In mild confusion, Johannes glanced around the lobby of Prism Tower and then to Viola, who shrugged at him. Daniel had taken off the moment they'd entered, stopping long enough to tell Johannes to distract the attendant, before leaving the researcher and his wife to loiter around after disappearing with Charles through a door labeled "maintenance." The couple watched the odd Trainer enter and speak to the attendant now and again, before they were handed a wristband, and told to wait to be called to take the Gym challenge.
He felt Viola lean against him and rest her head on his shoulder. "Are you worried?" she asked, her tone mellow.
"A bit," replied Johannes in an undertone. "But Daniel seems pretty confident now and has a plan. We've got the mega stones if we need them. An escape vehicle too. And we don't have to go into the brothel, just wait." He took hold of her hand and wove his fingers between hers with practiced expertise. "But overall...I think we'll be fine." She squeezed his hand back and let out a soft sigh.
Worry remained balled in their chests - a tangled net of brambles that tightened and loosened as revelations and mysteries alike arose, but now, with their enemy known and some sort of plan buzzing about Daniel's head, it was the loosest it had felt in the last several days.
But still the thorns pricked at their hearts.
The four emerged from Daniel's apartment and began their trek towards the rental service. "Rent a car, visit the tower, hit the rouge. That's all we're doing, right?" asked Johannes. His eyes swept across the sparsely populated streets - odd for a late afternoon.
"That's it. Now get a move on, we have to make it to the tower before it closes," replied Daniel.
"Why does it close at sundown?" said Johannes.
"League reasons. Some idiots tried to pull something stupid to skip the gym challenge by sneaking in and waiting at the uppermost floor and then pretending they'd made it up there by coming out of a maintenance shaft or something."
The researcher laughed. "That's...that's extremely stupid."
"The League challenge takes all kinds. Hot shots, one-tricks and ten-year olds with nothing but a rattata - you're all in."
Their voices began to die out as they moved further and further away, and two red eyes blinked into existence in the foliage of a tree. A grin spread slowly across the ether before a gengar materialized. Terrence had been right to pick this tree to stake out the apartment, and it was worth what pain it caused his (now mostly healed) leg.
The tower - Prism Tower. Only tower that was also a gym, he thought. He looked towards the horizon and saw the tip of the building crest over every other building that surrounded it. The grin on his face widened and he set off, darting from shadow to shadow as fast as his ethereal form would allow.
Soon he'd have his answers and be free from his service to the King. His grin twisted into a scowl.
Good riddance.
Daniel wound his way through the dimly lit maintenance tunnels and hallways, descending staircase after staircase. Hisses of steam escaping punctuated the relative silence of the narrow pathways and made him jump. The walls were pulsing, he swore it, and each beat of his heart made them pulse harder, threatening to draw closer and consume him. An excess of hot steam at his side sent him barreling back up the path, up several sets of stairs. He paused, panting, doubled over and swearing, and looked at Charles. The bisharp seemed unperturbed.
Daniel slapped his face and shook off the fear as best he could. It draped itself over his body a second later. "Fucking tunnels. Fucking tiny ass cheapskate construction hard to navigate claustrophobia-triggering cunting fucking tunnels." Another pipe vented steam and he shouted, "FUCK. OFF."
He wiped the sweat from his brow and pulled a map from his pocket. The display flickered to life and showed him the tunnels that comprised the sewers. He shivered and began flipping through the device, trying to find plans for the maintenance tunnels. After several minutes he stopped, stomped his foot and cursed his own jittery hands and racing mind. There was no reason at all for him to have blueprints of these tunnels. He shoved the device away into his pocket and beckoned for Charles to continue following.
Several minutes, loud swears and another break up a few flights of stairs later, Daniel found himself at a locked door marked "SEWER ACCESS." He furrowed his brow. "Strange," he mumbled to himself, "We went down a lot of fuckin' stairs, how are we not way under the sewers?" He pulled his Xtransceiver from his pocket and checked its display - no reception. "Of course. I'll have to head back up until I can ping Ricard. But first…" He grasped the doorknob and shook it. Not even a millimeter of give. He pressed his shoulder to the door and gave it several shoves. Door's god damn solid too. "Charles, give this door a punch right in the center."
The bisharp nodded and drew his fist back. With a loud, sharp grunt of exertion his gauntleted fist connected squarely with the metal door - an earsplitting metallic echo rang out in the tunnel. It made Daniel's vision blur and his head feel like it had swollen to double its size. "Fuck, that was loud. Let's get the fuck out of here, that shit probably carried far enough to alert the entire tower, several stories underground or not."
