Welcome to the Distortion World.

I HIGHLY recommend you read this chapter on desktop.

(CW: death)

I plunged into a deep blue pool of water, immediately
losing my sense of direction. But there was light coming from my
left, so I swam towards it, breaking through the surface of the–

I tumbled out of the vertical water face and fell hard
onto an expanse of pebbles five feet below. I lay there
for a moment, the wind knocked out of me. Looking
back up at the water, I saw… It was vertical, so it
should have been a waterfall, but the water undulated
gently, like a lake.

"Everyone good?" I checked in with my pokemon.

"All present and accounted for," said Coeur.

I got to my feet. My clothes were all dry already. Okay. Cool.

Find Looker. Return home.

Returning home, I realized, was going to be the hard part. Giratina's portal had been closing, and I'd already lost track of it. It was definitely something I hadn't been thinking about as I dove through the portal after Looker. I poked my head back underwater to see if I could spot it, but to no avail.

My head stayed soaked this time. Inconsistent. Awesome.

The gravel led up to a hill covered in brown moss that looked like feathers – or, no, actually I think they were just feathers. I bounded up it lightly, gravity unlike the real world, then stopped to take in the scene in front of me.

A field of huge sunflowers, shooting out of the ground and blooming at timelapse speed, then decaying and falling just as fast.

Giant kelp anchored to snowbanks, floating in the air like they were underwater, with a texture like they'd been knit from giant yarn. Snowflakes hung suspended in the air, unmoving. I examined one more closely – it was seven-sided.

A river of white clouds flowed through a gap in the terrain, bordered by some sort of pinkish-grayish grass. Islands of red rock floated above, angled in all directions, all with a different conception of "down."

No sign of Looker or Cyrus or Giratina, as far as I could tell.

"Sense him anywhere?" I asked my pokemon.

"I sense him," said Coeur. "I just… I can't tell where. Location is weird."

I took another step forward, and suddenly I was on the banks of the cloud river. My foot crunched on something – I lifted my foot to find the pink-gray grass had crumbled like glass. I angled my other foot a step forward, and immediately I was on the opposite shore.

I started walking, having no idea how to find him but knowing I wouldn't accomplish anything standing still. I traveled in leaps and bounds; I ran for a solid minute just to get across five feet of space. And then I took a step further and there was nothing below me but I was falling up towards a rocky island –

"Def, help!"

Def popped out of his pokeball and
caught me before I could pick up too
much speed, teleporting to the island.

I exhaled. "Thanks, Def."

"Mais oui."

Looking up at the ground far below, I frowned.
"How are we gonna find him across an entire world?"

A moment later, Def nudged my elbow. "Look."

I looked where he was pointing – it was
too far away to really see clearly,
but there was a little blue dot floating
by an island, poised like it was waiting for me.

"Can you get me there?" I asked Def.

Def needed no further instruction –
within moments I was there.

Azelf floated in front of me, and behind him was a cave. The tunnel stretched into darkness, even though there didn't seem to be nearly enough island to hold such a deep cave.

I nodded at Azelf. "Thanks," I said, and Def and I headed in.

Follow the emotion.

We emerged into a hot cavern full of magma pools, standing beneath stone steps leading up to more stone steps leading up to the stone steps I was standing on. Instinctively I knew to climb – the dais in the depths of Stark Mountain was at the top, the Magma Stone needed to be protected – and so my pokemon and I started up the endless stairs.

Follow the knowledge.

We emerged into a rickety-looking room made of wood, cobwebs graying the corners, dimly lit only by candles. Shadows danced along the walls.

Follow the will.

We emerged into darkness.

"Trust, light the way!"

Trust came out, his headflame lighting up the tunnel made of dark stone, winding into the distance so that we couldn't see the end of it.

Time was weird here; I could feel it.

I squinted. Is that?

He couldn't – Lucas couldn't be here. But I kept climbing, and he got closer and closer. He was climbing too, slower than I was.

