Chapter 41 – Blackout

Silas, Newton, and I stared at the matte black box I had placed in the middle of my bunk. Ginger, Balrog, and Lizard were having a game of cards at Balrog's bunk, while their teams were out grabbing supper – at the back of my mind I wished that elusive furret all the best with evading capture.

Orders had come down from above along with the little box, and they had been very clear about what I was to do with the box's contents.

I exhaled slowly. "So, it's all unpredictable, right?"

"That's for sure," Silas said softly, sounding a little unsure. "But we don't exactly have a choice, do we?"

"I did ask Uncle Aloysius about it, and he said older pokemon tend to process the changes faster," I shrugged. "He says that's how it was with Muriel, anyway."

Newton wasn't smiling, for once. "You do realize you'll be blind by the time it all finishes, right, Silas?"

Now that was unexpected. "Say what, Newton?"

His face formed a rubbery grimace, and he took a step forward, flicking the box with his tail. "Silas told me about that not too long ago."

I turned to face my starter, and saw that he was trying his best to look away. When I pushed his shell around to make him face me, he slowly withdrew his tongue and clamped himself shut.

Wordlessly, I picked him up, feeling his familiar weight in my hands. He wasn't exactly light, but he wasn't that heavy, either – I could easily lift him up with one hand if I needed to. His shell was smooth save for the shallow grooves that fanned out from its back, and its edges were regular, almost like a pair of human lips.

"Silas…," I said gently, "it's alright."

He remained silent.

I put him down on my lap, and slowly rubbed the outside his shell, just the way he liked it. "I… I know it's hard, but… but maybe this is how we ended up together, eh? Affinity, being alone, and well, maybe effectively homeless.

"But maybe it's because both of us were meant to lose our sight together."

After an age, he slowly opened up, and moved himself about until he was facing me again. His eyes were large and moist as always, although this time, there seemed to be a hollow depth to them that was new to me.

"You…," he whispered, "you've changed, Trainer."

I hugged him to my chest, even as he made a sound that resembled a hiccup. His tongue snaked out and ended up draped around my neck like a scarf.

To his credit, Newton stayed at the foot of my bunk, looking away.

Silas made that unusual hiccupping sound again. "Trainer, let me see your face."

Wordlessly, I lifted him up, feeling his tongue sliding back between his shells. He and I were at eye-level then.

"Please, take off the black glasses."

Off went the glasses, taking my eyesight with them. I sat there, staring at the blurry lump that was Silas, and it was a while before he finally asked me to put him down. I placed him gently on the mattress, and he scooted closer, propping himself up on my knee to look me in the eyes.

"I'll never forget how you look like, Trainer," he trilled, with a distinct quaver to his words. "Always."

I patted him on the shell, and he gave me one of his usual shellder tongue handshakes. When Newton slowly nudged the black box towards us shortly thereafter, I opened it with shaking hands.

It was beautiful, and seemed to glow from within with a sea-green light. Somehow, the glow even seemed to shift about and pulsate, almost as if it was a living creature instead of a chunk of radioactive minerals.

When lights-out came later on, the water stone's glow bathed us in an eerie light from where I'd placed it by my pillow.

xxx

More and more soldiers were being called back into base camp, and increasing numbers of digimon troops were being assigned to street patrols. Naturally, this meant the increased presence of the massive, UFO-like constructs which served as their specialized sleeping chambers. Strangely enough, the digimon troops were pulling increasingly longer shifts despite there being more of the radiation chambers being out and about.

Lizard wryly remarked one day that perhaps they'd managed to rig the moon to be radioactive. None of us could decide if we even wanted to consider taking his suggestion seriously.

And, of course, the night lights about Mount Coronet were practically a meteorological constant by then. Couldn't forget those that easily, really.

xxx

Newton was a happy soul most of the time, to the point that Mama, the gigantic Arab in charge of the mess hall, decided to give him the nickname of Said, which supposedly meant 'happy' in some Middle Eastern language. He – Newton, not Mama – usually went about with a face-splitting smile, and would cheerfully greet everyone he recognized as he walked about camp by my side. Unsurprisingly, most of the folks he regularly saw about base camp soon grew fond of him.

Myself, I found him to be an amiable companion, and I guess a respectable pokemon in his own right.

