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Chapter 90
Part 2
I phased a finger into the stone. It buzzed me with an annoying tingle to my darkfire, like it was trying to nibble off little bits of my soul.
For a moment I almost wanted to throw up geodes at the thought of all those hideous Pokémon being real. But I decided for a moment to feign interest. I always envied the Pokémon who could evolve, and I wouldn't mind trying it out myself. Especially if it meant I could revert back to normal once I got bored.
"So… any idea how this thing works?" I asked the Flareon, trying to sound a bit more disinterested than I really was.
"To be honest, I only have secondhand information, as I didn't have much time to stick around and ask questions," said Hunter. "Apparently, you keep it on your person, and it charges over time using your elemental energy. I would imagine that anything which normally swells your elemental energy – stress and anger, mainly – would charge it."
"So… wait," I said, turning the stone over in my claws. "You just said you were going to give this to Lyre. So how do I know this works on Sableye too? You're not messing with me, are you?"
Hunter, annoyingly, looked unbothered. "The owner of the stone implied that it was created by some deity, be it Arceus or Jirachi, at the request of a mortal. So I would not expect them to work the same way they would in the human lands. I, too, have heard about the concept of 'mega energy' and I would assume this stone somehow converts your elemental energy into whatever is needed for the transformation. Perhaps you could charge it yourself and give it to another Sableye. But as a Pokémon who isn't capable of such a transformation, I couldn't tell you for certain."
Oh. So that's his angle. I see.
Go against the ex-boss, the one Pokémon in the world I never wanted to see again, knowing that all my contempt for her would only make me stronger.
How fitting. I would crave negative reinforcement in a practical sense, not just in a psychological sense. And maybe that would teach me to take the criticism head-on instead of avoiding it.
Alright. Maybe he was onto something.
I took one last look at the stone, and I tossed it into my mouth and swallowed it. Not to digest it, I mean, but as a dramatic way of storing it inside my body. I pushed it around until it was poking out of my back like the other gemstone-shards I kept there.
Hunter flicked his tail at me. "So… have I shown enough good faith, that we could perhaps talk about the holes in the walls?" he said with what I could only describe as sinister intent.
I groaned and flopped down onto the floor, admitting defeat. I mean, he was a teammate, like he said. And he was good at keeping secrets. Would I tell the same secret to Char if he asked nicely? Probably. So hey, what the heck, why not.
"Okay, so, the 'hole in the wall' is not a thing," I explained. "It's actually a job position on Team Cog. The best job position, most of us would say, and only a few of us get the privilege of being assigned to it. And the job position is… um… we spy on everyone. Like… everyone. All the time. Like in a military sense. We try to pinpoint the Pokémon with the highest-profile secrets in the entire base, and… um… we hide in the walls and listen. And that's what the 'hole in the wall' is. It's what we call it when you're assigned that job position."
The Flareon grinned and flicked his tail several more times. He knew where this was going. I knew where this was going. There was literally no way he wouldn't ask the next follow-up question, but I was still going to let him say it first.
"And… what exactly do you do with all this information you collect?" he asked plainly, trying to sound much less interested than I knew he was.
Alright, this is where it was going to get tricky to explain.
"We… okay, you know your little book on the desk over there where you write down all your leads? We have something like that. We call it the 'Book of Secrets'."
"Interesting," he said, pathetically failing to hide his excitement.
"But wait," I shouted quickly. "Before you even think about trying to bust into Team Cog and steal the book… it's uh… not really a book. That's another ghosts' cant thing. It's actually, um… a machine, I think, is the best way to describe it. It's about the size of this cabin. And uh… it has some rules as to how it works."
"I'm certainly listening," he said. Yeah, I bet he was.
"You have to touch it," I tried to explain, pushing through the brain fog. "It communicates with your mind, even if you're a dark-type, if you touch it. And um… it's supposed to only give Team Cog members information that's relevant to their job positions. There's different security clearances. Like, pretty much everyone on Team Cog knows about Zachel and Sabertooth, that's a level-1 secret, because we all gotta know it's OK to leave them alone and not, y'know, try to redirect them to different hallways or whatever, like you're supposed to do with mortal enemy Pokémon. But then there's a lot of secrets with elevated security… the machine doesn't tell you unless you're assigned to specific parts of the base, or for specific jobs. So… that's one obstacle you're gonna have to consider if you want to try getting any juicy gossip from it. And… that isn't even the worst problem you're gonna have to face…"
The brain fog was taking over now. The fuzzy memories were fighting back. I dug my claws into the floor in an attempt to ground myself to reality.
"See… if you're gonna steal secrets from Team Cog… there's one real big obstacle," I warned him, grumbling as I felt tendrils crawling into my imagination. "And I do mean… it's a big obstacle. That's why it was designed this way. See… for the bigger secrets, like those level-3 and above, it, um… if it tells you a secret, it actually has the power to erase it from your memory again. Kinda like how the memory-wipe works at the base exits? So the next time you interact with the Book of Secrets, or you try to leave the base… boom, laser-guided amnesia. Gives secrets, and takes them right back again. I'm… ugh."
I clawed at my head, feeling a migraine coming on. I was hitting the limits of my available memory, straining to tell him anything more.
