Empty Places

Misty shivers standing in front of the half building, craning her neck to look up into the empty black of the roof. It's cavernous—a mouth open wide to a field littered with trenches and strange tubes of metal and glass. Misty shivers again thinking of it like that—a mouth waiting to swallow her whole. It makes her feel little again, staring into Gyarados's open mouth before crawling in.

She shudders, knees shaking violently enough that she would tumble over if not for Brock catching her.

"You ok?" he whispers, eyes on the dark of the ruins just past her shoulder.

Misty hums a response, already spinning away from Brock to search for Ash, she'd have sworn that it had been Ash that was right next to her.

Pikachu offers a concerned chuu from the ground somewhere to her right and she turns to the noise only to find Ash staring up at the dark with his arms wrapped around his frame.

"It's huge." Ash whispers in response to another awed pika. He's leaning back as he speaks, wide eyes focused entirely on the space in front of them. Misty takes another step back and shivers, almost in time with Ash.

Which is weird; they shouldn't be shivering. It's not exactly cold…the temperature anyway...but it feels…like ice…

...or...

...not really like ice...more like...raw and open.

Like she's been stung by a million beedrill.

Shifting a sleeping Togepi to one arm, Misty reaches a hand up to rub her neck at the thought. The hair that she can never quite seem to catch in her ponyta-tail is standing on end. The whole place feels altogether wrong...like...the Pokémon Tower in Lavender Town...but still somehow…Misty is sure she's been here before...and it's missing something….something like...like the sting of saltwater in her eyes and drenching rain and...and

"Hey, Mist?" Ash calls, breaking her from her reverie.

Misty blinks and looks over to Ash only to find him staring straight ahead into the building. "Yes?"

"Does to place seem...familiar to you?"

"What do you mean, Ash?" Brock asks. Both she and Ash jump. Misty had forgotten he was even here. But he had caught her when she'd stumbled...how….how had she forgotten him?

"Like….like I've been here before." Ash says. Pikachu offers a confused kaa in response to his trainers question but…

"Yeah." Misty says, nodding. "But...also…" She trails off, unsure how to convey exactly that something is missing without being able to say what it is.

Ash sighs. "Yeah…" he trails off, shifting his weight uneasily from foot to foot.

Behind them, Brock coughs and they both turn to look. Sheepishly the older boy scratches his back and smiles. "Do...you guys want to go in?"

"I don't know…" Misty starts, only to be cut off by Ash's uncharacteristic "Is it safe?"

Brock blinks back at them. "Probably?" he says shrugging. "It's on pretty solid ground and is made of stone...I'm don't think we should go up any stairs if we find them...but if we stay at this level, we'll probably be ok?"

Misty's eyebrows shoot to her hair and she opens her mouth to say something but Brock cuts her off.

"I'm sure it will be fine. Besides, maybe they'll be something inside that can help us figure out where we are. Otherwise we're camping again tonight."

Ash nods happily and glances down at Pikachu with a fierce look in his eyes. It's a look Misty has learned not to trust; nothing good follows it. "OK then," Ash starts, chuckling. Misty wills herself not to wince at the tone. "Last one in's a rotten exeggcute." And he dashes inside.

Misty and Brock watch him go, cringing when something large and stone clatters boomingly to the floor somewhere in the dark followed by a hurried "That wasn't me." and a worried chuu.

Misty turns back to Brock from the mouth of the building and smiles weakly. "I'm surprised at you, Brock. You don't usually encourage Ash's..." She trails off, waving off into the dark. As if on cue something else large and heavy clutters down eliciting the same response from what they hope are the sole inhabitant up ahead. Misty hangs her head. "That. You don't usually encourage that."

Brock sighs. "Yeah...but we're here. And if I've learned anything, traveling with you two it's that there is no stopping whatever is going to happen. May as well just set it in motion and deal with it sooner. Maybe we'll get off easy."

Misty nods. "I just keep waiting for someone to show up and...I don't know...claim Ash is the only hope to save the world or something."

"Yeah...I guess we'll just have to pray that it's a guy who shows up….I'm not sure that we would survive your jealousy if someone like that kissed Ash again."

"Yeah." Misty says, starting forward only to stop and turn around again. "Hey, that only happened once...and you weren't even with us…"

"What, Tracey and I aren't allowed to talk?" Brock asks as something else falls. "We better get in there and stop him from killing himself before the end of the world."

"That was only that one time...maybe two…" But Brock has already started inside. Misty sighs and, looking back once more to the field behind them, steps shivering into the dark.