And then suddenly he was falling–

I lunged and caught him, unable to push him back up like the last time this happened. "You okay?" I asked him.

Lucas sighed, and on his face I saw more frustration than I'd have expected if it were really him. His eyes were amber brown as usual, but they glowed too bright. He opened his mouth, and in my voice he said, "You keep saving me."

And he vanished.

"…stay close," I murmured to my pokemon.

We crept across the floor, which creaked more than I'd have liked, and peered through the door on the other end. Another room, much like this one, with three doors leading out of it. I checked each one – three near-identical rooms, each with further doors leading past them.

I stepped into into the room past it. The door at the other end of that one led to a room that was distinctly upside-down – I stepped gingerly into it, but gravity didn't pull me away from the ceiling I was standing on, despite the dusty chandelier hanging upward from it.

Several more doors down, we reached a dead end. I could see more rooms past us; there just wasn't a door from this one.

"Faith, phase through the bounds!"

Faith popped out of her pokeball and sank into the wooden wall, floating away. I waited for a second.

The door to the left popped open – judging by the sound of things, a bunch of doors popped open. Trust a ghost to navigate a haunted house.

"Well," I said, "I guess we head that way."

So we started walking.

And walking.

I glanced back at my pokemon. Def wasn't paying attention – he was looking up.

"Evelyn, I think…" he pointed. I followed his gaze – up at the very top of the stairs, there was a ring dangling from the ceiling. It was in the middle of the winding staircases, though, so even at the top I didn't think I'd be able to reach it.

I threw a pokeball. "Hope, fly high!"

Hope appeared and immediately rocketed upwards, weaving between stairs to reach the top. She grabbed the ring and pulled – the top of the cavern swung open into darkness above.

The cavern rumbled.

We twisted and turned through the rooms, veering sideways and at one point walking up onto the wall in front of us to reach the right door in the ceiling. Entering another room, I yelped. Lying in a corner, skin a pallid gray, covered in cobwebs, was the body of Dawn Berlitz.

"Coeur, help," I choked.

Coeur emerged and gave Dawn's body one glance before saying, "It's not real. Illusion."

I nodded, averting my eyes and taking deep breaths. Just an illusion.

And I reminded myself of this when we came across the body of my mom, of Tricia, of Megan. My heart was pounding the entire time, but I knew it wasn't real. They weren't here. They were safe. And despite the adrenaline running through me, pulling me to them, I clung to this cold hard fact to keep moving.

They're not here.

They're safe.

They're back at home.

They're winning at Mount Coronet.

They're safe.

And walking.

Down below, the magma started to rise.

We ran up the stairs, but it was climbing too fast. "Prom, protect us!" I said, releasing him from his pokeball. He shot water at the rising magma, and then ice, but both of those hissed and sank into the boiling rock. When the magma was right on our heels, Prom yelled "Jump!" and leaped into the middle. He landed in a hemisphere of energy – a boat he'd conjured of aura and Protect and ice. The rest of us jumped in to join him as the Protect boat rose faster and faster, floating closer and closer to Hope, who swooped up through the open door–

With a roar and a splatter, the magma reached the top of the cavern and exploded outward. Our weird little spherical boat went flying. "Def, displace us!" I said, and he blinked in and out of existence, bringing us all down to the ground and out of range of the molten rock.

And walking. The tunnel never branched off to the side; it only curved with its single passageway. With all the twists and turns we were making, all we could see was a little ahead and a little behind – no light visible on either end.

That's all right. We're going the right way. We just have to keep at it.

"Thanks guys," I panted, trying to catch my breath. Taking in our surroundings, I found soft violet-blue moss beneath our feet and a thick gray fog over everything else. Not even the lava we'd burst out of was visible here.

I closed my eyes. Follow the emotion, I thought.

Uncertainty. Fear. I'd been pushing them back out of sheer determination, but they were undoubtedly there. Fear for our safety; fear that I'd never find Looker. I wanted to push those feelings away and focus on finding him.

