Aftershock

Chapter 12: Warm Hospitality

I was looking into information concerning my next anticipated wrongs, and updating records on previous of my accomplishments, when I noticed a recurring name among the rolls of sordid honour: a strange, renowned fellow by the name of Seymul Colt. In fact the list of his rightings was well-known, at least in mention, by most world-wise anomaly hunters, and I had taken no interest in him simply for his fame before I realized a certain strange fact around him.

The list of wrongs which I had finished, and was intending to finish, was exactly identical to his own roster: a coincidence I found to be meaningful, in a thoughtless, idle way. This was a sufficient hook of interest for me, and remained so long enough for me to learn of him more stably absorbing details: his singularity, like to my own in many ways, and his inhuman strength and skill, even for a Righter. Thus, I was kept in some species of awe for a sizable amount of time, before realizing that most accounts of his life were, if not entirely apocryphal, certainly disputable. Even so, his one indubitable history – the list of attempted and succeeded rightings – caused me to regard him with a fair amount of kinship, and I decided, idly but truly, to lead my life in his footsteps. (It would save me several long hours of contemplation upon my next course of events, as much as I realized all prospects of novelty would fly out the window.)

Why, the both of us had allegedly run from a mentally scarring rendition of the anomaly 0A1, early in our life, only to discover our noble occupation and begin work on 3S1, closely followed by research on ghost phenomenon, and the Righting of wrongs 2G3, 2H5, and 3A1. Ah, I seem to have misled you. When I mentioned beginning work on these various wrongs, I don't mean to say both I and my new [Irole model[/I righted these projects, one after the other. I was merely set to work upon his failed goals, of which there were countless. As these leftovers were most often too difficult for the young Seymul (and, therefore, for most righters of his age at the time), my training was harsher and steeper that his, and far more effective, seeing as I did manage to survive each successful Righting.

Colt's traditional image was that of a large, powerfully-built man with a sharp face and bold, perceptive eyes. However, in the light of some of his papers upon the subject of righting, I was obliged to see him in a more sophisticated, subtle light – his actual appearance was lost to all visible records, and I allowed imagination to take reign over this trivial matter. In my mind, therefore, he was shaped in the influence of Kalens Oak, touched with far greater youth than the decrepit and infinitely wronged professor, and surrounded in logical tendrils of black and pale white vapour, due to the combination of Psychic- and Dark-type assimilation he claimed to participate in. A Gardevoir invariably stood by his side, his apparent starter, and served purpose only in implication. Even so, the aura was one of deep impressiveness, and remained to be so for the entirety of my life.

The refined scholar kept his Gardevoir by his side, and what did I, the sequel to his esteemed existence, have with me? The Ralts line is unmatched in empathy by all others, but Ytarrik served in fair sympathy to my cause, soon after the desecration of the poor Professor Oak. While he left my side in 'peacetime', as I call it, to train long hours at the Saffron Gym, he remained with me for all eventful occasions, aiding me with the majority of my anomalies, and pretending convincingly to join me in my lightless beliefs and chains of thought. As for his inner views on my matter, I was no longer concerned with the whole truth in affairs other than necessity, and felt not the least bothered of what lay beneath his supportive face.

It was this very face of his which had suggested the idea, spotting with his loyally keen analysis a most interesting failure of Colt's. A merging anomaly, was it? How on earth had the man survived failing its righting? Ah, but this was the perfect thing to marry with my other ideas.

And so I sent it through the grapevine of the more sociable that the Legendary, Famous, Inhumanly Skilled, and Intensely Profitable to Befriend Luphinid Silnaek was organizing and hosting an event, a mass get-together with a thousand undefined attractions purposed to grab the interest of any and all who wished to come – provided they were righters. Only an unsociable fool, or rather a useless hunter, failing in his one pathetic obsession, would dare miss the extravagant pomp of this new development. Everyone worth knowing would depart immediately for the abandoned Riquanne Halls in the heart of Celadon, or face the royal wrath of social disagreement.

And, anyway, who'd want to refuse the irresistible master of all things wrong called Luphinid?

