of screens showcasing the various chambers of the laboratory. We show up on one of them, labeled "cam", as surprising as it sounds, and it is here that I pull out my keys.

"This looks promising."

Flint grunts. "Yeah. Let's hope so." We split up, examining the room. I head straight to the very back and gloss over all the bright screens, my fingers digging into the dark recesses surrounding them to seek out key-holes.

And then—beneath the screens, beside some sort of control panel I can't begin to make sense out of, I catch a little slip in the mechanism. Cycling through keys, I try one at a time until one chicks in and the screens all light up with wonderfully helpful instructions.

"Over here, Flint," I call, except he's already beside me and working the panel.

Under his breath, he assures me, "I have no idea what I'm doing, but if it explodes, it should take me out first, uh?"

"D-Dude..." I cringe, "don't go there."

He waves me off, gently pushing me back. "Let me do this. I'm gonna lose my mind if I don't follow this lead for myself." Sure, I could get Lucaro to shove him back, but I ultimately come to the conclusion to let Flint burn through his frustration. Peeking over his shoulder, I watch him glance across screens and zoom backwards and fiddle with all kinds of tiny buttons—I'm not sure how he gets so quickly used to the system.

"Geez, Flint, have you been here before?"

He flinches to the sound of my voice breaking air. "Uhhhh... oh, no no no. I'm just trying things." He glances up once, his afro jiggling aggressively, to meet my eyes. "Just... I have an idea." Returning to the controls, he clicks one other decisive fob, and the screens all dim save for one. It's the camera with Volky on it, passed out in his cot, surrounded by glowing pokemon. It's almost like a ritual. "Aha." While I stare on, Flint carefully rewinds the footage of the lone screen.

A mob of grunts passes by, a thundercloud of gray fabric. They zoom backwards into the folds of the past, and then doors shuffle and people funnel in and out—and the scientists stand up. Gasping, I tap his shoulder. "They just—"

"I know I know I know," he hisses through his bewilderment, and he zooms back a few more spasms of screen-color, then forces the camera's feed to roll forward once more. "Now we just gotta figure out what went on in here." After a few excruciating seconds of watching mouths move without hearing voices, Flint laughs weakly and tries another button. The video explodes with sound.

"Hurry hurry hurry hurry," one scientist—the woman—is gesturing to the other. "She'll be back soon. She expects an answer."

The man sighs, long and hard, sagging into his coat. "I can't believe this happened... The one day I visit Sinnoh..."

The woman cringes. "C-Cedric. I'm sorry."

"No, this..." Cedric closes his eyes. His head sort of curls into his neck, and his sandy brown beard disguises his mouth. "This was important. You had every right to tell me. I can't believe the thugs of your region have been kidnapping members of your laboratory. I just... I think about—Have I told you about my daughter?"

"Cedric we need to hurry before—"

He cuts her off. "We don't have much time left. Why spend the rest of it under her orders? Sounds like we'll be doing that either way."

Flint and I flinch. I awkwardly grab at his hand, shivering. He lets me. Lucaro takes my other one, staring into the screen, brow furrowing.

Dropping the substance in her hands, the woman stares up at Cedric. "Fine. Elaborate." The object pools from her grip and onto the table—a chain, glowing crudely red.

It's the chain. With the realization, I wince, tugging at Lucaro, thinking about all the horrible things it may have done to my best friend. Then before I can stop it the image of it curling around his throat, cutting off his air, burning the brightness of his vision, scraping out the mirth in his face, leaving him empty, utterly empty, is more than enough to leave me stunned and silent as the scientists continue their conversation. The more I listen, the less I want to, yet the less I'm able to tear myself away.

With her compliance, Cedric places a hand over her shoulder. "My daughter, Juniper. You've heard of her, yes? She took in a young girl a few years ago, a young girl apparently from the Sinnoh region. She... she's a little unnatural, the poor girl. Her skin's white, like white like—well, like a shaymin. And there are flowers in her hair—they just grow there, naturally, I guess—like one. I think there's a connection between her and... here. Yet somehow she ended up in Unova. Do you follow?"