As the detective and his pokemon ascended the stairs he mumbled to Charles, "Why the fuck is there a sewer access tunnel this far down? We're way below the sewers at this point, we have to be. I mean, fuck, we've already climbed up three flights of stairs and there's like six more to go!"
Charles shrugged, unseen to Daniel, and replied with a plain grunt, quiet and short.
"That might be the King's chamber. Or access to it. But it just seems too obvious. Anyone that comes into these tunnels would have to know about it. They'd have keys or something." Daniel jumped as another pipe vented steam in his face and shouted several expletives at the top of his lungs. Resolving to consider what he'd found somewhere decidedly less passively hostile and detrimental to his mental health, he sprinted up the last few flights of stairs and emerged in the lobby, sweating and sodden.
The receptionist gave the detective a single look - Daniel's flushed face and wild eyes stared back. The dark jacket, loaded belt and tightly laced boots made it clear any question she posed would be met with an answer she didn't want to hear, and so, she looked to the entryway to the lobby, humming a tune loudly and pointedly.
Daniel stomped over to Johannes and Viola and whispered, "Found a door. Won't open. Don't know why. Can't ask the receptionist. Have to come back at night with everyone else and see what we can manage."
"But if it won't open, what will coming back at night do for us?" asked Viola, confused.
"Give me a chance to sic arcanine on it. Maybe send drifblim through and peek around the other side. I left them at home like a fucking idiot thinking I wouldn't need them." explained Daniel. Annoyance wound its way across his every feature as his displeasure with his own short-sightedness grew.
"Hrmm. I can see why it is you roped Ana into this," said Johannes. At the look of confusion on Viola's face, Johannes added, "Drifblim aren't exactly the talkative type, to pokemon or humans alike, and generally prefer to roam the world of the living than the dead."
Daniel stopped fiddling with his Xtransceiver long enough to look up at Johannes and raise an eyebrow. "That explains everything that free-spirited balloon has ever done." He returned to his device, typing out a message to Ricard requesting the blueprints to the maintenance tunnels and hallways that ran up, down and around Prism Tower. A few minutes later he had downloaded them to his map and was poring over them. He had no idea how it was Ricard got his hands on these things, but his ability to (likely aided in no small part by his sizable coffers) was appreciated just the same.
"These plans are giving me a worse feeling than those steaming, hissing tunnels did," he mumbled. "Look at this shit. According to these plans, the door I was looking at doesn't exist. Shit, most of the hallway before it and an entire flight of stairs shouldn't exist either. Something fucky is going on, and given how deep in the shit we are now, I'm putting my money on the King. Or one of his minions."
Johannes racked his brains trying to come up with an explanation that was more mundane than "a ghost did it." It wasn't so much that he didn't believe Daniel, rather, he wanted to be sure this explanation was the correct one, lest they go chasing shadows. He frowned at the floor plans and asked, still sifting through explanations, "You sure?"
"As far as this case is concerned, I'm more sure about this than just about anything else I've been sure about."
The researcher sighed and nodded. "It could be a trick. An illusion of sorts. Maintaining it for so long would be… tough. Unless a ghost found a way to make it permanent. Can ghosts even do that?"
Daniel shrugged. "Might be something d'Artagnan would know. Or Ricard. Maybe Ana, but she's asleep." He rubbed his chin. "Do ghosts pull energy from the other side?"
Johannes offered only a shrug in response. "Da- uh, Ignace: ghosts are probably the least understood pokemon type in existence. We know more about psychics, dragons and fairies than we do ghosts. They mingle too closely with death, or outright interface with it. As a species, humans have a long record with death and a tremendous fear of it, but we're still no closer to fully understanding it than we were centuries ago, millenia go. We probably never will be."
"But is there a chance they do?"
With a sigh, Johannes shrugged again. "I'd be a world-renowned researcher if I had any sort of definite answer to that. We have evidence to believe they do and don't. We think it's species specific, but then a banette goes and does something it shouldn't have, or a cofagrigus pulls some kind of utterly baffling display of interfacing with the afterlife. I mean, the entire time you were in the so-called "ghost world" did you see any spirits wandering around? Any pokemon?"
Daniel frowned. "No. We...sensed them. Sensed something. Never saw anything other than the structures d'Artagnan explained and a great big fuck-off gate." He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at his bisharp. "Charles heard the king whisper shit to him, trying to get him to turn on me. Scared him, but he also completely fucking ignored that rat bastard." He clapped his companion on the shoulder, drawing a hum of approval from Charles, and to Johannes' shock, a genuine smile.
