Chapter 15: Smoldering - Part 3
"Okay, so," Risa said around noon the next day as Heat and Nanimo finished off the latest cloud of unown. Thanks to Nanimo's insight onto unown battle tactics (which didn't seem to be that complicated once you figured out that they just swarmed and hoped for the best), her team was able to beat back whatever set of letters came at them. It got easier and easier with each battle, as long as Risa made sure not to let her two pokemon's injuries get out of hand, and watching both Heat and Nanimo get stronger helped calm her nerves a bit. However: "We have a problem."
"What?" Heat asked, stretching a bit. "We're beating the weird things easily. I see no problem. Or is it just that you feel threatened by our awesomeness - especially MY awesomeness?"
"We aren't 'weird things,'" Nanimo muttered as she floated away from Heat. "We're unown. Get it right."
"No."
"I really don't like you."
"You're weirder than Risa."
"Actually, I find myself hating you."
"You're weird and -"
"Knock it off!" Risa yelled, standing in between her two pokemon. They'd been throwing borderline-unfriendly banter between each other for the entire day, and it had been getting less and less creative. "I was gonna say that our problem is that we can't find a way out!"
Nanimo floated up and down in a sort of levitated shrug. "It really shouldn't be that hard."
"Okay," Heat said, poking his head around Risa's ankle to glare at his teammate. "Then why aren't we out yet?"
The unown shrugged again. "Inferior intellect?"
Risa nudged Heat in the side before he could say anything else. "Nanimo, are you sure you don't want to tell us how to get out?"
"I told you before," she snapped, "I don't want to help that book."
"You're not helping the book, you're helping me...your...um...trainer?"
"I can't say that exactly makes me want to help you. That means associating myself with the book."
Risa groaned. "Shut up about the book already!"
"No."
"Okay, fine, but the book is safely away in my backpack, and you won't even tell me more about it." Risa crossed her arms and shifted her weight into what she hoped was an intimidating position. "You need to be more helpful."
Nanimo stared at her from across the corridor, floating near a message written in letters that resembled unown. "May I ask why I have to be helpful?"
"Because otherwise, we don't get to leave this maze."
"And that would be bad for me...why, exactly?"
Risa just groaned.
---
Two hours later, the same thing seemed to be happening:
"Can you please tell me how to get out?"
"Or me?" Heat asked hopefully.
Nanimo shrugged. "I really don't feel like it."
"I hate that thing," Heat muttered.
"I am female!"
"No you're not - ow!" the cyndaquil grunted as Nanimo hurled an ice ball at him. "That hurt!"
---
Three hours later...
"What about the book? Can you tell me more about that?" Risa asked as they walked along yet another dimly lit corridor. "Maybe about how you said I was gonna die?"
"You're going to die."
"Yeah, I know, you said so already, and it's not scary when you say it now because you told me, like, a bajillion times," the girl said, kicking a pebble down the corridor until she couldn't see it anymore.
"I don't mean to scare you, just tell you the facts."
"You need to tell me more facts, then!" Risa yelled, turning to face Nanimo. "You're not being helpful at all!"
No emotion seemed to go across Nanimo's face. She just stared back, floating calmly at Risa's eye level. "We've been down this road before, Miss Trainer. I don't see any reason to be overly helpful towards you. You seem like a lost cause no matter what."
"And what's that s'posed to mean?"
"You're going to die, and if I stick around, you might drag me down, too," Nanimo explained with a small shrug. "I don't feel particularly keen on dying, and, in case you hadn't noticed, I don't come from a particularly strong species, hence why your blabbering cyndaquil has been able to defeat so many unown clouds. If you get sucked into this - which you will - then I won't be able to protect myself."
"Protect yourself from what?" Risa demanded, tugging at her hair. It was no longer in pigtails, as that required too much work and she couldn't sleep at all the previous night. Crumbling mazes did not make for good bedrooms.
Nanimo gave her yet another a hard stare. "The end of the world."
If Risa hadn't been so frustrated and tired at that point, she might have gasped. Instead, she just rolled her eyes. "Well, now we're getting somewhere. Now, maybe you'd like to say how the world is going to end?"
"No."
The trainer sighed, then started walking in the direction Heat had started to waddle in. "You're really annoying."
Behind her, Nanimo whispered: "I'm just warning you - if you stay the way you are now, doing what you're doing now, and going in the direction you're going now, you're going to die. I don't want to be around when that happens."
