Prompt: The hero and partner of one crisis meet up with the hero and partner of another crisis.
The realisation was sudden. We were both not looking where we were going, and as we collided, my Dimensional Scream triggered. So did hers, and we knew...
"You are the one I replaced."
"You replaced me."
Hub Town, Nexus - Wigglytuff's Guild, Middle Tier
"The newcomers, eh? Makes sense, I guess." Said Blazewind as they jumped down the ladder.
"Wow, it really does look exactly like the one in Treasure Town." said Blair, a vulpix with a deep red coat.
"Told you so. We can all talk privately here." replied Blazewind, the not-actually twin of Blair.
Down the ladder, the two grovyle had followed. They were both extremely confused. "Blair/Blazewind, mind telling me what is happening?" they said in unison.
"That's the plan, Summers." the two vulpix replied together. The grovyle looked at their respective partner, then at each other before figuratively dropping their jaws.
"Oh, right. Introductions should be in order, especially for those without special powers whose rules make no sense..." said Blair. "I am Blair, and this is my partner Summers. We are part of the exploration team, Team Summer Breeze."
"Well, then I will formally introduce us. I am Blazewind, and this is my partner, Summers. We are also the exploration team, Summer Breeze. This is going to get so confusing..." The two pairs just looked at each other for a minute.
"Okay, let me start out real easy. So in your... timeline, I guess, I was somehow swapped with you. The scream didn't tell me how, or why, so can you elaborate?" asked Blair as she watched her partner inspect his double, letting out a little chuckle.
"Arceus... Well, it was Palkia that did the deed, but it was the big A who planned the whole thing. Needed someone to stick to the 'script' due to..." Blazewind paused for a bit, the unnatural looks of the creatures flashing in her mind. "... complications of sorts." 'Her' grovyle changed his facial expression as well.
"Just say Specters, Blaze." said the Summers who was partner with Blazewind.
"Specters?" the other duo asked.
"Ghastly creatures that tried to derail your timeline." Blaze replied. "Why, we do not know. We still don't really know what they are..." She stared at the floor.
"Derail how?" asked the Summers paired with Blair.
"To ensure Darkrai succeeded is my best guess. But sometimes they were essentially helping us." Blaze still couldn't wrap her head around it all.
"There was also the time they attacked Treasure Town, just after we returned from Temporal Tower." added the Blaze Summers.
Blair and her Summers looked at them in shock. "Wait... 'We'? She didn't fade from existence?" asked Summers, pointing at the vulpix that looked exactly like his partner, but wasn't.
"Technically not from the future, so I was spared that pain. Having to keep everything on track was hard enough though." answered Blaze. The other Team Summer Breeze looked at her, making motions for her to elaborate.
"In short, thanks to the world where I came from, I knew what was supposed to happen, so I could redirect everything back to the 'script' whenever the Specters tried to derail it. Meanwhile," I pointed at Blair, "you were held in my world, and I have NO clue what has happened to that version of you." I finished my tale of the slightly modified adventures of Explorers of Sky I had lived. Blair had accepted the truth immediately thanks to the Dimensional Scream. Her Summers on the other hand, was skeptical. Made sense, seeing as mine was as well when I told him way back when. At least I and Blair used different names, but they were the same in every way.
"Sorry to say, but it just sounds too convenient and contrived. I am not buying it." said Summers. I sighed as I started pacing. I had to do some convincing, and I would do it in a way that this Summers couldn't refute.
"You lived on Sharpedo Bluff for two years before you and Blair met. The reason why no one from the guild actually knew you before this point was because aside from getting cold feet in front of the guild entrance, you rarely entered town, and spent most of your time working up courage inside your home or trained down in the forest next to the beach. Also, you found the Relic Fragment when you played with your siblings, in your favorite hiding spot beneath the roots of the Elder Tree" I couldn't help but look smug.
"How do you know that? According to you, this 'game' starts the day that Blair and I met." Blair's Summers was stumped. I glanced over at my Summers, and he looked about as smug as me.
"I can also say that your birthday is $%- $-XX" Nail was hit. It was super effective.
"Because, as Blaze so finely put it earlier, our worlds were the same until she swapped with Blair..." my Summers said as he wrapped an arm around his clone's shoulder. "So of course I told her about my family and childhood. You did the same with your partner, no?"
Blair nodded to my Summers suggestion. With the elephant, or donphan rather, out of the way, I could ask the question to end all questions to Blair. "So, you know why our fur is so red?"
"That was my hair color." she replied bluntly.
"You sure?" I asked her, just to confirm.
"Completely. I don't remember anything before waking up on the beach except for this: I used to be a female human named Blair. I looked like an 18 year old, but was far older due to the whole 'time has stopped' shit, though I can't remember the time stopping stuff, I had tons of freckles, green eyes and long hair of a deep red color... Also there was this voice in my head, screaming to come up with a cover name when Summers asked." She beamed as she answered. I guess that she was happy about knowing at least a bit about her past self.
"I am afraid to ask..." came from my Summers. "What was that cover name?"
The two looked at each other, smirked and then looked at us before replying "Blazewind '' at the same time. I was starting to side with Blair's Summers from about three minutes ago. It was way too convenient. But that effectively confirmed a theory I had had. Blair and Grovyle had given her a cover name as to be harder to track by Dusknoir. Sadly, it seemed that he had known about it beforehand. Then again, happy endings to all, so it wasn't all that bad.
After having a great talk about each of our adventures, with it splitting heavily post Darkrai as Blazewind told everyone in Treasure Town her truth, we decided to go back to this 'Hub Town'. As both the Summers left, talking passionately about their favorite mysteries to uncover, an image returned. One that I had gotten when my Dimensional Scream triggered on contact with Blaze. "One more thing, Blaze." I stopped her before she started climbing.
"What is it, Blair?" She seemed confused as to why I stopped her.
"So... There is this one thing... So..." I would have been so red in my head, had I still been a human... Though, I was always really red in my current form. She looked at me expectantly. "So, one of the things the Scream showed me was that when you were a human, you weren't actually..." I trailed off. It seemed as though she caught on.
"Yeah, I wasn't." she sighed. "When the condition to get dragged into the pokemon world was 'The next to start a playthrough as vulpix in Explorers of Sky' then... I mean, I wanted to play as my favorite pokemon, and to do that I kinda had to lie about my gender, that is how that game works." I could see in her expression that she was a bit embarrassed about the topic.
"So, how is it? And... Does HE know?" I was morbidly curious about this.
"The change to a vulpix had overwritten my shock of the gender swap initially, so not really anything I could comment on... Though at some point it caught up and everything was just horrible." She somehow looked even more embarrassed. "And yes. He knows. He is one of only three, now four, who does, and I want it to stay that way, if you catch my drift."
"Don't worry, Blaze." I started climbing the ladder. "We girls have to stick together, no?" I said with a wink.
AN: Say hi to Blair, Blaze and Summers times two. We will see more to them in both the nexus storyline and in their own stuff prior to and after this whole shebang.
So, I tried playing with PoV for this one, and if it wasn't for me just plastering everyone's name everywhere, it might have been a bit confusing as to whom's first person perspective we were following when.
Well... I guess there are no indicator to who the 'I' is at the very beginning, but it could honestly be either. That was on purpose, by the way.
Lastly, the dates of the pokemon world uses a really strange, non-number system and the thing causing Blaze to understand pokemon cannot actually properly translate it, and the actual words representing the dates sounds like gibberish to her. It is definitely that, and not the fact that I am too lazy to invent new names for the months since the ones we use doesn't really fit well in a pokemon only world where Ceasar and Augustus never existed.