Amberly had been crying at a steady rate for the past hour, though he had taken care to be doing it silently. And Terrance was glad of it. He was scared. Honestly, properly, deep-down scared. But, he hadn't been trained as a butler for nothing. And one of the hallmarks of a great butler was that they never lost their cool. Never. And it wouldn't do to let Miss Roxanne know how dire he thought their situation was.
Roxanne had enough to deal with. Skidmore was catatonic on the ground, and Roxanne looked like she wanted to join him there. She also hadn't stopped chattering to him in the hopes that he would wake up and acknowledge her.
"And I really don't get people who like avocado, because it's so slimy going down and, alright, the taste isn't bad, but when you think of all of the many other things that you could be eating, there really isn't any competition over which one any sane person would go for!" Roxanne took a deep breath, ready to continue babbling about avocado, when Terrance slapped a hand over her mouth.
Terrance spoke quickly, before Roxanne had a chance to react and lash out at him. "Miss Roxanne. You need to be calm. Your Skidmore seems to be in no immediate danger, and we don't appear to be in any either. So stop. Take a breath. And listen to me: Everything is going to be alright."
Above his hand, Roxanne's brown eyes were still large and wet, and her auburn hair was getting steadily messier due to how much her hands were running through it. But Terrance was relieved. She was calmer now.
"I'm going to take my hand off of your mouth now. Will you remain silent, Miss Roxanne?"
Roxanne nodded furiously. Terrance gave a mental shrug. She was as calm as he could hope to get her, under the circumstances. Terrance removed his hand, and Roxanne promptly turned her full attention back to Skidmore, though silently this time; and never moved her eyes from his face, as though she could heal him if she stared long enough and hard enough.
Terrance ran his hands through his hair in frustration. "OK," He said, "OK. So: We have a sort of idea of how we got here. We fell off of the ledge overlooking the lake. We both tried to swim to the surface, but when we came up out of the water, we were in a completely different place." And hadn't that been one heck of a shock, he thought. You go underwater in a lake in a forest, and you come up again in some place right out of a nightmare. "We've tried going back the way that we came, but we always come back up here, no matter how deep we go- and there doesn't seem to be a bottom, either.
"And for some reason there doesn't seem to be anything really alive here, except for us. No wild pokemon, nothing."
Terrance scuffed his shoes on the terracotta ground. What kind of a place were they, if there were no pokemon?
"No sky too, but then we have such poor eyes. It's hard to see a difference."
Terrance, Amberly, and Roxanne both let out eerily similar shrieks of alarm at the new voice, and frantically looked around for someone to assign it to.
"Funny-funny! I can still remember sorta-kinda what the sky looked like! It was green, and wavy, and prickled your feet when you walked barefoot on it, right?"
"Show yourself!" Terrance yelled, grabbing Amberly up into his arms.
Roxanne crouched protectively over Skidmore's body, her eyes darting anxiously in all directions.
"My Brother, my Brother, I knew you would come for me!"
Terrance's head began to ache. "Brother-? I-I don't-"
"I waited for you! Like Mommy an' Daddy said: 'When you get los' wait f'someone t'come an get ya.'"
The voice was coming from right behind them. It sounded like it belonged to that of a young boy, maybe eight to ten years old.
Terrance spun around, and saw who had been speaking. The scream that he had instinctively worked up on sight died in his throat.
Its skin was withered and wrinkled over muscles shrunken and desiccated from hunger. Its hair had been leached of color and hung in wispy white shreds to its balding scalp. Its grayish lips had pulled back from yellowed teeth, and the teeth almost brittle and fragile looking against its shrunken gums. It was barely four feet tall.
"Terr," Roxanne whispered, "Look at its eyes."
Terrance looked. Its eyes were the worst part. They looked young, and belonged on the face of a boy.
On this face, they looked profane.
It smiled, and Terrance reeled back so fast that he fell over backwards, and crabwalked to Roxanne, who had planted herself between Skidmore and the Thing, as if she thought that it was going to run at them and attack. Amberly had buried his head into Terrance's chest, and had refused to remove it since It had arrived.
The ghastly smile faded from Its face. "Oh. Oh yeah! I remember now! The last one told me too: He said that we don't notice, but once we've been here about a thousand years, we only have one thing left of ourselves that looks the same as when We came here." It raised its hands to touch its face. They were as old as the rest of its body, almost translucent and patchy with liver spots. "Ray- he was the one before me- he had the same hair as when he came here. And his Hypnohad the same pendulum!"
