26.
Ʌ GengɅr is Born
Cyllene was vaguely aware of what was happening around her.
She was vaguely aware she had left the village. Vaguely aware of stumbling several miles out into the Obsidian Fieldlands with… someone… and now vaguely blinking as red-tinted moonlight flowed over her skin like warm water, causing her to surface and shiver and sigh.
And then suddenly very very aware that her breath was caught in her throat and her hands were pressed up against her cheeks and it was actually cold outside.
"WHAT!?" she burst out.
adamaN and his Leafeon jumped in surprise, both tumbling down into crinkled gray grass. The contested leader of the Diamond Clan sat up quickly, a finger pressed into his lips.
"One I refer to!" he hurriedly whisper-shouted. "My companion! Isolated female human sentience who in this moment is sharing my vicinity! You must needs… silence!"
Cyllene glanced down at her hands in the grass. She was kneeling. She'd been standing earlier. She vaguely remembered that. Just like she vaguely remembered adamaN pulling on those too-tight sky-blue leggings and strapping a sheet of leather around his chest but leaving his arms and stomach still pathetically bare. And his poor Leafeon… its ears and tail were wilted. Lapping up water from the streams had only made it weak and bloated with sediment.
adamaN pointed to where a small orange flame danced atop the silhouette of a cliff in the distance. "What you call Deertrack Heights," he urged. "My people still mourn my sister up there. Somehow we have managed to elude the respectfully glacial funeral procession, although some may still have witnessed our traversal. We must trust they will follow the allotted schedule and not betray me before we return to Jubilife Village."
"Traversal…" Cyllene repeated thoughtfully. She tilted her head upwards, toward the waxing moon stained crimson by the jagged wound still weeping in the sky. Once more, she felt a warmth spreading fast through her bones. The Red Chain's weight still hung like a stiffy, sticky string of links around her left wrist. She fell down onto her back and kicked at the grass, all giddy and giggling again.
"I must have made Eiffel gain a thousand pounds! All with a snap of my fingers! Accursed! I should've forced him to grow even bigger! What if he became an Alpha Snorlax!?"
"Accursed Galaxy woman—"
"I could've given him any shape I wanted! Of course Snorlax popped into my head right away because it just made sense, but oh, what would be worse? Oh, Gulpin! We used to have those in Hoenn! They were like sacs of bile that could stick themselves together…"
adamaN growled in warning. He stood up and glared down at Cyllene, which only made her laugh harder because of the leggings and the cropped bit of leather. His hair was in shambles, snarled and stringy and coarse with dirty sweat.
And Cyllene felt… Well, despite the day's nonsense, she felt surprisingly good. Warm and cold at the same time, and still vaguely confused about some things, but way too clear on others, and the night was relatively beautiful, with clean air, and strengthening moonlight… and…
Cyllene stopped kicking. Her smile faded as she raised herself to a sitting position again. Then she looked at the sky and watched the faraway threads of lightning lance out from the center of the wound. More red came out now than any other color. It was all bright, bloody, and menacing, and crackling fiercely like it had grown unstable.
If Ginter were here, he'd probably tell me just how strong that storm is based on the way his heart feels. And then tell me he wants to fight it.
And thinking of Ginter, it all hit her fully.
"It's been an entire day," she voiced, her hands dropping like stones to the ground beside her.
adamaN grunted, narrowing his eyes up at the fire in the distance, then crouching down, pulling her quickly over to where a great, cracked dome-shaped rock cast a long shadow out into the field and concealing the both of them behind it.
"You've been on-and-off, here-and-there, drunk-or-sleepwalking all this long, accursed day," he told her. "That's the simplest way I can put it for you."
Cyllene shook her head, suddenly aware of the cool night breeze and the trilling of Kricketot and the ominous, gurgling hisses of the Ghastly flocks materializing all around. She breathed in and tried to find those two stars Ginter had studied the night they became hopelessly tangled in each other's lives. The clouds and red obscured any chance of it.
"I wasn't sleepwalking. It's more like I was… dreaming. But… accursed, it's like this, adamaN. The Commander gave me three days to prove we don't have to start over from nothing. Before he burns the village and probably starts your war for real. I… I've wasted one whole day. What am I thinking!? I'm not supposed to be like this!"
"All things remain to be seen," adamaN told her. "Galaxy woman…" He caught the way her nose scrunched up at that label. "Cyllene, are you clear-headed enough now to listen to me for once?"
"Just let me… ugh… figure things out."
"There will be timE to figure things out."
"Sorobū told me to behave like a Captain. The same way Eiffel told me to be more mature. But I thought I was already the mature one in the village. I was respectable. I was Captain Cyllene of the Survey Corps. That used to mean something. Now something's changed. I feel stronger doing what I want to do, and ignoring what's expected of me, and… I don't know, adamaN… Am I going to get you killed if I can't fix the whole accursed world in two days?"