For that while, I had abandoned the dreary old fashion of my decrepit cloak for a swanky tailcoat, dipped in indigo, and an almost ridiculous top hat for good measure. A bowtie perched on the collar of my white inner suit, and a mock cane, silver encrusted with Espeon rubies, I held loosely in my hand. How loving the caress of my vapours upon those relics of their psychic ability, as they (almost!) hid their parasitic hold upon the rubies, leeching slowly the energy collected in the 'charms'. The old styles of the 1800's, though next to impossible to find, were the only alternatives I would entertain from my usual heavy, outdated cloak.

This attire was perhaps entirely based on the venue of its employment, though I had been using clothes to its like from far back. The Riquanne Halls were a set of buildings in a previously bustling portion of high-class society within Celadon City, and they possessed a main structure by their name in which all social meetings were once held. Now, for reasons I wished not to know, the great cavern of a room lay in vague disrepair, and yet was all the more fitting for later meetings by such social parasites as righters. A vast curtained, gold-enameled space held a hundred fine tables, which converged around the showpiece: a dais at the very center, displaying musical accompaniments or announcements. For the purpose of this party, I had installed several sources of light which pretended to originate from the vast, intricate chandeliers, and their golden radiance, tinged with the unearthly pallor of all my objectionable techniques, supplied the exact degree and species of mood to befit this gathering.

How outwardly melodious, the tinkling of the crowd; and how rotten the core within!

I leaned against one of the alcove walls, despite my accumulated fame, looking out with extravagantly shaded eyes in a manner almost furtive, obscure. From all external perceptions (including my own) I was entirely at ease in my corner of the hall, untouched by the physical notice but vaguely amused out of the concern for my absence of the guests. My entertainment came from the sole act of watching, from fixing upon each tale of sordid woe which played out under affable guises, one by one, and seeing their cold hearts wither a degree further with every word. The comedy was hidden in the realization that these creatures actually believed wholeheartedly in their pathetic causes, in the notice of a sudden, secret flick of thought from Ytarrik's part to manipulate them into greater lows, in the abdication of all reserve as I joined him in his tricks.

The gates admitted another group of visitors, and the majority of the shadow of an exceptionally muffled niche in the right wall vacated its temporary abode. A man in a navy coat appeared from no distinct point of origin to greet the newcomers, silver honey on his tongue.

"Ah, the Lady Veleama," I crooned, bowing to breathe on the leader's hand. I offered vague mentions on her two acquaintances, attempting to remember their names. "I was waiting especially for your visit."

The self-styled Lady was an especially unpleasant specimen of high-class righter, who had seen the ill fortune of doing me a bad turn on several past occasions. It was indeed on her arrival that I had been waiting, sunk patiently into my deep corner of obscurity.

I glided to the central dais, and played a single, dull stroke on an awaiting wineglass with the tip of one thumb. Once all attention had been presented to my half-unnoticing gaze, I began the formalities.

"So glad you all could come," I said; "it's an honour to have the presence of so many illustrious ladies and gentlemen." I widened my dangerous smile for a fraction of a second as the flies in the spider's web simpered.

"After all, we have some of our finest arrayed here. I'm sure much of what I say is unworthy for your audience, but let me speak a few minutes more." Idle fun to watch them raise themselves on pedestals, each the solitary pillar of radiance in their minds. Ah, but this would not do for my plans at all. Even so, I flapped their vanity some degrees further, as far as their distancing would not visibly affect the itinerary. The extent of my parading was the period of time before I noticed the vast crates of alcoholic beverage left to collect dust in a deserted corner, at which I ended my speech and leapt into the fray.

Those who have never done it before can see none of the frivolous but severe entertainment of pretending to be drunk, while your guests diligently accumulate on actual booze. There is a very fine distinction between this art and its truer version, but one which made all the difference to me: where the latter is an unnerving experience, capable of extreme recoil damage if timed badly, the former is only a fraction of a measure below its twin in terms of fun and allows the doer to alternate between two mental states at will. As I piled higher with prodigious quantities of grape juice, singing the occasional snatch of song which wandered in my head, I found it immensely difficult to believe those I entertained could have let their guard down so fully in my presence.