Terrance choked on his own tongue for a few seconds before he could get the words out of his mouth right. "…I don't-have-a-brother-like- you."
It blinked Noctowlishly at Terrance for an achingly long moment before it began to giggle, chortle, and then laugh out loud.
At the sound of Its laugh, as youthful as Its eyes, Terrance gagged. Roxanne turned her face away and outright puked. Amberly did nothing but clench tighter to Terrance's chest. Only Skidmore, still unconscious, was unmoved.
It finally stopped laughing and stared at the four of them. "Oh." It said, again sounding like a small boy. "Oh. You…y'aren't joking, are you? But-but I was so…so sure. 'Cause-'cause- he promised me, he PROMISED me that he'd come an' get me…But…Then why're you guys here?" Its voice had gotten progressively thicker, like It was trying very hard not to cry.
Terrance and Roxanne exchanged helpless looks. Then Roxanne, visibly steeling herself, stood up with shaking legs and a queasy expression, and touched Its shoulder in what was meant obviously meant to be a mimicry of a comforting gesture.
It stopped whimpering in shock, and stared at Roxanne like It had never seen her before. Roxanne held her ground, though Terrance could see that she longed to put as much distance between herself and It as she could.
And then It flung itself into Roxanne's arms and began to keen and howl in complete and utter misery and with complete and utter abandon. Roxanne's knees buckled, and her face went stark white. She turned her head back to Terrance, who couldn't bring himself to move, and could only stare as It wept.
A single, wild thought ran across his mind: You don't want to avert your eyes when It cries like this because It looks wrong. You want to turn away because it looks pathetic…and…pitiable.
And then Roxanne did something that Terrance never would have seen coming, would never even have considered.
Roxanne, with her auburn hair and easygoing ignorance of any type of responsibility, whom he had suspected had nowhere near the amount of emotional maturity needed to be compassionate or empathetic at all; put her arms around It.
Terrance thought that he could see from the way that her face was still white that she still wanted to run, still wanted to turn away. But Terrance also prided himself on a good mastery of reading body language, and he was forced to admit that her shaking was not completely from disgust.
Her shaking was also saying that Roxanne was crying too.
. . .
The moment was over quickly. Roxanne and It jumped away from each other at almost exactly the same moment, and looked away from each other. At that, Terrance gave himself a mental slap on the head. If Roxanne, Roxanne, of all people could pull herself together, than it would be an insult to his years of training to be impeccable and ineffable to do otherwise. Even his Amberly had stopped crying, finally. They had all entered a strange sense of calm. And maybe, Terrance thought, maybe It could answer some questions. It seemed to be living here, so maybe it knew a way out of here.
"So," He whispered, "So, who are you?"
It turned to face him. "….Denny. Dennis."
"Are you lost?"
"No. And Yes."
"Which is it?" Roxanne asked.
"Both." It said.
Roxanne hissed a very rude and unkind word under her breath, and Terrance hastily tried very hard to at the same time not hear it and delete it from his memory. His Amberly giggled.
Exasperated, and losing the calm he had gained, Terrance rubbed his hand against the bridge of his nose and decided that he needed to get to the point, and quickly. "Do you know how we can get out of here?"
It didn't say anything in a way that told Terrance that It knew exactly how to leave, and Terrance knew with a glance at Roxanne that she saw it too.
She took a threatening step forward. "Out with it!"
It scowled at her. "You can't leave yet. Y'haven't done what I did for Ray when I got here."
"And what was that, pray tell?" Roxanne bit out.
It- he had to remember that It was not an it anymore, It had a name and It was pathetic and pitiable when It cried, not disgusting- grinned. "I faced the Darkfor Ray. And then Ray and his Hypno got to leave."
Terrance didn't try to stop the grin from spreading on his face. "It's that easy? We can get out of…of wherever this is that easily?"
"Or that hard. But, it is simple!" Dennis trilled out.
Roxanne already had a grip on Skidmore, and was trying to pull his unresponsive body onto here back. "Dennis! Where do we go to find this 'Dark'?"
At the sound of Roxanne saying his name, Dennis' face glowed.
. . .
In his head, Terrance was whacking himself over the head with a very large saucepan. His Amberly was riding on his head, and pulling at his hair in alarm. Roxanne, who was carrying Skidmore piggyback, looked like she was contemplating strangling Dennis, and was working herself into a fury. As they had walked and jumped over tracts of terracotta ground- gravity seemed to be spotty here- they had gotten over much of their revulsion; for the most part.
But Terrance still couldn't look Dennis in the eyes without wanting to flinch.
