Man this chapter was hard to write. Finally got through it!
Chapter 16: Phenomena
The world swims before me, as if I am staring through a glass bubble. Excluded, I struggle to discern my surroundings, head swirling amongst a litter of unremarkable dreck.
Piercing clarity overcomes me, a sharp voice through the fogs in the form of the boy N.
"Filloma... why did you run?"
His visage, all angles and softened mint hair and pale skin, overtakes everything else. He's refreshing in the worst way possible. I can't feel my body, merely sense its weakened form half-against some sort of support, maybe even him. Yet he's everywhere, his wide blue eyes fighting to reflect back my bewildered state.
"Fillomaaa," he whispers, dragging the end of my name.
I'm grappling against this mindblowing headache, struggling to make sense of his melodious lilt between the gnarled mush of pain in my skull and the way the throbbing hiccups through my head. His hands are on me, cold and yet comforting, and yet—
Wincing, I pull against him, slapping away his fingers with slow, inaccurate hands that more touch and falter than tug.
He asks, ever softer, "What's wrong?"
My voice won't work. Then, sputtering, I manage to swallow and speak: "You."
The confusion leaks from his eyes and into his expression, palloring his cheeks. "M-Me? That cannot be right..." He's laughing, an awkward little fake laugh, a wow-what-a-terrible-joke laugh.
"You," I manage a second time, past the cottony tang of my mouth. "You... are wrong." And he's still staring at me with this dimwitted confusion lighting up his eyes, attempting to point itself back at me.
"How can I be wrong?" he's whispering, the confusion threatening to tear his face in two. Or maybe that's my face. The pain is blending it all together. "Filloma isn't even your real name. I'm saving us, saving our future."
And I'm going to kill myself if this headache doesn't abate. "Shay isn't my real name either."
He sputters, a flash of alacrity lighting up his stupid pristine features. He's like some sort of tree nymph, which I recall with alarm is what my best friend first called me. "But it is. It's short for your real name, that is. Shaymin." He says it louder, harder, a smack to my already splintering head. "You were a shaymin until we made you human. Why wouldn't Shay be your real name?"
Until we made you human...
He was never really helping me, was he.
A part of me idles, pondering whether the headache will go away if I can get him to shut up. "Then I have no real name. Now leave me alone."
"N-No," he replies, suddenly growing a backbone. "We're supposed to be together, F-Filloma. That's our purpose. To rule the world—to make it a perfect harmony of—"
"I don't care." Finally he goes still.
I just want to be happy. I wish I could find the miserable creature that thought it would be funny to make it so hard to be happy, and just, and just... beg him to make things easier. Things, something, any number of things. Get down on my weak, jelly knees and implore that I be given some sort of kind speck in this hapless field of sorrows, something that gives me a reason to go on.
Tiredly my mind flickers over my best friend, my adoptive family, but simultaneously they are discarded. Not enough. It's never enough. When will it ever be enough.
But I don't know. I just don't know.
Perhaps with my attitude, it will never be enough.
At some point N fades from my periphery, and a frigid pinch of gratitude overcomes my otherwise endless numbness. From where I am, curled up against the metallic wall of a Galactic-owned building, I feel myself re-enter my body and come to terms with my own skin. Steadying, my head crashes against metal and sags gratefully into the cold crush of weight, comforting, holding me in place.
It matters not where I am, merely that N has released his hold upon my aching skull.
And to think I thought I could have him join us, join me...
Oh, it matters not.
Swallowing, I stay there, breathing slowly, deeply of the stale air.
Unfortunately I am not left alone for nearly as long as I would have liked. Footsteps pound the ground behind me, and I think about turning to greet my guest, but ultimately I do not feel like moving.
The voice follows, washing over me like an acid bath. "Shay."
"Oh, great," I mutter, the sting of his tone still burning, "N didn't tell you to call me by my name."
"Yes, actually, I was a little confused upon that matter. He insisted that you have no real name. His proposed solution was that we do not call you anything at all."
"Oh my goodness. Of course he said that." I choke on a bitter chuckle. "I no longer go by Shay."
"Would you face me when you tell me your 'real name' then?"
Stubbornly I sit there; then my curiosity overturns and I spare a glance over my pale shoulder. It is a man. His plastic-looking blonde hair has been combed over one side of his face, and an utterly indescribable strand of blue hair just about encircles his head. Unovan fashion. Marlun and I used to make fun of the magazines together.
