Shelly – Chapter Two – Foul Weather Friends

Whipped by the gale-force winds into one blinding sheet after another, the frigid, driving rain battered itself against the floor to ceiling windows of the room in which Shelly sat, producing such a racket the trainer could barely hear herself think. Resting in the rickety chair and facing the tall windows looking east, Shelly stared at the dark sky and frowned. "I hate this fucking country," she growled to herself, kicking up to her feet and pacing around the bare room, knocking about rocks and bits of debris cluttering up the otherwise derelict chamber. "Stupid, asinine, unreliable weather and people to match. Gods above and below I hate it here: no sun for days," the statuesque redhead grumbled. Despite harboring no love for Hoenn's brutal summer sun and the sweltering days it inflicted on her, Shelly found herself missing daylight more and more every day the driving monsoon battering the continent's entire western coast robbed her of any natural light. "Goddamned worthless country with its goddamned worthless weather."

Turning on her heel and reaching up to pull her loose red hair into a tight ponytail she tied off with a bit of leather, Shelly yanked open the door to her little room and stepped into the dimly lit hall beyond, adjusting the bound leather parcel hanging from her side as she did so. Immediately the sounds of muffled screaming wafting throughout the weather station reached her ears as the Aquan commander paced out into the passage. Passing a number of rooms with open doors she glanced into the chambers as she walked, meeting the gazes of either her own troops who immediately hopped to their feet and saluted as she moved by, the steely gazes of the mercenaries newly added to her list of allies, of the terrified stares of the bound prisoners. Amongst the latter category sat what Shelly guessed to be all that remained of the old interim government's scientific corps: about two dozen elder men and women, all university educated and bearing the fresh scars of torture. Shelly couldn't help smirking ever so slightly, the look on her hostages' faces when their mercenary protectors defected to her coin had made trying to reason with the arrogant old scholars more than worth it.

Reaching the end of the hall, Shelly turned to the door from whence the screams originated and slid it quickly open. Stepping inside as the screams grew louder she closed the door behind her. Within the chamber a bed of hot coals smoldered in the center of the room, over which hung a man suspended by ropes wrapped around his wrists and ankles. His body bore countless boils and blisters raised and irritated by the fire beneath him and the ends of his long hair had long since been burnt off. Worse yet, the strips of bamboo meticulously slid beneath the victim's fingernails and left to fester already looked brown and black to the eye, clogged with clotted blood.

Looking up and spotting Shelly, the man above the coals ceased his screaming and began to quiver and gasp for air. "Please," he begged, his tone whimpering. "Please let me down from here," tears streamed down his mottled, blistered face, dripped from his chin, and sizzled on the coals beneath him. "You've got the wrong man!"

Walking to the desk adjacent to the prisoner, Shelly took the leather-bound parcel from her hip and set it on the smooth surface, unrolling it to reveal a great many tools strapped to the leather backing. Pliers, knives, scalpels, hooks, braces, ties and more all caught the twinkling light from the coals, the mere sight of them bringing fresh terror to the prisoner's face.

"So," the Aquan commander faced her prisoner, "apparently you haven't hung around long enough to loosen your tongue. Should I give you a few hours more to think it over?"

Instantly the man's shaking intensified as he looked between Shelly and the implements of torture. "Please!" he shouted. "Please, no more! I told you I don't know anything!"

Shelly stepped up and took the man's chin in her hand, forcing him to crane his neck at an unnatural angle to look up at her. "You're lying to me," she said calmly, no hint of emotion in her tone or manifested on her face. "Your little friends ratted on you as the chief researcher for this little project. The only catch that I'm running into is that none of them seemed to know what the goal of this project actually is," she turned back about and drew a scalpel from the implements lying on the desk at the same moment that a flash of lightning shot through the glass windows on the room's northern wall. "I suppose I could hike all the way to Ever Grande and ask what's left of your government, but you're right here and it would so lift my mood if you'd just tell me yourself," she said as if musing to herself. "It might even incline me towards mercy for you and your subordinates."

Face falling, any defiance left in his features draining away, the old man hung his head. "Fine," he said. "Let me down and," he paused and swallowed hard, both the lump in his throat and, Shelly imagined, what fragments remained of his pride, "I'll tell you everything."

