Mewtwo uncrossed his arms and adjusted his inclination so he looked directly down at Castelia City. From twelve thousand feet above it, a human would have been hard-pressed to resolve any details. For a nigh-omnipotent being with senses carefully engineered and pushed beyond their original limits by radical psionic augmentation, femtoscopic resolution was trivial to achieve. Mewtwo registered the thermal excess in his skull as his brain parsed, analyzed, categorized, and archived his observations. So far, little out of the ordinary had happened. His largest city, like all his other cities, was entirely subject to his perfect mental dominion.

Just as he was about to teleport to Nimbasa City for his next set of inspections, a long-dormant subroutine flagged an anomalous observation and called it to his conscious awareness. Deep within Castelia's heart, there was a darkness. Mewtwo knew of it, of course; he had hardly bothered to eradicate all the filth and human degradation when he had finished seizing control of Unova, and certain districts in Castelia still charmingly persisted in believing themselves to be controlled by organized criminal syndicates. But his mental subsystems had not erred by drawing his attention to this particular darkness, for it was deeper than any he had seen since absorbing the life essence of Giratina. There was none more black than this shadow.

Mewtwo blinked down to the streets to investigate directly.

Shadow the Hedgehog spindashed through the streets, evading the blistering CFL flashlights of Team Plasma. He could feel the refuse on the streets against his soles, his skateshoes long since worn to near shreds. Despite his repeated insistence that he wasn't a shiny, talking Sandslash or a dapper-clothed Zoroark, a legion of pursuers and thieves maintained their quest to capture him.

He hurled a handy Rattata corpse behind him, hoping to disorient his followers and achieve respite, at least for the night. Shadow hacked viciously into his elbow and pressed on; he couldn't afford to be slowed down by the city's pestilence. Upon reaching a high, narrow alley, he managed a few leaps from the walls and burst through a window into an abandoned tenement. Shadow rolled until he collided with a wall and collapsed into a sprawl of aching limbs.

Before he allowed himself to crash, he performed a quick check of the room's exits. None of the doors were robust enough to stand up to even a cursory battery, but they were not so sodden with rot that the splintering would fail to wake him. None of the evictionaries would be infringing upon him here. He curled into his comfortable spherical configuration, and prepared to lose consciousness.

A physically painful blast of light and a pervasive blast of the stench of gasoline shocked him to full alertness. Clad in glowing ethereal armor, a person twice his size hovered in the room. Though the apparition's face was hidden behind a visor, Shadow could feel an overpowering stare boring into his soul. He wished he had the energy left to tremble.

The being's visor and armor faded into invisibility, and Shadow's guts inverted themselves once he realized that he was beholding Mewtwo himself.

"So," Mewtwo intoned, "We have an intruder."

Mewtwo drifted toward the shivering wretch before him. Focusing his mental energies, he bound Shadow with a move of his own invention: Psiunder Wave, which is like Thunder Wave except it can't be resisted by anything and only Mewtwo can learn it.

Shadow was paralyzed and afraid. "Help," he said scaredly.

Mewtwo stroked his Tony Stark-style goatee and sideburns, which he had grown on a whim. His inspection of Shadow had yielded a number of surprises. To control chaos, he thought, would be useful indeed. Perhaps I can ply the secret of this technique from him. For a moment Mewtwo considered forcibly extracting the technique from Shadow's brain. A vivid mental image of the process, and the ensuing rattled husk of a skull it would leave behind, flitted behind his eyes. He could sense that Shadow was squeamed out by his emerging smile.

But something about Shadow stayed Mewtwo's (mental, infinitely powerful) hand. Perhaps it was his stylish gloves, his ripped washboard abs sensuously covered in fur that still seemed luxurious despite being coated in Castelia's filth, clotted with blood around the poorly-healed wounds Team Plasma had inflicted, and richly malodorous with the stench of rotting dead. Mewtwo's nostrils flared as he sampled and pondered the scent. Every once in a while, he found it necessary to remind himself of the extremes of life. He decided to show Shadow some of them.

"Every walk a quarantine, isn't it?" asked Mewtwo rhetorically. He chuckled to himself, then cracked his knuckles sharply.

With a burst of Telekinesis, he drew Shadow close enough to him that the hedgehog would be caught within the singularity envelope of his Teleport. The two were too far away from the tenement to hear the thunderclap that followed in their wake.

Bleary-eyed, Shadow tried to coalesce himself and take stock of his surroundings. Warmth, that was new. Something about his proprioception was awry. Disorientation from his encounter with Mewtwo? No, he was being buoyed. With a sudden clarity, he realized he was in a hot bath. Shadow scrambled to lift himself and take in the room he was in. It was empty of other people. Indeed, it was empty of most details. Walls and surfaces of stark purity bound the space. No windows, paintings, candles, or other homely accoutrements adorned the chamber. Squat ribbed piping proliferated above and below the tub, leading out of the room to parts unknown.

Peering closely at the walls, Shadow thought he was just about able to make out subliminal etchings of patterns that seemed too intricate to be real. When he ran his fingers over the surface, none of the details he thought he saw were perceptible through his glove.

Shadow arose from the bath and cast his gaze about in search of a towel. It didn't take him long to realize there was none to be found. Sighing, he daintily stepped toward the only visible exit. Hands over his ample loins, he peered into a vast hallway that stretched cavernously to either side. Rows of pale purple lights raced overhead. Portraits of Mewtwo in various military and ceremonial armors tiled the walls, alternated with depictions of a woman Shadow had never seen before. Nearly at the edge of his vision to the left, the hallway seemed to flare out into a larger chamber. Motion caught his eye, and Shadow figured he might as well see what it was about.

Stepping lightly and quickly in case his dripping were damaging anything Mewtwo cared about, he made his way to the room. Through the roof shone undiluted sunlight, which played over the gently cascading waterfall Shadow's eyes had caught. A small deciduous forest had been planted here, and an artificial stream wended its way through the room. A pleasant mix of earthy and herbal scents emanated from the woody grove, inviting Shadow to relax in it. He stepped lightly over the stream and clambered onto a broad flat rock that was currently catching a fair amount of sun. Curling up to dry off and warm up, he drifted into an alert restful state and waited to be discovered.