Now that Blake and Sylvia are working together, and Blake can finally trust Sylvia, it seems, what awaits them in this strange place? Will they be able to become friends, even? We'll have to find out for ourselves!

Also, thank you to everyone who read my story "The Heir to the Dragon". I would appreciate if you continue to read and support it in the future! You can get there through my profile!

Today is the final day of the nomination round of the Second Pokemon Academy Best Girl Contest! Tomorrow we move onto the Elimination Round, where everyone votes for their top five favorite girls! Until that poll is up, nominations are still open, so if there's anyone else you think deserves the nomination for best girl, here's your last chance to say!

Currently Nominated: Alcea, Ayame, Carrie, Caelia, Cynthia, Dakota, Elaina, Elizabeth, Julia, Kate, Kitty, Maddi, Marion, Nikita, Olivia, Sango, Sylvia

Rowlets and Oshawotts: This bizarre world certainly raises a lot of interesting questions and exciting theories, that's for sure!

ReadingForFun: Thanks, I will! Thank you for binging it, I'm glad you like it!

KedharS: A very bizarre buddy cop movie, with two "buddies" that aren't exactly buddies. Or cops.

JoshGamerV: Well feel free to share any other theories that might occur to you! I'm happy to hear them, it amuses me to see how many of them might turn out right.

Pokemon Academy: Beginning of Beginnings

Chapter 627

Blake had no idea how long they'd been walking in the desert for, and Sylvia had chosen not to tell him. "You don't want to know" had been her response, and so they walked in silence for a while, Sylvia leading the way and leaving him to watch her catsuited backside.

He was loyal to Aya, of course, but he couldn't help but admire quality.

Another thing he had noticed in his time there was that they weren't getting tired. Certainly, their bodies would run low on energy and they'd have to stop for a while to rest, but they didn't need to eat or drink anything to regain their strength. And that wasn't the kind of "tired" that Blake was most concerned about.

Since he had woken up in the desert who-knows-how-long-ago, neither he nor Sylvia had ever gone to sleep. He didn't even feel the urge to take so much as a nap. It was just walking. Walking, walking, walking, through sand, sand, sand, until they couldn't walk anymore and then they just sat down in the sand until they could.

Blake would KILL for another one of those sand worms to attack right now, he was so bored. They'd been traveling like this for what felt like forever going through the same boring routine, and he just wanted something, anything to change. But it stayed like this. There were no more bizarre monster attacks, just more of the same, more sand and that unchanging black sky.

Blake felt like he was going to go crazy. Part of him was grateful Sylvia wasn't telling him how long he'd been there, she was probably right, he probably didn't want to know the answer. Definitely more than a day at this point, but how many days? Weeks? Months, even? Would he even notice when months had passed, if they stayed with this same empty schedule?

How long would it be like this? They weren't eating, they weren't drinking, they didn't need to sleep, hell, were they even aging? THAT was a theory Sylvia had floated a while back that had caused Blake no small amount of stress.

If they weren't even getting older, would they ever even die? Were they going to just wander this wasteland forever?

An eternity without his sister, without his pokemon, without Aya or his friends, with no one but Sylvia Driscoll for company, it was not a very pleasing thought.

"Blake," Sylvia called, coming to a stop at the crest of a dune, turning back to glance down at him. She raised her hand and beckoned him to come up after her. He crossed the sand and climbed the dune, reaching her in a few seconds.

"What's up? See something?" He asked, looking down the other side of the dune. But all he saw was more sand. He sighed in defeat. Nothing was ever going to change, it seemed.

"No, it's not that," Sylvia said, shaking her head. "I was just thinking about our circumstances, being trapped here, with nowhere to go. Just trapped here, walking, forever." She glanced at him, her face hard. "Not exactly a pleasant thought, if you ask me."

Blake swallowed. She was giving words to his own fears, and it wasn't like he could exactly be grateful for that fact. Maybe there was nowhere to go. No way out. Maybe this desert just went on forever, and eventually they would run out of energy and be eaten by that worm. Maybe that was the only other life form there. Just he, Sylvia, and a big hungry condom ready to devour them whole, and there was nothing they could do but wait.

Sylvia was right. It wasn't exactly a pleasant thought.