But then again, that was the fear. I mean that the fear lurked behind the willpower, fueling it. Fueling me. It wasn't an obstacle; it was an incentive.

I opened my eyes. "This way," I said to my pokemon, and I started to run.

Suddenly, I was backpedaling. I tried to push my body forward, but I only walked faster backwards. My pokemon were walking backwards, too. The music in my ear was warped and weird. And then it was over, and we were walking forwards again, although we all immediately stopped for a moment to catch our bearings. The music had returned to normal, but it had skipped to a point earlier in the song.

"A time anomaly," I said, surprised. Even with the music in my ear?

"Is that what's been happening to you all this time?" Trust asked with a shudder.

"Not exactly. Time usually just jumps. That was more of a… a rewind."

We kept moving. Time skipped some more. Time skipped some more. It wound backwards, it slowed down and sped up, it jumped around. I didn't try too hard to think about why it was happening despite the music – honestly, in the Distortion World, I was more surprised my pokemon and I were still traveling together at all.

And eventually – one eternity later – there was light.

And soon we'd caught up with Faith, who was waiting for us in front of a doorway. Between us, though, was a pit with no bottom in sight, with lily pads suspended in the air over it, forming a bridge across.

"Def, can we cheese it?"

Def blinked out of existence, then back in. "Non. Il y a un psychic block."

I gingerly tapped a foot onto the nearest lily pad, which didn't move until I removed my foot. It then tumbled like an autumn leaf into the pit.

"There's a new one over there," Coeur said, gesturing over to the left.

I nodded. "Okay. I think we can do this, but we gotta go one by one."

We ran through the mist, only seeing as far ahead as the next footstep, calling out in the dim world to keep track of where everyone was. I ran from the fear – fear isn't an emotion you run towards, but rather one at your back, urging you on – and eventually the fog began to lighten.

Earth and grass and wind greeted us, a cool breeze under a lavender moon. Tiny white flowers speckled the rolling hills, which swooped into loop-de-loops and corkscrews and other impossible shapes.

I stepped forth and immediately found myself on top of a hill in the distance. "Over here," I called to my pokemon, waving back towards where they stood.

Trust tried to step towards me, but wound up on another hill. Def teleported, but reappeared upside-down at the top of a grass loop-de-loop.

Oh boy.

Coeur went first because I trusted her dexterity. I stood by with her pokeball ready, in case she needed an emergency escape (I know I could have recalled them all, but listen, it was comforting to have my pokemon out around me). But she made it across just fine, and by the time she was with Faith there was another clear path of lily pads for someone else to hop across on.

I went last. My head spun at the sight of the endless void beneath me, held off by just a thin pad. And I couldn't not look down, because I had to watch my feet. I hated heights, but I'd never considered how awful the depths could be.

My pokemon and I kept trying to find each other again, but space was warped and illogical here. At one point I crashed headlong into Def, and we tried to stick together by linking arms, but then one step later we were far apart again.

"Let's just try to get across," I said.

This, too, was easier said than done – taking a step forward didn't guarantee forward motion. Multiple times I found myself back where we'd started.

We'd entered a cavern of crystals jutting from the ceiling and floor and walls and somehow from the air itself, glowing blue and pink and gold. I saw, briefly, someone's reflection, but when I looked again I saw no one there.

We wove through the cavern, crossing chasms on rickety rope bridges, and I kept seeing reflections in the crystalline faces just ahead, and at some point I became sure it was Thomas, and it stirred a mixed sorrow and hope inside me.

"This is stupid," Coeur complained.

"Tell me about it," I said.

Trust started badly singing "One step forward, three steps back," and while it didn't move us closer to the end, it did make us all giggle.

"You should try for a music career after we get out of here," said Prom.

"At this rate we're never getting out of here," said Trust.

"Yeah, you get it," said Prom.

I heard scattered pokemon laughter across the plains. "Wowwwwww," said Trust, though he was laughing too.