"I don't know how it works, or how far its influence reaches. Or under what circumstances it will take its secrets back. I'm sure I've 'borrowed' plenty of secrets over the years here, and I'd have no way of knowing. It's… it's not fun to think about."
That did it. The gears were turning and the flames were burning in the fox's head now. This was all a puzzle to him. He looked up and stared at one of the stolen torches, as though it would help connect him with the mindset of a ghost. No doubt contemplating the blatantly impossible task of trying to gain intel from our Book of Secrets.
"What if you learn a secret yourself? Without the use of the machine?" he asked. "Can the machine take away a secret it didn't provide?"
Another uncomfortable question I did not enjoy thinking about. "The spell certainly has that power," I admitted, "again, like the memory-wipe. Ether swears upon Kyurem it only takes away secrets it gave us in the first place. But if she were lying, we literally would have no way of knowing."
Now he was up and pacing across the room, back and forth. His eyes were sparking with possibilities.
"Who decides how important the secrets are?" Hunter wondered. "Does the machine decide?"
Ooh, here comes the brain fog again. Some part of my mind was desperately trying to keep me from remembering something. But that was just an occupational hazard when working on Team Cog. You get intrusive amnesia sometimes, but you just learn to live with it. Happens all the time.
"Nah, the machine can't really think for itself, if that's what you're asking," I tried to explain. "I think Pokémon like Ether have to make decisions about which secrets are most harmful. So I think how it works is… some Pokémon operates the machine and looks at all the secrets, and sorts them by severity. Then, if necessary, the machine takes the secrets away from the decision-maker once the decisions have all been made. Pretty sure Ether does this all the time. Then the secrets are given out to Team Cog members as the machine deems necessary."
"Am I to assume that only ghosts can operate it?" he asked.
"Yup. That's why we literally only allow ghosts on Team Cog," I explained. "The machine works using ghost-type energy. You can only interface with it if your soul has the ghost-type element."
Still undeterred. Hmm. How much more was I going to have to tell him before he got the picture that it's pointless to try?
"What if one were to write down the secrets they learn?" he wondered. "In, for instance, a real book? Would that not help you regain the secrets you lost?"
"Yeah, about that," I started to say. "We're not allowed to write down basically anything the Book of Secrets tells us. We have a term for that, too, in ghosts' cant. We call it a 'deposition.' That's when a secret starts spreading unnaturally, in ways that are only possible if the Team Cog ghosts slipped up. So if there's someone tattling on us, or if someone wrote something down, the Book of Secrets will figure that out pretty quickly, since it'll have to start erasing that secret from more Pokémon who aren't supposed to know it, or couldn't have known it naturally. Whenever a deposition pops up, we have to take emergency precautions to deal with it. Destroy it, or erase memories, or whatever's necessary."
I shot him a challenging snarl. "So… yeah. Good luck dealing with all that, if you're after Team Cog's level-5 secrets," I said. "Honestly don't know how I'm gonna help you with any of this. Even if I could make it back in Ether's good grace, the precautions around the Book of Secrets are so tight that it's kinda insane. That's part of the reason we've been able to rely on base security for so long. Some secrets… really should not get out, like at all."
Hunter had that look in his eye that said "But that means there's still a chance." Like, I really just directly told you how impossible this is, up to and including literal memory erasure, and you're still poking around at the idea of getting answers this way? I kinda wanted to mega-evolve right there and grab him and yell in his face "Look, flameball, it's not happening."
Then he told me, "Something you said just now doesn't add up."
I got back up to my feet and crossed my arms at him. "Yeah, how so?"
"Well… maybe that's an overstatement," he said. "It all somewhat adds up, especially since it's kept your base operational this whole time. But it adds up to… I suppose I could say… a suspiciously incongruent approximation. And I'm fairly certain you're not lying… or at least, not knowingly lying. I'm trying to think here… If Team Cog is watching the whole base, specifically in search of high-profile secrets, do you think they know about the portal?"
"I promise you they know about the portal," I said. "Team Ember mentions it all the time. The ghosts in the walls have heard. They've figured it out. Can't tell you how classified of a secret it is, but I can tell you that they know. If it somehow turns out that they don't know, I'll swallow my own hand."
"…But because of the way the Book of Secrets operates, it erases that knowledge from the minds of any Pokémon who aren't meant to know," he said, trying to finish my explanation for me. "So it doesn't raise a huge fuss. So High Intelligence never learns and shuts it down. But the portal is a security risk. Likely the worst security risk the base has ever seen… so why would they allow it to exist?"
"Maybe because it only operates on an allowed list of Pokémon? I mean, we did implement a whole lot of our own safety precautions when we installed it," I figured. "Yeah, it creates an extra ward pinhole on the base, but overall it's pretty safe, since you need to be inside the base to become part of Team Ember in the first place. I mean, like I said, we can't act on every juicy secret we know. Only the really bad ones. We've still gotta let Pokémon do what they think is right, without just pouncing them at every turn. Maybe the portal isn't as bad of a secret as you think."
Hunter wasn't convinced. He paced and paced with his head to the ground, as though tracking his own scent in circles.