"You know, I almost prefer the old you," Blake sighed, shaking his head. "All bright and cheery and excited. At least that you wouldn't be all stern and stalwart, and bumming me out right now. No offense, I mean. It's just, well…"

He looked out across the wide expanse of nothing in front of them.

"…A little levity would be nice."

Sylvia smirked, flopping down to sit on the ground and kicking her legs out across the small dip of the tall sand dune. "Well, if you're bored, I'm sure there are a few things we could do to pass the time… you know, if you're interested…" She glanced up at him and fluttered her eyelashes, her lips curling up in a flirty grin.

Blake rolled his eyes. He wouldn't exactly say this was better, just a different kind of annoying. At least this Sylvia was an amusing conversation partner, though, when she wasn't all business and on-guard. He studied her for a little as she looked out over the sand, the two of them taking an impromptu break. He had learned a lot about her in the time he had spent with her here.

Well, more accurately, he had learned a lot about how much of herself she showed back at the Pokemon Academy had been, well…

He didn't exactly know if it was fake or not. But that Sylvia, the one he had encountered up until this point, had been wicked and mischievous, callous, cruel at times, while also oddly helpful at others. She was an enemy, and yet a…

…

No, she was never a friend. At her best she was a nuisance who didn't go away, a nuisance with occasionally good advice. She was odd, and most of all, chaotic.

None of that was what he saw at his side right now. She wasn't… cold, or rude, but she wasn't friendly, either. She was very serious. Honestly? She reminded him a lot of Alcea. Mature. That was the word he had been looking for. Maturity was odd on her, like seeing a pokemon dressed up in an outfit that didn't quite fit on it. He'd always known from her occasional slips that there was a greater depth to her than he'd seen on the surface, and he wondered if he was seeing that right now.

He'd heard that Sylvia Driscoll was a genius. Right now, he was grateful that she really was as competent as she had been before. And he was even more grateful that that competence didn't come with her usual irritation.

Sylvia slung her backpack off her shoulder and set it down in the sand. That was something else he was grateful for. Blake had come to his meeting with Sylvia that night without any idea of what he was going to encounter, but Sylvia had come prepared. Her backpack had a lot more stuff than he'd expected. Her lockpicking kit, of course, that had gone without saying. And the flashlights (which they had unfortunately lost). But there were more things that were varying degrees of useful. A notebook and pen, a length of rope (he didn't want to know what use she'd had for THAT), a lighter, an ipod and earbuds, her phone (no bars), a portable charger for both, a first-aid kit, some packets of beef jerky and two bottles of water, a STUNGUN (again, he did NOT want to know) a black sleeping bag (just one) along with a portable tent (no idea how he'd fit THAT in there), a change of clothes, a swiss-army knife, two books, "Finnegan's Wake" and "Totality and Inferiority: An Essay on Exteriority" (or as she put it, some "light reading"), and the most interesting of all, a compass.

When she'd taken out the compass and checked it, she'd showed it to him. The needle of the compass wasn't set in a direction. It just spun and spun and spun, like she'd developed a formula for a perpetual-motion machine.

One couldn't be said that Sylvia was unprepared. Neither one felt any compunction to drink the water, or eat the beef jerky. Sylvia said she was interested in seeing if it would ever expire, but Blake had talked her out of it, saying he didn't want to know. What she was digging for in there right now he couldn't hazard a guess.

"Perfect, here it is!" Sylvia cheered, pulling her head up a few minutes later and presenting him with the first-aid kit, much to his confusion. What did she want with that? They were both fine. "Here, take this, just in case."

Blake looked at her, confused, and took the kit from her.

"What's this for?" He asked, but Sylvia ignored him, reaching back into her backpack and coming back with something else, a swiss-army knife.

"If my theory doesn't work, you might need it," she replied, hopping down the side of the dune and unfolding the knife. She began to trace something in the sand. It took a while, and Blake could see that she was writing words in the sand. Why do that instead of writing in the notebook, Blake wasn't sure. But she was clearly going to be busy for a while.

While Sylvia wrote, Blake looked in her backpack and took one of her books. This was what she considered light reading? Seriously? "Finnegan's Wake" was a mess of incomprehensibility that he couldn't understand. He slid it back in, his head hurting a little as he glanced back at what progress she had accomplished.