"But for now, we've got something else to deal with. Visiting hours should be ending soon, and we'll have to work fast if we want to deal with both this place and the rouge in one night. Let's head out."
The four emerged from Prism Tower a minute later and were greeted by the brilliant orange of the setting sun. Long shadows stretched out from buildings, trees and railings, and City of Lights was was beginning to illustrate its namesake as streetlamps, cafes and high rises filled with lights of different colors and intensities. Daniel stopped them all with an outstretched arm and withdrew a cigarette from the pack in his jacket's pocket.
A curious lighter followed, its upper portion that of a chandelure's head towards eyelet of the device. With the press of a button and a soft click, a brilliant purple flame sprung out of it.
He lit his cigarette, and after a long drag and longer exhale, turned to Johannes and smirked at the researcher's confused expression. "Gift from Ana. Not sure how it turns fire purple. Never bothered to ask. Nothin' mystical about it though, or so she says." He took another drag from his cigarette and exhaled again. The stench the smoke left in the air gave Johannes a headache, and to his left Viola coughed pointedly once. At this, Daniel chuckled and said, "Just give me a minute. Calming the nerves after all the bullshit I dealt with down in those tunnels."
"What bullshit did you have to deal with down there?" asked Johannes.
The detective took one last drag and then dropped the cigarette to crush it under his boot. "Claustro-fucking-phobia. No reason for it either, at least not one that I can remember. Been a problem forever." He stretched and motioned in the direction Johannes had parked. "Pain in the ass, but if Charles can deal with the dark, I can deal with tight spaces. Shit sucks, you deal with it. How I dealt with fuckin' everything life threw at me."
Johannes stopped and looked at the bisharp. "Your bisharp is afraid of the dark?"
Daniel turned to Johannes with a wide, genuine grin on his face. "You fuck pokemon?" He shrugged, and turned about again, Charles joining him in his laughter.
Terrence arrived at the tower, panting and feeling rather drained, but triumphant nevertheless, to the sight of his four targets piling into a car. His leg twinged only rarely now, a bit more than it had been recently given his haste. He sunk into the ground and snaked through the shadows into the street, his vision obscured but clear enough to notice the body of a car driving over him.
The world around him went quiet as he focused on the space directly before him. The ground began to rumble lightly, the sound of tires on asphalt began to grow out of the silence. Here at the tower would have been a terrible choice to pick a fight. But in the rouge - they were moving where he had to lead them on their own! He had only to pick the proper time to spring and bait them.
But before any of that, he needed to get there. He focused harder upon the sound of the tires.
Now.
His gaseous form surged up into the undercarriage of the car and coalesced again as a shadow. He was moving and secure.
Johannes pulled into an alley and turned the car off. Next to him sat Daniel, consulting a map and checking Xtransceiver now and again. In the back seat were Charles and Viola, both completely silent. The rouge felt foreign to him. Wrong. Shadows crossed before his car: men, women and pokemon walked by, their gaits full of purpose, shame or intrigue. Johannes unbuckled his seatbelt and sat back in his seat. "Lot more people walking around than I expected," he said in what he hoped was a casual voice.
Daniel looked up from his map, closing it with a soft click and pocketed it. "Still a little early. People are barhopping, looking for a nice place to settle that serves up the kind of shit they're looking to get into." He fiddled with his Xtransceiver and then added with a shrug, "Or let get into them." He sighed and gestured at the ignition. "Gimme some power for a second, gotta crack the windows." Johannes nodded and tapped the button once.
The window to Daniel's right slid down with a soft whirr and he pulled his curious lighter and a cigarette from his jacket once more. The purple flame winked to life for an instant before giving way to the steady glow of the red cherry of a cigarette.
"You'll be waiting in the car, naturally, but you won't have to worry too much about getting accosted. People try to avoid pulling shit out in the streets here in the rouge. Dead-end alley too. No way to come at you from behind. Unless they open the windows, but the chances of that happening are slim to none."
Johannes put his hands on the steering wheel for lack of another reasonable location to leave them. "Why's that?'
"Because any attention is bad attention. The dickheads that own these things want as little heat as possible on them because what they're doing is eight godsdamned different kinds of illegal. Brothels are one thing, Lumiose has allowed those since the time of the fuckin' kings, but pokemon brothels take a big fat dump at the intersection of hell no and piss off."
