all i want to do is write this story, it's my life now

i had to change the 16 plates to 17. i forgot that a type has come out since i conceived the idea for this story.

guess i should go back to my other stories and change that now.

Arc I, The Plate of Space

Chapter Sixteen:

The Plates that Hold Up the Universe

"Aurelio, is it normal to feel ill?" I complained, burying my face into my pillow. Once we had boarded the ship and it had set sail onto the sea, a horrible nauseousness had overcome me. My mouth tasted like copper and my eyes stung. "Oh, take me off of this godforsaken ship…"

"It's called seasickness," Aurelio said. He opened the window. "Here, maybe this will help."

The breeze that followed smelled of brine and fish, intensifying the rolling of my stomach. "I should have flown," I grumbled, turning over onto my back to glare at the ceiling. "I don't sleep nor do I eat. I wouldn't have needed to rest."

"You're forgetting about me," reminded Aurelio pointedly. "You could have gone by yourself, you know. I'm not stopping you. Here." He gestured towards the window. "By all means, fly off into the sunset."

I frowned at him. "For a person who has spent his entire life studying me, you're not very kind."

"And for an entity above gods who created the universe, you're good at complaining."

"Subject change," I said irritably. "When are we meeting Josie for coffee? I'm growing impatient. I would like to what she overheard."

"Arceus, it's been a whole forty-five minutes since we talked to her," Aurelio said. He seated himself at the small desk inside of our room, just underneath the window and between our beds. The wind kept pulling his hair over his eyes. I believed that he regretted opening the window. Pulling out his notebook, he added, "Although, I've got to admit that it's making me pretty antsy. I can't stop thinking about it."

I leaned on my arms, watching him write. My legs were propped against the wall. These beds were much too small for a human of my stature. "It cannot be worse than what we've heard already."

"We've heard a lot of things."

"First, you tell me that the Antebureau were seeking to strip me of my immortality and kill me," I said, as casually as any other conversation. I stroked the Alterstone. With each passing hour, I grew more and more protective of it. "That seemed implausible enough. Then we visited the fortune teller, who foretold my death. I'm about as concerned as I can be."

I sighed, unsure if the pain in my belly was coming from anxiety or from seasickness.

"The only thing that will surprise me now," I muttered, "is if Josie tells me that she overheard Grimmwolfe talking about how he plans to kill me."

"Well, you know that fat man with the scar on his neck?" asked Josie, delicately sipping her coffee. She leaned forward, making sure that nobody else in the café was listening. Her voice lowered to a scratchy whisper. "He was talking about how he and Antebureau were going to kill Arceus. And get this, I even heard how he plans to do it."

I dropped my knife, still slathered with cream cheese.

My body requires no sustenance, but the immense variety of pastries in the café had even tempted me. Plus, Josie had nagged me the entire time we stood in line, asking what I would get, what were my favorite cakes, if I liked toast, and on and on it went. Now whatever appetite I had convinced myself into having had completely dissipated.

Aurelio kicked my foot below the table. "You're joking," he said.

"I swear," vowed Josie. "You know him, don't you? He seems cozy with your dad."

"Yeah, he's on the ship right now. Mr. Grimmwolfe."

"I thought it was strange at first," she continued. "People from the Antebureau always wear those pins on their coat pockets—" I hadn't noticed that at all. I had been too focused on Grimmwolfe's neck. "—so they're easy to recognize, especially in the library. They're always checking out the shadiest stuff. Well, I saw your father and that man in the library, because you know if a city has one I've got to go through it, and I went to go say hi, but they didn't see me and they started talking about killing Arceus, and that was that."

I struggled to keep up with how fast she talked. Did she ever run out of breath?

"My father was talking about killing Arceus?" said Aurelio. I heard his teeth grinding.

"Hold on, let me rephrase that." Josie patted her mouth with a napkin. "Your father wasn't happy about it. He had the same look on his face that you do now. Mr. Grimmwolfe was using words I didn't understand. Something about Arceus' three Plates and some sort of stone…"

Aurelio looked at me from the corner of his eye. "And the Antebureau is going to use those to kill Arceus."

The secret I had tried so feverishly to bury underground, my greatest endeavor, was being peeled away by its skin like a fruit. A rotten, black fruit. I sat as still as I could with my hands under my thighs, no longer craving my first ever piece of food. The bagel with the pink cream cheese sat untouched, looking delicious and pristine as it could to an entity with no appetite. It felt like Aurelio's eyes were accusing me of deception.

"Yeah, or so he claimed," Josie said, her mouth full of a cupcake. She squinted her eyes, compelling herself to remember what she had overheard. "I don't know a lot about Arceus, but I do know that it can't be killed. But he said he would use the Plates — the first two — to find the third. And when he found it, he would destroy it and use the opportunity to take what was inside, whatever it is, and Arceus would be vulnerable to death."

Aurelio had not stopped staring at me. I wasn't even sure if the words were getting through him. He seemed too intently focused on how I would react.