A possible explanation presented itself to me, and soon I was mentally staring in mock admonition at Ytarrik, who exuded the aura of a mischievous child, caught in his wrongdoing.

[So I confounded their minds a little, said he, [so what? It only serves your purposes better, and anyway I can take them off my telepathy once they're drunk enough.

I caught hint of an old memory, of a certain Abra and a fourteen-year-old trainer on their trickster escapades, and of the sardonic humor which chose to be their form of affection for that instance.

[But, of course, I mentioned to the observant Ytarrik[the two of [Ithem[/I were razed to the ground, weren't they?

[Razed to the ground, he agreed.

[Razed to the ground, as I said, and not a trace of them! We all go to hell in the end.

[We all burn.

"Whose agents," I sang physically, "could not ever see / His hilly eyes and two green rings…"

The boisterous din of the branding irons of hell swayed to my magnetic influence, all naturally entirely ignorant of my control. I sang a few more lines, and gave up the chorus to a band of musicians who nobody could really [Ifind[/I, anywhere within or without the hall.

I am the one you warned me of...

I passed like a ghost through the masses, slipping into conversations unobtrusively and slipping out, without leaving a single recollection of my presence. The atmosphere and substance played on the faculties of the mind in fresh, unpredictable ways and added a new tone of interest into my usual gamboling; it additionally destroyed my mental guards, allowing me to think thoughts I had kept dark and skinless in the deepest corners of my mind. At the moment, this circumstance seemed not so much inconvenient as thrilling.

Conversing inadvertently with Ytarrik was a peculiar practice. If not for the unreserved, near-dissociated nature of the replying thoughts, I could have easily maintained the illusion of a simple mental discussion with the self; and this trick of the mind was a perfect habitat for my experiments.

I anchored myself mentally to those around me, ensuring that any particularly obscene thought entering my mind would impress itself upon my guests, spreading the discord of which I was so famed. While it was doubtful whether obscenity would be the main driving force behind my musings this night, any thought at all could cause havoc when injected forcefully into a sufficiently disagreeable specimen of human stupidity.

Five fingers have I, to play them like ten.

I was no longer certain where the old Luphinid had fled to. I was still an unstable sociopath, and I desired the life of the late Amaren no less than before, but I was not particularly abhorrent of this life anymore. No, indeed I was; I hated the life of Luphinid Silnaek with a passion, but perhaps this hatred was borne mainly out of Ytarrik's repugnance of what I had become. (In any case, the precise thought in those musings which declared my hatred was almost certainly Ytarrik's, and as he shared my mind only partially he was prone to overestimations.) I wished that Ytarrik would stop allowing his emotions to cloud our judgment while we were hard at work upon this logical project. It was my place to wreck reason with anger and hatred, not his.

Ten fingers have I, to play them again.

As the Kadabra impressed upon me his revulsion of what I had become, a cool and efficient young man to our right suddenly realized the futility of some unnamed efforts which he had been mentally planning during the party and broke down, sobbing about the pointlessness of his life and how dearly he would wish to start over from the beginning, when he was still working through puberty and engaging in such practices as I did not want to hear of. A secluded righter had begun some calculations as to the quantity of assimilation heightening required for a righting project, and as I lingered mentally on the thought of allowing emotion to cloud my judgment, he felt an irrational surge of fear and miscomputed the quantity by several hundred milliliters, ensuring lethal failure in his next righting. And I laughed and shook my head.

Oh, where was I? I was certain I had been thinking of my opinion about my life before I interrupted myself… Ah, yes, thank you, Ytarrik. I did not like the state of affairs in my life, but (in sheer contrary to the doctrines of the Lavender ghost) I was beginning to wonder whether it was exactly sin to milk the opportunity of my abilities to their full. If I was damned from my very beginning, there was no reason not to take the advantages of damnation while they still existed.

No, what thoughts was I indulging in? This life was despicable—all right, perhaps that was Ytarrik's bias, but the doctrines of the ghost at Lavender were entirely opposed to this philosophy. I had to choose either her mode of life, which I was so certain I was destined for and the ghost had seen within me as common ground between us, or this new world of mad, swinging lights and thrilling dangers. No, but I was accepting this on my fundamental level with the greatest height of difficulty, wasn't I?