The researcher nodded, turning from the detective and then jumped in his seat when he saw two shadows duck into the alley. The sounds emanating from them, registering two distinct pitches - one clearly inhuman - reached into the car. One sounded like a giggle, the other, an amused growl. Johannes raised an eyebrow and glanced at Daniel. "Should I do anything about this?"
The detective puffed out a plume of smoke and chuckled. "Thought you were into this shit?"
Johannes threw his hands into the air and pointed at the ring on his finger, his eyes trained on Daniel. "I'm married, damn it." He looked back out the window and squinted at the shadows. "And I don't know if you noticed, but Viola walks on two legs, not four."
Daniel snorted. "You've given me a better opinion of pokephiles, so I'll hold off on being mean for the moment, but…" He glanced back at Viola, who stared back with a pout on her face and a flash in her eyes. "Good choice sticking to something still vaguely human." He sighed and took another drag from cigarette.
An awkward silence stretched out between them - the shadows before them seemed to be wrestling against the wall, the four-legged one with more difficulty than the two-legged one.
"I'm giving you shit. Mostly as a joke. That last bit got a little too fuckin' heavy though." He coughed and took another drag. "Sorry. Just... relax. I try to take the edge off before I get shit done here because it always riles me the fuck up, and I'm doing a bad job of it. I don't fuckin' know anything about these two in front of me, who they are, if they know each other, and if whatever the fuck that thing is even wants to be doing this."
Viola frowned at this. "Why wouldn't…?"
"Because this city ain't as pretty as it looks, that's why," said Daniel, cutting her off. "They're sex workers, not people or pokemon with any kind of agency. You show up, you put money down and you get what you pay for. I don't know anything about these two though, could just be secret lovers taking advantage of the fact that you can slap a lopunny's ass here and not have someone think twice." He tapped ash from his cigarette out the window and brought the thin stick back to his lips. "Might be good to just give 'em the lights. No sense shouting at them."
With a nod, Johannes twisted a knob on the turn signal - bright lights filled the alley and revealed the form of a woman, her shirt hiked up a considerable distance and an absol standing on its hind legs, its lips pressed somewhat awkwardly against hers.
Daniel burst into laughter and stuck his head out the window, shouting, "Hey! C'est le quartier rouge, pas le quartier des fusées rouges!"
The woman tugged her shirt down and smoothed it out shooed the absol from the alley, following close behind. She stopped before rounding the corner and made an obscene gesture at the car. "FUCK YOU!"
The detective pulled his head back into the car and coughed again. "Shouldn't do that right after having a cig. Throat's totally shot now."
Johannes and Viola both looked appalled.
"Was that...necessary? They weren't doing anything harmful to you - to any of us." Viola's cold voice made Daniel shiver as it echoed in his head.
"Could have just let them run off, did you really have to-" The rest of Johannes' statement was cut off.
"I think I did. I know how it looks to you two, but this place is rotten to the fucking core." He swung the door open to the car and got out, with Charles following suit.
Johannes sighed. "Let's get out as well Viola. You can sit in the front seat after he heads off." Unseen, Viola nodded and got out of the car as well.
The four moved to the front of the car and faced each other. The bright headlights made Johannes squint and washed out most of Daniel's face. To his right, Charles stood, his arms folded, the light glinting off his polished blades.
"Does he…?" asked Johannes, distracted and pointing at Charles.
"Polish his blades?" supplied Daniel, glancing down at the bisharp. "Yeah. I do sometimes too." He shrugged. "Serves the purpose of letting me inspect them, take a whetstone to them, check for nicks, whatever it may be. Nicks are easy enough to deal with, since the blades repair themselves if they take minor damage."
Johannes nodded. "And major damage?"
"Don't know, don't want to know really. And neither does Charles I'd wager." The bisharp nodded and let out a sharp grunt in the affirmative.
Daniel reached out and put a hand to Johannes' shoulder. "Alright, look. I've been an ass for the last half hour or so, and I probably sound bitter or angry or flat out nasty, but let me make it clear:
"I am bitter. I am angry. I deal with this shit a lot. Way fucking more than I need to. Not this, not you two, not happy marriages with consensual dickings in the mission-fucking-ary position or however the fuck you manage it. I deal with finding pokemon that get stolen to be shoved into these places. Or have chunks of them torn off to be used for some fucking designer drug. Sometimes it's just plain old ransom.
"I've seen shit here. Broken souls and ruined bodies. Sylveon reduced to matted messes forgotten in the corner of some dingy fuck-in-the-wall while the tenant digs into whatever other warm hole he bought himself in case the first gave out."
