Looker got the coordinates. That was it. Just the coordinates. No pertinent information or anything else to keep them from getting their asses handed to them.
Tapu Village, 50907
The address made the GPS scream, already half an hour out in the desert, sun scorching and shoe soles on the verge of melting, too hot to do anything but keep moving.
Sand, rock, and sky all seamlessly blended together.
They kept moving.
The GPS kept screaming. Not literally screaming, but screaming as in the volume was up far too loud, and the robotic voice enunciated words in only the strangest, most unethical ways - syllables stressed wrong and with constant demand for everyone to take a hard left into the nearest cactus.
That, and Looker's phone was on 15%.
"RETURN TO ROUTE."
"I'll turn you left." Said 000.
"LOW BATTERY."
"I'm gonna replace your battery with a fucking Ekans, ya hear?!"
Looker promptly put his phone away.
Because the route was filled with more than a few cacti. And rock spires. As deserts tended to be filled with.
He really didn't feel like becoming a living pin cushion.
Forward had less rock - still a decent amount of rock, just, less than every other direction - and more people. Shiny caravans circled an oasis.
That was the only proper thing to call it, with "it" being a literal hole in the ground filled with sparklingly clear water, ferns and flowers defiant in the sand.
Of course they walked to it. It only made sense.
Alolans were more friendly and helpful than GPSs and incompetent Interpol Chiefs. (A simple fact of life.)
That, and water was oh so tempting. Because it was either that or a juice box from inside Looker's trench coat, which might've been the only reason he had yet to pass out. Or he was immune to the heat. Or incredibly stubborn despite sweating buckets.
One or all of the three.
The first caravan was propped on bricks, axels bare and rusted, grown up with weeds hiding in the shade. The door was propped open with a brick, too. A box fan hummed loud and proud, whirring its life away just beyond the doorway.
Which was as much of an invitation as any, really. Don't leave your door wide open if you don't want visitors.
Sweet went first, clomping up the stairs. (Hiking boots ≠ desert boots, but no one had told her that.)
000 didn't go because he was even less of a people person than he was a one-hundred degrees Fahrenheit person, and he could only help one of those things.
Looker didn't go because. No.
(Matilda didn't go because she was already in the oasis, splashing about, skin glistening, the laughter of children heard but unseen, but surely some concerned adult was watching, right?)
"Hello?" Sweet asked, sticking her head into the doorway and its one lightbulb darkness.
The fan whirred.
Sweet stuck her face in front of it. Recycled air or not, it was cool, and it was beautiful, a box-shaped miracle whipping her hair about and promising promises that would melt later - popsicles and nice, sensible people and safety. There might've been footsteps, or maybe not, nothing much over the sound of ACTUAL DECENT AIR CONDITIONING.
000 stood on the porch - the porch made of metal steps that burnt more than the sand and were balanced on a cinder block. Looker sat on a not-porch cinder block.
"H-E-L-L-O?" She shouted, the fan chopping up her voice and tossing it like candy to trick-or-treaters.
"Just a moment!" Shouted a woman from somewhere deeper inside the caravan.
(Or maybe it was a trailer. What was the difference between the two, anyways?)
Sweet turned around, proudly giving two thumbs up. Sugar pressed against her legs harder.
The young woman - younger than Sweet - younger than Looker even - entered the doorway, dark hair and dark skin and a smile that stretched for miles.
"Ada, I swear if you -" She froze, a hand scrunching up her hair - dreadlocks with bright little beads clacking together.
Sweet waved. "HI!"
"You're not Ada."
"I'm Sweet! And lost!"
"You're...Sweet."
"And lost!"
(Nanu groaned into his hands, not that anyone cared.)
"Well…" The woman looked back over her shoulder, and then over Sweet's shoulder. "Are you guys tourists?"
"Yeah! Very touristy! We're looking for...a place!"
"Tapu Village." Said Looker.
The woman's face scrunched up - the deep breath, eyes closed, skin paling kind of face scrunch that meant nothing good.
"I wouldn't go there if I were you."
Sweet's face scrunched, too. "Why's that?"
"There was an...incident."
"Oh."
"Yeah." Said the woman, stiffly.
"What happened?"
(Everything about this was stiff. The silence, the empty air, the fan still whirring, the sun hot on her bare shoulders and starting to burn.)
A moment passed, mostly of Sweet and the woman locking eyes and staring. Unblinking.