I directed my mind to Amaren. I had never given the matter a second thought, but an entirely beginning trainer of average skill would require half a year of practice to defeat a lower-end gym leader, let alone such a formidable trainer as the leader of Saffron. Regulations had been passed to lighten the load on novices in recent times, but they had not reached any level of effectiveness by the time of Amaren and Ruki's challenge. I knew not why no acknowledgement had been made for their achievement, but they had very certainly gained the Marshbadge within their second month.

If life had continued at this pace, the two trainers would have become champions. I wonder, in retrospect, which one would have proved superior in the final match—whether Amaren Kelanis and his Alakazam, Ytarrik, or Ruki Ferena with Angin the Typhlosion would become the champion of Kanto.

It was vaguely amusing to see exactly the manner in which my thoughts affected the characters around me, but as two guests went so far as to challenge each other to a pokèmon battle at random, I decided the idle fun had run its course. It was time to execute the grand finale.

I leapt up to the stage.

"Order, people, order," I said, forcing back a hiccup, "I've got something to say. Finally, I mean.

"This party really is the best in our century or something. Don't you agree?" I called for a mass cheering, and I received. "And I think, personally, something this big of a [Iblast[/I"—I directed my vapours to run up my arm, and Ytarrik shot telekinetic force into the outcrop to explode it into a few hundred shards—"deserves something… else that's really just as big of a blast. Therefore, ergo, hitherto, I call for A MASS RIGHTING!"

More cheering, this time uncalled for. Welcome, however.

Social gatherings were great patrons of the mass righting, in which large groups of righters synchronized their minds almost entirely to tackle a major wrong by their collective effort. Individual though, though discouraged, was still very possible, but the majority of the brainpower and psychic skill would be directed towards a common goal, set (with the consent of the whole) by one conductor, myself in this case. I had some extremely unorthodox plans for this righting, and I would not seek the consent of the crowd before executing them.

I detailed to the guests a fictional Water/Fire type pokèmon which originated from a certain wronged 'generator' of organisms in the theoretical plane; it would be highly unstable and self destruct soon after creation, and therefore a large amount of momentary, concentrated power would be required to ban its generation before it ceased to exist. (It should be elucidated that few righters practiced their art to benefit the world by preventing wanton destruction. There was no conceivable way to invoke the wrath of most existent wrongs unless one was doing so deliberately, but hunters righted these anomalies nevertheless for the thrill of the chase.) I then rose up to the conductor's podium of their souls, and linked each of their minds to my own with a telepathic link, waiting as they abdicated most thought and allowed my mind to override their will.

Why, already I was leaving tradition, and already laughing at the blunt daze my guests must have suffered under, to be insensitive to my departure. Righting has a very rigid and precise set of instructions for carrying out any of its incarnations, and any deviation from this is almost certainly the death of at least one of the participants. By sitting still in the human plane and shepherding the righters remotely, I was refusing the usual convention of personally leading my army directly into the fray, and suggesting ulterior motives to the nonexistent none who sensed my lack of presence. To speak the truth, my entry was from another angle.

The theoretic plane encompassed several levels of complexity, each holding and dealing in one particular attribute of the existences in the universe. It was never my style, of course, to take the most beaten path; it was always quite too sunny, far too populated, entirely too healthy for me. Thus, I shunned the main 'interface', as it were, and plunged into a level of complexity with the exact purpose as my requirements needed—the entire withered expanse of the proximate minds' interconnected thoughts stretched out before me.

that haughty self-aggrandizing fire/water instability assurance of purple Curtains gold distractions aim mucH unnEcEssary boredom prevalent blank buffoonS thoughtlEss gormless beliefless speech-contradictions psychic assimilation superior over dark immature uncivilized drunkard unlike messself—I AM ONE AND BEYOND LEVELLINGS—egos far below me littering the expanse like lowly unfitting for my (my) my [my my my [[NOBLETY

(Is this how my thoughts translated? I apologize profusely. I know that they seemed far more orderly when I saw them assembled there.)

