Where it NeVer RɅins
A Twisted Tale
1.
Cyllene
Of course it happened on the same day Cyllene lost her eyebrows.
Complaining about nonsense only attracts more, her best friend Zisu told her. But Cyllene couldn't describe this as nonsense. No — waking up in the morning without eyebrows is nonsense. Finding out your adult best friend waxed you in your sleep is nonsense. The sky rippling and stretching and cracking open like an overboiled eggshell is not nonsense. It's a calamity. It's an emergency. It's throw everything at the wall and hope something sticks because—
"Your eyebrows didn't stick, that's for sure," Zisu laughed. She was the tallest woman in Jubilife Village, and twice as wide as Cyllene, and in the basement of Galaxy Hall her laugh echoed like a Walrein's bellow above the crying children and cursing of Matron Pesselle.
Cyllene was down on her knees, wrestling with a little boy's scraped leg while his mother restrained him. Her left hand was bloody and her right clutched an old rag soaked in beer. (Because she didn't drink mirin, she told the matron. She drank beer. She had beer in her office upstairs. Beer was alcohol. Alcohol cleaned wounds.) The little boy took a good aim and kicked her right between the hairless ridges of her face, and she tumbled backwards, head knocking into the leg of a wooden chair.
"Oh dear, Miss Cyllene!" cried Eiffel Laventon. Even in the end-times, the Galaxy Expedition Team's resident professor wore that ridiculous purple hat with the pom-pom, and even he was somewhat smirking as he reached out a hand to help her back to her feet.
"Don't stare at me," Cyllene bit.
"I wasn't," said Eiffel. "Would you care to help me remove Rowlet from its perch on the ceiling over there? It's quite fussy, you see."
Rowlet was a small round bird Pokémon that lived in the professor's office, cooed at all hours of the night, chewed up the paperwork and shat on the furniture. Eiffel treated it like his own child. And he was starting to look the part of its father, stuffing his face with all that candy Zisu's husband peddled him.
"I'm cleaning wounds!" Cyllene shouted into his stubbly face.
"I'll clean wounds from here, egg-face," scoffed Matron Pesselle, who snatched the sour rag from Cyllene's right hand and chucked it far across the dimly-lit room. Those new electric lights had been flickering for the past half hour, but there was no way she'd let a live candle be brought into this mess.
Her heart pounded, and she was sweating beneath the heavy blue jacket of her uniform just imagining someone with a candle coming down here. Her head was starting to ache.
"And don't touch my medical bag," the matron hissed in her direction.
"Well, if I can't even touch the medical bag, then I won't help you at all!" Cyllene seethed.
"Ignore her, Cy," whispered Zisu.
And for that Cyllene gave Zisu a bad-tempered slap on the breast.
The breast?
She'd been aiming for the arm. Now she'd slapped her friend's breast. In front of the whole village crammed into this tiny basement office where the chalkboard was still cluttered with juvenile drawings of Pokémon anatomy — or at least, how a few sad, drunk bookkeepers imagined it after they'd pilfered the beer from her office upstairs because who else would take it but the accursed bookkeepers!?
"Why are you down here!?" Cyllene demanded, grabbing Zisu's left sleeve and shaking it. "You're captain of the accursed Security Corps! Are you not going to go out there and keep us all safe!?"
"You want me to fight the sky!?"
At those words, the ground rumbled, and the lights flickered once more. The ornate woodwork wrapping around the doorframe started cracking. The cream wallpaper peeled and curled. A sound like buzzing static had the professor's accursed bird leaping off the ceiling and trilling while raking its talons through children's hair.
More screaming. Green feathers spilling everywhere. Laventon still smirking and staring at her. Now he was reaching out to touch her. His pudgy light brown fingers grazed her shoulder. And was it even possible to assure her without that accent dulling his Rs and sounding like he was chewing on a hot biscuit?
Cyllene could feel her face growing hot, and the sweat growing thick, and tears beginning to run down her cheeks while everyone stared at her eyebrowless face.
"Stop," she forced. It was the only word that came to mind.
Eiffel only gripped her harder, his face growing more concerned, until Zisu pushed his hand away and replaced it with her own.
"Let's get some air, Cy."
"The sky is breaking!"
"You've been waiting for an emergency, haven't you."
Gently, then a bit forcefully when she struggled, Zisu walked Cyllene out of the office, through the darkened basement hallway and up the stairs to the foyer of Galaxy Hall. The red carpet clashed with the hazy green-yellow light streaming through the windows. A storm was swirling above the peak of Mount Coronet in the distance. A mixture of dark clouds and crackling white energy that pulsed and churned in the center of where the sky had broken open. Around it, the blue was all crinkled and warped. Bruised, Cyllene thought with alarm. The sky itself was bruised.
By the time Zisu had her sit on the left-hand staircase she was crying and gasping, throwing her arms around the larger woman and squeezing her tight in a hug.
"I'm overwhelmed," she whimpered.
"You did fine," Zisu told her, returning the embrace with a smile. "And I'm sorry about your face. You can punch my other boob if you want."
Shivering, Cyllene lifted her hands to wipe her eyes, before remembering they were covered in blood and beer and settled on using her sleeve.
"I should be tougher than this," she said.
"You're the toughest person I know."
"But I shouldn't be crying."
"No one's going to blame you for overreacting. It caught us all off guard."
Zisu craned her neck to see out the window. An uprooted pine tree was lying across the pathway leading up to the Hall's front steps. Then it was gone — blown clear into the sky by the winds whipping shingles off roofs and sucking them up into that merciless hole. Lightning lanced out from the folds of bruising blue. The building shook. Glass shattered in one of the offices upstairs, and the temperature dropped immediately.
"I suppose," Cyllene whispered, still locked in that awkward hug, "that we are witnessing history."
Her eyes were large and round and blue — like full moons, Eiffel told her. They were more reddish now, sticky and itchy and certainly nothing to respect. But still glistening as she, too, looked beyond the rain-pelted glass toward the storm and the evening.
The glass broke, and the land of Hisui came rushing right in.
we only try to survive...
~N~
So I finish one novel-length Poké fic and dive right into the next one the next day. Welcome to "Where it NeVer RɅins!" A twisted rewrite of PLA, where Cyllene is our heroine and the land of Hisui is full of strange new mysteries...
Published by Syntax-N on FanFiction . Net May 7, 2023. Cover art by T-M-Wolf, commissioned. Thanks for reading! Don't repost.