My heart aches. Marlun. She said to stick together. I hope she isn't trapped here as well.
I swallow the sharp pang in my throat. "Your name is Colress."
"Ah. You remember me." For some reason his cheeks brighten. "I did not expect you to."
I shrug. "Hard to forget someone who ruined your life."
Then the glasses across his face—darken. His head bows stiffly. "Ruin it?"
"No, perfect it." I roll my eyes. "Yes, ruin it. You took me away from my home, my family, my safety." Maybe that's why I can't seem to contain myself, can't sustain my own paltry existence. I'm so far away from where I belong. Once belonged.
"We did however replace all of these attributes fully, with a new home, another family, a different flavor of safety."
"Ah, yes, safety." I expand my arms to point out at the metal walls surrounding us. "I feel so very safe within this death trap."
"Fantastic. Then that means I've done my job well." A shifty quirk in his mystifying yellow eyes. "Are there any comforts you are lacking?"
"My name," I reply, and his brows raise.
"Child, you neglected to tell me of it."
Cold invisible hands squeeze my sides together.
A piece of me doesn't want him to have it, to hold it in his stupid nerd brain. That's what he is—some sort of freakish scientist. His experiments warped my body and transformed me into this not-quite-correct existence.
Yet my heart stutters, and I stand slowly, my legs protesting as they stretch to support me. I face him, the scientist, and I whisper, "You're a nerd."
He coughs in some sort of awkward laugh. "I suppose that is one way of labeling it." But his eyes glint and he recognizes what I used to call him when I lived here. I must have picked up the word on television or some other strange place and plastered it onto him.
Now I stare into him and the memories come flooding through me, everything I had locked up deep inside and hoped to never let relinquish the light of remembering.
Yet I still needed those memories, and so we coexisted. Until now.
"How is the bird?" I ask him, and the realization dawns as if a sunrise in his gilded eyes.
"The bird is not present and will not be coming today," he replies smoothly.
The bird is Ghetsis.
We pretend that the bird is his pet pokemon, but Colress has no pokemon.
But if Ghetsis is not here...
I stumble forward, throwing myself into his labcoated chest and clutching his thin frame tightly.
He smells the same as he did when I was a child. The faint whiff of machinery and chemicals, yet the clove of a natural musk hidden far beneath it. It's almost a ghastly combination, yet somehow I find it tolerable.
More than tolerable. Comforting.
Into his shirt I mumble, "I wasn't supposed to return." My tears have soaked his shirt.
One of his long-fingered hands gingerly touches at my hair, then settles somewhere behind me, as if afraid to relax. "No," he replies softly, "you weren't."
"My name is Filloma," I finally tell him, "so don't you dare call me Shay again."
I sense him stiffen. "That is what the girl called you. Something to that effect?"
"The girl?" Why is she the one thing I can't seem to piece back together in my head...
"I never learned her name. The girl, the little brown one. The one who opened your cage and led you out the night I put Ghetsis to sleep and disabled my security measures."
Struggling to force it to fit, I ask, "Was her name Iris?"
No avail. Colress is silent. "I cannot tell you what I do not know, Filloma."
Filloma.
He doesn't hesitate. N hesitated.
Grateful tears drench his shirt. He doesn't push me aside but lets me stay, my heart thundering ceaselessly in my broken chest.
"There is still something I do not understand," I say, and he shifts, awaiting my question. "Why didn't you leave? I thought you were going to leave."
His hesitance greets me like a barbed wall, far too tall for me to ever hope to scale. His breaths tighten, and finally I recall that he is no father, merely a man plucked up by the Plasma Dukedom in search of a place that will utilize his compelling skill set.
He must see it in me, for he slowly says, "I was weak, Filloma." He moves back, allowing space to reclaim what we once shared. "I knew if I stayed, I would receive more work, more experiments, more possibilities. And I wanted to see how far I could stretch what matters I had only begun to discover."
When Colress's eyes flash back to me, I do not see the weathered pale yellow gaze rendered by years of unspeakable, unnatural deeds driven by an innate curiosity, but the one of years past. Brighter, the light of a sunrise.