Still devoid of any display of compassion, Shelly shook her head. "No, I think not," she said, taking in her hand the rope running through the pulleys bolted into the ceiling which suspended her subject above the coals. "I may not be from around here but even I know not to underestimate an Ever Grande Guardsman, even an old, retired one." Shelly tugged on the rope and shifted the torture victim to his left, away from the coals. "Start talking," she said.

Breathing a sigh of relief, the old man relaxed as much as he could into the ropes suspending him. "My name," he gasped, "is Titus. I work for the Elite Four, currently as a chief researcher and previously as Drake's personal bodyguard."

Grinning, Shelly crossed her bare arms over the denim vest bound tightly around her chest. "Good boy," she said with mocking civility. "Now tell me, neither the Elite Four nor any of their little lapdogs have set foot off Ever Grande Island in more than a decade. Why would they break that isolation now? What are you doing here? My superiors should very much like to know."

Turning to look out the window as thunder rumbled, Titus took another heavy breath. "It's complicated," he began but trailed off.

Shelly waited a second as a sour look settled on her features and she gave the rope hanging beside her a tug, shifting Titus an inch closer to the coals and eliciting a reactionary scream from the bound man. "Do go on," she said.

Titus licked his cracked lips. "It's the climate," he said, defeated. "The whole natural world really. Everything's completely out of kilter."

Nodding once, Shelly locked her fingers behind her back and stretched, rolling her head around as her neck and shoulders popped. "Tell me something I don't know. The weather here sucks," she lingered on the last word, looking almost wistfully out the tall window.

"Not just the weather," Titus shook his head. "Record heat waves, record-shattering storms," he inclined his head towards the raging gale outside, "wetlands drying up and temperate plains turning to swamps, all at unbelievable speeds. The climate is destabilizing faster than should be physically possible and the process is only accelerating. Worse," he paused to catch his breath, though this time Shelly allowed him to collect himself. "Worse," Titus went on, "the climate destabilization is exacerbating the seismic problems already wreaking havoc out east. The east coast has had nineteen quakes above a 7.0 in the last six months and the pace looks to be speeding up, not slowing down."

Shell raised an eyebrow. "I knew I hated this place for a reason," she said. "And what have you found so far? What's causing all these problems?"

Staring at his torturer a moment, Titus' face grew even graver. "The news is awful," he answered. "Lady, please" the old man went on, his tone growing firmer but not defiant. "The data we gathered here suggests that what we're feeling right now," he again nodded towards the storm outside, "it's only the warmup for a climate shift unlike anything anyone has ever seen. I get that you're going to kill me and my men," Titus met Shelly's steely gaze with a look of resignation. "You're Aqua after all, but if there's some part of you that still cares about the people of Hoenn then please, please get my results to Ever Grande…"

Mouth dropping open just a little, Shelly took a few seconds to examine the man before her. The heat must have addled his brain, thought the Orrean to herself. "Just tell me what you found, what makes you think it's going to get worse" she said. "Then I'll decide what to do with the data."

Nodding, Titus adjusted himself on the ropes. "What we found," he trailed off. "Hoenn, no, that's not true, the world is on the brink of an environmental disaster that I worry will leave each and every last human being and Pokémon living on its surface dead within the next decade."

Shelly flinched. "What makes you say that?" she asked. "That's quite a prediction. Get to your fucking evidence already," she growled.

Titus hung his head and half chuckled, half sobbed. "What, you want to check my math?" he asked.

Again Shelly tugged on the rope beside her, pulling the heavy cord through a number of loops and pulleys overhead to swing Titus' feet back over the coals. "I want you to make me believe you," she said curtly, glaring into the old man's eyes. "You're still alive because I'm actually concerned there might be something to what you're saying."

