They arrived at the forest at around 2 o'clock. Yellow felt her frayed nerves begin to constrict her chest as she looked at the looming trees. The woods now seemed as shadowy and threatening as the day she had been attacked by a Dratini. In the quietness, the rustle of the wind through the trees morphed, turning into ghostly whistling that chilled her to the bone. The leafy expanse that was once her anchor now shifted frightfully. Her forest was turned against her.
"Yellow, what's wrong?"
Yellow blinked at the sound of Blue's voice. Quite without meaning to, she'd stopped in her tracks, staring at the trees before her, to unsettled to even continue walking.
"Oh," she said, breaking her eyes from the trance and attempting a reassuring smile that stopped short at a pained grimace. "Nothing. Just thinking."
Blue frowned, obviously unconvinced. "Right. Well, if you're really okay, then seeing as you're the only one who knows where we're going..."
Yellow blinked. "Oh, right." Somehow it hadn't registered until now that she would have to lead her friends back to where she had seen the strange man, the unknown Pokémon, and the phantasmagoric portal. Perhaps she had unthinkingly decided that if she didn't acknowledge the place existed, it might not be real. If she didn't lead them to it, it might be simply a figment of her imagination, an extension of her nightmares.
But now she recalled the experience in vivid, mortifying detail. Despite her desperate hope that she might have forgotten the clearing where her night terrors had merged with her reality, she knew exactly where she had to go, the memory seared into her mind like a bright light into retinas. "Yeah... um... follow me."
And so they did. The route wasn't very long. A few times Yellow tried to slow down, to delay the moment when she'd have to confront the clearing again, or else to take a slight detour to elongate the distance, but no matter how hard she tried to break her pace, her feet remained resolutely on the path she'd walked yesterday, and her speed stayed constant. It was as though there was an invisible magnetic force pulling her towards the spot. Once or twice it crossed her mind that she might be possessed.
The journey was complete long before Yellow wanted it to be. Feeling as though she was forcing herself to move through gelatin, and ignoring that every molecule of her body was screaming at her to turn back and run and never stop running, a command that she would have gladly obeyed if she'd been delusional enough to think she could outrun a phantom, she approached the same bush she'd poked her head through the day before and came to a dead stop, listening intently. The others seemed to catch on and fell silent as well.
Silence reigned for a few moments, save for the eerie whistling of the wind through the trees. Yellow's heart pounded hopefully. Perhaps, for some reason or another, the man had left, and taken his portals with him. Perhaps the threat was gone, and she and the forest were safe. But the chills on her spine didn't go away, and moments later she felt her fingertips go numb as electric buzzing drifted through the foliage from the other side of the bush.
Swallowing with difficulty, she looked back at her fellow Dexholders and motioned for them to follow her example, mouthing, "Slowly."
She knelt down and gently shifted the leaves of the bush, careful to make it sound like no more than the wind, and, holding her hat tightly on her head so it wouldn't get caught in the twigs, peered through the foliage.
Sure enough, the skull-faced man was there again, holding the same device that emitted the same static buzz as before, and with the same strange Pokémon by his side.
The man looked frustrated. "Lousy piece of crap," he grumbled, striking the device with an open hand. "Can't even fail right." He pointed it in the air in front of himself like a remote control, hammering a few of the buttons with his thumb. "Come on. Open sesame already."
Save for a slight shift in the pitch of the static, the machine didn't heed his instructions.
The man slapped his forehead in exasperation. "This is stupid," he muttered, drawing the device closer to his eye and twisting a dial minutely. "Just work, dang it!" He scowled at the sky and pointed the machine at it once more. "Abra Kadabra!"
At once, the static went dead, and in its place, high-pitched wailing began to emanate from the device.
The man grinned, strengthening his uncanny resemblance to a bare skull. "Bingo." Just as he had done before, he raised the device into the air, the metal rods pointing towards the sky, and pressed the button near its base.
Blue light flickered in the air where he pointed for a moment, and then, much more suddenly than before, strengthened and took the shape of a glowing crack. The eerie whistling now came from there, not from the device. Yellow's blood ran cold when she realized that somehow it sounded angrier, more forceful than yesterday.
Her fists clenched in terror as the crack shook like something on the other side had rammed into it, and her eyes flew wide at the horrifying recognition that the shaking had expanded the crack. Whatever was beyond it wanted to get through–to force its way into this world. There was something here it wanted to do. Her breath stopped. Her mind filled with the countless nightmares and hallucinated day-terrors she'd sought to repress. A pale white form floating towards her–ghostly hands gripping her neck, suffocating her into black depths–bloody fingers seeking revenge, reaching towards her to rip her throat and spill her blood as payment...