He'd been making some routine check-up when his face came close to mine, and he had spoken low enough into my hair that the cameras could not pick it up. "Tonight is the night." There had been a flash of something low and grieving—something afraid to lose someone dear—in the shadows clinging to his face that day, but still he had said it and still he had stepped away, allowing the ties to sever.
Even now he tells me that I was not supposed to come back. He kicked away my footprints, all residue that may have allowed Ghetsis to find me, did all of this for me even as he stayed back here in this hellish pit and let the lustful greed of Ghetsis's mind control him.
I blink sharply, willing the cold pinpricks in my eyes to dissipate.
"Why didn't you want to leave?" I ask again, softer, weaker. "I met another scientist upon my escape who took me in. You could have furthered her research rather than..." than what? Continue to obliterate the natural order of the world?
Colress's head lowers, and he murmurs, "I told you. I was weak. I am weak. My heart is not anywhere near as pure as yours, my child." With a snap, his foot turns and he begins to recede to the edge of the metal chamber. "I'm sorry for what is about to happen, but I lack the resources to save you this time."
Then he hesitates.
Turns once. Looks at me, long, hard.
Mutters, "I still have a plan, however. But it's not a very good one." A bright expulsion of concern brims and then abruptly dies in his emotionless face. "So be careful."
He exits through a sliding door in the far wall. I do not follow, nor do I attempt to escape.
Pouting, I sit myself back into the corner of the chamber, staring back at where Colress had disappeared to. Weak, he calls himself.
But as the metal wall peels away in front of me, revealing a glass see-through holding area stuffed full of people in robes, I begin to wonder what he truly means by weak.
Be careful, he said. Of what?
One robed figure steps ahead, their face obscured as always by the hood.
I call out, the smirk carving up my mouth, "Too afraid to show your face to me?"
"Yes," they reply in a low, sorrowful tone. I'm so taken aback that I lose all fire to shoot another reply. "Yes, I am afraid. But our lord commands it, and so I must."
Their hands snap back to their sides, and the tiniest opening appears between the glass wall and me. Then for a moment I catch angular skin and sunken cheeks as a burst of flame erupts between the believer's lips, sailing straight for me.
I gasp and duck to the ground. The fire crashes somewhere above my head, singeing the metal.
Singeing the metal—
This holding chamber wasn't prepared for a person who... who could use fire.
He said he still has a plan—a poorly-made plan.
Gasping, I jump up as another shot of flame curls toward me, blackening the floor beneath my feet. I cry out and hop away, my bare feet forming the starts of blisters. My heart squeezes into my chest as if seeking a way of escape, and I land clumsily, tripping over my own burning toes. Reaching out my hands, I struggle to grasp, to feel, to find some connection to the outside world. The metal has begun to smolder, and I catch the slightest specks of green outside. If I could only—
With my head turned away from the enemy, I receive a fireball to the back and fall smack to the ground.
Then the fire whiffs through my hair, licking my skin and I realize—I am literally aflame.
The clinging fogs of my past memories burn away, and I'm left curled up on the floor in a midst of unspeakable torture. My skin is being eaten alive, my very clothes to blackened crisps along my back, my poor hair acting as transport while the flames tease at my neck, tasting for my face, my eyes, my—
Screaming, I pound a singed fist into the metal.
I don't see it, just sense the sudden flourish of wind and the guttural lurch of steel wall breaking away. Glancing once above me, I catch the trunk of a wayward tree hovering above my head. When I reach out to it with a cracked finger, the rush of calm overcomes me as if a balm, and the leaves of the branches settle about me, set to work on its rejuvenating properties.
Gasping into my palm, I sense the restorative process and only look once at the glass, daring the creatures draped in robes to try again.
They've developed new forms of experiment, I see. No longer probing with chemicals and fingers, now utilizing their own inhuman methods against me.
Colress's experiments—
Before my eyes, the one in reddish robes abates, and one in blue takes their spot. The hands raise, and a crushing tidal wave rips the walls to shreds. Metal goes flying as a gray-robed figure punches a fist and the shrapnel explodes into tiny needle-like shreds. Struggling to keep air in my lungs, I grasp at the tree's sturdy trunk and crawl on top of it, securing myself under a protective layer of leaves. My breaths, so fast and needy, shove against the tree, pressing my stomach into its grainy surface.