I hadn't asked to become his trainer, and he knew it. So most of the time while he did make an effort to be cheerful during our conversations and work together, he nonetheless maintained his distance from Silas and I. Just like me being assigned to the Inkblots, though, he hadn't exactly had a choice in the matter. And unlike me, he didn't have the option of reassignment, either.

Fate had a sick sense of humour, that was for sure. Or had I angered the irony gods?

To Hell with it all.

xxx

When all communications from Sootopolis abruptly ceased one day, Coronet base went to Code Red in about three and a half minutes. That isn't to say that we were surprised by it, though; suspicious would've been a more appropriate term for how we thought of the whole situation thanks to some snooping by a certain lecherous ghost.

"Bloody stinks of a foeckin' conspiracy, if ye ask me," huffed Ginger, as we watched another trio of sentries making a round of the perimeter fence not too far from our barracks.

Lizard paused in the act of dipping a still-squirming cricket into his honey jar. "What makes you say so?"

Ginger cast a quick glance about, and gestured to Mac. "Ol' Mac 'ere's been telling me that there's been increased naval patrols about Sootopolis, and that they put Aegis in charge. 'eard it from the commandant's mouth 'imself, he did."

That particular piece of news made me wonder. Sootopolis City, having been built inside a dormant volcano, was rather infamous for its bad reception. But a communications blackout which persisted during clear weather at sea was odd, to say the least, especially given that Grand Admiral Aegis had been assigned to monitor the area.

Koothayan Aegis was a legendary mariner, and was particularly renowned for his cartography skills - back in his native Johto he had been among the first captains to successfully chart the treacherous waters around the Whirl Islands. By the time the Revolution had come around, he was already the commodore of the Johto Security Fleet, and even the digimon had acknowledged his skills by giving him a vice-admiral's rank.

At present, he was one of the five human Grand Admirals, and was supreme commander of Earth's naval forces. And somehow, he had been personally assigned to monitor the situation at Sootopolis, whatever it might have been.

Which was why, when I managed to secure a communications slot several hours later, I was completely unsurprised to see that General Harding was a nervous wreck.

"- and it's not like this is uncommon," he half-muttered, running a hand through his hair. "It's all a massive over-reaction, if you ask me."

"They did send Aegis over," I pointed out, as I drummed my fingers on the side of the video monitor, "and they certainly wouldn't do that on a whim now, would they?"

General Harding remained silent for a while, before giving me a shrug and ending the video call.

xxx

Day after day, I noticed that Silas' shell was growing rougher and bigger. He grew heavier, too, and one day, I realised that I had to start getting him to sleep on the floor when I tried to sleep and nearly had my rib cage cave in on me.

And then came the day when he didn't come out of his pokeball when I pressed the release button.

I had known that we would reach such a point in time eventually, but, as with all other big things in life, I hadn't expected it to be so soon. Uncle Aloysius' words regarding matured pokemon progressing faster along radiation-stimulated evolution pathways had turned out to be true, since Silas had only been exposed to that water stone for just over a month.

Checking the calendar, I felt the briefest flicker of doubt crossing my mind – one month of water stone exposure meant that the Sootopolis communications blackout had already gone on for ten days. We hadn't received news on weather conditions about the city, but base camp was now at a Code Yellow alert level, so the situation must have gotten closer to resolution, I suppose.

Honestly, though, Sootopolis wasn't exactly of any significant concern to me right then, since my bunk felt… too big without Silas around.

Newton couldn't even sleep next to me thanks to the effect his mildly-toxic slime had on my bare skin after prolonged exposure, and I was used to having a shellder as my makeshift bolster after the last three years or so in the army. It came to a point whereby I ended up rolling over and hugging Balrog as he slept during a training exercise out on the slopes of Mount Coronet, which quite predictably led to a slew of lewd jokes when Slappy the banette gleefully spread the word about the incident around camp.

Thankfully, Lizard was kind enough to loan me Ludwig as a bolster until Silas completed his evolution.

xxx

"Oi, NiceGuy!" a voice, somewhat familiar, called out from behind me as I got up to leave the mess hall.

I turned to look at its owner, and recognized her as one of the administration troops – just like what I'd been back at Canalave. "Yes?"