The first steps into the building sting like she's been hit by a tentacool swarm. She actually stops, one foot in and one out to shift Togepi to her bag just so she can rub her arms. They hurt. Her face hurts. Her legs hurt. She doesn't want to step in but Brock walks through like he's stepping through a door so Misty follows. It has to all be in her head. Like...like she's just remembering Gyarados and nothing more.

She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath and grits her teeth. She can do this. She breathes out, slowly and then steps the final few feet like breaking through plastic wrap.

The stinging is still there, like a buzzing at the back of her mind pleading with her to leave, to step back out, that being here is not really something she needs to do. But…

The air is cooler inside the half building and outside on the grass everything had felt just as wrong so, after a moment, she feels silly standing in an open room with her eyes clenched shut and hands fisted as though waiting for something awful to happen. She breathes out and opens an eye to the dark. At first, she doesn't see anything but slowly her eyes adjust until, if she squints, she can make out the clutter.

Those strange tubes are everywhere cracked and broken; sprouting from the floor and hanging from the ceiling like so many teeth. There's broken glass everywhere—the floor practically glitters in a sharp snow. Stranger still are the shells, every few feet the light bounces off what looks like the discarded shells of the strange creatures that Ash had scared away. Mostly, though, the shells are hidden. Tucked away under desks and behind broken screens. There's paper too and folders and binders. Most of it looks to be falling apart or burned to a char. Whatever happened here, it wasn't good.

It's dusty too.

Misty can see it floating in the dim light.

She takes a breath in and regrets it. She sneezes and the papers she'd been glancing at go flying.

Coughing, Misty bends over to pick them up and stops. There's one paper, well, the corner of one really, that's dated only a few months back. The notes are smudged beyond legibility and, honestly beyond the numbers there's not a really a symbol she recognizes anyway. But what catches her attention is the watermark that she can almost see behind the numbers and text—it from the Cerulean hotel. For a moment, she's dizzy. That date—it's around when her sisters had called. Around when she'd have been back in Cerulean if she'd followed their plan.

She swallows hard and puts the paper down; it's weird, but it won't help them figure out where they are. She hopes one of the others have found something because she would really like to leave.

"Ash? Brock?" She calls, standing up. She wipes her palms on her legs, trying to rid her hands of that nauseating stinging that's come back. Taking a deep, she finishes her thought. "Where are you guys? Did you find anything?"

"Nothing that says where we are." Brock replies, walking towards her from somewhere in the dark. "But I found something weird." He holds out a rusted clipboard with a few papers still attached to a near disintegrated clip. The papers are heavily degraded—nearly everything that might let Misty know what the notes were taken in reference to has crumbled away, but they seem somehow familiar. Though not in the same way that the building feels; the papers don't look like she's them before, somewhere. No, the papers remind her of the ones Professor Oak is always carrying around. Or Tracey's sketchbook; notes a scientist would take. It makes her wish she could read more on the disintegrating pages than a date, some four years before, and a location...or at least what she thinks is a location if that's what the watermarked Old Shore Wharf means.

"What's so weird about these?" Misty asks, confused.

Brock's eyes widen and he shakes his head in disbelief. "Misty, we were at the Old Shore Wharf when whoever it was wrote these notes. Don't you remember? That huge storm that just...vanished?"

Misty shrugs. "So?" It doesn't seem that important, until, all of a sudden, it does. That storm...the pokémon…"New Island." She mumbles.

Brock blinks. "New island?"

Misty nods slowly. "The reason we were at the wharf," she replies, trailing off. She was sure they'd gone to the wharf to get to New Island...But that can't be right. In all her memory, Misty can't recall a place in Kanto by that name. Besides, they'd gone to the wharf for… "Why were we there?"

Brock shrugs. "Who knows? It was years ago, Misty."

"But why were we there? We dropped everything and went there...and then... to that island." Misty shivers, remembering dark beaches and color water.

Brock tilts his head, confusion and concern playing across his face. "What island? Are you feeling ok?" Brock asks.

Misty nods, plastering a smile on her face. "Must be from a dream...have you seen Ash? Nothing's crashed in a while and I haven't heard Pikachu shock anything."

Brock shakes his head, still eying Misty worriedly so she turns to the dark, away from his face, and calls, "Ash?"

Both she and Brock are silent for a beat, waiting for a response. Somewhere up ahead, something large and heavy falls to the stone.