"Hmph. Well, you injure me right now. Call me The Sekki… or… The Contested Sekki, or nothing. My familiar name is reserved for use by men and direct relatives only."
Cyllene huffed curtly through her nose, giving him a sideways glare. "And if I wanted, I could turn you into something that doesn't need special rules for what people call it. Maybe your Leafeon there would like a friend its own size."
"Seeing as you apparently already know how to use the powers Almighty Sinnoh decided, in His infinite and incomprehensible wisdom, to bestow somewhat carelessly, I must judge, upon an interloping female infidel, why don't you give that a try?"
Cyllene mocked him. "Are you, adamaN, The Sekki, the one I am referring to, jealous of my magical powers, the ones I still do not even understand how I got or why something that might be Almighty Sinnoh would tell me I have?"
"Jealous?"
adamaN crossed his arms. The right had abandoned its wrapping and now boasted a full sleeve of intricate black tattoos. Stars and planets were etched in their various revolutions around a towering fir tree rooted in his knuckles, whose lower boughs were heavy with snowfall and whose upper needles were withering away in flame and smoke.
"Jealous, no. To envy is to covet that which does not rightfully belong to you, and I covet nothing that would bring the threat of annihilation any closer. I am just perturbed. Miffed. Put ill at ease. Left with a sour taste in my mouth. Mortified, more like. I could go on."
"Please don't. We don't have time."
"There will be timE," adamaN said. But the wrinkle between his eyebrows said differently. "There will be timE."
"There isn't time," Cyllene argued. "If you want to take me to the Coronet Highlands, we need Abra to teleport us. Otherwise it'll take way more than two days to get there on foot, and you'll have bandits searching for your head on a pole. We have to go back."
Leafeon wilted even more at that revelation, but adamaN was begrudgingly surprised.
"A full day of travel, and now you reveal you don't have Abra with you and you want to go back to retrieve it. I called you a prophet before, but now I think I should prostrate myself."
"I sent Abra to give Ginter his… something that belonged to him back. It didn't return right away like it should've. You whisked me away before I was awake enough to tell you."
adamaN shook his head, sliding down the rock until he plopped right next to her. A Ghastly hissed just overhead, its beady eyes throbbing.
"At least it's not quite the high Gengar breeding season," he whispered. "Two moons from now, if a Gengar had you cornered and managed to force itself all the way down your throat, it could dissolve and dissociate itself in your bile and you'd have around thirty distinct globules of sentient gas festering in your intestines by morning. You never know which end they're going to pop out of when they're ready."
"Ew."
"It's true. Add it to your Poké Dex."
"I'm glad that Poké Dex burned."
The Ghastly swelled. More had congregated around it. They could sense heat, and were growing excited at the idea of sucking it into themselves to grow ever darker and thicker. Stronger as they prepared to evolve and seek greater prey. adamaN and Cyllene deftly skittered around to the lighter side of the rock again.
Or, they tried to. Before the rock began shuddering and groaning. Cyllene's face went loose when she felt the stone itself bulging a bit beneath her fingertips, almost like it was beginning to breathe.
"adamaN, tell Leafeon to use a Grass move. I think this rock is a Pokémon—"
The rock screamed.
It began as one voice howling. Humanlike, but twisted. Deeper, more resonant and strange. Then the voice multiplied. A chorus of deafening howls rang out as the rock's gray "skin" rippled and forced itself to stretch. Dust erupted outward into clouds as ancient cracks revealed themselves and widened. Within was a pulsing violet glow, steadily growing brighter.
Cyllene looked to adamaN, who had hastily scrambled on hands and knees out into the ruddy moonlit grass again. The glow in the rock intensified. A violet-black tendril of light burst out of the thickest crack and slithered over the rock's surface, as if testing it. Then more emerged, and more, until it looked like a crude, dripping anemone were blooming, shuddering and screaming the more it was exposed.
The tendrils melted and congealed, then. They began to levitate above the rock, rooted by a single thin root that was planted firmly inside the biggest crack. Screams vibrated across its surface, bubbling out of the shimmering substance. It spun. It flattened. It formed into a disc.
"What the accursed is that?" adamaN cried. "The one I am referring to now in the third person must, through her association with the recently-mutilated naturalist, must understand the physiology of this previously misunderstood phenomenon—"
"I have no idea," Cyllene spat. "Run!"
"LEAF STORM!" adamaN commanded.
Leafeon coughed and sputtered. A few weak, wilted leaves dribbled out of its mouth before it fell over onto its side with a groan. Exasperated, its master scooped it up and began running in the direction of the nearest stream with Cyllene in tow. The violet thing rooted in the rock finally grew to its full size — an immense, spinning disc of light whose screams rippled across its surface in the vague, jagged shape of a face.
