Transmission 4 - 03-02-2146
Sorry! It's been a while. The Attic's been keeping me busy. They started giving me real work. I've been coding and scripting my whole life, but nothing like this. I'm learning so, so much. I keep it up I might find a way to take over the grid.
Anyway, enough about me. Chris has a shot at a sponsorship! He's been speaking with Rocket Co. and they've been considering him. If they take him up and the league approves he'll officially be a Pokemon Master! He's been wanting this for so long and he's worked so hard, so I know he'll make it.
He keeps trying to get me to start training again. Even said he'll mentor me. But I tell him over and over again... that ship has sailed. I sold all my Pokemon when I quit the league... (except for Kofi. There was no way I'd ever give up my little Rookidee).
But lately, he keeps asking about my work. He doesn't know I work for the attic. He thinks I just do IT consulting... which is kinda still the truth... but... eh... I don't want to be a trainer. I want to be a hacker. So that's what I'mma do. Talk soon.
"Trap it."
Iono spoke those words and Trev died.
Or so he could have sworn.
The Nidoking had been charging and was a mere few yards away from them. He'd tried to defy Iono's order to stay put, but his legs betrayed him. In fact, he felt as if he had no legs at all. He felt like he had no body at all. Hence the assumption of death.
The world had inverted in on itself. Intense vertigo wound its way around Trev, and when he tried to catch himself, he felt as if his bodyless form was falling further into abject nothingness. He heard the distant sounds of Kofi's terrified squawks- echoes bouncing off the walls of the abyss. The Corvisquire had been with him just a moment ago, hadn't he? Where had he gone? Despite the distance of his voice, his furious wing flaps were a deafening sound.
When Trev tried to call out no sound came from him. He had no voice, much in the same way that he had no body. Feathers, thick and obsidian, fell around him, the size of elm trees. They covered him up; weighed him down; suffocated him. And then there was nothing.
When Trev came to, the humic smell of soil hooked into his nostrils. The scent took him back to his childhood when he was 8 or so. His mother had taken him to the botanical garden on one of the top levels. It was one of the few times he'd seen the sun in more than a few fleeting rays and it was so wonderful. Everything there was green, including the Pokémon. All of them rich and full of arboreal life. It was in stark contrast to this... where Trev was sure he was dead.
He pushed himself off the ground, soil sliding from his cheek in sloppy, moist clumps. Somehow, the ground was covered in dirt and brush, not asphalt. He looked up and saw thick, twisted trunks of dying trees and when he stared at them for too long ghastly faces seemed to form in the light and shadows. Everything around him looked to have dipped in a dusky aubergine.
Then he noticed the sounds. A deep ubiquitous treble that felt like it would compress him into nothingness, accompanied by ad-libs of inhuman screeches in the night. Suddenly, the Nidoking's cry cut through them. That got his adrenaline going enough to will him to move. He had legs again, after all.
He scrambled to his feet and listened for a beat. The treble was back, but he couldn't hear the Giovanni's prized Pokémon anymore. Then panic set and he shifted around. "Kofi?" he called. But his voice was constricted- dry. He tried again louder, straining against uncooperative vocal chords. "Kofi!"
A rustle sounded in the bushes behind him, and he whirled in time for the bird Pokémon to barrel into his chest like a giant ball of cobalt feather. "Kofi! You're here! You made it, you're..." he stared down into the bird's big questioning eyes. Trev expelled a sigh. "You're lost... like me." He glanced around.
"I don't know how this is possible... but we've gotta move."
Trev and Kofi found that the forest was thick, without a beaten path. As they trudged through the horror jungle, thorny branches brushed up against his clothing, and spider webs seemed to reach out to cling to his face and hair.
He batted at them like a crazed man as he forced his way through the angry brush, trying to make sense of what had happened. He was just in the city, wasn't he? Blue Light City didn't have this many trees for hundreds of miles from his location. So, how was he here?
As he moved through the foliage, trying to get to, or away from the chitters and screeches (he wasn't sure), he found himself hitting dead ends. They were stone walls, with moss growths and invasive kudzu stretching over their surfaces. On them were ancient carvings of creatures that may have been Pokémon.
Mismagius itself, perhaps? The faces certainly seemed to match. Domes umbrellaed over writing coils with deep inset eyes. They seemed to be grimacing at him. In every direction they ran, they found more ghost-like trees, deadly thorns, and afterimages of ghastly faces in his peripheral that disappeared when he turned to look.
Amongst the sounds he heard voices. He tried to ignore the fact that they sounded eerily familiar, but even once he'd accepted that fact, he couldn't place why he'd known them, or what they were saying. They were like cries or warnings, but what they cautioned against, he did not know. Was it because he was here? Were the wayward, disembodied voices of past travelers cautioning them against traversing this place? How had he gotten here? What exactly had that Mismagius done? Where was Iono?
As if reading his mind, his answer came in the form of Iono's voice, an echoing boom from all around. "Trevor." She called.
Trevor and Kofi spun around like tops, looking for the source of her voice. "Iono! Where are you!? Where are we?" Trev cried.
"You're in Mismagius' Trick Room," she said. "It's a manifestation of her mind, of darkness and... an unknown realm. It's like a prison. Here, Mismagius always has the advantage in a battle because she... understands this place, but right now we aren't trying to win a battle," Iono said. "We're trying to escape. And that's what you need to do. Right. Now."