"To begin with, ocean temperatures," Titus said a bit more calmly despite the heat biting at his toes. "Until a year ago they'd been stable for a century but our most recent measurements indicate that within the last twelve months the oceans warmed three degrees and the increase shows absolutely no signs of stopping; worse, the warming's accelerating. The problem is that the polar lands aren't huge chunks of floating ice," he trailed off. "They're solid ground covered in ice, so if this warming continues then all of that ice will melt. If that happens sea level will rise by no less than twenty meters and it might rise by as much as fifty. There's just so much goddamned water locked up in all that ice. To further complicate things, dumping all that fresh water into the oceans will throw off the waters' salinization. We can't say for sure but I worry that such a shift in the saltiness of the water could have catastrophic effects ranging from mass extinctions of ocean-dwelling Pokémon, to the death of the kelp beds that provide most of the world's oxygen, to the breakdown of oceanic currents that rely on very delicate balances of salt water versus fresh water.

"To make matters even worse," Titus went on, "global atmospheric temperatures are on the rise as well. It's difficult to determine exactly what's going on, but the average temperature, again stable for as far back as you care to measure, has gone up by almost four degrees in the last year alone and it looks like the rate of warming is increasing at the same rate we see in the oceans. As to what's causing the warming, we can't explain it. Solar activity is stable and thus can't be the cause. Atmospheric composition hasn't changed either. All we can tell is that there's something, something we can't even detect dumping huge amounts of energy into the atmosphere."

A lump forming in her throat, Shelly reached up and wiped a bead of sweat from her forehead. "And," she said slowly, as if thinking, "what about the earthquakes?" she asked.

Titus shrugged, as much as he could given the ropes. "We can't explain them either," he answered solemnly. "Continental drift is stable. There's no reason we can see for the rise in the number and intensity of the quakes. What we do know is that if the quakes don't stop, it might just set off the super-volcano beneath Mount Pyre. If that happens then it will bury all of eastern Hoenn beneath tens of meters of ash. Additionally it would release countless tonnes of sulfur-dioxide into the atmosphere, poisoning the air and making agriculture across all of Hoenn nearly impossible. Countless people would starve to death."

Titus looked up and straight into Shelly's eyes. "I don't know if you're following me," he continued, "but what I'm describing is the end of the world as mankind knows it. If this warming and these quakes continue and spread outside Hoenn it will result in environmental changes so catastrophic that the world we're left with when all is said and done probably won't support humanity."

"So," Shelly dropped her arms and then folded them behind her back as she began to pace, "ocean temperatures are skyrocketing, atmospheric temperatures are climbing through the roof, earthquakes and volcanos are threatening to destroy the world, and you have no idea what's causing it," she stopped pacing and began tapping her foot on the ground. "How do we fix all this?" Shelly asked.

Groaning and adjusting in his airborne prison, Titus tried to shift his weight more comfortably against the ropes after maneuvering his feet away from the coals. "Actually, my men and I were in the midst of forming a plan to take to the Elite Four before you showed up," he answered exceedingly slowly, as though he measured every word before it left his lips.

Shelly waited a moment before leaning closer to her quarry. "And," she prompted, "what is it old man? We're talking about the end of the world here. Some haste would be nice."

Looking up to his captor, his eyes fresh with some new source of strength, Titus nodded to the leather bound book set on the desk by Shell's torture tools. "My journal," he said calmly, "open it."

Looking between her victim and the table, Shelly crossed the room and picked up the book, parting its covers and turning such that the light from the coals illuminated the vellum pages. "What am I looking for?" she asked.

Titus smirked. "You certainly do have a lot of questions for the man you've spent days slowly murdering." He stopped speaking immediately as Shelly turned and glared at him.

Teeth clenched, the Aquan commander turned back on Titus. "None of that would have been necessary if you had cooperated with me from the start," she growled at him. "Now tell me what you're planning and I'll take the data to Archie." She paused. "Hells below, if your solution sounds workable I might even release you and your men back to the Elite Four so they can get working too." Without hesitating another moment Shelly yanked on the ropes holding Titus aloft, lowering the man to the ground where he collapsed on his hands and knees.

Titus picked himself up, winced in pain, and nodded to the journal. "Page sixty-seven," he said as Shelly flipped through the vellum sheets. "Long story short," the man went on, stepping up beside his captor and looking over her shoulder and down into the book, "Hoenn's most ancient myths tell us of three ancient monsters that inhabit our world, Leviathan, Behemoth, and Ziz, which rule over the waters, the land, and the skies respectively. During the days of old, as an ancient and evil god tried to consume our infant world while it emerged for the first time from chaos, each of the three monsters took responsibility of a third of the world and working together they safeguarded creation from the evil god. Each of the three then bound their thirds, the water, earth, and air together to make the final form of our world, or so the story goes."