She knew with absolute certainty that the thing struggling to break through the crack was the ghost of Lance, come to kill her.
With a jolt of horror, Yellow saw that there was something moving inside the glowing crack. She'd assumed it had been merely a precursor of the opening that would happen if the crack finally burst, but now she realized that it was more akin to a window–already open, just not large enough to fit through. The same sort of twisted, self-hating curiosity that drives people to watch train crashes without flinching forced her to squint to discern what she'd seen moving within the crack. Though it was difficult to see anything beyond the most general shapes and colors, thanks to the thinness of the crack and the glow it gave off, her muscles went numb as she caught sight of more movement and its perpetrator: a ghostly, formless, white apparition. She couldn't tell what it truly looked like, but that didn't matter. She knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was him. The ghost of Lance was staring straight at her.
Yellow felt the urge to seize someone's arm, to give herself assurance that her fellow Dexholders hadn't vanished and left her in this nightmare alone. But her muscles refused to obey her, slackened by fright, and she found herself stuck in a purgatory of living rigor mortis.
The whistling grew louder, more impatient. It crescendoed, filling Yellow's ears until it was the only thing she could hear. She finally forced her eyes closed, but it was no use, for the image of the phantom had seared itself into her mind. All she could hear was the eerie wailing that sawed at her soul, and all she could see was white apparitions, smeared with blood, dragging her into an inky abyss...
Yellow wasn't quite sure of how it happened, but the next thing she knew, the whistling was gone, as was the crack in the air, the man, his Pokémon, and the device. It took her a moment to regain her bearings before she realized she must have blacked out when the ghostly form looked at her, and she'd realized that it would stop at nothing to get to her and...
Panic rose in her throat, threatening to stop her breathing again, but she shut the thoughts from her mind and pulled herself from the bush to find her friends sitting so that the four of them formed a small circle.
She must not have been out for too long, because none of them showed any sign that she was acting out of the ordinary, though Yellow figured they would soon notice the blood that had drained from her face and the clamminess of her hands.
"Wh-what happened?" she asked.
Blue gave her another questioning look. Yellow knew her friend was wondering how she could have witnessed the entire thing and not registered what happened. Thankfully, though, Blue didn't voice this query, and answered, "The portal thing started to fail, and the crack disappeared. The guy seemed pretty pleased though, and said that 'the boss' would be happy with the results."
"He also said his name," Red added. "Something like, 'Yaboi Guzma'." He frowned. "But what kind of name is 'Yaboi'...?"
Blue acknowledged him with a nod. "Right, it was part of a mantra of some sort. And then he left. We couldn't follow him because he had an Abra teleport him away." She shrugged. "He could be anywhere."
'He could be anywhere.' The words didn't rest easy on Yellow's mind. 'Anywhere.' That meant that at any point this Guzma man could open another crack in the sky, totally uncontested. That meant that at any point she could hear ethereal whistling, and come face to face with the vengeful ghost of Lance. She felt her muscles going slack with terror again, and once more vainly pushed the thought to the back of her mind.
"What I'm wondering is what was on the other side of that portal," Green said. "I saw something, but I couldn't make it out."
Yellow felt her throat constrict as she tried to ignore thinking about what she knew was the answer to his question. Thankfully, she was saved by Blue introducing another question. "I'm more worried about this 'boss' he mentioned. Someone else is ordering him to do this stuff." She looked concerned. "Do you think it could be Giovanni again?"
Red frowned. "So soon after we just saw him? He'd have to have been working pretty fast. I doubt it. It's gotta be someone else." He shrugged. "I'm just trying to figure out what that Pokémon he had was. I've never seen anything like it before."
"It didn't show up in your old Pokédex," Yellow remembered, her voice barely above a whisper. Any louder and she was afraid she might not be able to speak. A distinct pain broke out in her chest when Red once again refused to look her in the eyes.
"Must be foreign," Blue reasoned. She glanced at Green. "Did you...?"
The gym leader shook his head. "No, it's not from Kalos. At least, it's not in that Pokédex. But more on topic, the portals: we know for sure they exist, and that it's the same guy making them." He turned his calculating stare on Yellow. "Was anything different from yesterday?"
"The opening was bigger," Yellow whispered, wincing internally as she voiced what she'd been hoping beyond hope had just been her imagination. Now that she'd said it, there was a whole new layer or reality to the concept. She could no longer put it out of her mind.