She walked up to me, and handed me an envelope with a smile. "Security saw this the other day on surveillance. They found it so cute that they had it blown up and made a copy for you!"

With a frown, I took the envelope from her, and opened it. Its contents confirmed my suspicions that I was being watched at least some of the time in the barracks, and managed to make a lump form in my throat at the same time.

It was a picture of me sleeping propped-up in the corner with Silas and Newton all snuggled up at my sides. Silas' tongue was lolling out over my right knee, and Newton had been passed out on my lap. That day had been the day we tackled the notorious twenty kilometer 'Steamroller Trail' within Mount Coronet's cavernous chambers, and had been so exhausted afterwards that we fell asleep directly after cleaning up at the barracks.

From that night onwards, the picture ended up in the waterproof box I kept in my footlocker, and Newton got a little blanket that allowed him to sleep next to me without causing my skin to start peeling again.

xxx

Sootopolis remained silent for a total of twenty three days, and I barely noticed. Thanks to Silas sealing himself away inside his pokeball to evolve, I was solely reliant on the chipper little bastard of a wooper as my combat partner, and he was definitely more than a handful to deal with.

To start with, he, like Silas before him, had turned out to be a tad precocious with his skills. My first training session with him had revealed a passable Surf, a dodgy Ice beam, and a scary Toxic. He also could pull off a Mud Slap with appreciable force but deadly accuracy, as his opponents learned to their cost. Several broken bones, a dead butterfree, a mankey with an amputated foot, and an impressively scarred Newton later, I learned to keep my distance when he was attacking.

If anything, the training sessions seemed to make him even more active than he already was, and the hyperactive little bugger seemed perfectly content with just three hours of sleep in a day. Which was why, by the twenty third day of the Sootopolis blackout, I was hardly surprised to find out that I was way out of touch with the whole crisis situation, and that Newton was showing signs of transitioning into a quagsire.

"How old are you, again?" I asked him wearily, as I examined the emerging stumps beneath his neck. Yup, those did look like arms in the making. "I mean, Silas is nearing fourteen, but your species doesn't live that long, right?"

He thought about it for a while, and chirped, "If I remember properly, I am six springs old."

Now, that was a little surprising. "Eh?"

"When the rain comes!" he nodded, the antennae on the sides of his head waving about. "One of your four seasons, spring? I've lived through six of them."

"Oh," I blinked at him like a hoothoot as the meaning of his words sank in. "And how long do your kind live?"

That made him pace about for a while in thought. "The elder quagsire usually survive for almost fifteen springs, and the oldest I've known of died after her eighteenth winter. So I should have quite a bit of time left, though probably nowhere near as much as Silas does."

I nodded as I recalled him into his pokeball. Shellder and cloyster could live much longer than humans, according to the research I'd done on Silas before I'd left Canalave. Apparently, there even existed a wild cloyster somewhere near the Seafoam Islands which was estimated to be almost three hundred years old, whose shell was close to fifteen feet wide and five tall, with a calculated weight of near half a tonne.

So Newton was about halfway through his lifespan, me about a third through mine, and Silas perhaps a thirtieth of his.

Interesting, if not anything else.

xxx

The light around his pokeball's release button was gone, and a month had passed since Sootopolis went incommunicado. Silas had been busy evolving for two months, and Newton was already halfway through his growth into a quagsire, if the emerging fin and rudimentary flippers he was growing were any indication. Now, it seemed, Silas was finally done.

"Come on, mate!" cheered Ginger. "Let 'im out, and we'll see 'ow 'e's like!"

"Ease up, G-man," laughed Balrog, as Gandalf the piloswine shuffled closer, puffing out icy fog in his excitement at seeing a fellow ice pokemon to work with. "It's NiceGuy's first evolution!"

I bit my lip, turning Silas' pokeball over in my hands. So he was a cloyster now. Questions, doubts, and every miniscule worry I'd ever had about Silas seemed to pop up in my mind, flashing past like a billboard on steroids. Sure, I'd met General Harding's cloyster that eon or so ago at Snowpoint, but no two pokemon were the same, were they?