"I'm ok." Ash's voice calls from somewhere ahead. It's much closer then Misty had thought he was, definitely much nearer than the noises that echo in the dark. Misty looks to Brock, concerned but he doesn't seem worried. "I found something." Ash calls, voice closer still.

"Us too, come share." Misty says towards the dark before turning back to Brock with a smile that quickly falls when she finds her face full of rusted metal and tea-colored paper.

"Misty, read this." Brock says again.

Misty rolls her eyes and, grimacing, reaches out to take the clipboard. It's cold, her hand tingles when she touches it, like touching Pikachu's cheeks before he shocks Ash. Her arm drops and she rubs her palm against her hand. "Eww." she offers, weakly. "It's so gross. You hold it." She says, not wanting Brock to ask about her actions. Brock rolls his eyes but, obligingly, holds the board so that she can read it.

There's nothing much to read. Most every word is worn away, the paper is crumbled to tatters and fibers. The few words that are there stand out in stark pen. A 'the' and 'are' and then a few strings of those same symbols. She's about to hand it back to Brock, having glanced through the whole thing in an attempt to find whatever it was he found odd, when something catches her eye. At the very bottom of the last page is a nearly complete sentence which is only slightly worn away with maybe three words marked out. It's blurred and smudged but, from what Misty can guess, says something about a young trainer with strange abilities. Blinking, Misty reads through it once more, before looking back up at Brock.

"OK?" she says slowly, unsure what he's found.

Brock sighs. "Don't you see? Misty, we were there. With Ash." He grins, mischievously and Misty shakes her head. "Obviously this is about Ash."

Misty scoffs and smacks him just as Ash finds them.

"What's about me?" he asks, he's holding an old file stamped with a large, red 'R'. Pikachu, on his shoulder, has another.

Brock laughs, rubbing his head where Misty had swatted him.

"Nothing" Brock says at the same time Misty asks where Ash had been. She's surprised, it hadn't taken him long to find them at all. He must have been close.

"Just over there." Ash gestures with the file, knocking loose some rotted pages, towards a desk not terribly far away. It's close enough he must have heard her sneeze. "It felt weird too far from you guys...like something was buzzing."

Misty swallows hard. "What did you find? Does it say where we are?" She asks.

Ash shakes his head. "No, but it's strange." Without any further explanation he takes the file from Pikachu and opens them both.

They're degraded, obviously, both of the files. There are signs in each that there had once been papers and notes and memos that have become dust and rot and mold. One of the files, and not the one Pikachu had been holding, looks like it might even have been chewed on by something. From what is left, there's nothing really that seems weird to Misty. Most of the pages that remain are blackened out, same as the paper Brock had found. Or covered in those strange symbols that Misty can't read. There are no names and what little Misty can understand are only dates from nearly 50 years back.

She raises her eyebrows and looks at Ash, about to ask just what is so strange about the files when Brock beats her to it.

"I don't get it. What's so weird about these?"

Ash sighs and flips some pages, first in one file and then the other to reveal a picture in each stapled to what might once have been a form of some kind, long since rotted away.

Brock shakes his head, laughing. "Leave it to Ash to only look at the pictures."

But Misty barely hears him over her gasp. Those pictures...they're Jessie and James. Or at least...some people who look just like them. But no, it's not just the hair and looks. It's the way they're standing; Jessie, glaring at the camera and James looking down and away with a rose in his fingers. Misty refuses to believe there are more than two people in the world who would look and stand and act like that.

"Weird, right?" Ash asks. Pikachu chuu's beside him, nodding his head.

"Yeah." Misty agrees.

Brock snatches the papers and looks at them more closely, shaking his head as he does. "It's strange." he says, after a moment. "They look just like Jessie and James. But it's not possible. These papers say that they're from over 50 ago. No way this is Jessie and James."

"They have been following me for six years." Ash says, swallowing hard. "Do they look any older to either of you?"

Brock shakes his head again, handing the files back to Ash. "They're older than us though, who knows how old they actually are. Not fifty though. This has to be a trick or something. Maybe we should leave before they find us."

"Brock, do you really think this whole building is a trap?" Misty asks.

Brock shrugs. "Why not, they've built crazy things before. Do you remember their Gyarados sub?"

"Yeah but…" Misty stops, hearing a creak somewhere at the building's opening. The three of them look at one another, and then out to the field in front of the building. Moments pass and nothing happens. Misty breathes out.

"Arceus," Brock swears, breaking the silence. "I thought that they were here with that motto."

Misty shivers, suddenly cold in the building. "They don't really do that anymore." She whispers, locking chapped lips. Her voice sounds rough to her ears.