She was almost finished, and Blake was stunned at how much time they'd spent wasting on this, time that could have been spent walking. She had written symbols that he didn't know, and yet looked familiar all the same. Strange symbols, just like the ones on the tablet.

"What do you think?!" Sylvia called up to him. "Look familiar?!"

She walked around the large symbols etched in the desert floor, climbing back up the dune to take another look.

"My memory's perfect," she reminded him, sitting back down beside him. "So?"

"'So' what?" Blake asked, looking back at her.

"So, can you read it?" She asked, raising her eyebrow. "You did it before, after all. And I guarantee that the tablet was written exactly like that."

Blake raised his eyebrows, surprised. So that had been her plan.

"I needed to find a flat enough surface that we could use," she explained. "If I wrote it in my notebook, well, that might not be big enough. But this way, if reading the words does anything, we'll definitely be able to see what happens. That sand's just like the surface of that tablet, so…" She gestured towards it. "Go on, read it."

Blake squinted, staring at the words. But no, there was nothing. Just scratches in the sand. They looked like the symbols on the tablet, but he couldn't read them. The words had popped into his head before, but he'd forgotten them. And now that he was looking at the symbols, well, they still hadn't returned. How puzzling.

"Sorry," he said, shaking his head. "I can't read it."

Sylvia sighed.

"Behold the Realm of the Ravenous," she called out, startling Blake. She ignored his surprise and continued, "in the world of unending darkness, dwells those who hunger constantly. The denizens of the dark, like thousands of hungry shadows. Fearful they would devour all worlds whole, the ruler of the gluttonous dwells in the land of the ever-starved, where his hunger lives forever unsated… The never-ending shadow, the darkness that devours everything, even light and life itself, sealed in the darkness. To those who continue to hunger, whose thirst can never be quenched, the Realm of the Ravenous awaits them, to hunger for an eternity!"

She finished, staring out at the sand, but nothing happened. Blake looked up at her like she was a crazy person.

"What was that?" He asked as she sat back down. She gave him a strange look.

"What do you mean?" Sylvia asked. "That was what I wrote down just now. The words on the tablet. I can't read them, but you did, and I remembered them perfectly."

"…Huh?" Blake had no idea what she was talking about. Now, she was looking even more suspiciously at him, almost… studying him. It made him feel uneasy.

"You read those words, you spoke them out loud," Sylvia said. She narrowed her eyes. "Don't you remember?"

Blake didn't remember those words. He didn't remember anything, really, he remembered reading, but what he had read remained lost in the fog of that night.

"Those words caused those shadow-things to come out and pulled us into the portal to this world, when you spoke them out loud," Sylvia explained, stroking her chin and staring contemplatively out at the flatlands below her. "So I figured if I read them, well, maybe we could go home. But no, apparently, it didn't work. And you said that, looking at those words, you didn't see anything different about them, right?"

Blake shook his head. "No, they're just weird symbols to me."

"Me too," Sylvia agreed, nodding her head. "And that's what's so fascinating…"

"Huh? What do you mean?" Blake asked, confused.

Sylvia smirked. "You can learn a lot more from a failure than you can from a success, Blake Harker," she laughed, patting him on the head. "In fact, this failure gives me three different theories about the nature of those words."

Blake looked curiously at her.

"Theory one," Sylvia said, raising her finger. "That tablet, the words on it, are special. That's why you could read it, but I couldn't. There's something about the words themselves that require one to read it, not just look at them and know what they mean, and say them out loud. It's the tablet itself that triggers the portal or whatever it was. Even though we're reading the words right now, because we don't have the tablet in our hands, they're just words. If it's not those words themselves, written on the tablet, they won't translate themselves in your mind and thus reading them is the same as when I looked at it and saw nothing. Make sense?"

Blake nodded, that was a reasonable theory.

"Theory number two," Sylvia said, raising a second finger, "is that the words have no effect because the surface of the words themselves are essential for whatever it was that happened. The sand isn't the same as that tablet, obviously. Maybe, we need to find the right surface to write the words on, something more stable than sand. And luckily for us, that's a theory we can test for ourselves right now."

Sylvia reached into her backpack and withdrew her notebook, scribbling on it, and presented it to Blake, the same symbols from the tablet. Blake squinted and shook his head. The strange marks were just marks, he couldn't see any words.