Blue pursed her lips. "Okay... So it's pretty obvious that this guy Guzma is still in the testing stage of that device. He was happy to see that the portal was bigger today, so that probably means his end goal is to open it enough to let whatever's on the other side through."
"Or go in himself," Red suggested. "Can't rule that out."
Blue shrugged. "Or that."
Though the words were nothing Yellow hadn't already come up with herself, the fact that now others had said them, that now she couldn't blame it on lack of sleep, or her lingering post-traumatic stress about the Lance incident, pressed down upon her mind and chest like iron weights. No longer could she tell herself that her fears were merely her own delusion–now they were manifest in others' minds.
Looking at it, the situation felt almost like some great, cosmic practical joke. It was something that might be laughed at, were it not so horrific. Here she was, wishing she was delusional so that she might keep herself sane. There was a certain humor in that–a distorted, twisted humor that made her want to cry far more than laugh.
"Well, we have a good grip on the situation now," Green said, all business. "That is, assuming Yellow's information from the first incident is reliable."
Blue shot him an agitated look. "I think today's a pretty good proof of that."
He gave a small nod of acquiescence. "Then it is. In that case, I think it would be best to come back tomorrow, to see if this happens again, and, if it does, whether this Guzma guy makes any progress."
The slackness is Yellow's muscles increased at the thought that she would have to leave this clearing and then come back the next day. It was like she was being dipped in freezing water, given a minute's respite, and then frozen again in a horrible cycle. She would almost rather be submerged forever rather than be continually given hope, only to have it cruelly snatched away.
Red nodded in agreement. "Yeah, that sounds like a good idea."
Blue crossed her arms. "It makes sense." She glanced at Yellow with a raised eyebrow. "Is that good with you?"
Yellow hoped she didn't look or sound as sick as she felt. "Yeah," she forced herself to agree. "Let's do that."
"Then it's settled." Blue checked her watch. "Now, it's, like... 5-ish. I don't know about you all, but I could go for some dinner."
"Seconded," Red said, almost immediately.
Green smirked. "The bottomless pit strikes again."
Yellow would have agreed to the prospect of food, if she'd been sure she could stomach anything. As it was, she felt like she'd swallowed a stormy sea, and suspected anything else wouldn't sit well.
The four made their way back to town. Yellow walked slower than usual. The magnetic hold of the clearing seemed only to have strengthened, now that the phantom in the portal had seen her. She felt as though there were elastic tethers tied to her limbs. Every step stretched them and pulled her back with more force. She wondered if this was what being pulled into a whirlpool felt like. No matter how much her mind screamed at her to run as fast and as far as possible, she failed to increase her pace quicker than a walk. The idea of possession once more crossed her mind–perhaps she was, in a way.
By the time they reached Viridian, it was 7 o'clock.
Blue stretched and smiled, seeming as energetic as ever, despite the exhausting day. "Hey," she addressed Red and Yellow. "There's this restaurant I want to take Green to–you two wouldn't like it–so do you think you'd be okay on your own?"
"Hang on, do I get a choice in this?" Green interjected, looking annoyed.
Blue considered the question for a moment. "Hmm... Well, unless you'd like those childhood photos I found in Professor Oak's photo album to slip into the hands of the public... no, not really."
The Viridian gym leader's jaw clenched. Apparently the photos were embarrassing enough to coerce him. "Is it a place I'd like?"
She shrugged. "Probably not. But hey, you'd be with me, and that's the important part, right?" She gave him a coy wink.
Green inhaled slowly, closing his eyes like he was imagining all the things he could say in retort written on a whiteboard. After he'd drawn in all the air he could, he paused, and then said, "Fine."
Blue grinned. "Excellent." She glanced at Red and Yellow. "You two will be fine without us?"
Red shrugged. "Yeah, I suppose so."
Yellow felt a lump in her throat. Did the nonchalantness of his agreement mean he was still mad at her? And even if it didn't, could she trust herself to not snap at him unprovoked again? Her stomach clenched at the thought of losing her temper again and seeing that hurt look on his face.
"Ah... yeah, no problem," she lied.
"Great!" Blue chirped, seizing Green by the wrist and dragging him off towards whatever restaurant they were going to. "See you two!"
When they'd disappeared from sight, Red placed his hands on his hips, looking down they way they'd gone. "Huh," he said. "I swear there's something going on between those two. Green never lets anyone but her push him around like that."
Yellow made a tiny noise of agreement, too uncomfortable to say anything more. Now that they were alone, the air between them seemed charged. She could feel the times she'd lashed out at him standing between them like brick walls–walls it seemed neither of them knew how to climb of knock down. There was a tension that she wasn't sure how to disperse, and wasn't sure if she even could.