The woman's brows raise. "I... follow." Her lips stray low, scrunched together. She is counting down her seconds left of freedom, and I don't know what happens when it reaches zero, but my heart is thudding against my chest like it wants to kill me.

"There's a group of delinquents not unlike the ones here back in Unova. They'd somehow gotten their hands on the girl, years ago. I'm thinking there's some sort of connection we had yet to establish between them, as Juniper's daughter—er, I suppose my granddaughter—is... well, the girl's unnatural. Not only her looks, but she can speak to pokemon. It's done wonders for my research, but it's only making me more aware of the little we understand about our world. How badly we may be treating it." A grunt from Lucaro. Flint glances at me, concern in his eyes, and I shrug back. "I'm thinking, with this chain you've been developing—if it works on pokemon and humans, that only confirms the relationship between humans and pokemon being much more prevalent then we've thought about it. I wonder, sometimes, what awaits us in our next lives, what sort of being watches over us... I think less and less that anthropocentric religions understand the truth..."

"Cedric." The woman interrupts him, eyes over his shoulder. "Why are you bringing this up."

"Well... back home, these religious icons are trying to convince us that we must renounce all connections to pokemon. Pretty crazy. I think—I'm really starting to think that they know about this region, about yourthugs. Because they knew about my granddaughter, and by all accounts she looks like she's connected to this region here. I fear that these icons plan to work with your people... that they're going to use this chain of yours...

"And I'm thinking, if we can somehow warn someone... that this team of fiends has their eyes on the gods..."

Suddenly his hands are on the chain. The woman squawks. "CEDRIC—"

Just as the doors slam open, and high heels drill through the tile ground, resounding ominously, Cedric has grappled the chain from around the woman's desperate fingers and held it out to the stranger in the room. "I'm not letting you control the gods."

The stranger purses her lips. "Oh? That is not the answer I asked for. Cedric, I said I expected a detailed report concerning the percentages of elements in the conglomerate upon my return. Easy, right?" She steps nearer, nearer, heels sliding against tile. From her belted dress she reveals a poke ball, then releases a husky purple skuntank, who grins at the scientists. "You've already conducted alloys supposedly holding similar mixtures of elements also in the blood of the gods. We just needed to ready it. We are so close to my beloved Cyrus's fruition and the birth of his new world."

We all cringe at beloved.

Then the doors slam open one last time, followed by bright yellow electric pokemon and a livid blonde-haired man. "MARS, I WILL TAKE YOU CAPTIVE."

Flint whispers "Volky" as his eyes glaze over.

Screeching, Mars surges at the scientists, grappling for the chain in Cedric's hands. "GIVE ME THAT GIVE ME THAT GIVE ME THAT NOW! GIVE IT! GIVE IT OVER! YOU—NO!" Her screams grow rampant, hungry, repulsive, and as she tears away at the chain, it begins to shudder.

"NO!" cries the woman, the other scientist, who takes Cedric's side to tug away.

It's a sick tug-of-war threatening to claim lives. Lucaro and I watch with wide, glistening eyes when the chain, spasming, begins to froth. At the wills of three separate individuals, pulling it into three directions, it hisses, bubbling, fizzling—and Mars, in a moment of distress, releases it to duck behind a table.

Red.

Red bleeds into the screen, encompassing the room, only to implode and attach itself to its closest objects: up the scientists' arms and into their faces. It's like blood dripping onto their skin and swallowing up their arms, necks, heads, only the chain seeps into them and leaves crazed crimson imprints that glow.

The two collapse. Mars, screeching, points her skuntank in the direction of Volkner and his electric pokemon.

Then the screen flickers off. I look up; Flint, eyes resolute, has ended the feed.

"I don't want to see any more. I can't sit and watch any more of it." He releases a breath. His hand cups around his head. "Is it crazy that I can't bring myself to believe any of this actually happened? N-Niri. Confirm what I just witnessed. Please. My head's gonna explode."