Shelly turned on the old man with fire in her eyes. "You'd best tell me you've got more than ancient superstitions for me," she glowered at him.

"To this day many of the people of Hoenn worship those three beasts," Titus went on. "And whether or not you buy off on Hoenn's creation myths the gist of the matter is that all three of the ancient beasts still call our world home; Behemoth dwells somewhere beneath the Pyre Mountains, Leviathan sleeps, I believe, in the deepest waters of the Great Trench to the east, and Ziz supposedly circles the world, keeping to the upper atmosphere where it can look down on all of creation."

Scanning through the pages, studying the detailed ink drawings and scrawled notes detailing Titus's theories on the locations of the three monsters, Shelly looked back at her captive. "So they're actual Pokemon? Like those three monsters in Kanto or the Hunters in Johto? And they have what to do with the current crisis?" she asked.

Titus reached down to the book as if to turn the page, but instantly recoiled as the bamboo beneath his fingernails contacted the book. Cradling his hand, he looked down to the smooth pages. "Turn to seventy," he instructed.

Doing so, Shelly scanned the pages of the journal. "The World Spirits?" she stated flatly. "What are those?" asked the trainer, reading on when Titus failed to immediately answer. "Control the ancient ones?" she asked, echoing the words in the book and staring at the three orbs glinting on the page, one drawn in ruby red, one in sapphire blue, and the third sketched in emerald green. "How?"

Titus shrugged. "There are many mysteries in our world," he answered. "This, I believe, is the key. How the three World Spirits control the great beasts I do not know. I've scoured every corner of Hoenn for information on the subject, but all I know for certain is that the ancients believed the World Spirits, three orbs of a materiel like colored glass, possessed the means to control the ancient ones.

"As near as I can tell," Titus continued, "there are three such artifacts, one for each of the three Ancient Ones. I believe that if we could gather all three of the World Spirits, we could use them to awaken the beasts and set nature right. Behemoth could settle the tectonic problems. Ziz could cool the atmosphere. Leviathan I believe can repair the damage done by the warming oceans." He slowly trailed off before speaking again. "And if I'm wrong, then we'll all be dead in a decade anyway. That's the situation, we are literally looking for a miracle because there is no other option."

Walking to the windows and looking out into the storm, Shelly thought in silence as several minutes ticked by. "And assuming these three artifacts could be collected and brought together," she said. "How would they be utilized?"

Looking by his captor to the storm raging outside, Titus cleared his throat. "Each of the World Spirits would need to be brought into close proximity with the beast over which they have power," he said, gingerly cradling his mangled hands, looking down at the many bladed implements left on the table. "How that might be accomplished, I cannot say. The myths about the Spirits originate from a tribe that used to live around what's now Dewford. That tribe no longer exists of course but their descendants became the islanders living throughout the Southern Sea. I was planning looking for them to see if they knew anything."

Still staring outside, Shelly watched as lightning flashed and illuminated the ground far below her. Shaking her head she folded her hands behind her back. "A problem for later then," she said, turning back around. "I'll let you go back to Ever Grande, Titus," she said flatly. "Take your message to the Elite Four."

Slumping against the wall, Titus breathed a sigh in relief. "Thank you," he said, closing his eyes. "My men and I will depart as soon as you let us."

Turning around, Shelly looked the old man in the eye. "I wouldn't bother entertaining any thoughts of revenge," she shifted her gaze to the man's maimed hands and then back to his sunken eyes.

"Of course," Titus bowed. "Revenge is overrated," he smiled weakly. "Take my journal," he said a moment later. "It might help you on your hunt and there's nothing in there I didn't memorize long ago."

Walking to the table and picking up the book and her torturer's tools, Shelly tucked it between her hip and her short denim skirt, turning afterwards for the door. "I'll send my physician to see to your hands," said the Aquan commander, reaching out and pulling the door open, stepping out, and closing it again after she'd cleared the room.