"OK, what gives?" I spat at him, getting annoyed with his persistence. "What's on your mind?! Are you thinking about breaking into the Book of Secrets? Do you think that's gonna help you find Scythe?"
"Perhaps," he hummed at me. "It would certainly be a logical next step. I'm trying to consider all the resources at my disposal. I have a shapeshifter… I have an illusionist… And yet… I wonder."
He looked at me with a grin almost as crazy as the ones I've been known to give.
"I think I have a plan," he told me.
Urk... my head...
Woke up with a migraine a bit more intense than I'm comfortable with. Feeling the memory-tendrils every once in a while is normal. Feeling them burrow into your brainstem and leech out your spinal fluids is another. They got a bit too aggressive for my liking this time.
But eh, whatever. It was another day. Another day, another mission, another chance to figure myself out. Though I'd need a few berries to get myself moving. Darkfire was being groggy.
Hardly noticed that I was in the entirely wrong room of the base. Hardly noticed that the fox next to me wasn't Arcana, not until he spoke.
"Kerzek," he said, sounding concerned about something. "What's the last thing you remember?"
"The... last thing I remember..." I grumbled, scratching my head. "Uhhh, that's a weird question to ask first thing in the morning." Honestly, I hated questions like that. They can catch you off guard, before you have a chance to keep all your secrets and alibis straight. Might end up telling the truth to the wrong Pokémon if you're not careful. So I had to take a good look at whomever I was talking at right now.
"Hunter? What the heck?!" I shouted. "What are you doing in my room at this hour?"
I wasn't prepared to meet his face. I'd never seen the fox frightened before. Like, actually frightened. "This isn't your room," he only said. "I... don't actually know where we are."
I clawed my way up to my feet and looked around. Didn't sense a lot of spirits around. None in the walls, none in the halls. The room itself looked like a normal sort of bedroom in the division base, though it was impossible to tell just by looking which team hall we were in. There was only one hint: the room was empty.
"Unoccupied team hall, it looks like," I said. "Down on... I think this is B9F? I think. Uhh... how did I get here, exactly...?"
"Please, tell me," he said again, sniffing around. "What is your last memory?"
I tried to shake away all the tendrils and think. It certainly felt like time had been passing normally… but that's how it works. I felt like I'd spent the whole day doing normal things in normal places, but I couldn't tell you what any of those things are. The memories were all just "It's OK, unremarkable things happened, nothing to worry about, nothing worth remembering specifically."
I combed back through my recent experiences. "Uh... last I remember, we were in your cabin," I recalled. "I had just told you about... well... the hole in the wall. And you said something about having a plan."
"No..." he growled at himself and started to hop around like he was on fire. "No, no, no. NO!"
The Flareon did a little fiery roar which I'd almost dare call adorable, puking out an angry fireball at the tunnel wall. "No… No, I was… I can't… I wasn't ready for this…!" he seethed. "I've been through memory blackouts before… and I suspected there was one coming, but… I didn't think it would happen so soon. I wasn't ready… If only I had a few more hours to prepare… Auugh! Or even a few minutes!"
He shook out his fur and glared at me with fierce determination. "I learned something," he growled. "Probably something useful. I still feel it there. I feel the epiphany in the back of my mind, taunting me… I solved the puzzle… and now it's gone. And someone came and just took it right back away from me. And by my standards… that's plainly unacceptable."
I wanted to be like "Meh, that's just an occupational hazard when you poke around at the things you really don't need to know," but I could tell that wasn't getting through to him. This fox loved secrets with a fervor even I'd rarely seen before. He'd melt all the ice off Ether before he'd let anyone get away with this. And to be honest I had no problem with that.
"Wait. How do you know you didn't prepare for it?" I asked, walking back with him into the main halls of the base. "For all we know, you could've set up the perfect scheme to get back all the memories you lost. Sounds like something you'd do."
"N-no, I… I think I would have remembered setting up a memory gambit," Hunter sighed. "There's a whole process to it, with mementos and codes that only I would understand. And I know this was a non-consensual erasure… Domo didn't do this, otherwise he wouldn't have been able to get into your dark-type head and take your memories too…"
It seemed… so normal. Like we'd just returned from a routine day mission. There were even other teams in the hall around us. A Blastoise nudged me in the back and said, "Whassa matter? Lost your way?" and walked around me.
I glanced around. Same old Gold Division, same old halls. Nobody else acted like anything strange happened. Teams heading downstairs to eat. Even an old Shuppet co-worker flashed me a smile as she drifted past. I gleamed my eyes at her like she was suspicious, though I didn't really have any reason to. I just felt like it.
Now, I didn't notice until we stepped back into the main halls, but I wasn't feeling so hot either. My skin was crawling with the feeling of maggots all over me. My back had a tightening feeling, like there was some kind of boil on my back. And whenever I moved wrong, I felt a sprain shoot right through to my darkfire. I was not happy.
"There's probably something else worth mentioning," I said, coming to the only reasonable conclusion. "I'm pretty sure I… might have… used the mega stone."
"…What…?" he barked at me, squinting at my back.