"So sand doesn't work, and even a more solid surface like a sheet of paper doesn't work," Sylvia mused. "Could the tablet be the only appropriate surface to read the words? In that case, it's really more like theory one…" She dismissed it with a shake of her head and returned the notebook and pen back to her bag.

"Last theory," Sylvia said, raising a third finger, "is that those words are a one-way trip. Even if we have the tablet here, you wouldn't be able to read it, and we wouldn't go home. Or rather, we can't bring the tablet here, because the tablet itself is one-way trip. The words are designed to pull us into this world, but we can't bring ourselves back out of it with the same words. If anything, we'd have to find different words to exit."

Blake raised his eyebrow. That theory…

"It doesn't explain why you could read it then, and I couldn't, but it certainly solves the mystery of why you can't read the words now," Sylvia continued. "Because those words, well, they're just words. It's like a pokemon trap. The pokemon goes in, but it doesn't come back out. And now here we are. We went in, but we can't come back out. Unless we find some words that we can use as an exit, of course, then we're stuck here forever."

Blake REALLY didn't like the sound of that.

Sylvia sighed. "Any number of those explanations could be why it isn't working now. But personally, I think it's option three, baby."

Blake frowned. He was starting to think that, too.

"See, the third theory explains a lot of the stuff that's weird with this world," Sylvia said. "Why we don't need to eat or drink, why we don't need to sleep, why the temperature changes, a whole hell of a lot. We've got to think of this place as something unnatural."

"Yeah, no kidding it's unnatural," Blake replied. "You think that stuff like this would occur on earth? A sun that doesn't move, this bizarre silver sand-"

"That's not what I meant," Sylvia said, shaking her head. She looked out across the sand, her face hard. "What I mean is that someone might have created this world for a purpose. That's why we can't get out." She didn't elaborate any further.

Blake had been confused since practically Sylvia had begun talking, and this was just the latest confusing moment. What was she talking about?

"Who would… who would create a world like this?" Blake asked. "Why? And why can't we get out of it, huh?"

"I'm not quite certain, but there's something I can use to test this theory," Sylvia said, turning over the swiss-army knight in her hands. She stripped the glove of her left hand off, and glanced at Blake, then down at the medical kit. "You might want to get ready, you'll need to use that if I'm wrong about what I'm going to do."

Blake realized what she was about to try, seeing the mischievous gleam in her eye. For a second, she was the normal Sylvia again. He reached out to try and stop her, but she was already moving it in preparation.

Sylvia raised her knife and brought it to the bare flesh of her palm, sliding the blade against its surface without even wincing in pain. Crimson blood poured out, spreading across her hand and dripping down into the sand, where the color was quickly absorbed, disappearing completely.

"Sylvia!" Blake exclaimed, grabbing the knife from her and flinging it away into the sand, grabbing her hand and staring at the deep wound she'd cut into it. He dug into the medical kit, flipping it open and reaching for the bandages, but was stopped when Sylvia raised her hand.

"…Take a look," she whispered, glancing at the gash carved into her palm. Blake turned and looked at it, and to his shock the wound slowly began to seal itself closed, before finally repairing itself completely. Her hand was flawless, not even a scar. The only sign it had ever been wounded at all was the blood still smeared across it.

"That's… how… what?" Blake looked at the blood, stunned. Sylvia turned and wiped her hand across the sand, the blood consumed, and the sand slid off her hand to clean it completely. She showed it to Blake again, fully healed.

"Just as I thought," Sylvia said, her voice surprisingly grim for someone who had just recovered from a seriously deep cut. "No eating, no drinking, no sleeping, no temperature changes, even our wounds will recover. I don't even want to think about what would have happened to us if that hideous slug had eaten us."

"Sylvia, what are you talking about?" Blake demanded. She was really starting to scare him now, with that troubled look on her face.

"Wherever we are, it's preventing us from escape. We can't get back with those words, even if we know them. We don't need anything humans need to sustain ourselves, hell, we probably don't even need to breathe. And even if we tried to hurt ourselves, or kill ourselves, we'd just recover." Sylvia let out a long sigh. She turned to Blake, her eyes filled with anxiety as she explained what she suspected.

"This," she muttered, "is a prison."

Some new revelations about their strange world! A prison? That doesn't sound very good. Who would design a prison like this, and why? What purpose could it serve? And what will they do, now that they're trapped inside of it?