I swallow. I look at Lucaro, once. He catches my wary gaze. When I open my reluctant mouth, Lucaro grips my shoulder and speaks through me. My voice flows outwards, but Lucaro's words take flight. "I saw. I saw the scientists converse over the nature of humans and pokemon, as well as the strange chain that they created. I saw Mars, the Team Galactic woman, who tried to make them work for her bidding. I saw them fight her. I saw them lose. I saw them lose horribly."

Wheezing, I scoot out of Lucaro's grip and mouth, You can do that? He nods, unaffected. I ask with my hands all splayed out, Why did you never use that before now? Lucaro just freaking shrugs. I think about punching him, except he's just too good a boy to punch.

Flint can't find words. He stares ahead, the shadows playing across his pale face. "I'm... I'm just speechless. Thanks, though. Thanks, Niri." Lucaro blushes, collecting his owed gratitude. "What were they saying at the beginning, about some sort of... the daughter, or whatever. I wonder what that was all about."

We're silent, pensive. There's not much to be said—

Until Lucaro blurts, "THE STORY ABOUT THE POKEMON THAT WAS TURNED INTO A HUMAN!"

I shriek at him; Flint completely shuts down. I thought he was lost before, but now he can't even look at us.

"Y-Y-Your lucario can speak."

There is nothing we can do to back ourselves out of this. Sniggering, I hide my face into my hands. "Yes... he can talk."

Lucaro jumps in, "And I am not her lucario! I am my own lucario. My name is Lucaro."

Dead silence. Flint eventually squeaks, "You have your own name."

"Yes. It is Lucaro."

"Wh-Why didn't you tell me any of this at all, Niri."

I look up. Scowl. Fold my fists into my lap. "Okay, we were trying to get into the habit of not telling random strangers about how he talks, because then this happens every single time someone new hears him speak."

"Oh..." He draws off. "I guess that makes sense. I... Well, I'd probably do the same in your position." We spend a moment just sort of staring at each other, out of words to express the thing that we just watched, unable to continue this idiotic conversation concerning the lucario who can speak. "Let's go find Volky and tell him about the camera feed. Now at least we know what happened. That... chain... has some amount of Dialga's and Palkia's... matter... in them, I guess—the ability to control space and time. Somebody else's, most notably, as our pals in Team Galactic have been doing.

"They aren't... oh, gosh, are they? Is that how they plan to control the universe? Control the gods? But how..." Groaning, he folds his head into his hands. "I don't know. I really don't want to know. We just have to find them and kick them really hard where it don't shine. Then maybe we can stop ourselves from having to answer these sorts of questions." He starts to get up, pulling himself from where he was all leaned into the control panel. "The red, though. I recognize that. I think... I think that's why some of the leaders have gone dead on me.

"I think that's why Volky and I are the only ones trying outside of the idiots who would never care. Galactic's... oooh, this is scary... they're targeting us. They're totally targeting us."

"Wait—" I butt in with the one slightly-helpful detail I have left. "What about Roark? He was totally not possessed. I fought him, and he was weak. That's a lot coming from someone with a singular prinplup."

Flint snorts. "Hey, Roark's a kid. He's new to this. Don't be so hard on him."

"Oh."

Quiet again. He sighs, dragging his hand across his face. "We're freaking lucky those guys didn't get me or Volky... since their weird chain thing broke. Oh." He blinks. "Maybe they can't hurt us, then. I mean... it broke... after all."

"Oh!" My voice erupts at this hopeful speck of good news. "That would be very nice."
If they can't hurt us, then they can't hurt Layke either, right?

They can't possibly make another chain now, can they? Now that they lost the scientists smart enough to make it? Team Galactic can't possibly be that smart, too. Nah. They wouldn't be trying to freaking kidnap people if they didn't need the involuntary assistance of others.

That's the conclusion we come to. We head out of the room and reunite with Volky in the hopes of never having to experience what we witnessed ever again.