We kept trying to traverse the odd space, and maybe we were losing our minds but the shenanigans only increased over time. Trust decided to test whether sprinting would help, and he blinked between locations so quickly that Faith howled with laughter. I tried recalling pokemon from afar at one point, and they started dodging me like it was a game instead of letting a more efficient means of travel happen.

"Come on, Evelyn!"

"You can do it, Evelyn!"

"Spruce!"

I focused on my pokemon's voices guiding me across, and a small eternity later, my next step was onto solid ground.

"Good job," said Faith.

I patted her on the head. "Thanks, guys. Let's keep going."

We headed through the door behind Faith.

And then there was a door in front of us – a massive purple door, embedded in the wall, with a carving on the front. It was a picture of a man, carved in the style of ancient Sinjoh. His long coat and suit were nothing like ancient Sinjoh's, yet the carving was weathered, looking like streaks of water had eroded it over time.

I pushed the door – it swung open, and we stepped through.

But eventually – truly, it felt like hours later – Def reached the end, and then me, and steadily everyone else arrived. I knew it was the end because I took another step and only moved about a foot forward. Hallelujah.

I waited for everyone else to arrive before facing the doorway in front of us: an archway woven from tree saplings, threaded through with the same white flowers that dotted the landscape. Mist hovered within, obscuring our next destination.

"In we go," I said, and we stepped through.

We emerged into a fragmented landscape of mirrors and glass. Shards of glass grew through the space like branches in a tree, refracting light every which way. Time was weird here, but I realized I had no idea the order things had just happened in, and this was less weird than that.

"We're close," Coeur said.

I saw a flash of someone in a brown coat
running backwards across a plane of glass, and then
he was gone. "Looker!" I shouted, but I heard only echoes in response.
My heart pounded – he was here! Why was he running backwards? I looked around for
clues, but all I saw was distorted space. We'd seen a lot of that – but we'd seen a lot less distorted
time. There'd been one major stretch of anomalies, but nothing like the unending time skips I
was used to. Did the music playing in my ear help? But then why'd I experienced any time
distortion at all? And why had all my pokemon traveled through time the same as me?
I saw another flash, this time of gray and purple – Cyrus was here too, with his crobat out. I stepped
deeper into the space. "Guys, try and catch Looker," I said. "Catch, like grab him?" Coeur asked.
"Grab his attention, grab him, whatever you can," I said. My pokemon and I spread out over the
glass branches, looking for any sign of Looker or Cyrus. Prom yelped. "Over here!" he said,
darting towards a figure that vanished shortly after. "Mahogany!" called Faith, zooming though glass
to reach a version of Looker who was gone before she got there. Images of Looker and of Cyrus flashed
at various points around the space inside this glass tree – Looker running,
Cyrus directing a gyarados, Looker falling from one branch onto another – and in the glass
I saw reflections of other places – a hilltop covered in cherry blossoms, a crowned hoothoot
atop a beehive atop a pile of books – a young wizard and his friends fighting an old, powerful sorcerer
on a stormy sea – Looker on an ocean liner, sinking with the ship
– a dusty cathedral, a rapidash skeleton with its horn through the chest of a human in a tie-dye
shirt – an ancient priestess walking into the house she knows she will die in –
a college student in a grand library with soaring ceilings, hard at work
on something totally unrelated to class –
and while everything was
Friendship: All lives touch
scattered and out
of order, I started
to see the path
other lives to create
Looker had taken
/was taking/would
take along the inside
of the tree. I ran up a
something anew and alive.
mirrored surface to put
myself in front of his path.
Let's travel through the chaos together.

A blunt force knocked me over. "Ah! Sorry, I didn't see…" Looker stopped, realizing who he'd just run into.

I grabbed him by the arm, like he'd disappear if I didn't hold on to him. "Are you okay? Are you hurt? You're bleeding!"

There was a cut on his face, but he waved it off. "It's nothing. Why are you here? How did you find…?"

I threw my arms around him. "I'm so glad you're okay," I said into his coat.

