(CW: Blood, gore, death)
Mars's purugly kept her claws on Thomas's chest as I recalled my pokemon and allowed some grunts to take their pokeballs. It took Galactic a hilarious amount of time to figure out how to restrain a girl with one arm in a cast – I laughed out loud until Mars slapped me – but they figured it out eventually.
"Any last words?" Mars teased, holding out a strip of tape.
I shrugged as best I could with an excessive amount of chains holding me against the pillar opposite Thomas. "Nah. I have faith."
Mars narrowed her eyes, but plastered the tape over my mouth without another word. Her purugly withdrew from Thomas but stayed nearby.
"Pokeballs and psychic are blocked," Coeur said through aura. Her voice in my head was steady, but I could tell she was nervous. "What's the plan?"
"Patience," I said. "We'll need patience. And we'll need faith."
The answer had been there all along, even if it had taken me a while to realize what was happening.
Mars strolled over to the huge machines stationed off to the side, where Charon was frantically typing on a keyboard. Behind him stood Cyrus, arms crossed, silent and still as the pillars around him.
"Is the obstacle still there?" Mars asked.
"It's waning," Charon said dismissively. "The Lake Trio is fighting the sky more than they're fighting us, and the sky is winning."
"If everything else is set up, let's get a move on. Saturn and Jupiter will only last so long," said Mars.
"What do you think we're doing?" Charon snapped. "Besides, you think those other twerps will see these two" – he gestured at me and Thomas – "and keep fighting?"
"Charon," said Cyrus. Mars and Charon shut up. "Focus."
"Yes sir," Charon said, typing more furiously than before.
I'd only seen Cyrus a few times before – more than anything, I'd heard of him through Looker's research. Born in Sunyshore, never lived up to his parents' expectations, attributes spirit to suffering and suffering to having a spirit. Needs therapy more than me or Looker, because while Looker and I may have issues, neither of us are trying to create a new world as a result. In person, he was just as rigid and gray as steel, with a personality to match.
Laid out in a circle around the dais was a series of red crystals – the Red Chain, although it seemed inactive currently. The Lustrous Orb and Adamant Orb sat atop two stone pedestals by the dais. Everything poised and ready.
I felt something start to loosen around me. "No, find the pokeball blocker first," I said.
"Here we go!" said Charon, pulling a lever.
The red crystals started to glow. They rose from the floor, starting to swirl. A whirlwind of red took shape, picking up speed until they seemed to join together in lines of red light.
Cyrus walked to the front of the dais. "At long last," he said. "My dream of a new world – a world devoid of spirit – comes to fruition."
Or you could like, not, I thought.
"Now, by the power of the ancients," he declared, "Dialga! Palkia! I summon thee!"
Charon was pushing buttons so frantically that I was sure Cyrus was only there for dramatic effect, but the draconic bellow that followed, resonating through the chamber, sent chills down my spine nonetheless.
Violet-black lightning crashed down from the rift in the sky. I flinched, and when I looked again, there they were, twenty feet tall and extraordinary with the gravity of their sheer presence. Dialga, night-blue, rigid as steel, serious as stone. Palkia, pink as a sunrise, a shape I couldn't describe to you because the body twisted and falsified corners and connected where it shouldn't have.
The Red Chain glowed brighter and snapped onto the Creation Duo, binding them in place. Dialga, or maybe Palkia, roared with fury. I felt the ground rumble and crack from the sound alone, but the Red Chain didn't falter. It had transformed – it was now fluid, spreading out like a spiderweb over the behemoths to encircle their limbs, their necks, their heads.
I only saw this because I was watching for it: a minor component of Charon's machinery sparked and dimmed.
"We're out!" yelled Coeur.
"Get them!" I shouted back.
Five of my pokemon and six of Thomas's sprang from the pokeballs piled in a corner and attacked whatever they could – Charon, Mars, the machines. Galactic grunts shouted and threw pokeballs. Mars's purugly ran to join Mars's other pokemon – Cyrus stood still, letting his subordinates fight for him.