"Yeah." Ash agrees, rubbing his arms.

"Are you two ok?" Brock asks.

"Cold." they say together, shivering again. Far away, in the dark, something else large and heavy hits the floor and Pikachu coos uneasily.

Brock lays a hand on each of their foreheads, eyes focused somewhere in the dark. For a moment, he looks concerned but then shrugs. "Neither of you feel warm. Let's head back outside though. There's nothing in here. Still, we should " As if to punctuate his words something else falls, close enough to where they're standing that Misty's legs shake with the noise.

They're just stepping out into the late afternoon sun when Misty's stomach drops. It's odd, one moment she feels fine—well, not fine. Not really. Her arms, face, legs—everywhere—is still tingly and everything still feels off; but no more off then it's felt all day. So she doesn't feel fine but she does feel...the same...at least...until she steps outside and suddenly everything flips.

Her arm is over Ash's shoulder it happens. He's helping her over some of the more difficult steps between the building and the field that might be a lawn one second and the next her stomach is lurching and Ash's skin has gone clammy. He turns his head and looks at her, panic raw in his eyes. What is happening? Brock alone seems not to notice. He's ahead of them already, helping to scout an easier path, but stops as soon as he realizes Ash and Misty have frozen. He turns around, eyes etched with concern, to see what has happened but never quite gets words out of his mouth.

"What are you children doing here?" A deep, whining, voice drones over them. "It's dangerous."

Brock takes a step back and nods, slowly, with the voice. "Arceus," he breathes, looking around. "It is dangerous here. We need to leave."

"We are leaving, Brock." Misty says, slowly. Her eyes are focused entirely on Brock now, he's standing dazedly like he used to around Nurse Joy and Officer Jenny. But his eyes are blank and his tone low and steady.

Ash shakes his head quickly, Drawing Misty's eyes to his face. For a moment, after he shakes, his eyes unfocus before he too nods. "Brock's right, Misty. It's dangerous here."

Misty starts, she can't remember the last time Ash had called her by her full name. Even screaming at one another, he still calls her Mist. "What are you two talking about?" She asks, unease bleeding into anger. "We are leaving."

Brock nods. "You're right. Misty, how did I ever let you convince us to come here?"

Misty blinks. "Excuse me? Wasn't it you who said that there was no stopping whatever's going to happen? "

"You need to leave, now." The voice echoes again.

Ash shakes his head again and his eyes refocus. He scratches his head and blinks, looking just past Misty towards the voice. His eyes widen in surprise and he starts waving. "Mist, look. It's that old guy with the berries."

"What are you talking about, Ash?" Misty asks tiredly. At least she's back to being Mist. Turning to follow Ash's hand, she barely swallows her gasp of surprise. Ash is right. Standing out in the field is the same old guy they'd run into before. He standing rigidly, turning his whole body to look around the field. Just like the last time they'd seen him, he has his hair pulled back into a ratty blue tinged tail that drags near his feet. He looks just as dirty...or...dirty was never the right word...worn, maybe? Old and forgotten at least.

Stiffly he lifts one hand and points a weirdly clubbed finger towards them. Misty shudders. His finger, like his face, is stained purple; the same purple as the berries that grew in the region.

"It's not safe here." The man repeats, narrowing his eyes in a glare.

Misty swallows hard as Brock and Ash nod slowly along with his words.

"OK," Misty starts, Brock and Ash turn back to her and the rest of her words are drowned in a gasp. Both of them have dazed expressions on their faces. They need to get out of here. "Ok," she says again.

"We'll leave. Happy to. But we're lost. Is there a pokémon center nearby?"

The old man narrows his eyes again. "Yes." he says, and points towards the opposite end of the field.

Misty nods and, under the old man's narrow glare, grabs Ash's hand and pushes Brock towards the opposite end of the field. It's slow going, she practically has to lead both boys over and around everything in their path. And every stumble, trip and fall she can feel the old man's eyes searing g into her back.

At the edge of the grass, Ash shakes his head and looks around with newly focused eyes. He starts to ask Misty...something but only gets as far as a hoarse "Mist?" before Misty puts a finger to her lips and throws Brock's arm around his shoulder. She doesn't have the energy to talk or the answers to give.

Together, the two of them haul Brock into the forest and down the path until, ten minutes later, with the start of a village just visible past the sparse trees, Brock too shakes his head.

His confused, "Where are we?" is perhaps the most wonderful sound Misty has heard in a long while.