"I tried reading some books in the library to see if I could understand what I was hearing," she said apologetically, "but I'm afraid I don't. I hope it makes more sense for you."

Aurelio forced a smile. "It makes perfect sense," he said, the spell which had cast upon him finally breaking. I saw the numbers and figures running across his eyes as he tried to decode what she had told us. "Thanks, Josie."

"Anything for you. I risked the wrath of your father if I was caught."

"Yeah, he'd kick your ass then swim across the ocean to kick mine," said Aurelio.

Josie laughed sheepishly, like that was the funniest thing that she had heard in her life. "Remember when you stole his notebook and took it to school for show and tell?" She had to take pauses for her overwhelming giggles. "You tried to tell everyone, even the teacher, that you were the one who wrote those. But Ms. Dorn — oh my god, this was so funny — she looks up at you and says with this look on her face, 'This is doctorate level work. You're a first grader.' You were so occupied trying to convince her that you did it that your dad had all the time in the world to head to the school and give you the biggest earful in front of the whole class."

They shared laughter, their knees hitting the bottom of the table as they embarked on a string of, "Remember when…?" and "That one time…"

I wasn't sure where I belonged in this conversation.

I had a brief flashback to my years on my throne. The echo of the legendaries' voices across the towering ceilings. How they seemed to support entire conversations by themselves, pretending my opinion mattered to them. Where my consciousness drifted, far away from all of the noise around me, almost into a separate dimension all by itself, neither mortal nor immortal — only abstract.

This is what I, as The Original One, could not achieve.

The time and trust behind relationships.

"Don't think I didn't see that guilty expression on your face," Aurelio said accusingly. "You looked like a guilty Lillipup after it's torn up the couch."

I had stood in the furious path of the legendaries before. They were enormous and powerful, and when I angered them, they snorted flames and threatened my life. I would have rather faced them than Aurelio in that moment. Aurelio didn't paw at the ground, his mouth foaming with eagerness to challenge me — all he did was sit across from me on the bed, his legs pulled up, vulnerable and glued to the tracks of a life beyond his wildest imagination.

And that was scary.

"Okay, so you're not going to talk," he said, exasperated. "What's wrong?"

"You humans are too damn meddlesome," I muttered. "If I had known how nosy your kind would be, I might have not created it in the first place."

"Well, what was all that about?" asked Aurelio. He leaned over, trying to impose himself into my line of sight. "Look, Arceus, I'm not pissed with you or anything. Your business is your business. But I'm trying to help you get what you need. And now that there's all this talk about the Antebureau and how they — you know, want to kill you, I would do anything to protect you."

I straightened. "I cannot be killed," I said.

"Yeah, I thought the same too," said Aurelio. "But I saw how you reacted. In human form, you're just as transparent as everyone else. Someone who is truly immortal, no exceptions, would stand up and threaten the Antebureau, not cower and hide from it."

"I don't want to challenge anyone." The room suddenly felt too hot. "All I want is to retrieve the Plate of Space and leave the mortal dimension. Humans cannot touch it—"

"Because they'll obtain the power of space manipulation?"

"No, that's not it—"

"Because with all three Plates in their possession, your 'true form' will come out?"

"Aurelio, stop, that isn't how it works—"

"How what works?"

"My true form!"

"So you do have a true form."

"No — yes —"

"So what the hell is it? It's obviously nothing that I've ever heard."

I flew to my feet, seething. As if just realizing that he had been too brash, his eyes widened, and he started to sputter out an apology.

"Let me completely rewrite everything that you and your family understands about the legend of Arceus, all eight hundred years of it," I said, glaring at him. "Without those Plates...without this Alterstone...I would not be standing before you in this room. I was not born as some dark, swirling mass of chaos. The Pokémon form that you think is only a disguise, it is nothing of the sort…because the only disguise I have ever worn is the human pelt. I came into existence as a Pokémon. And your grandfather, the one who met me first, had all of this figured out when he caught me in that damn Pokéball!"

The color drained from Aurelio's face. "Wait, he never—"

"Did he never document that?" I demanded, my emotions spiking. "Fair enough, because that was embarrassing for me as well."

"I've never read that before—"

"I did not create the Alterstone to give myself physical form, like everyone thinks I did," I said, my voice breaking. "I have one already: the creature that we see in the drawings and in the stories. The humans from before the Alterstone left those depictions. I saw something that I desired in humankind, and so I sacrificed whatever I could to give myself that option — the option to live amongst you, undetected, so that perhaps I could experience what you can. Everything I had, I gave it up. Everything to be just like you."

Aurelio's face shattered. He didn't even reach for his notebook.

"Arceus," he said, his voice tired but his eyes fearful. "What did you sacrifice?"

I stared back.

Like the black, rotten fruit I was.

"The seventeen elemental Plates that hold up the universe," I said. "And when the universe inevitably dies, so will I — as well as everything else in existence. That is how you kill the god above gods."

End of Chapter Sixteen