The chains around me loosened and fell to the ground. I stepped out of them and caught Thomas as his shackles gave way immediately after. My sixth pokemon, having returned successfully from escaping her pokeball undetected and uninhibited (as she'd done many times before), deactivating the pokeball blocker (and, if Def's fighting was any indication, the psychic blocker), and freeing me and Thomas, rematerialized and grinned at me.
"Redwood," said Faith.
I'd have to gloat at Thomas later.
Trust, being who he was, came over to shield us. I ripped the tape from my mouth. "Are you okay?" I shouted over the cacophony of battle and the roars of legends.
"I've been better," Thomas mumbled.
I lowered him and leaned his back against the pillar. "Take a rest. Trust, protect him."
"You got it."
I dove into battle. Thomas's pokemon had fallen into a well-practiced rhythm I didn't want to mess with, but I directed my own team at the purugly swiping at Coeur, the toxicroak slashing at Prom, the skuntank sending pin missiles up at Hope. Nonverbal communication flew faster than I ever could have spoken aloud, and for a moment I was suddenly so grateful for the ability to speak without tripping over my tongue constantly, and then Faith entered battle against a particularly feisty croagunk and I had to focus again.
I heard something to my left, through the music in my ear – a golbat had frozen inches from my head, surrounded by a psychic glow in an unfamiliar shade of pink. Xatu blinked into existence, and I spotted Looker at the entrance to Spear Pillar.
"Stay back," I called.
He shook his head. "I've done enough of that."
A grunt came at him – in a quick maneuver I'd never seen from him, Looker shot a hand out, striking the grunt in the chest and sending him wheeling back breathlessly.
I turned my attention back to the dais, where Dialga and Palkia were struggling against the Red Chain. Charon was still at the helm of the computers controlling it, his hands flying across the controls. Cyrus stood uninterrupted amidst the sound and fury, gazing at his captured giants.
"Create for me," he declared, "a world free of emotion, of sin, of human impurity. Cleanse this world of its foul existence, and let us start anew!"
The dragon gods of space and time continued to protest against their bonds, but began to summon energy against their will. A tiny dark ball of… something corporeal and immaterial, something with and without mass, began to form between them.
"Faith, the machines!" I said frantically.
She dove in. Lights flickered, switches twitched, and Faith and another pokemon tumbled out the other end – Volkner's rotom, the one she'd befriended in battle, the ghost within the Ironworks. Rotom giggled and disappeared, and Faith giggled and vanished, and they weren't battling but they sure were distracted, and that's all I needed.
"Wreck that machinery!" I hollered, speaking aloud so Thomas's pokemon could hear me.
There was a lunge – of energy, of physical form – as our pokemon attacked. Charon screamed and threw his body over his machine, absorbing much of the damage but far from all of it. His battered, burnt form slid off of the console, revealing a sparking console and a monitor that had gone black.
The Red Chain stayed strong, shining like a web of fire, trapping the pokemon whose dual creation had grown from the size of a marble to the size of a fist. I looked around frantically. There was no one wearing the kind of crystal-enlaid gloves the admins had used against the Lake Trio, or any red crystals present other than the ones trapping the creation duo.
"Can we break the Red Chain?"
Prom went for it – enveloping himself in an aquajet headed by ice, he rocketed toward the center of the room. He cautiously skimmed a strand of the Chain that circled Palkia's leg, and the impact shot him away, singed, as if he'd been blasted sideways with a hyper beam. The Red Chain looked no different.
"Not sure about that one," he let me know.
I kept scanning for a solution, and finally I noticed: there was a third pedestal, empty, completing a triangle with the ones holding the Adamant and Lustrous Orbs.
Candice had mentioned some dispute over which legends fit into the creation of the world, but out of all the mythical and legendary pokemon of Sinnoh, only one fit the caliber of Dialga and Palkia, even if they'd been relegated to a shadowy background.
We didn't have an orb for them, but I ran anyways, dodging attacks. Mars's purugly swiped at my face – Xatu pulled her away from me.
I reached the pedestal, still struggling to figure out what to do in place of an orb. "Giratina, we need you," I said. "Help your siblings snap out of it."
No response. Unsurprisingly, Cyrus's lofty declarations had been just for show.