Back then, I had learned that cloyster had two shell layers: a pair of large, flatter shells on the outside that were basically grown versions of their shellder armour, and a smaller, rounder pair on inside the older pair that protected their soft bodies. The muscles controlling the opening and closing of both shell pairs were opposing in nature, such that the outer shells could only open if the inner shells were shut, and vice-versa. It was a simple, elegant means of keeping cloyster safe from other marine pokemon, but did make cloyster entirely dependent on a specialized form of echolocation to 'see' their surroundings.

It was also the reason why evolution was a literally blinding experience for Silas.

Part of me wondered if I had been wrong in allowing Silas to evolve, orders be damned. Had I, in being an obedient soldier, doomed my starter to spending the remainder of his life in darkness? Had I taken the world from him along with his sight?

Mechanically, my thumb depressed the release button, and bright light surged out of the pokeball, gradually reshaping itself into the large, rocky mass that was Silas' external shells.

The six of us – Newton and Gandalf included – cautiously stepped closer to where Silas lay on the floor, easily covering about a square meter of space with his current size. He looked like a colossal oyster.

"Silas?" I called out hesitantly. "Silas, can you hear me?"

The large shells opened slightly, and a series of strange-sounding clicks and whistles came from between them. Upon hearing them, my knees felt weak, and my throat felt oddly tight, as though I was trying to swallow compressed air.

"Trainer, are you there?" Silas trilled, even as Newton and Gandalf let out excited cheers, and my barracks mates offered me their congratulations, "It's great to be out here again!

"You won't believe how boring it got in there, hoo!"

"Hello, Silas!" Newton called out, waving happily with his stubby little flippers despite the fact that Silas probably couldn't see the gesture, anyway. "How's it feel to be a cloyster?"

There was a long silence before Silas responded with another round of muted whistling, "I feel sluggish. And is one of the humans here Trainer? I can't tell with this shitty excuse for cloyster eyesight."

"I-" my voice cracked, as I stepped forward and knelt down next to him, laying a hand on his shell, "It's me, Silas."

He was quiet for a bit, before he let out a cheerful, "Trainer!"

I leaned over, and hugged him as best I could despite his abrasive new armour. A tear escaped my left eye, and I briefly wondered if it was due to the sharp bits of his shell digging into my arms and face.

"Welcome back, Silas."

xxx

One month of zero communications, and they expected us to be surprised by the announcement that we were going back to a Code Red alert? Nice try, but no cigar.

What did surprise us was the broadcast from Sootopolis that they showed to the commandos, though. It was supposedly to keep us abreast with current developments in the event of an emergency Hoenn deployment, but most of us ended up watching in a kind of slack-jawed horror as none other than Grand Admiral Jonathan Treacher – supreme commander of the air forces, and someone whose presence at Sootopolis definitely hadn't been announced – very calmly stared into the camera and made his statement.

"As of oh-five-hundred hours, it has been ascertained that no less than three hundred individuals from Sootopolis," he said in his gravelly voice, "have been involved in terrorist activities. We have not ruled out the possibility of the radio tower attacks being linked to them, along with Slenderman, the pokemon battle that was nearly televised, and whatever else those treasonous scum have done.

"All residents of Sootopolis City are henceforth to be suspect as terrorists until proven otherwise. A blockade of the city is now in effect, and jamming of communications is to continue until the terrorist agents are rooted out and interrogated.

"You have your orders, and they have forty-eight hours."

No less than three hundred individuals, out of perhaps a million.

Jamming of communications is to continue, implying that the blackout had been deliberate.

Forty-eight hours, suggesting that Grand Admiral Treacher had given the suspected terrorists a deadline.

Even as we filed out of the briefing room and headed back to our respective activities, the question of why and how the terrorists had been traced to Sootopolis screamed itself out in my mind in bright neon letters. And then there was the question of what Earth's most ruthless military officer would do to Sootopolis if they failed to meet his deadline.

Out of desperation, I asked Ginger, Slappy, and Mac for a favour, and they readily agreed. All it took was a Shadow Sneak or several, and they returned not three hours later with grim news.

Zachary Harding had been temporarily relieved of his general's rank pending an investigation of the suspected terrorist activity at Sootopolis, and was already en route to Coronet base camp for debriefing and questioning.

Not unexpectedly, just an hour after the two ghosts had delivered me the news, the Intelligence operatives came for me.