"Fine!" Risa said, waving her arms around and almost slapping her unown. "I promise nothing's gonna happen, okay? We're not gonna die, I'll figure out a way to save the stupid world, and then we'll win the stupid Johto championships -"
"Thank you!" Heat called from ahead.
Risa rolled her eyes. "But in order for me to do that, you gotta help us get out. OKAY?"
She stared at Nanimo, waiting for an answer. Just as it dawned on her that she just promised to save the world - and she didn't know how closely her strange, ancient pokemon would hold her to that - Nanimo nodded. "I'm going to hold you to that. I'm going to take this promise very seriously. Do you understand that you are entering into an agreement with a literal representation of your language?"
Risa blinked. It sounded like Nanimo was taking things pretty seriously. That bit about saving the world really just rolled off her tongue as a retort, not a real promise. "Um, yes?"
When Nanimo floated closer, Risa realized that, "um, yes" was probably not the best thing to say. "Good. We're going to make a deal: I will stay with you and help you as long as you keep your promise. As long as you keep your promise, I will do anything in my power to make sure you reach your goal."
"Which...would be...?"
"WINNING THE CHAMPIONSHIP!"
Nanimo ignored Heat, keeping her eye on Risa. "Saving the world. I hope you realize what you're getting into."
Risa smiled shakily. "Uh, yeah, of course," she lied.
Really, all she wanted was a nice Pokemon Center meal and bed, or at least the chance to camp out outside.
Or, if this whole "making an agreement with an unown and then saving the world" thing was actually happening, then knowing why the world was in danger and how she was supposed to save it would be nice...
But she really did prefer the latter.
---
"Here we are," Nanimo said as they reached the end of the corridor.
After a quick look around, Risa groaned for what seemed like the millionth time that day. "This is a dead end!"
"Exactly."
"How is that gonna get us out? There's nowhere to go!"
Nanimo floated closer to the wall. "Shine your flashlight over here."
Risa flicked her flashlight up towards where Nanimo was, squinting at the wall. For the first time that day, Heat had gotten overwhelmed by a recent pack of unown, and was currently sleeping it off in his pokeball after using up the last of Risa's potions. Luckily, Risa still had an emergency flashlight in case Heat ended up too tired to make his own light.
"Do you see the writing here?"
Squinting and leaning forward, Risa examined the wall and found a few scratched-in symbols resembling some of the unown that had attacked them. "Yeah, it's a bunch of pictures."
"You can read it, can't you?"
Risa studied the symbols for a minute. "Um, they kind of look like English letters."
"...Do you mean to say you DIDN'T notice that before?"
Sparing her unown a glare, Risa tried to match each symbol with an English letter, starting with "F", then "L", then "A"...
"It's says the English word 'flash'," Risa said, turning back around to face Nanimo. "I don't get it."
Nanimo groaned. "Your cyndaquil knows the attack flash, right?"
"Right."
"So get him to do it here," the unown said slowly, sounding more than a little exasperated. "I'm actually rather surprised it wasn't obvious."
Risa rolled her eyes, taking Heat's pokeball out of her backpack. "I'm tired, okay? Heat, get out here!"
A moment later, her bedraggled cyndaquil appeared, looking more than a little ruffled and exhausted. "Okay, do I really have to be here right now?" the cyndaquil groaned, sounding quite a bit less enthusiastic than he had been a few hours prior. "I'm tiiiiired."
Risa ignored him. "Heat, use flash."
"Do I have to? I'm tired. Use your flashlight."
"Heat, do it."
"But -"
"Now!"
Heat groaned. "Fine, fine, I'll do it." He took a deep breath, then ignited his back in one brief burst of bright yellow light. The light lit the cavern, shining light on all the little details and cracks in the stone walls.
Risa had just enough time to blink before the ground dropped out from underneath their feet, sending the two pokemon and their trainer through another stone chute. She opened her mouth to scream, but when she did, a sudden wave of nausea wracked Risa's stomach and stopped her voice from working.
She hit some sort of floor with a thud, but she swooned and succumbed to vertigo before she could open her eyes to see where she landed.
---
"Where am I?" Risa asked, looking around. She could see Nanimo floating next to her, but Heat didn't seem to be anywhere. "Where's Heat? Did we get separated again? What's going on?"
"This is the Land of the Unown," Nanimo replied, though her voice sounded distant, as if she and Risa were both underwater. "We are exempt from time here."
Risa blinked. "You're still not making sense."
"Am I?"
"Is this even real? It definitely feels like a weird dream," she said, crossing her arms and trying to give her unown an "attitude-filled" look, one she assumed meant that she was a teenager and she meant business.