"So..." Red began uncertainly, turning to face her (with a stabbing pain in her chest, Yellow realized he was still refusing to look her in the eyes, and was staring firmly at her hat). "Do you want to get something to eat?"
Truthfully, the answer was 'no.' Yellow still didn't feel like she could eat anything, and her now-aching heart didn't help matters. But out of nowhere an idea occurred to her. "Er... sure," she said. "How about something outside?"
He tilted his head. "Like a picnic?"
She nodded. "Yeah, like that."
Red smiled. "Sure, sounds good!"
For the first time in the past 24 hours, a flicker of hope ignited in Yellow's heart. She imagined what would happen on the picnic: they would be alone, far from interruptions; she would apologize for snapping at him earlier; he would forgive her, and things between them would be back to normal. This was perfect. What could go wrong?
They stopped by a take-out sandwich shop that Yellow vaguely remembered having gone to in her youth and headed towards a part of the same river she'd drawn yesterday that sat on the border between the city and the forest.
As they walked, Yellow felt like she was standing precariously on the edge of a cliff, half her feet on and half her feet off. At the moment, she stared straight forward, refusing to acknowledge the drop-off. But any sudden movement, any realization of the danger of the situation, and she'd lose her balance and fall. As she and Red settled down to eat, she found herself unconsciously averting her eyes from the trees just meters away.
Once again, both found themselves at a loss for what to say. Yellow felt like a faulty calculator–she knew all the individual components of what she wanted to say, but no matter how many times she fed them through the whirlwind in her brain, she couldn't figure out a proper way to phrase them.
She shot nervous glances at Red as the silence stretched on. He was eating his sandwich, but he seemed unfocused, staring at the grass by his feet. She suspected, with a fresh stab of guilt, that he was remembering the conversation at lunch and wondering how to go about talking to her so that she wouldn't lash out at him again. Shoving aside her fear that she might snap at him no matter what he said, Yellow once again shoved her scattered ideas through her mind, searching desperately for some way to speak her mind.
"This is a really good sandwich," Red spoke first, breaking the silence. He smiled, though it looked uncertain. "I, uh, never knew there was a sandwich place in Viridian."
"Yeah." Yellow picked halfheartedly at the aluminum foil still wrapped around her own sandwich. "Most people don't. It's pretty out of the way."
Silence again. The atmosphere was so thick Yellow imagined that if she reached into the air she'd be able to feel a solid wall. 'Come on,' she berated herself. 'It's not rocket science–find some way to say you're sorry!' And yet no matter how hard she concentrated, something kept catching inside her mind. Something was stopping the gears–freezing them solid.
Seconds turned into minutes. Yellow had reached a dead end. She knew what she wanted to say, but found it impossible to say it, and every passing second added more and more weight onto her voice, making it harder and harder to command. Red, on the other hand, seemed to be drawing a blank. He appeared to be out of ideas for conversation–even small talk–and apparently found the grass at his feet highly interesting.
Finally, several minutes after Red had finished his sandwich, he spoke again, alleviating the dead weight of silence pressing down on her lungs. "Uh..." He looked awkward. "So... it's getting kind of late."
Yellow hadn't paid much attention to her surroundings, finding it much easier to ignore the forest if she restricted all her peripheries, but now she glanced up at the sky, and was surprised to see the sun already in the process of setting. "Oh," she said. "Yeah, it is, isn't it?"
Red nodded, balling the aluminum foil from his sandwich in his fist. "Well... I figure the four of us should stay near Viridian, just in case. Blue and Green are probably going to stay at the gym, and you live really close, so you guys are good." He shifted the aluminum ball from hand to hand, focusing on it. "I could take Aero back to Pallet Town and come back tomorrow morning, but if something serious happens, I might be too late, so... uh..." He met her eyes for the first time since the morning. "Can I stay at your place?"
Yellow took a moment to compute. She wasn't sure she'd seen or heard him right. "Sorry, what?"
Red looked away. "Ah, I mean–sorry, I phrased that badly. I just meant sleep on the couch or... I mean, if you don't want me to, that's–"
"Sure," Yellow blurted without a second thought, her thoughts carried by a swelling feeling in her chest. "That's definitely okay."
His face lit up with a smile. "Really? Great! Thanks so much!"
It was getting dark outside, so they packed up what remained of their picnic (Yellow figured she'd put her untouched sandwich in the refrigerator for another day when her stomach calmed down) and headed toward Yellow's house.