He began to rattle off names on his fingers.
"Lopunny, florges, absol, roserade, every fucking eevee, and you-" He pointed to Viola, his face caught between a grimace and a manic grin. "Ohoho. Tons of you. Tons of you. Fucking TONS OF YOU."
Viola clung to Johannes, mortified. The researcher too wound an arm around his wife and took a step away from the detective.
"I have pulled everything out of the shit to get it home to owners that just want their companions back. So excuse me for being more than a little bitter."
"How regularly are pokemon stolen?" asked Viola, still cowering beside Johannes.
"Often enough to give me regular work, not enough for the police to care. Usually they get their stock through breeding, black market trading, shipments and all that jazz. But sometimes a catch is a catch. The common shit, the pokemon I just named off, those are easy enough to get, and I do get cases now and again to pull some from here. But weird, fringe pokemon are in vogue too. I've had to pull weird shit from this place. Stuff I never thought anyone would want to fuck." He dug around the inside of his jacket and produced a compact pistol. He pulled the slide back partially to check the chamber and then flipped the gun in his hand, grasping it by the barrel and offering the grip to Johannes.
The researcher sputtered, completely lost for words.
"Take it, now's not the time to be a pussy," said Daniel flatly. "I said no one would bug you, but I don't pin my hopes on a prayer. You know how these things work?"
"No!" shouted Johannes. "Why the fuck would I know how these things work?"
"Keep your voice down Jo. This little lever here's the safety. Switch it from S to F like this." He flicked the safety off. "And now you're ready to kill someone." He flicked the safety back on. "And now with it back on safe you're ready to intimidate someone."
"You're misunderstanding me, Daniel. I don't want a pistol," insisted Johannes. "I don't even know how to use it."
The detective paused and then sighed. "I'm going overboard, you're right. I'll just keep this as a backup. Keep your finger on your megastone. Will probably do you more good and won't accidentally blow your hand open or a finger off or something if you fuck up. Sorry, used to Ricard, who actually knows his way around these things." He stowed the pistol and then looked out at the street. Shadows, briefly illuminated by the headlights of the car, became men, women and pokemon before they were consumed by darkness again. None seemed interested in their exchange.
"I'll wait here. Where's the brothel you're going into?" said Johannes.
Daniel stuffed his hands into his jacket pockets and continued to look out at the street. "Few buildings down. We're only just inside the rouge right now. My search probably won't stop there, I have a few contacts here that reach pretty far in, but I'd rather give you a ring and tell you to drive straight down this street than have to deal with telling you if you should turn left or right. I'll give you a ring on your C-Gear if I need a pickup.
"Keep all the doors locked until I give you a call, then unlock them because depending on how shit goes, we might have to get out in a hurry. Understand?"
Johannes nodded. "I do. Are you sure you wouldn't prefer for me to follow you around in the car? Just in case?"
"Don't need you sticking out around here. Sit tight in the car and wait for a call from me, if it comes at all," replied Daniel.
The researcher nodded again and turned to look at the car. A thought struck him. "You said a bit ago that people don't like to strike up a commotion here - but they take pokemon just fine. Wouldn't that be a good reason for the police to come snooping?"
Daniel stepped out to the mouth of the alley and beckoned to Charles. "Never greased palms in your life, have ya? Get in the car with your wife, Johannes. I'll be back soon." He set off down the street, Charles at his side, and disappeared into the darkness.
Johannes sighed and beckoned Viola back to the car. He flopped into his seat and flicked the lights off. He heard his wife in his head before she had sat down proper. "I cannot say I find sitting in a dark alley in a part of the city that seems rather actively interested in stealing me away from you to fulfill their own…" She trailed off, the muted blues creeping through his head dropping down several shades in tone. "I'm sure you understand what I'm saying."
"I do. Believe me, I do." He took her hand in his. "But we promised Daniel. We've got your mega stone if we need it, and I think we'll be fine if it comes to it."
Viola leaned over the center console and dropped her head against his shoulder. "I hope so." She raised her head up and kissed his cheek. "I love you."
Johannes smiled. "I love you t- what the hell is that?" He pointed at a shadow that had begun to materialize out of the hood of the car. "By the gods, no. Viola! Quick-"
Two brilliant red eyes opened in the darkness of the alley, followed by a glowing white sneer, wicked and triumphant. The eyes flashed several colors and Johannes fell forward against the steering wheel. Viola raised a hand enveloped in bright pink energy and met the shade's eyes.
They flashed an array of colors again and she fell forward onto the dashboard.