And then, in a harried whisper, "The Tapu is upset."
"Is that bad?"
The woman looked disappointed. Really and truly. An empty frown and lowered brows.
Sweet took a step back. Onto Sugar's tail. Sugar yelped, and the both of them stumbled off the porch.
"If you're looking for a tourist attraction, maybe try Malie City?"
"That's not, um, no thanks but thanks!" Sweet said, and promptly left.
And Looker and Nanu promptly followed.
Back to the GPS it was.
A single bar of signal stood defiantly on Looker's phone, a slash as stark and lone as the desert all around.
Bing.
"That a text?" Asked 000.
Dry wind whipped and Lycanroc howled. Barren bushes writhed.
Looker shrugged. "Dunno."
"Is it Trenchcoat?"
Looker shrugged again.
"That could've gone better." Said Sweet.
"More like the locals are superstitious as fuck."
"But -"
"Also, you're annoyin'."
"Youch." Sweet said and leaned into Looker with the utmost grace of someone sweating to death.
"Stop that!"
Sweet leaned more.
Looker just gave up and resigned himself to reading the text. "It is called Assembly. Last documented specimen from Snowpoint, Sinnoh."
(As in assembly line?)
"A what?"
"Assembly!"
Looker turned his phone, showing a photo of an incredibly blurry brick wall. It looked like any other brick wall, really. Gray, a little crumbly, and completely and utterly stationary.
Normal.
"That's stupid." Said 000.
"What else are you to expect from aliens?"
Which was fair.
So they walked.
Sand turned red, turned to powdery dirt, dry as bone, and scraggly grass. The temperature climbed with the sun - paused, hanging there.
The sun climbed to the center of the sky.
(And the temperature fell.)
Mountains loomed over their shoulders, dark and overbearing, right up into the haze of clouds. A breeze blew, needle-like - cold and sharp and piercing. Then, snow. Slush crunched, half-melted. Ditches lay puddled, stagnant water frozen over, slick and shiny.
Scatterings of rubble littered the ground, dusted like powdered donuts. Fallen buildings waited. Broken windows no longer glittered, empty and jagged.
A sign on half a wall welcomed them to (lo and behold), "Tapu Village."
The thick-leaved ivy strangling the letters into oblivion welcomed no one.
They entered the village anyways, though it wasn't much of a village any more.
Houses stood without their walls, not really standing at all. It was more of slumping, rubble wearing crumpled tin hats for roofs. Thorny vines, frost-tinged and sharp, strangled deader than dead bricks within an inch of their crumbling lives.
Rot and death hid. The stench didn't - pungent in the stinging air. Sharp. Gagging.
"This isn't right." Said Sweet, balking.
(Like a Tauros in a head gate, metal clamped around her neck, still trying to back up, to kick or buck or run. Wild eyes and breathing wrong. Trapped.)
"That's why we're here, ain't it?" Asked 000. Rhetorically.
Because OF COURSE that was why they were here.
If a beast did this to the village...to the people, then it needed to be dealt with permanently.
(Or if the Tapu did this. Whatever the Tapus were. Was it even ethical to "deal with" a deity? Hell, where were the ethics in "dealing with" anything?)
(Or had the Tapu been fighting a beast? Fighting Assembly?)
"Fan out. When you find the beast, yell. And for the love of Arceus, keep your Pokémon out."
He tossed a pokeball, metal snapping as Twitch landed and snapped her jaws even louder. Because she had razor-rocks for teeth. (And for most of everything, really.)
Sugar bristled at Sweet's feet, ears flattened and tail out.
000 did not grace that with a response.
Matilda and Looker simply walked away. Well, Looker did the walking. Matilda did the happily sitting on his shoulder while he picked his way through debris piled like mile high Jenga towers. His gun led the way, held out ahead, poised and ready. Like rust stains on collapsed roofs were real threats, or little skitter-scattering stones.
Like the stains darker than rust, splattered on walls and grass trampled dead were ever threats.
Cold nipped and stung. Footsteps crunched, louder than they ought to, no birdsong, no small, chittering sounds in the crackling-ly dry underbrush, no foraging things with paws crunching dead leaves and twigs. There was only their methodical footsteps, a steady pace and steady breaths that glittered and died all at once.
The ground bucked and broke.
Sweet screamed.