The walk was a decent length, and yet Yellow felt like she was barely expending any energy at all. She felt downright ecstatic. It was as though the cliff she stood on now faded away, and she could step off it and fly, not fall. Even though darkness settled fast around them as they walked, the rift in the sky and the shrill ethereal whistling imagined ghostly white forms lurking behind tree trunks and foliage seemed as far away as the Moon. She had developed tunnel vision, unable to see anything but Red's eyes, euphoric that she could now look into them straight on.
Yellow still rode on this swell when they arrived at her house and she unlocked the front door. She twisted the handle and the two stepped inside. Yellow hadn't cleaned in a while, but there wasn't too much of a mess. She doubted she would've noticed it to be embarrassed, even if there had been; her peripherals had gone defunct.
The rush she felt inside was similar to her earlier nausea. If she hadn't associated it with different feelings, she might have thought it was the same thing. It was a high like she imagined a wave on the ocean might feel, picking up speed as it went. Everything else seemed to wash away in the face of this euphoria.
And yet something stopped her from removing her hat. Something stopped her from smiling. She didn't know why she couldn't make herself do these things. She could see no reason for these unconscious inabilities. In her mind, she was on top of the world. With a feeling like this, what could be wrong?
Red gave a low whistle, looking around the house with interest. "Nice place."
"Thanks," Yellow said, realizing that he hadn't seen her house before. "It's not a lot, but I like it."
He smiled. "It's really great." He looked her in the eyes again, and her stomach began to churn faster. She could stare into those red eyes for now until the end of time. Nothing could break the swell in her chest. "Seriously," he said, "Thanks for letting me stay here, man."
Agitation coursed through Yellow's veins. "Yeah," she said, her voice caustic. "Whatever."
A hurt look washed across Red's face, and he looked away. "Er... right, yeah..." he mumbled.
Suddenly, Yellow wasn't flying anymore. She never had been. She'd been falling the entire time. The wave had reached its final destination: shattered on the sheer cliffs of the shore. She plunged into the freezing water once more.
Her limbs went slack as her bearings came back to her in a shock. Her field of vision returned to normal, and with it her reason. The darkness of the forest, which had been blotted from her mind on the way home, now pressed down on her chest like iron weights. She felt as though the pale phantoms had their hands clamped around her neck, so tight that she could barely draw a breath, so tight that the corners of her vision were going black.
Yellow was suddenly drowned by the need to get out of the room, for the hurt etched in Red's expression caused such a pain in her chest that she thought she might lose consciousness. "Uh, there's a couch... there..." She feebly gestured towards the couch in question. Her muscles were so unresponsive with cold that she couldn't gesture any more clearly. "And I..." She, unable to find a good end to that sentence, hurried as quickly as she could, up the stairs and into her room.
The blood in her veins flowed icy cold as she locked the door behind herself and curled up in the fetal position on her bed. The weight on her chest and tightness in her throat increased. She felt sicker than she'd ever felt before–the flu was a meadow breeze compared to this. "Wh-why?" she mumbled weakly.
That 'why' asked all her questions at once. 'Why me? Why now? Why all these sufferings all at once? Why am I acting this way? Why do I feel sick?' She found answers to none of these questions, which only made her feel worse. Finally, out the terrible whirlpool in her stomach and heart and mind came a singular question: 'What if I'm broken somehow?'
That was when tears began to pour from her eyes, for the unanswered question was the weight set to drag her, falling, down into oblivion. How stupid she felt now, to have thought she was flying just minutes earlier. She now realized the truth: she'd been falling from the precipice all along, and now an iron weight clamped to her ankle to expedite the process. The swell of the wave she'd allowed to carry her had been a fleeting illusion–she'd been blind not to see the cliffs. Now she was sinking... sinking... sinking numbly into the icy cold water, the pressure building and the vain light of the Sun slowly and steadily waning into inky darkness.
In this trench of despair, Yellow's mind seized on a thought–the only thought that didn't immediately drown her–the only thing to blame that didn't instantly condemn her to the void. She gritted her teeth and clenched her fists. "Stupid hormones," she growled. "Stupid, stupid hormones."
It wasn't a satisfactory explanation. It didn't solve the problem. It didn't overcome the cliffs. It didn't break her fall. It didn't insulate her from the freezing water. But it was all she had.
Her anger already giving way to sadness once more, for there was nothing in her to fuel it, she grabbed her pillow and hugged it close–a cold comfort against a phantom threat. She shut her tear-stricken eyes, and gave way to semi-conscious nightmares.