[this life isd[lost among greater matterse[destructives[musty degradation, deformation, beyond all possible lawspi (A cushion of mental blocks protected the core of my consciousness from the ravaging effects of a hypnagogic trance, and as my worst fears and petty desires raged around me as voices to a schizophrenic, my sanity was allowed to sail unmolested.) ca[this is no lifeb[pathetic illusionsl[and no deathe[despicable

skreeeaothelodhuuuuuuuu
[i need but to wade to a set of adjacent minds most similar in thought and experience
uuuuuuuuhdolethoaeeerks

What does Silnaek mean in this pointless exercise?
I wish I knew where that Luphinid was taking me…
It seems imperative to me that I find his full intentions!
I have to know what he means to do!
I have to know his intentions for leading us here!
I have to know his intentions!
What is this theatrical wait?
This is ridiculous!
Are we performing a righting or a play?

A h, (im)perfect. Exactly to plan. Swoop down, just a little nudge…

I have to know what he means to do!
I have to know his intentions!
I have to know his intentions!
What is this theatrical wait?

If any two minds, adjacent in their mental ruminations, could make the infinitely improbable coincidence of thinking in exactly the same concepts and emotions at the same time, it would constitute the seed for a specimen of anomaly set B80-99, in which notwithstanding the vast differences in memory and other mental faculties nature would come to refer to both minds as the same, resulting in deep problems of an uncertain nature. This set of wrongs is unsafe and untrodden by the reckless standards of righters themselves, and any hypothetical creature who would attempt to invoke one of these wrongs by telepathically affecting the thoughts of two similar minds can immediately be taken to be profoundly and dangerously unstable in sanity.

I herded the guests wordlessly back to our plane, and took refuge once again in the plane safest for my sanity—a section of the theoretic plane, this time, one unrelated to but with a prime bird's-eye view of the pandemonium in more complex scales of existence. And I watched, feeling to be an overexcited trickster impatient with the results of his own trickery.

As the ladies and gentlemen slumped in their chairs awoke with confused exclamations, the Brothers Traula and Vesperta Kobbit stood up rigid but unnoticed, eyes wide and blank. The alcohol-dulled senses of the partygoers endeavored with characteristic difficulty to focus on the peculiar psychic manifestation forming over their heads, but no further struggle was required of them.

The Kobbits opened their mouths simultaneously, and a concept emanated in the form of sound from every surface of the hall, screeching metallically off the glassy marble floor, thrumming from the great curtains with a violence to suggest a resemblance to speaker membranes. It was a grainy condensate of two separate lives, mixing sloppily two sets of insoluble memories and experiences, but the graceless monotone of its harsh frequencies ruled the minds of all who heard it with a force like no other.

The infestation spread like wildfire through the crowd as the contents of minds were overwritten, twenty at a time, and replaced with that abominable screech. Conscious matter began streaming exponentially to fuel the massive super-consciousness above, and the air twisted violently with every amplifying wave of sound, beating at the hall with layers upon layers of solid wind. Vibrations churned the matter inside the bodies of the humans; bones buckled under the massive thrum of liquefied organs; the marble of the hall splintered, cracked, crumbled over the pulpy human remains, sloshing noisily with all the consistency of soup.

The super-consciousness disintegrated at last, its fire deprived of further fuel, and released its composite energy in a massive burst of thought, reducing the Riquanne complex to ashes.

At last, after my utter exhilaration had run its course, I enlisted the strained help of Ytarrik and created a block over that particular frequency. If ever any trickster (but me) should attempt to try what I had done, his consciousness would be annihilated by the same construct which annihilated minds after their bodies had run their course. And anomaly B85 was righted.

I returned to our plane, jerking awake from the center of the dais to find the trustworthy Ytarrik loyally guarding over my body with the finest example of Barrier I had yet seen. In this existence the massacre had only just begun, different planes of complexity carrying different time frames, and my audience was already beginning to recognize my beautiful craftsmanship. I flashed once again my dangerous smile, bowed to the shocked glares all around me, readied (as did Ytarrik) the exact type of thought required to teleport us out of the carnage—

And a faint strain of sound floated past the barrier, into our ears.

The teleport swept us away.