"Yeah… the stone is still there, but I don't feel its energy anymore," I groaned, reaching to pluck the thing out of my back. "That, and I might feel like my whole body has deflated, or something. I don't know how to describe it… I've never really felt this way before, even after getting my memory zapped."
Except, when I tried to pluck the mega stone out of myself, it... it wasn't there.
I kept grabbing and clawing at the spot I know I put it. I phased my arm right through my stomach to see if I could grab it from the inside. It just... it wasn't there. Only the phantom feeling that it should have still been there.
I glared at Hunter. He looked back at me and I could tell he understood. The stone was missing.
Delightful. Apparently I missed quite a lot.
"I think your plan has gone either horribly wrong, or horribly right," I hissed at him. "Whatever it was. What do we do now? I kinda want that mega stone back. I was looking forward to lugging around an obnoxious invincibility gem for a few hours. And actually have the memories to know whether I hated or enjoyed it."
Hunter stared blankly into the Gold Division for a moment. First time I saw the guy so at a loss. He always looked like he had the spark of some idea going on, always held himself so confidently. But now there was no hiding that he was baffled. Almost felt sorry for him, except that I probably felt the same way. Always used to knowing the hidden details of the base, being in on all the relevant secrets...
For the first time, I felt that part of myself threatened. Someone reached into my mind and took away something I really wanted to know. If that wasn't a whopping dose of negative reinforcement, I don't know what else would be.
"So... what do we do now?" I wondered. Even though I knew he still hadn't figured that out yet. I'm kinda mean like that sometimes. Can't help it.
"Remind me," he said. "What your last memory was. I know you just told me. Please tell me again."
"Fine. Last memory... we were in your cabin," I repeated flatly, "and I just got done telling you about the Book of Secrets."
"Book... of Secrets..." he mouthed.
He looked at me, and the spark was back in his eyes. He was onto something. His passion and defiance of the odds was... dare I say it... oddly infectious.
He shot off back in the direction of Ember's hall, and I needed to climb up through floors and run through walls just to keep up with him. We even ran into Saura on the way out to a mission, with Dragonbane, Lyre, and Gemstone tagging along. Hunter tried to evade smalltalk, but asked for the date and time, and that's when we learned that we lost two entire days... somehow.
"Do you... by chance... know what we were doing for the past two days?" Hunter tried asking the team, and he tried to look all mysterious and pretentious about it, as though he had everything under control.
"Not a CLUE!" shouted Dragonbane. "We've seen you around, but you're always being secretive and up to your own adventures. But that's why we leave you alone unless you ask for us!"
But sometimes it's better just not to get caught up in nonsense. I think flamey kinda forgot that in the moment. So I stepped up and just cut to the chase, and I said, "Look, Saura, we've both been hit with precision-guided amnesia. We have no idea what we've been doing for the past two days. So if you could get together with your team and, I dunno, maybe ask around and see if anyone else has seen us recently, we'd appreciate it."
"Whoa, seriously?" Saura said, looking concerned. "Wait, you're not joking, are you?"
"How often do I joke about these things?" I returned flatly, looking pointedly disappointed at him.
"Has the point! Blue Magi, she is not!" Lyre piped in, though I have no freaking idea what she was talking about.
"Well... okay, we'll... We'll ask around," said Saura, looking more thoughtful. "Hopefully someone saw you somewhere."
"Yes... even if it might not seem significant, I'd like any information you can possibly scavenge up," said Hunter with more humility than I'd probably ever heard him speak. "Anything which can remove unknown variables will help more than you can imagine."
Once Saura was out of earshot, I got to tease the fox. "Had to make me say it, huh?" I cackled. "Still trying to impress Saura, are you? Didn't want him to think you made a mistake?"
He pointedly refused to humor me with a reply. We doubled our pace into the war room and the secret hideout, passing by Tallie and Ray on the way in, who didn't seem to pay us mind.
When we reached his cabin, he pounced straight at his book, nearly tore the pages open. He flipped to the last written page and scanned it. "Book of Secrets, Book of Secrets," he kept muttering to himself. "Tell me what you know."
And I thought, what? Was this his plan? Did he count on himself recording his findings into his Book of Secrets before the memory gambit began?
And I thought to myself... Team Cog should have something like that, too. Have a place where we can pool all our secrets together. It's a good idea. Seems like something we should implement. Though, it would be a logistical nightmare, making sure Pokémon only learned things relevant to their jobs, especially for the really big stuff. But we had the spells necessary to pull it off.
In fact... it was too good of an idea, I thought. Why hadn't someone come up with that already? We could even call it the Book of Secrets. Sounds ghosty and mysterious. It'd be perfect for us.
"Ah-ha!" Hunter shouted. And he pointed to a page in the book. It said:
BOOK OF SECRETS: TEAM COG DEVICE, STORING HIGH-PROFILE SURVEILLANCE DATA GATHERED FROM GHOSTS. LOCKED BEHIND CLEARANCE LEVELS. MEMORY ERASURE THREAT. DUAL PURPOSE?
And I was like... oh. That's why it sounds like a good idea. Because we already had it.
Wait, what? Why did I forget that?
Did... did the Book of Secrets take away my awareness of the Book of Secrets? What the...?