The spinning Pokémon gave a laugh that sounded like a gurgling moan, then surged forward, its vast, glowing tendrils managing to lick at Cyllene's sandals. She threw herself into a long-jump, then somersaulted away, thrusting her heel into adamaN's side to knock him to the ground before the same could happen to him.
Then it retreated, screams becoming grunts as its single root strained. It was bound to the rock, Cyllene realized. It couldn't move.
"That thing scared the Ghastly away, at least," she whispered, feeling lucky her head was clearer. "We were so close to it, too!"
But adamaN didn't respond. From where he lay, his eyes were locked on the spinning Pokémon, whose rippling green face seemed to study him.
"Don't look at it," Cyllene warned. "You'll piss it off."
adamaN let out an astonished breath.
"Are those... icicles on the ceiling?"
Cyllene channeled Zisu and punched him in the back, but he barely felt it.
"Now it's just using Hypnosis on you. Quit looking at it, or I'll have to worry about you turning into a sleepwalker."
"I am not a sleepwalker," adamaN forced. He was beginning to shake now. The weakened Leafeon tumbled out of his arms. He pushed himself up on hands and knees, then tried to rise to his feet, but stumbled.
"Wait… what is… I can see the sunset! I can taste the wine! There are three on each side! Perfectly symmetrical! Six rings! Very striking! Red suits and blue gowns! Except… no, I don't like the yellow with the red…"
He rose fully and took a step forward in a burst of new energy.
Cyllene wanted to bang her head into… a rock, most likely. She wouldn't have cocked an eye if The Sekki had started foaming at the mouth. adamaN was sleepwalking. His body had gone past shaking and into strange jerking. His suntanned skin had turned very pale, and his breathing was rough and stunted. She raised her wrist with the Red Chain, but it was still sticky and inactive.
"What touched you?" she demanded, seizing his arms and trying to push him back. He took another step forward. "A Ghastly, or that spinning thing?"
adamaN coughed. Deep shadows were spreading out under his eyes like paint.
Hypnosis causes hallucinations and dissociation without a loss of vitality. Night Shade causes excruciating pain. And an obvious loss of vitality combined with a total lack of pain…
She took her hands away immediately.
"Curse," she whispered. "It lured you into sleep with Hypnosis and then used Curse on you. adamaN, wake up."
She slammed her fists into his chest, but it was good as punching a rock. His nerves were dead. He kept stumbling forward, back toward the disc.
"Oh, I love this song~!"
"Oh, what the hell," Cyllene cursed, backing up and then sprinting forward to ram into him with all her might. Now he tumbled over again, body giving one giant spasm as it landed.
adamaN went still. More still, at least. His eyes had closed, and his breathing was even, if punctuated with whimpers. The Curse was still slowly draining away his life force. There was no way to put that violet disc back in its rock without a Pokémon.
And even if Abra could fight it would be no use here. It seems to be a Ghost-type.
She glanced at her wrist again. Upon her mental command, the Red Chain began to flicker deep red like embers, links digging into her skin as that powerful warmth rushed into her fingertips. The blood liquefied and poured down her forearm, once more soaking her sleeve.
"I'm going to turn you into a Gengar," she said, glancing furiously back toward the Pokémon in the rock, which was only screaming and throbbing louder the more of adamaN's essence it consumed. "It'll hurt, but you'll just have to deal with it. We don't have any other options. And no accursed impregnating me with flatulence, got that!?"
Her confused companion moaned something about the flavor of cake. Cyllene snapped her fingers, and the Red Chain flared fully to life. Right away, the telltale angry gurgling started to brew up deep in adamaN's gut. She watched his abs ripple and melt beneath a bloating torso, satiny purple-black fur creeping upward and out from the thin blue trail beneath his navel until it was wrapping around to his back.
"Stop," he grunted. "STOP!"
"You can feel pain again. Good. Just hold on. You're going to feel so much stronger in a minute or so… I think."
Thick purple claws tore out the end of adamaN's fingertips and dug into the ground on either side of him. His eyelids cracked open. The whites were bloodshot. The pupils were slits.
"Who… are… you?" he cried. "Eyebrowless… CREEP!"
"And just for that, I'm taking your skeleton away."
adamaN's chest collapsed as the gasses bloating his body dissolved his ribs. The gurgling heightened to thick, wet, SCHLUK-ing sounds that overtook the man's whole body. His muscles went floppy. His elbows and knees bulged with flesh until the fat could redistribute over shrinking limbs.
Fat? Is it really fat? Or is he… changing fully into a solid gas? For a moment, the thought of putting this all in the Poké Dex enthralled her. Turn a man into a Pokémon, then turn him back, and learn what he experienced…
And then she was interrupted. Quite forcefully, in fact. Something had grabbed the neck of her jacket and thrust her backwards with inhuman strength. She landed in the grass and let out a snarl of anger, instantly up on her knees.