"Escape!? How am I supposed to do that?" Trev asked as he hit yet another dead end. The wall before him was carved into the face of a wicked creature, the horns curving overtop a hat-shaped dome. "Why would you put us here!?" Trev shouted, heart pounding furiously against his chest.
"Because if you're lost, so is the Nidoking," came her voice again, from all around. As if agreeing, he heard the Nidoking's frustrated roar in the distance.
"So why don't you just... show us the way out?" Trev asked.
"That's not the way it works." Iono responded. Her voice sounded even more distant now, like it was fading. "Everyone has their own, unique exit. Either I drop the room, and we risk Nidoking finding us... or you find your own way out."
"That doesn't make any sense!" he said, throwing his hands up and peering up at... nothing.
"I believe in you Trev," she said, her voice barely audible. "We found our way... you can too." The last words were so vague, Trev hardly heard them. She was gone.
"How the hell..." he muttered to himself. This wasn't the kind of problem he was used to. He was a hacker. Code and logic made the most sense to him... not the mystical gymnastics conjured by terrifying Pokémon.
He sighed and jogged back into the forest. Again he found nothing. He'd felt like he'd been in the brush for ages and yet he always came to another dead end with walls engraved with ancient-looking inscriptions, most often the one with either the horned creature or the Mismagius carved into it.
Sweat beaded down from Trevor's head. His clothes, hot and muggy, stuck uncomfortably to his skin. The treble was thicker now. The feeling that he was being watched intensified, and while he didn't think it was the Nidoking, the thought of there being something else in here rocked him to his core.
The ground beneath him pulsed with an otherworldly feeling that he was sure would haunt him in his nightmares for the rest of his life. He noticed somewhere along the way that the voices had come back, but he still couldn't make them out. He nearly screamed, going mad at the attempt.
A Pokémon had done this. It had magically sent him into a parallel maze dimension of some sort, and he had no way of knowing how to escape it. This new knowledge would torment him forever, he was sure. He didn't know much about Pokémon, but learning that they were capable of something like this was maddening.
They came to another wall with a horned creature, but this time, instead of turning away immediately, he remained. The voices were louder here, more clear. Suddenly, Kofi squawked. He'd flown off of Trev's shoulder towards the wall, where he'd begun pecking at the thing's sunken stone eyes. "What, Kofi? I don't think that's going to-."
"Trevor," The voice that spoke stopped any and all thoughts Trevor had as he focused in on it. From he stone wall, came the ghostly apparition of what only could have been some sort of deity as far as Trevor could tell from its regal eccentricity.
Horns jutted up like the carving, from a large inset headdress that looked vaguely like an armored, brimmed hat. While the horns were blackened with tribal-like adornments, the broad, spanning headdress was mostly crimson in color, with white and amber accents.
The body of the creature that hung below, was also dark with strange, tribal markings. The arms were stunted but were angled downward in the perpetual gesture of authority. At the bottom of its oddly oblique-shaped body, was a golden bell-like apparatus that seemed to serve as the tip of its tail.
However, as strange as the thing looked, how it sounded was what paralyzed Trev in place. He responded shakily. "Mom?"
"Trevor," it repeated in an echoed trill of his mother's voice.
"This can't be you... you can't be here... we're... a... a... Pokémon brought us here."
"You are everywhere and nowhere, Trevor," his mother's voice responded from the Pokémon.
Trevor's eyes watered. "Mom... Pokémon... they can't reach the afterlife... can they?"
Kofi stared at the ghostly form of the Pokémon intently, as if trying to parse if it was what it sounded to be. But that couldn't be possible... could it?
"You don't have long here, Trevor. You must go." His mother's voice warned.
"But if... if it's really you," he wiped a tear, rivuletting down his voice. "I've got... so much to ask."
"You're what I always wanted you to be. You're strong. You're accomplished. What you did to Rocket..."
"They're after me, Mom," Trev said. "I think I really messed up this time."
"You didn't Trevor. My son is no failure. He's strong, and he does the impossible. And he'll be fine. I can promise you that."
"But M-"
"No more time. I'm here to tell you this... Things will get worse before they get better. You have hard times ahead, but you will prevail. Be ready for the pain, the hurt, the difficult decisions. Be ready, and conquer them. And most of all... finish what I could not. Finish what you have begun. You can do it. It is who you truly are." The translucent Pokémon began to back into the wall, phasing into it once more.
"Wait!" Trev called, reaching out towards it. "Mom, wait!" But as he reached it, it had gone, and he touched only stone. It was warm and vibrant with life energy. "Mom..." he said one last time, his voice cracking with the word. "Don't leave me," he whispered, as he rested his head against the ancient, weathered stone. Kofi nuzzled him affectionately with a feathered head.
He let his fingers slide down the carved slab until they hooked on an unexpected crevice. It felt like a handhold. He lifted his head to glance down. Reflexively, he pulled and miraculously the giant wall began to move without much effort on his part, despite it looking too large for two dozen men to budge it, much less one.
As he pulled, it began to swing open like a door, and behind it, a bright light manifested from the opening. Too bright to look into. Kofi squawked. Trev breathed out and wiped the remaining tears from his face with his sleeve. "Well... it ain't like we got nothin' else to lose."
And then they walked into the light.