Why would it do that? I thought we couldn't do that, because... it would cause a recursion paradox or something! Even so, that's the only explanation. The Book of Secrets erased itself from my memory.
"That tells me what erased our memories," said Hunter. "Not why. But it's a start. Wait… perhaps I did do this on purpose. I have no way of proving it, but I might have a hypothesis."
"Why the heck would you voluntarily want to unlearn a huge secret..." I grumbled. "Seems like an absolutely backward way of going about things."
"Assuming I willingly gave up my awareness of the Book of Secrets… No, no, I can't think of anything that would logically follow," he sighed. "Not unless I wanted to remove it as a distraction. Perhaps I accepted the memory erasure, keeping me from wasting any more time pursuing the Book of Secrets as an answer to all my problems. But that wouldn't explain what happened to the mega stone… That wouldn't explain a lot of things, to be honest."
"Look, I think you just have to accept the facts," I kind of yelled. "We tried something, we failed, and we paid the price. Or should I say, you tried something, you overstepped your bounds, and you slipped up and messed with the division base security. So I think maybe you need to get it through your thick skull, that whatever you did, you should probably just let it go. Probably had nothing to do with finding Scythe anyway. So maybe you just need to get back to doing the job you were hired for, and stop poking around at gossip just for the sake of it. I don't eat every shiny rock I see, and neither should you. Whatever. I'm not helping you with your fuzzbrained schemes anymore. I have missions to run. If you need my help again, you have a shapeshifter who can turn into me."
So I left him there to stew in his confusion and went back to the hideout. I was more than a little peeved at losing that stone, but I wasn't going to let it mess up the rest of my day. I went all my life thinking that mega evolution was a myth, so I don't see why I can't just go back to that.
There was one thing that caught my eye, though. In his book, he wrote "dual-purpose" near his description of the Book of Secrets. Unfortunately for him, and thanks to enough Team Cog operations, I'm very familiar with that term.
Dual-purpose. That's when you have some kind of a scam, where you just want to do something at the expense of other Pokémon, but you don't want them to argue with it. So you add a secondary purpose to it, so that it sounds legitimate, or even helpful. Anyone willing to give you the benefit of the doubt will fall for the secondary purpose, until the main primary purpose fades away and gets forgotten altogether. The classic example is when you want to lock up some prisoners, so you tell them you're locking the door to keep the bad guys out, instead of to keep them in. It's not a lie, exactly… it's just a dual purpose.
Kind of like how we have torches all over the base as an excuse to hide in the walls and listen to everyone's secrets. Which, by the way, I just made up. That's not real. I mean, we do both of those things, but that's just a coincidence. But if it weren't a coincidence, that would be the perfect example of a dual-purpose scheme.
So Hunter was asking himself whether the Book of Secrets was one of those schemes. Was it? If so, I don't remember ever encountering the supposed second purpose. But then again, whether or not I remember things doesn't really matter when it comes to a device which regularly erases our memories. Point is, it didn't seem to be breaking anything. If there was a conspiracy, it seemed to be helping us keep the base safe. So it was best to just leave it be, I think.
And again, what did this have to do with Scythe anyway? Hunter seemed way off the mark with this one.
So back to the usual routine, I went and asked Tallie what she wanted me to do today, and she told me I was assigned to the Gemporium. Said that we had an order for blue gems. Some water-based team wanted to decorate their hall, so they needed stuff like lapis lazuli, aquamarine, topaz. Okay, whatever. Waste of perfectly good gems. Gems are for selling, enchanting, or eating. Not hanging on the walls. But hey, nobody said I couldn't eat some on the trip home.
Hour later, I got there, phased through the entrance which was still blocked off, and started figuring out how I was going to navigate down to the lower levels which still had the biggest color variety of gemstones left.
But someone was already at that cave, waiting for me. Our favorite Shedinja showed himself from the wall, and I said, "Hey, it's a surprise to see you. Tallie didn't tell me I had any help today. What are you doing here?"
And he said, "I was watching. Just like you asked me to."
I said, "What? Watching?"
He said, "I saw everything. I saw it all. And now that nobody's around to listen, I can tell you what I know."
I said, "So you know where I've been the past two days? Because I asked you to keep an eye on me?"
"Not entirely, but I saw most of the important parts," he told me.
Then he produced from his body a smooth, rainbowy stone, set it on the ground in front of me. "Also got away with this," he reported. "You're welcome, by the way. That wasn't part of the plan, and it wasn't easy."
I grabbed that mega stone fast and tossed it inside of myself. It had a bitter, raw flavor to it, kind of felt like I was eating a freshly-enchanted wonder orb. I couldn't tell whether it was charged enough to let me evolve, but it certainly tasted like it was a bomb that had just finished exploding.
I thought… wait, so was this my memory gambit? Not the flamefox? Mine? Oh, this was getting interesting. I had to give myself an evil grin, just because.
"So… you helped Hunter break into the Team Cog headquarters and you almost got to the Book of Secrets," reported Watcher. "But you got caught. You didn't tell me whether or not you got caught on purpose, but if you ask me, it really looks like you didn't even try to escape. Ether confronted you. Said she didn't like how easily you slipped in. Then she said, an incident like this proves the existence of the Book of Secrets should be classified as a higher-priority secret. So she went and changed it. Now members who aren't on Team Cog anymore, like you, don't get to keep the secret after they leave. So she made you forget about the Book of Secrets."
