The Underground: Issue #5

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issue #5 apr 2019

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Contents FANFICTION 5

The Pantheon Dtmahanen

12

Operation GEAR: The Gardener of Gratitude

33

Coltar: The Prophecy Cavespider_17

illustriousrocket

52

The Haunting eldestoyster

78

Toxic Bonds HumanSoulEngineer

-03

FANART 11

Door (from Electric Sheep) illustriousrocket

25

Rosalita (from The Gardener of Gratitude) illustriousrocket

51

The Long Road (Ch. 12 Cover) Panoramic_Vacuum

REVIEWS 95

Aquifer: The Prophet’s Guide to Dungeoneering FifthQuin (eldestoyster)

FAN

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WO

RK

-05

The Pantheon Book 4: Loki’s Gambit

by

“Why did I open my damned mouth?”

Loki was perturbed by the sight in front of him. A massive, obsidian wall interlaced with veins of ice towered over him. On top of the wall, an icy, dead-eyed dragon with vestigial arms sat, contentedly looking over the masterpiece of his creation.

Or, perhaps more accurately, the masterpiece of his horse’s creation.

--------------------------

This embarrassing fiasco had begun not three seasons prior, when the frost-bitten jotun, named Kyurem, had wandered into the halls of the newly constructed Valhalla, supposedly looking for work. The gods, troubled at the presence of such a vile creature in their halls, but still naïve in their curiosity, inquired further.

“It is a rather simple request, truly,” the beast growled. “I am a builder, held in high regard by human and Frost Giants alike.” He gestured to the hall in which he stood with his withered,

Dtmahanen

ice-covered wing. “I would think that noble beings such as yourselves would want to protect that which you hold in these walls. For that, I can build a wall, a fortification, if you will, that will keep invaders from attacking the gates of Valhalla.”

“And how, pray tell, do plan to do this, creature?” mighty Odin asked.

Although seated on his haunches, he was still an intimidating presence, with his glowing, silver eyepatch, his long neck craning over all present, and his disc of arms giving off a menacing golden sheen. “I see no tools on your person. How can one with such a deformed figure as yours possibly hope to complete such an immense project?”

The husk gave the gods a toothy grin, and then proceeded to conjure a wall of ice right in front of him, much to the shock of all present. “All jotun can conjure ice such as this. It’s sturdy stuff. As for the stone needed for the bulk of the project, however, I have my ways. It will be done, and it will be done well.”

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A loud grunt echoed through the halls. “I don’t like this, All-Father,” thunderous Thor bellowed, standing up from his own throne. The black dragon glared intensely at his icy counterpart, his right hand grasping the lightning bolts that comprised his mighty hammer, Mjolnir. “The jotun always have strange tricks up their sleeves, and you know as well as I do that the Frost Giants hate us for giving them the icy realm of Jötunheimr. There is something more afoot.” The lightning bolts coalesced into its hammer form, sparking with electric energy of a Bolt Strike. “With your permission, Father, I would like to smite this cretin from the Nine Realms.”

“At ease, brother,” Loki interrupted, his hand momentarily leaving his thick, blood-red mane to off-handedly wave off his more boisterous brother. “This jotun has not even named his price yet, and you mean to bash his brains in? At the very least, hear him out, and let our father name his conditions.”

The noble Odin scoffed at the zoroark’s words. “You know full well you are no true son of mine, trickster,” he mumbled under his breath, before continuing at full volume. “I have conditions two. If you do not accept these terms, you will not build this fortification. Is that acceptable to you, giant?” Kyurem, after taking a second to think it over, nodded his head in agreement.

“Condition the first!” Odin shouted.

“You will finish the fortification wall within three seasons. For someone of your alleged craft, this should be more than enough time to complete this task.”

Odin paused, making sure the jotun was still paying attention. Seeing his face remain stoic, he continued.

“Condition the second! You will receive no help! Not from any man, woman, or beast of similar ilk!”

“Can I…clarify one thing quickly?”

Kyurem interjected.

“I accept the conditions, but, on the subject of the second, would it be alright if I bring my horse along? He will be useful in carrying the supplies I will need to-” “Denied,” Odin interrupted. “You will receive no help. Not from man, woman, or beast of similar ilk. I will not bend my condition, for I am master of the Nine Realms, and my word is LAW!” “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait just a moment, All-Father!” Loki exclaimed, standing up from his seat.

“Are you truly suggesting that this jotun, this thinking, speaking being, is as bestial as a creature that plows the fields for man?” He sat down again, waving his hand to dismiss the issue. “I have no issue with this Kyurem having his horse play carpenter with him. Do as you please, dear jotun.” At his words, the rest of the gods, Odin included, grudgingly acknowledged

-07

the truthfulness of his claim, and agreed to let the giant have his horse The ice dragon smiled, his jagged face splitting into a toothy grin. “I’ll name my price, then, if that’s settled.”

He took a deep breath.

“I name as my price the sun the moon and the goddess Freya thank you I’ll begin work immediately.” Before anyone had time to react, the jotun, betraying his withered form, bolted with an almost supernatural speed out of the halls of Valhalla.

Oh, horse shit, Loki thought, worried that he had make an incalculable mistake.

--------------------------

His fears had proven warranted.

It was two days from the end of the third season, and the wall was nearly complete. However, Kyurem himself had barely lifted a finger throughout the entire process. No, in his stead, the damned horse did most of the work. Strong as an ox, yet swift as the wind and green as the leaves of Yggdrasil, this horse was a freak of nature. Svaðilfari was its name, if he remembered correctly, and what a monster it was.

Needless to say, Odin had grown more and more angry at Loki as the seasons dragged on.