Looker laughed and hugged me in return. "I'm sorry you had to come get me."

"Don't be silly," I said.

I let go of him and realized – he'd been clean-shaven the last time I saw him, but already his stubble had grown back in. His lips were chapped.

"How long have you been here?" I asked him.

Looker frowned. "Ages," he said, and I realized how raspy his voice was.

"Arceus, take my water bottle," I said, digging through my bag. "Did you not find any water?"

"Not a drop to drink," he said, gratefully taking it from me.

My pokemon had come over – by the time Looker had hydrated a bit, Def had already healed the cut on his cheek. "Now what?" Trust said.

"What do we do about Cyrus?" I said out loud.

Looker glanced back up. "Honestly, I'd be all right with leaving him here, but his pokemon don't deserve the same fate as him."

As if on cue, Cyrus blinked into existence. Prom threw a shield up instantly, causing the hyper beam flying at us to ricochet. It shattered a bunch of glass, which tumbled down, down through the expanse below.

"Why's he after you?" I yelped.

"I don't know?"

"You are not welcome in my new world!" I heard Cyrus bellow from above. "You shall die!"

"We don't want to be here!" I shouted back. "We're trying to leave!"

But it was too late; his gyarados cast another hyper beam our way, and Prom put up a shield again but the hyper beam tore through the glass beneath our feet, and we started to fall.

In a split second, I was on solid ground, watching Def blink in and out of existence to save everyone else from falling (except Hope, who drifted down gracefully to join us, and Coeur, who was immune to psychic but able to jump down between glass branches). We were at the bottom of the glass cavern, standing on a mirrored floor. Trust shielded us from the brief shower of glass rain that followed us down.

Cyrus swooped down atop his gyarados, shouting, "Begone!"

"Okay!" I shouted back. "We will! Uh… give us your pokemon though!"

Cyrus laughed. He was looking more disheveled than usual – stubbly, hair a little rumpled, clothes askew. There was a wild look in his eyes.

"Y'all up for a fight?" I asked.

"Let's do this."

"One last time, everyone."

Trust, Prom, Faith, Hope, Coeur, and Def charged into a free-for-all battle, initially against Cyrus's gyarados, but he quickly brought his other pokemon to join in. There was zero room for error in this battle, so I took a risk.

"When we win, put this back in," I said to Looker, pointing at my ear.

"Will do."

I removed the music in my ear.

And strangely, while there were some time blips, I remained fairly steady. I was able to jump in and get Hope to focus on the gyarados, and tell Trust to put up a shield before Cyrus's honchkrow could swoop, and redirect Def towards his crobat instead of weavile, letting Coeur dart in and take care of the pokemon quadruple-weak to aura. Cyrus had a lot of fliers, compared to our two, but we had enough experience to know what to do.

I'd banked on us needing a few tries to get it right, but by the time Cyrus and his gyarados came crashing down, I'd ultimately experienced just the one timeline. I put the hearing aid back in my ear before Looker could even get to it.

I understood now. The anchor I'd experienced during pokemon battles — the one where I stayed focused with one of my teammates at a time — it was just them.

Def teleported over and swiped all six of Cyrus's pokeballs from his belt. Cyrus shrank back. "Leave me here," he said, sounding panicked. "Leave my world, take my pokemon back to yours."

And the thing is, it looked like we were giving him what he wanted, and after spending over a year in total fighting him, that pissed me off. But I'd also seen the weakened state Cyrus and Looker were in after just a little bit of time here, and despite all his talk of a world free of spirit, I knew Cyrus had been driven by his ambition for a long time, and I had a gut feeling that said without that, he wouldn't last very long at all.

I shrugged. "Okay. Bye."

There was a crevice of in the corner of the cavern. I saw a flash of tails – whitish gray, with reddish gems inlaid near the ends.

"Let's go," I said to my friends.

I took Looker's hand, like a kid pulling her dad along, and we left Cyrus in the cavern of mirrors and began our journey home.