"Then how do you know about it?" I asked. "Wouldn't your memory get eased too?"
"I'll be honest, I don't actually know what the Book of Secrets is," he admitted. "I'm just explaining what I saw, just like you told me to do. I assume by context clues, it's something to do with trade secrets of Team Cog."
And I thought… well, that's interesting. That's twice now… or, three times if I count myself… someone was able to infer something about the Book of Secrets just by its name. This thing that's apparently so low-profile and intimidating because it keeps track of things nobody is supposed to know, that we just moved it to being a level-3 secret… All you need is the name, and a little bit of context, and you can figure the rest out yourself.
Oh. Ohh. I'm starting to see a pattern.
I remember thinking in the moment: that's interesting. The secret was kept, and not kept, at the same time. Nobody realized it, and that's what made it brilliant.
See, I didn't fully realize it yet, but we had a system of keeping track of secrets even after they're erased from your memory. Leaving mementos for ourselves, to jog our memory of things we're not supposed to exactly know… without leaving depositions that can be easily traced and destroyed.
Something was dual-purpose and it wasn't the Book of Secrets. It was the words "Book of Secrets."
It was the ghosts' cant, our secret lingo. The words that don't mean what they sound like they mean. It was someone's way of circumventing the memory erasure, clinging to things that they didn't want to let go of. When words mean two things at once, memory-erasure spells aren't going to erase it completely. So on the surface, ghosts' cant was just a fun way of hiding trade secrets from the other resistance teams when we talk about them in plain sight. But the primary purpose… someone was trying to hold onto secrets they weren't supposed to have anymore.
That was the trick. Sometimes, words mean two things at once. So if you take away one of those meanings, you might still have a breadcrumb trail to lead you back to the other meaning.
But like I said, I wasn't coming to that conclusion yet. I was still trying to figure out if Hunter and I got our memories erased on purpose. My thoughts were starting to come together, but nothing was too concrete yet. Couldn't really conclude anything productive.
I let Watcher tell me the rest of what he witnessed.
"This is where things get strange," Watcher told me. "What happened next, I don't think anyone expected it. So… they went to erase your memory of the Book of Secrets, but you really didn't want your memory erased. You fought it. And somehow, when you fought it, you, uh… transformed."
"Wait, wait," I shouted. "I mega-evolved? Did you see it happen?"
"Y-yes," said Watcher. "It was one of the strangest things I've ever seen. Your ghost-aura got super potent. Your red gemstone in your chest, it started growing. You kind of went psycho. And you almost were able to stand up to the Team Cog ghosts. And Ether herself."
I was drooling. This sounded absolutely delicious. But then came the obvious question. "So… why'd I fail?"
"Because your transformation lasted all of ten seconds," Watcher told me. "Before you got too strong, Ether yanked your stone away and you went back to normal. Then she finished the memory wipe and ejected you and Hunter. They tried to lock the stone in the team vault. But I swooped in and convinced one of the ghosts to take it to Morrik instead. Then I swooped in and swiped it from storage when Morrik had the protections down. Like I said, wasn't really a straightforward task to get that thing back, so I hope you're happy."
I touched my chest-gem. The gem that isn't actually a gem, but it's part of me, kinda helped refract my ghost-type energy when I needed to focus it for attacks and stuff like that. That's the thing that turns into the supposed Mega-Sableye shield? I had no idea. Kind of gross, actually. But still I wanted to try it. And I wanted to actually be awake to enjoy it.
So I fought the memory erasure. Hunter said that stress could power up the gem. I fought it, and the stress that came from trying to cling to my memories, that's what powered up the mega stone. It must have been a fast charge.
I made sure to hide it all the way inside of myself this time. I had a feeling I couldn't let certain Pokémon know I had it back. And I didn't like the fact that I was about to pull off something completely insane.
Or maybe I did like the fact. Maybe I liked being insane. Maybe I was totally buzzed about what I was planning to do next. I don't know, and I don't think I'll tell you for sure. Use your imagination.
But Hunter was right when he said that something didn't add up here. I didn't get what he meant at the time, but when I was contemplating what I was about to do when I got back to the base, I really noticed that something about this whole situation was off. And that was:
What, exactly, did Ether think I was going to do? How exactly was I a threat to the Book of Secrets?
I wasn't on Team Cog anymore, so it wasn't going to let me have any security clearance to hear any secrets. And Hunter isn't even a ghost-type, so he couldn't have done anything. Worst case, we would have made it to the machine and we wouldn't have been able to do anything with it.
So what's the big deal? Why did she make a huge fuss about us breaking in and almost getting to the Book of Secrets? What freaked her out so much that it required stealing my shiny new toy and changing the security clearance on the Book of Secrets, something that's never even posed a problem until now? Was Ether really that afraid of Hunter?
Or… was she afraid of me? Why? Why does she have to be afraid of me? I'm just a stupid ex teammate who got tired of being around her. This can't just be retaliation. There has to be something else going on here.