In the hall beyond, Shelly found two men, both in Aquan armor and colors, waiting silently. One, an exceptionally tall and lean individual who appeared far too gaunt for his already narrow suit of armor, remained standing steadily while the second man inclined his head and dropped to one knee before the woman in blue. Folding her arms and looking down on the man before her, Shelly raised an eyebrow. "You're back early," she said calmly, gesturing for the bowing man to stand. "A week's hardly enough time to get to Petalburg and back, much less gather any great deal of information on our enemy," the woman set off down the hall with her two companions in tow. "Tell me what you learned."

As the trio arrived back in Shelly's private room, stepping inside and leaving the door open behind them, the shorter man, his clothes and muddy brown hair soaked with rain, wiped his forehead and eyes to clear them of both perspiration and rainwater. "May Haruka has made fair progress," he began. "Her forces evicted Team Magma's garrison from Petalburg barely a fortnight ago and she's been solidifying her grip on the region ever since. She moved her fleet of ships to Route 104 to cut Magma's southern and eastern cells off from their northern support. The people of the city adore her, probably because she slashed their taxes and opened Magma's private grain houses to them. Her forces have swelled with local volunteers and it seems she's focusing primarily on rebuilding Petalburg's infrastructure. When I left nearly half the city had electricity and running water."

Nodding along, Shelly turned to again stare out the window. "That's all to be expected," she said. "What about the cities to the east? Has she made a move on Oldale or Littleroot yet?"

The scout, a lightly tanned young man no older than twenty who stood far shorter than his silent companion, shook his head. "Not yet, but my men reported that Magma is massing its forces in Oldale. If Haruka tries to move east she'll have a fight on her hands."

Shelly thought a moment. "And if she tries to move north she'll have an even bigger fight on her hands. Magma will not give up Rustboro without a fight. May will move on Oldale soon. She has no choice but to take the city; from it she can use the river and the basin to strike at Littleroot, Mauville, Verdanturf, and Slateport simultaneously, after which Dewford will join her on account of being utterly surrounded and she'll control all the Southlands," Shelly looked up at both her confederates, a furious frown set on her features. "If Aqua loses Slateport," she trailed off.

"There's one other thing," the scout mentioned as his counterparts remained silent and Shelly looked up at him. "On the last day we had Petalburg under observation a storm rolled in from the sea; looked like it was going to smash the levies apart. So my boys and I were getting ready to blight off," the scout's hands grew animated as he spoke and excitement crept into his narration, "but the damndest thing happened." He stopped.

Shelly waited a moment before snapping at him. "And," she prompted, loudly and sharply.

Shaken from his memory, the scout looked down at his commander. "Haruka, she came climbing onto the gym's roof, walked to the western edge of the building, the one that faces the sea? Anyway, she reaches out with her hand and, and it was the most amazing thing. This ball of blue light appeared in her hand and started shining crazy bright. Just then the storm surge came rolling up on the city like a tsunami, but when it got to the edge of town, the wave jumped up like it had run into some invisible wall. The whole wave turned away and rolled back out to sea without touching Petalburg. Even more amazing, as May stood there with the orb the rain and the wind died down to nothing, the sky cleared of clouds, and the storm just went away."

Shelly stood absolutely still. Without a word leaving her lips she stared at the wall as realization sprang to her face. A second later she turned to the tall man who had yet to speak. "You still have that arrow I gave you?" she asked, waiting to continue until the silent soldier patted a long pocket running down the side of his leg and smiled in response. "Get ready to use it," she said then. "Gather the men and mount up," Shelly stormed from the room, drawing the leather journal and flipping through its pages. "We ride for Petalburg in one hour."

As the archer and the scout saluted and walked by her, the smaller of the two men shouting orders through the hall and into the rooms on either side, Shelly scanned through the pages of the journal. As the minutes ticked by, Shelly's Aquan troops and their mercenary companions set about breaking their camp and gathering up anything useful they could find throughout the weather center while Shelly read intensely.

Eyes going wide, Shelly stopped on one particular passage near the end of the journal. "Hoenn's Heir," she muttered to herself, her eyes hungrily roaming over the pages. Features growing slightly paler, the young commander shook her head. "This bitch has got to die," she stated flatly, "before she gets any more powerful."