Assembly towered. It was a tower, and it towered with its towerness above the sunken skeletons of homes that cowered and shook with each of its spidering steps. It watched everything at once, eyeballs flashing open-close-glaring faster than any eyeballs should, blue things threaded with veins like lace.
Sweet screamed gibberish at its many eyeballs and complete lack of ears. Her legs shook. Everything shook. They gave out, falling flat with a perfect view of Assembly's hollow insides that stared with eyes, eyes, eyes, eyes, eyes, eyes.
She fumbled, scrabbling backwards, dead grass fingers tangled around her wrists, nothing but brittleness breaking away beneath her fingertips. Something hard met her hand, and she grabbed it like a drowning man's life preserver.
Huzzah! A stick!
(...a life preserver would've been better….)
Muscles trembling, she reared back and threw.
She scrambled up, half a glance over her shoulder as the stick bounced off and died on the ground, splintered like wood chips.
Assembly glanced down with some of its eyes, the other watching Sweet.
They all turned red.
"Shit!" Yelled Sweet.
Sugar, ever a Sylveon of impeccable timing, took that to mean, "Do something!" and began to sparkle menacingly. Like a lava lamp filled with glitter thrown at a wall, the sparkles exploded in a shining, silver plume, right in all of Assembly's eyes. Or at least half of its eyes.
It growled. The sound vibrated in her chest, ping-pong ball bouncing between ribs.
Grass snap-crackled with each step back. Little imaginary bones, still slick and wet, popped in half, right in her ears. Her heel scuffed brick, stepping right into an empty-doored, three-walled house, the back completely punched out and upended, like a lost Scrabble board.
Once smooth plaster and paint littered ill-fitting floorboards. Blue paint, like the sky (or Assembly's eyes before it decided to go Super Saiyan), was broken into paler patches where pictures had once hung, fallen and left to drown in their own shards.
They crunched, microscopic diamond bits gritting beneath boots.
Assembly peered inside. One leg raised, thick as a pillar, it plowed through the front wall. The roof screamed. Shingles rained down, buckling on impact like soda cans met with scissors.
With all the agility of a Ariados screaming bloody murder and caught in its own web, Sweet vaulted over a couch and up a McFucking wall, as you do.
(The wall was still flipped like a losing game of Scrabble, a straight slope up to what was once upon a time someone else's house, but more importantly, what was still definitely a roof.)
Her nails dug in. Plaster dust crumbled, crescent moons gouged out and treads slipping, each kick leaving a new streak of black until her arms were thrown round the sweet, sweet body of a chimney. Heaving herself up, she flopped onto the roof, like someone desperately pulling themselves out of a pool, hair plastered to their flushed face and burning lungs aching.
Up here, the fog lingered lightly, about as thick as a wafer. Cold misted her skin. Everything stung. Deep breaths stabbed their way down, heart pounding dangerously fast, hands warm and slick with sweat.
The first house groaned. The sound was pained, as pained as anything inanimate could ever be. Metal screeched and split, the last of its walls bowing inwards.
It imploded. Shrieking like a banshee, Assembly dancing on the corpse, it collapsed.
The world shook. Sweet ducked her head, stiff shoulders pressed to the bottom of her jaw, busy holding on for dear life.
Assembly crushed the remains, plodding forwards at a steady, unbothered pace. It walked like someone assured in their victory. Without a mouth to smirk with, it would've if it could've, the corners of its eyes all crinkled up in silent laughter.
Something in Sweet's chest seized. Wrapped up, mummified lungs seized, squirming at the air that tried to force its way in.
The roof began to sway like a rowboat lost to the ocean, sea monster scales scraping its belly. If Assembly were a little less terrifying and made of brick, it would've made a great sea monster. As is, it made a horrifying beast. It moved like a bulldozer, every intention of tearing the place down.
Then, the roof began to crumble. One shingle, one brick at a time.
The ground was disappearing beneath her feet.
Behind her, the roof's edge lay dewy and taunting, metal curses in metal teeth. An overgrown garden had long since shattered through the patio below, green, leafy hands wrapped around the metal poles of a rusted awning, fabric shredded in their flower-and-thorn-blooming fingers. A tree watched with hollows for eyes, ivy climbing the trunk like a beard.
She swallowed past the lump in her throat, turning around and stepping back until metal dipped beneath her weight.
There was only one thing left to do.
She took a running go and jumped.