Also, I started wondering, why did I agree to this? I would have known this too, especially back when I had my full memories of the Book of Secrets. I would have known there was no way to get any information out of it. So what kind of a scheme did I agree to? What made me march up there and be foolish enough to trigger a mega-evolution in front of Ether and freak her out? What did I think I was trying to accomplish?
I told Watcher thanks for giving me the stone back, even though he only gave me more questions than answers in the end. I wanted to turn around and go back right then and there, but Watcher said, "Wait, we have to collect blue crystals, remember?"
I said, "Oh, so the job wasn't just a fake excuse to get us alone together so we could talk about these things?"
He said, "No, sorry. Tallie isn't in on this. It's just you, me, and Hunter, as far as I'm aware. The job is real. And I don't know about you, but I don't want a failure on my record."
I growled at myself. Some memory gambit this was. If I actually came up with this memory gambit, I was disappointed in myself. A fake job would have been much more awesome to set up. And here I was, just collecting boring treasure while some earth-shattering revelation probably existed right in front of my eyes.
I was actually starting to feel like there was no memory gambit. Maybe this all happened on accident. But now I knew how I wanted it to end.
Once the job was over and done, I dug deep down into myself and checked that mega stone. I tried tapping into it, like how you'd tap into the energy of any other stone, and its current seemed to be dead. It didn't want to work. Well, that just meant I'd have to power it up myself. And what better way to do that, then having a little meeting with my least favorite Pokémon in the world?
So I went up to the Team Cog managerial headquarters, just like in the good old days. They're on floor [redacted] but you need to know the correct wall to phase into.
To my surprise, nobody stopped me. Almost as though I was just any other ghost. There were other Sableye on Team Cog, I was sure. But if something huge happened to me, I was surprised everyone wasn't on the lookout for me to make a return.
It was all coming back to me now. I knew the path that went to the Book of Secrets. So I started walking that path. The other ghosts didn't pay any mind. It felt so weird. Almost as though I was wearing a disguise and nobody noticed. Talk about impostor syndrome.
Then I got to the big cube-shaped door that blocks the chamber of the Book of Secrets. Up until that point, nobody stopped me. So I was hoping to the grace of Giratina that nobody would stop me from going inside. But the moment I touched the door, I heard a voice.
"Kerzek… you can't."
I turned around and yup, there was Ether. Looking all firm and cold like she always did.
Oh yes. This was already starting to charge the mega stone. I felt it. Just a little bit at first. But I knew I could push this as far as I wanted.
"I can't what?" I challenged in my favorite way, quiet and straightforward.
She didn't answer right away. It was pretty awkward. I think she realized that whatever she was about to tell me not to do, it would just make me want to do it more. What really bothered me, though, is how she didn't ask how I still knew of the Book of Secrets. Almost like she expected me to get my memories back and she was waiting for my return.
"Just tell me," I finally said. "If you're trying to keep a secret right now, you're not doing either of us any favors."
"It's not that simple," she told me, afraid for some reason to get closer to me. "There's really no reason that you need to know."
"But you can't stop me, can you?" I guessed. "Is that why you're so nervous?"
Again, she really didn't want to answer. Like her ice was finally getting to her smug little brain and freezing up.
"Someone changed the machine," she finally said. "Nobody can figure out who changed it, or how it works. But… it has a serious problem. And despite the fact that I'm the primary administrator of the machine, I can't change it back. All I can ask is that you please don't go in there… for all of our sakes. This isn't necessary."
"But why me specifically, though?" I asked.
She really, really didn't want to reply, but eventually she did, once she thought of something cryptic enough to say. "I can't revoke your privilege," she said. "It won't let me. Says I don't have the authority. It's a glitch that I cannot repair."
Hmm. Very interesting. And convenient.
"What changed?" I tried asking. "Did Hunter change it?"
"No… this change happened long before Hunter was admitted into the base," she said. "Long before you traded to Team Ember, even."
"So the machine was messed up while I was still here?" I asked, making sure I understood. "While I was still on Team Cog, and regularly using it?"
"Yes," was her reply.
More silence. I turned to look at the door again, moving as though I'd walk right on through.
"I will use force, if necessary," she warned me.
Without skipping a beat, I said, "So will I." And I reached into my stomach and grabbed the mega stone. Still didn't feel like it was strong enough to activate, but Ether got the picture. She backed off immediately and scowled at me, looking all like, "How dare you! How is that possible!"
"Kerzek, look… nothing good will come of this," she begged and begged. "It would only destroy things. Do you like this base? Do you like the Gold Division? You wouldn't… wish ruin upon the entire Gold Division, would you? Is that really what you want? To destroy this place we've been protecting… this place we've helped maintain for nearly a century now?"
I clutched the stone. "Maybe what I want is for you to trust me enough to make that decision for myself," I told her back. "Yeah. I absolutely love the Gold Division. So maybe I want to know what's really going on with it. Even if it's messed up. Even if it's super bad. What, are we a front for the Master? Are you selling all our secrets to him? Is this all a big mystery dungeon, which is why everyone always gets lost in the halls and nobody knows how many floors the base really has, or how nobody can seem to remember how much time has passed when we're down here? Huh? You really think I can't handle knowing something like that? Are you afraid? Maybe I'm stronger than you think, boss. Maybe sometimes I can actually handle the things that life throws at me."