My frantic toes scrabble for purchase as I scoot backwards. My clothes have become a desolate, blackened mess. But there's no time to cry over it, and so I tumble up the trunk and make my way through the torrent, aiming for the puncture of light that now flickers fitfully overhead through the tree's own gaping entrance-hole.
Just as my fingers stretch for the opening, a wayward metal strip smacks my hand, knocking me aside and leaving me bereft for the monsoon to steal me away. I'm tossed into the torrent, unable to control my own motor functions. Hurriedly I throw my own hands into the air, reaching, reaching—grasping hold of a sudden vine that leaps out of the nature surrounding my metal prison. It wraps about my wrists and ties me onto the tree. Now I can't fall off so easily.
As if responding to my thoughts, even the ones I kept to myself, a collection of vines and leaves and little pink flowers fold about my body, crafting a tightly-knit dress of fascinating greenery. Releasing a wet, jagged breath, I sag for a moment into the tree, knowing all too much that this flash of weakness could send me spiraling into a whole new well of oblivion.
Carefully I inch my forlorn way across the tree again, vines tugging me closer to sunlight. More and more shoot into the opening like spiderwebs and blanket my sides, protecting me from the spatter and spray of water meshed in metal.
Behind me, I sense the monsoon drying. Swallowing, I manage a look backwards and watch as the one in black robes claps their hands and the room goes into shadow.
Idiot. The light from the outside still bathes my face in a gentle, hopeful glow. My shuddering body forces me inch by inch closer, and I can only hope that before they get the idea, I'll be gone.
Then my mind utterly shuts down.
An indescribable headache attacks me from the inside out, and I scrabble with my head, moaning inconsolably. H-How can I break something so psychological? Psy—Psychic.
The dread is consuming me whole and I've ceased moving. Sharp pinpricks of angry tears form in the edges of my eyes. I'm so close. I'm so close, and yet I've no clue how to—
Somehow it occurs to me. With one shuddering hand, I point back, and the vines quadruple, splintering through the shadows to intercept with the robed figures. I don't care how they are harmed so long as this cloudy, unruly fog of a nightmare dissipates.
While I'm left muttering to myself, unable to tell if the vines were in my head or hurtling toward my captors, a hand—no, a paw—grapples for my own.
I look up, the tears splintering down my face, and a snout meets mine.
Ashy gray—the eyes a luminous quartz.
Asha, I whisper, and the zoroark pulls me into her strong grip, tossing the both of us out of the hole in the wall.
We fall to the ground in a tumble, but she breaks our fall with the fat pouf of reddish hair that now lies below her waist. She's become two-legged in the duration of her evolution, and while I try to come to terms with it, she helps me to my feet.
Head bowed, she murmurs, I'm so sorry, Filloma.
I stare at her for a long time, unable to form words. The clothes I once wore, now tattered and burnt, have been replaced with this patchwork dress of greenery. My hair, somehow, has grown back as if a plant of its own. The burns along my skin have healed remarkably, but the memory is enough to cause me to cringe.
Either we're out of their range, or the psychic user has given up, as I am freed of the impenetrable headache.
Asha... why did N..?
She blinks imperiously. I don't know. I'm mad about it though. I'd love to go over to him and force-feed him a piece of my mind, but I don't want to drag you anywhere near them. Her shoulders stiffen, and she adds, quieter, If he's not going to protect you, then I will.
A-Asha? Oh dear. I'm blushing.
Her eyes meet mine and hold them. He's not listening to you. Your friend went missing with that girl who has the weird scent. They're... I don't think they're trying to kill you, but whatever the heck that was sure makes it look like they are.
Her paws take my hands, and she bows her head to me. She's gotten taller, a head above me now. But that's not right. I always thought N was trying to be right, but when he let you both get captured... it just... it really freaked me out. Really made me think, maybe he's not as far along as I thought he was. Maybe you and him were both trying to juke each other.
I can't support the Dukedom. They kidnapped and tortured a lucario N befriended a long time ago, a lucario that helped raise me. As long as they continue to uphold and recreate tragedies such as those, I refuse to join them.
Her smile has become incisive. So what next, Filloma? What's the plan?
And I realize that it's up to us. Nobody else is going to stop them. Nobody else knows to stop them.
It's up to us.
My stomach freezes, and I can't tell if it's adrenaline or dread that now pumps my heart faster.