I racked my brains for answers. Legends. The Red Chain could control Dialga and Palkia because the Lake Trio could control Dialga and Palkia. It's all symbolic – the spirit taming space and time.
"Def, I need Thomas and Looker," I said, placing my hands flat on the stone surface.
In a blink, Looker was there, and in another there was Thomas, who stumbled. Def caught and held him. "What are we doing?" Looker shouted over the noise.
"The ancients claimed the spirit could conquer space and time," I said, quoting Cynthia. "I don't know if we count as the Lake Trio, but Giratina might listen to us."
I took one of Thomas's hands and placed it on the pedestal. Looker followed my lead and did the same.
Giratina, I said in my head, aiming for the not-quite-psychic-not-quite-aura channel that the Lake Trio used. Please. Come shake things up.
Legend tells that Giratina was imprisoned by Dialga and Palkia for his crimes, kept in an upside-down nightmare realm parallel to our own for the safety of life itself.
But. You know. Legends change over time.
I felt a chill, the attention of something that rarely listened. The center of the dais, underneath the primordial gods of spacetime, darkened suddenly – a shadow, cast by nothing in this room, growing darker and darker than black. The sounds of battle dimmed as the rest of the room noticed what was happening.
The eyes of chaos opened, red against the void.
You've likely seen depictions of Giratina as a sort of caterpie-dinosaur, either with legs or without – I'm here to tell you now, neither form is at all accurate. Giratina, I realized as they crawled out of the abyss, is formless, comprised of shades and fleeting shapes, disobeying every law of physics you didn't know you knew until you saw it flaunted, and any bodily structure is imagined by humans trying to make sense of what they've seen.
Chaos is a force antithetical to space and time – disordered, distorted, older than time, vaster than space. The spirit can quell it, but not in the same way it can harness spacetime. Chaos shakes the spirit, the spirit undermines chaos, – a constant battle, the experience of the living.
In translation: Giratina took one look at the Red Chain and fucking ripped it apart.
The dragons of creation bellowed, shaking the forces holding us all together. The melon-sized world vanished between them. I saw emotion on Cyrus's face for the first time.
"My new world!" he shouted. "A world where there is no spirit to dominate you, gods of space and time! Dialga, Palkia, you should want this too!"
Dialga swung his tail faster than seemed possible, shattering the orbs and sending Cyrus crashing into the ground in front of us. Giratina pincered him between a pair of appendages that have no exact parallel on any living creature, lifting him off the ground. Cyrus scrabbled for a handhold and grabbed the person nearest him by the trenchcoat.
"LOOKER!"
I lunged, but Giratina yanked him and Cyrus away, pulling both through the shadowy portal they had emerged from. Looker's startled expression vanished into the abyss.
I saw red – I saw pink, really, but so dark it was nearly crimson – and tried to follow them, but someone grabbed my hand.
"Evelyn, no!" Dawn shouted over the din. "We need you here!"
I looked back at the battle that my pokemon and friends were still tangled up in. Mars was screaming into a headpiece, Charon still lay smoldering on the ground, the Galactic grunts were falling into disarray. Lucas's lucario shoved Mars to the ground, pinning her there with a bone made of glowing ground energy.
Dialga and Palkia took off, soaring upward with a light grace you'd have expected of a celebi or shaymin or something powerful but tiny, flying toward the rift in the sky. They vanished into the gaping maw of another dimension, which snapped shut as soon as they left. The shadows on the floor were shrinking.
"I have already asked around," said Def. "Emmène-nous avec toi."
I held up six pokeballs, letting the beams of red light find and recall their occupants. My vision was still pink – with it was a sense of deep stillness, not of grief, but of a determination too diamond-strong to allow loss.
The battle had swung clearly in our favor. I looked at Dawn, her face full of worry, and I looked at Thomas, half-conscious but alive on the ground.
"Take care of Thomas for me," I said, squeezing her hand.
I let go, and as scared as she looked, she didn't hold me back. My pokemon safely tucked away, I leapt into the shadows.
lol did anyone ever notice Faith escaping her pokeball when she shouldn't have been able to?
Reminder to submit questions via the comments!