This is usually the part where I say, "But I didn't actually say any of that out loud," but this time I did say it out loud. Some of it was stuff I've been waiting to say for years. And let me tell you, sometimes it feels really good to say the quiet part out loud. I think I got more energy in the mega stone just by saying that stuff, than I would have if I just let her speak down to me.
I saw the defeat in her eyes. She knew there was nothing more she could tell me. Nothing she could say would make me stop. She didn't respect me and I had to prove her wrong. But what really kind of scared me, made the darkfires wobble a bit, was how personally she took this. And that's what didn't make sense to me. She wasn't fighting to protect the Gold Division. That's what she said, but her aura told me otherwise. That she was fighting to protect herself. Like her own ego, her own sense of self-worth was at stake here, and she'd be ruined if she let me in that door.
So, I went into the door, I took the mega stone with me, and I didn't look back.
I had completely forgotten what the Book of Secrets looks like, since it had gotten erased from my immediate memory. But it came rushing back to me the moment I saw it. It was three big blue obelisks that were linked together, almost looked like a giant chair or something, the way they were arranged. They were humming and buzzing with ghost energy, and had some Unown runes carved into the side.
I decided something before I touched the pillar to tap into the mental-stream. That if this really was some secret that would legitimately throw the entire Gold Division into panic, I'd let the machine take the secret away from me again. But it was too late now, I was too deep, too close to an answer. I had to know.
So I grabbed the side of one of the obelisks with one claw, while still clutching the mega stone in the other. I vividly remembered grabbing the obelisk this same way when I worked for Team Cog, so a lot of weird, half-memories flooded back to me as I felt the artificial ghost soulstream link to my mind.
And to my first surprise… yep, it let me interface. Even though I wasn't on Team Cog anymore. Extremely convenient.
I saw the mental interface. Projected straight into the mind's eye, there was a list of teams, presumably all of them in the Gold Division. I could think about one of the teams, and I'd see a curated list of known and relevant facts to those teams. I could also filter the list of secrets by floor, or by security clearance, or I could ask my own questions for the machine to look up.
So the first question I asked was… "Why do I still have access to the system?"
YOU ARE A MEMBER OF TEAM EMBER, was the reply.
...What? What does that have to do with anything?
I asked it to escalate to maximum security clearance. The maximum, I've been told, was level 5. Ether was technically Level 6, but she was the only one – the main administrator, as she mentioned.
So imagine my surprise, as I was sitting and watching the list fill out with highly sensitive data, and I saw my security clearance rise past level 5… past level 6… past level 7… all the way to level 10.
Now I was actually shaking. I could see it all. The full contents of the Book of Secrets. This was terrifying. Part of me didn't want to see all of this. But I couldn't quit now. I had questions to ask.
"Why does Team Ember have anything to do with my security clearance?" I asked the machine.
TEAM EMBER: LEVEL 10 SECURITY CLEARANCE – SUPERSEDE POLITICAL MATTERS, answered the machine.
And that's when I saw it. I was browsing the list of data, and I noticed the secret at the top of the list – the only level-10 secret I could see. And what caught my attention was its title.
SECURITY LEVEL 10 HEADLINE: HOLE IN THE WALL
This is what Hunter was asking for. This is what he wanted since the start. I thought it meant one thing, because that's how we used the term on Team Cog. Turns out it was a dual-purpose term. Meant two things. And the other thing was apparently the biggest, deepest, darkest secret in the entire Gold Division.
I asked to be told the secret of the hole in the wall. And this is what it told me:
The term "Hole in the Wall" refers to the entrance to the Golden Abyss mystery dungeon.
The dungeon entrance exists behind a wall at the bottom of a certain stairwell deep in the base. It is supposed to be locked shut. Apparently… Team Cog existed long before the organization we now know today as the Gold Division. Apparently, Team Cog were originally founded as prison wardens to a dangerous prisoner locked in the Golden Abyss dungeon. Their primary directive has always been to protect the dungeon entrance, to minimize the number of Pokémon who stumble upon it. The rest of their base duties merely serve a dual purpose secondary to that.
For some reason, Ether de-escalated her own security clearance, knowingly locking herself out of some information and subjecting herself to the memory erasure. But she had established several terms, such as "hole in the wall," so she wouldn't completely forget about them. Apparently she only wanted to selectively forget about them, when it was convenient.
I asked about the prisoner locked in the dungeon downstairs, and that's when I found it. The big one. The one Ether didn't want me to see. The one she thought would cause the whole Gold Division to come crumbling down.
And when I saw the secret, I understood why. It was a secret she was personally ashamed of.
Team Cog had failed their primary directive. Someone, possibly Ether herself, let the prisoner out. And then she erased her memory of her failure, so she wouldn't be haunted by it every minute of the day.
But that's what I found. That was the deepest, darkest secret:
The prisoner has long since escaped, and everyone in the entire base is – and has been for years – in some kind of grave danger.