"WHAT?" Cyllene forced for the second time that night. The visceral sounds of adamaN's transformation grew fuzzy in her mind. "WHO DID THAT?"
"I did," came a firm yet gentle voice. "May I ask why you are warping spacE at this hour?"
Cyllene stood up. A figure like a skinny black shadow was now standing between her and adamaN, whose magical percolating had dangerously slowed. He was still mostly human-shaped, but unable to move without bones. Simply purple and fat, with claws and red eyes and pointed ears and a blocky-toothed frown carved into his bulbous, neckless head.
"I need a Gengar to fight that spinning thing," Cyllene forced.
"You would need a Fairy-type Pokémon to best Spiritomb."
"Well, I'm just a little desperate with Spiritomb trying to suck the life out of the leader of the Diamond Clan. Gengar will work."
The figure cocked its head. "Spiritomb is not vicious. Just curious. It probably sensed the torment in this one. All these sleepwalkers seem to be tormented terribly, though no one knows why."
"He didn't start sleepwalking until just tonight. I would've liked if he stayed one of the normal ones."
"Then you have not been paying attention. The Diamond Clan motto is that All Things Remain to be Seen," said the figure, as if it should have been obvious. "Please continue your spacE-warping. He cannot remain in-between, and your power might prove useful."
She tried to steal a glance at the figure, but its features seemed blurred in the darkness. Six fingers on each hand? Seven? Knuckles that broke through the skin? Colorless eyes?
"I said, continue. You wouldn't want him to remain like this."
"Right," Cyllene replied. This new anomaly unnerved her more than Spiritomb. She closed her eyes, then opened them again, blue moons turned the color of blood. "Change for me," she told adamaN's body. "Transform for me. Transmute from flesh to roiling gas."
The gurgling and moaning resumed. adamaN's limbs shrank until they were stubby and pudgy. The satiny fur spread to cover him, while spikes and a short, dragonish tail bubbled up and shot out of his back. In just another another minute, he'd transformed completely, and now a dazed, frowning Gengar floated before her, still with those dark circles under its bloodshot eyes.
Again, Cyllene felt faint. The chain dimmed around her wrist. The Gengar stared at her. Hurt, but unsure exactly why. Confused, as if this was all a scary dream to it.
"I think he's still in the sleepwalking state," Cyllene remarked tiredly. She almost collapsed before the skinny black shadow reached out one spindly arm and lifted her up by the back of her jacket. "What do we do? He's… vulnerable to the Nobles now. I made another mistake."
"No," the figure reassured her. "You didn't. Gengar is a good choice."
"What?"
Nothing could coherently explain to her what happened next. Three hooked claws as long and sharp as katanas suddenly burst out of the Gengar's stomach, splattering purple all over Cyllene's face before it quickly evaporated back into gas. They gave off a radiant golden aura like sunlight, and were coated in a terrible heat.
The Gengar that was adamaN didn't seem to notice. It confusedly floated toward Spiritomb, then stopped, floating back toward Cyllene, then seemed to recognize Cyllene as its tormenter and floated straight upwards, then realized floating was a previously misunderstood phenomenon and let out a deep whine, tongue flopping out of its mouth and dripping.
"Good evening, Lady Sneasler," the skinny, shadowy figure said. "This sleepwalker has turned into a Ghost-type Pokémon, and you cannot hurt him with a Normal-type move like Slash. Do you still plan on trying to add him to your marvelous kill count?"
The claws withdrew. Something that was taller than a man and bathed in awful sunlight hissed furiously.
"SSSNEEEEAAAAAAA…"
Then the claws exploded again through Gengar's stomach.
"You were just in time to protect him from my Lady Sneasler's wrath," the shadowy figure told Cyllene, still dangling in midair from its six-or-seven fingertips. "Bravo. That was very smart of you."
"It… it was?"
Tears came into her eyes at the thought of being praised. Aided by the fresh bout of exhaustion, of course. And as "Sneasler" continued trying to skewer the former Clan leader, Cyllene felt herself drifting into an unfamiliar dreamless sleep.
house of black, house of light...
~N~
This fic is a DeviantArt content Trojan horse. Congratulations to anyone reading on FFN. You are dedicated for figuring out I updated without email alerts. ;)
Didn't plan to have a super spooky chapter for Halloween either! May I recommend my one-shot "The Modern Ignoramus" for more spooky fun?
AND I JUST REALIZED NOW I'VE BEEN SPELLING GASTLY WRONG. I THOUGHT IT WAS ONE OF THOSE THAT HAD A REAL WORD AS ITS NAME. Gonna keep it the way it is just for consistency.
Published by Syntax-N on FanFiction . Net and on Ao3 by scrivenernoodz October 31, 2023. Do not repost. Thank you for reviewing.
