Estella's eyelids flutter open. Her mind, adrift in a haze as she tries to get a handle on her surroundings. Rays of sun and the smell of the unreachable world outside filter in through slight cracks between the wooden boards that make up the floor, walls and ceiling.
She notices a familiar image on one wall, situated at just the right point where two rays of light intersected, so that she could clearly examine it.
It was a picture of a man in a feathered cap grasping at an empty space with his right hand. A Woman garbed in an old fashioned red dress is kneeling behind him with a mournful expression on her face.
She squints her eyes and is able to decipher the word "Rose", printed across the picture in large, all capital letters, using a font that had fallen out of style with the times and that awoke an ancient memory in her.
Here was a poster that harkened back to the days when Poke opera was not just enjoyed by a stuffy and gradually decomposing generation of old-timers, but had been something current, fashionable, totally alive and deeply ingrained in the culture of Kalos.
The poster, she recognized in a flash, had been for the original production of Rose de l'amour éternel, more than a decade ago.
But what was that doing here, and more importantly, where was she?
Like a seeping nerve venom, her fear of the phantom returns and violates her thoughts. Had he trapped her? What then were his intentions? It made her sick to try and imagine.
She whirls her head around and, in her paranoid state, stifles a scream at the sight of her own reflection, cast across the reflective surface of a jagged chunk of glass hung crookedly on another wall.
A single, blood red pupil emerges within the darkened area next to it.
"Carmina...you are...at last awake." Says the phantom, in a crackling voice fraught with long, awkward pauses and fluctuating tones that would be impossible to imitate precisely in writing.
Rather, I find that the best way to describe the peculiar way in which the phantom spoke would be say it was so alien to the average English-speaking listener, that one would have to take the time to meticulously consider each word he uttered individually in order to fully 'hear' him.
To the untrained ear of Estella, he might as well have been speaking in another language. On top of that, she had already made up her mind about him.
"Fantôme! You have finally made yourself known!" She snarls at him derisively. "You've had your eyes on me all along. You have been the unaccounted for noises in the balcony since day one. You are the source of my hair-raising fear, whenever I am alone in the Palais. Vous êtes mon harceleur fantôme! "
He take a step from out of the shadows and, for the first time since the fire that nearly burned the Palais Thornier to the ground ten years ago, the phantom grants an outsider a full view of him.
"Perhaps you are right...but...fear not...I mean you no harm."
To Estella's surprise, the Fantôme is neither a man nor the horned devil she envisioned.
Instead, he stands at an unintimidating three feet tall - a deal shorter than she - with a scaly black extended needle for one hand and a withering flower bouquet for the other. The leaves that make up much of its body are pitch black, and the telltale cape of its species was colored an even darker shade of black, that would camouflage when set against natural darkness. Even its hair, too, was reduced to nothing more than an unattended mess of torn, crispy brown leaves.
The charred smell that belonged to the phantom challenges Estella's breathing as it closes the distance between them. She tries to move away, but was still feeling too groggy from the effects of the sleeping powder to make a concentrated effort.
"So you are a Pokemon, of all things?" Estella spits. "You are a Roserade?"
A mechanism fixed into its neck stirs subtly whenever it speaks (without opening its mouth).
"Yes. And I mean...not to...harm you." It says, then glides away from her with the swiftness of a dancer and raises, with all the rigidity afforded of its roasted and scar-ridden body, its thorn hand to stroke the girl's reflection in the makeshift mirror. "I am just...lonely."
Estella struggles to her feet. "Is that why you kidnapped me?" She asks apprehensively, almost falling again but quickly righting herself. "Why do you dwell in this theatre?"
"I was an...actor...at the Palais...before the fire." It tells her, flapping its cape using the bouqueted hand without warning, and so sharply as if it were an irrepressible reflex. "I once performed along...side the greatest actors...les plus grands acteurs...of all time...monsieur Francoise Béringer...Margaux le Baodin..."
Estella lunges at the phantom the moment its eyes stray from her reflection.
Estella grabs ahold of its thin leg. She rears back her other arm for a swing, but is held off by a retaliatory slash across the face from the phantom's thorn, that was every bit as sharp as any decent blade.
Estella, still dressed as Carmine, screams from the pain. She drops to her knees and bows her head as blood pours forth from the wound, dripping down unto the floor in small droplets.
"Folle...is it only...French...you know...or are you sim...ply stupid?" The phantom says, with no discernible change to its flat, robotic voice. Although, the pauses in its speech only seemed to increase with its elevated temper. "All I asked...for Carmine...was your company."
It proceeds to swat her in the head with its bouquet repeatedly, applying more force to each hit than the last. When the girl holds up her hands to defend herself, the gnarled thorns hidden among the assaulting flowers rip and tear at her skin like the fangs of a dog. While the enslaught continues, Estella is constantly shouting for help and begging her attacker to cease, but to no avail. The theatre was totally empty now, and the Roserade had fallen into an incurable rage.
It would not stop until it felt satisfied with the pain it had unleashed.
The phantom is panting, and Estella's arms are covered in the fresh blood welling from her raw palms, when the tirade finally ends.
It glares at her with the intensity of a proud soul who finds he must at last accept defeat. In truth, he was too tired to even lift his arm again. "If you cannot...stand the sight of me...go now, Carmine. But I promise you...without me...you will not get...far."
Estella stares at him blankly for a while, sobbing and blubbering uncontrollably; unable to speak.
"Leave." It commands one more time, and she tumbles out the door.