Roxanne, on the other hand, was either completely over her revulsion or was much better at hiding her emotions than Terrance had given her credit for.
"WE HAVE TO SWIM? SERIOUSLY, WE HAVE TO SWIM? HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO SWIM WITH SKIDMORE ON MY BACK, YOU FOOL?"
Dennis was cowering near the edge of the water, looking rather like he was face to face with a rampaging Tauros. Terrance, for his part, was having a hard time keeping a straight face. But then, he wasn't the one facing down Hurricane Roxanne.
"DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW HEAVY SKIDMORE IS!"
"But-" Dennis bleated.
"I HAVE BEEN THROUGH QUITE A LOT TODAY, YOU KNOW! I FELL DOWN INTO SOME NIGHTMARE WORLD, AND SKIDMORE HAS NEVER GONE THIS LONG WITHOUT SAYING SOMETHING. SO IF YOU DON'T FIND ANOTHER WAY TO FACE 'THE DARK' IN THE NEXT FIVE SECONDS, SO HELP ME I'M GOING TO-!"
` "We don't have to swim! Ollie can spin us a web across the water!"
Roxanne stopped her tirade, a nonplussed expression appearing on her face. "…What?"
"Ollie. My Galvantula!"
"You're what?" Terrance asked. "There isn't a pokemon that I've heard of called that."
Dennis threw a smug smile in Terrance's and Teddiursa's direction. "Ollie is so real, and he is so a Galvantula. I'm from Unova, I got him there!"
Roxanne flashed them both a wide grin, completely over her brief fit of temper. She bounced on the balls of her feet, and swung her head in all directions to look for Ollie. "So then let's go! Where is this Galvanta-thingie?"
Dennis smiled again. "Galvantula and Ollie. And," Dennis pointed to a space above Terrance's head. "Ollie is coming down right there!"
Terrance whipped around and jumped away, nearly throwing Amberly off of his perch, and stared at the spider-thing as it descended. Ollie was almost entirely hairless, and translucent. Like Dennis, what little hair that was left was brittle and gray. Ollie's eyes, however, were as clear and young as Dennis' were. Terrance shuddered. He hated pokemon like spiders. They scuttled, and that gave him the creeps.
As Ollie passed by them, Amberly dug his claws into Terrance's scalp. Terrance was about to utter a word of reproach, when he saw Amberly's face: It was horrified revulsion, fear, and what looked like a strong desire to be violently ill.
Just like Roxanne and I when we saw Dennis, Terrance thought.
Terrance turned to watch Ollie spin a web across the water with new eyes. What was this place, he wondered, what was this place that twisted pokemon and humans up so badly that their own kind could barely stand to look at them?
Once Ollie had finished, Terrance stepped cautiously around the spider pokemon, who clicked its mandibles in a way that Terrance assumed was a friendly way.
Amberly dug his claws in deeper.
. . .
Terrance was halfway across the web when he heard it, and almost fell into the water from shock. For a moment, he didn't know what it was, and then he remembered.
It was shouting. Someone was shouting.
Shouting.
PEOPLE!
"HERE!" Terrance yelled, scrambling back over the web as fast as he could. "WE'RE HERE!"
People, Terrance thought, People! Other People, who won't make me sick to look at them! Oh, Thank Arceus!
Terrance strained his eyes to see them, the people who were normal, blessedly normal-
Terrance was rammed aside by a tall blur, and shared an astonished look with an equally bowled over Roxanne that turned to utter incredulity when the mystery person promptly ran to Dennis and flung his arms around him and began to weep.
Puffing along behind him was a familiar looking girl with a Skarmory, both of them looking filthy and exhausted.
"What," She wheezed, "What-what is going on- Douglas, do you know that person- Hey!" She pointed at Terrance and Roxanne, sputtering, "You and You! You Guys- You were up on that ridge! You fell in here too? Hey, do you know who-or, or what that kid that Douglas is hugging is?"
Terrance and Roxanne stared at each other, utter incomprehension reflecting in both of their eyes.
Terrance was the first to speak, still half-staring at Roxanne. "No. We don't know who he is, really. We just met him."
The Girl stared at both of them, and Roxanne and Terrance stared back. Dennis was now hugging the boy back and weeping again, but nobody was paying the slightest bit of attention to them.
"What the HELL is going on here?" Terrance finally said.
The Skarmory clacked its beak menacingly. "I don't know about you," The Girl said, a grim look in her eyes, "But the way I see it, Douglas definitely has some explaining to do…"
. . .