Even though she wasn't really a teenager yet - she was twelve. But she'd be thirteen eventually, and Nanimo didn't have to know she wasn't already.
Before she could say anything, Nanimo began to fade away, a whispered, "is it?", floating in the air between them.
Risa stared at the world around her, taking it in for the first time - she seemed to be in a nighttime world, one with tall stone towers and magnificent buildings covered in unown letters. Four of them peeled themselves off a wall and floated over, spelling out a word:
"Ho-oh."
Then the world seemed to implode on itself, and once again, Risa felt herself falling before she had a chance to scream.
---
"Hello?" Risa groaned, trying to swat away the new voice. "Are you okay?"
"Nnng..."
"Um, is that a yes or a no?"
"Mmm...'m fine..."
"Can you open your eyes?"
Risa finally pulled her eyelids apart, trying to find the source of the new voice so she could tell them to shut up. Once her eyes were open, she found herself looking at a red-haired teenaged girl with grey eyes. She blinked, trying to figure out if she knew the girl.
She didn't.
"Who are you?" Risa mumbled, putting a hand on her forehead. "Where am I? What - what time is it?"
The girl smiled. "Oh, good, you're okay. I was worried. Um, as for your questions...my name's Johanna, you're in the Ruins of Alph, and it's about six in the evening," the girl, Johanna, said in a pretty, soft voice. She flicked a strand of her shoulder length red hair out of her eyes, and Risa noticed a light green ring on her right middle finger.
"That's um, a nice ring," Risa said, her head still swimming too much for her to piece together any sort of useful question.
Johanna smiled. "Oh, you like it? It's been in my family for years. My mom called it 'the Heart of Viridian', since my family's also been in Viridian City for, you know...years."
Risa nodded. "V-Viridian City?"
"Yep. Like...in Kanto?"
"Oh." Kanto. Did that mean anything? "Then why're you here?"
The older girl laughed. "Because I already got all the Kanto badges, silly! I'm here to train. See?" She stuck a thumb behind her, and Risa finally got a look at her surroundings. Johanna was squatting in front of her, and they were both on a grassy patch outside one of the crumbling Ruins of Alph buildings. Behind Johanna sat a tall rhydon and a nidoqueen. "I'm good with ground-types. Those two have been with me since the beginning."
Risa blinked, staring at the powerful pokemon. Then... "Wait! Where are my pokemon?"
Johanna pointed down at the grass, where Risa's backpack lay. "Did you try your backpack?"
Diving at the backpack, Risa ripped open the main compartment and immediately found two filled pokeballs - Heat's and Nanimo's, perfectly fine and safe inside. She breathed a sigh of relief, then put her hand back in the bag, pulling out the grimoire.
She held it up to the evening light, staring at it.
"What's that?" Johanna asked, peering over Risa's shoulder to look at the book. "It looks kinda...weird. And old."
"Yeah," Risa said, rubbing her forehead. Her headache would just not go away, and she vaguely wondered if it had something to do with the book. "It's a really weird, old book. It's in some weird language, too."
"Like, the language they based off the unown?"
"No," the younger girl said, putting the book back in her backpack. "It's a weirder language than that." She shivered. "It's a...very weird book."
Johanna giggled. "Yeah, you said that already. So, do you need any help? Like, with camping out?"
Risa shrugged. "Maybe...I dunno..."
"Well, I'm pretty good at outdoor cooking, so -"
"Actually," Risa interrupted, her stomach rumbling at the idea of a cooked meal. "Camping out with you would be great."
The older trainer smiled and stood up, extending a hand to Risa. "I found a nice campsite right outside the ruins on Route 32. We can sleep there for the night."
Risa took Johanna's hand and stood up, though she almost fell backwards when she did. She took Johanna's hand and staggered out of the Ruins of Alph, not looking back.
When they started to set up camp - or, rather, when Johanna and her team set up camp while Risa sat around - all Risa could think about was that she had fourteen days left.
Two weeks.
She could totally handle two more weeks.
Risa sighed.
She totally couldn't handle two more weeks.
---
Disclaimer: I don't own Pokemon.
Author's Note: Johanna isn't technically based off of anybody, although hypothetically, she could be a specific person in the game. Oh, and I hope the writing quality in this chapter isn't too bad - I am on pain medication, since I got my wisdom teeth out, and I don't know if that's going to hurt my writing or not. Hopefully this chapter wasn't too bad!