And for good reason, it was his idea to let the damn

thing help Kyurem in the first place.

As punishment, Loki was given one task. Stop the horse.

Stop. The bloody. Horse. Like that was possible.

Loki sighed to himself, and tried to think of a plan. What could he possibly do to distract the horse for long enough that the fortification would not be finished in time. And do I WANT the fortification to be stopped, he thought.

We do need protection, after all, and he is doing us a great serviceHe stopped, aghast with himself for even thinking such things. Odin commanded him to stop the jotun, so it was his duty to do so. He couldn’t think twice about it. And besides, the sun, the moon, and Freya as a price?

That was rather exorbitant, even by Loki’s admittedly lax standards.

So, what shall I do? He looked closely at the virizion, who was tugging at a chunk of obsidian rock to be placed on the wall. He’s a strong stallion, that one, he thought, and rather young from the looks of it. Those types of horses do not get distracted by much, not even to eat.

Perhaps what he needs is a littleLoki’s back went rigid when he realized what he would have to do. This would take every bit of his willpower, mental fortitude, and physical stamina to even come close to doing this most heinous of deeds.

“HORSE SHIT!!”

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--------------------------

Kyurem was feeling very relaxed on top of the wall. Svaðilfari was as powerful a presence as ever, and he was aiding him in what may have been his greatest scam to date. He had swindled the Frost Giants into giving him the horse in the first place, he had conned the humans of Midgard into thinking him a hairy ape that lived in the mountains, and now he was going to have the hand of one of the great goddesses of Valhalla. He chuckled to himself. Things were going rather swimmingly.

Suddenly, Svaðilfari stopped in his tracks, turning towards the nearby woods in a state of shock. “What, did you see a nice little feeding place?”

Kyurem taunted. “Do you need your eat’ums? ‘Cause if it ain’t, get back to wo-” He froze in the middle of his sentence, almost not comprehending what he was seeing.

A beautiful, white mare, her mane dancing with flickering orange flames was standing at the edge of the tree line. Her ruby-red eyes beckoned the stallion, shining in the sunlight with her onyx-black hooves and pointed horn. She’s like the unicorn of legend, Kyurem thought to himself. I never thought I’d see the day…

However, his thoughts returned to

reality when the mare, as if spooked by something, turned and fled back into the woods. Svaðilfari, still transfixed by what had once been there, stared into the woods. Its muscles, much to Kyurem’s horror, began to tense.

“Don’t you do it, you bloody animal, or I swear I’ll-” The virizion, not listening for a second, reared back onto its hind legs and sprinted away from the wall at top speed. It wanted the mare, and it would take it if it was the last thing it did.

“Oh, you bloody piece of horse shit,” Kyurem muttered as he stood up to chase the horse. He couldn’t let this random event get in the way of his greatest coup to date.

He was going to get that horse back, even if it killed him.

--------------------------

It took far longer for Kyurem to catch up with the AWOL virizion. It was a speedy specimen, and when it sprinted off into the woods, it looked like it was on a mission.

But an entire day? Yeah, the frost giant was none too pleased when he finally reached the damned horse.

He was sweating ice pellets profusely from his scaly skin, his ice armor was chipping from the constant shocks of his legs hitting the ground, and his

-09

hazy breath was coming out in rapid, misty spurts.

“Alright, you piece of filth, what the hell was-” He stopped, suddenly realizing the scene was different than he thought.

And not in a good way. Svaðilfari, far from resting contentedly after catching the mare, was lying on its stomach, fresh blood flowing into the frosty soil from its slit neck. A haughty-looking zoroark was lounging next to the dead body running his clawed hand through its massive black-and-red mane, a sly grin spread across his face.

“A little late, aren’t we, jotun?”

Loki crooned. “Sorry to say, but your horse isn’t in the best shape. Needs a little eternal rest in Hela’s domain to fully recover.” He patted the virizion’s stomach.

“Damn shame, too, that thing’s a monster. It took me a full day to get the thing this tired. AN ENTIRE DAY! And he just…dropped dead out of exhaustion. And just after a little jog? ~Sigh~ And I thought you trained him better than that.”

The icy dragon was seething in his anger. It almost appeared as if smoke were rising from its frozen form. “If what you say is true – if Svaðilfari just dropped dead – then why is his throat slit?”

“Oh, that.

Well, I couldn’t take any chances on him getting back to work, now could I? The gods told me to prevent you from finishing the

fortification by any means necessary, and I thought the mare form was going to be enough, but damn, that beast was a fighter. So, I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to get a little blood on my hands?”

He showed Kyurem his paws, stained red and crusted with the horse’s blood.

“And guess what? I did.”

“You monster!” the jotun screamed, bolting towards the smaller form of the god of mischief. “You’ll pay for what you’ve done to me!”

“Oh come now, boy,” Loki countered, completely unworried as Kyurem grabbed onto him with his jaws.

“Remember, I am a god, and you are but a lowly mortal. We couldn’t have you taking a goddess as a prize. Surely you realized that, right?” He paused as a thunderclap echoed in the distance.

“Oh, drat,” Loki continued, his devilish grin expanding wider. “Time’s up. I fear that Thor is on his way over here now. I believe he means to bash your brains in.” Effortlessly breaking free of the jotun’s grasp, he began to slide into the forest, out of sight.

“Ta-ta, Kyurem. meet again.”

May we never

--------------------------

Loki would not enter the halls of Valhalla for another week.

His physical form was completely drained from the ordeal, and he’d needed some

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time to recover. He had requested to meet specifically with the All-Father, and thankfully, he was alone when the zoroark entered the throne room.

“So, you have completed your task, little trickster,” Odin said, his long neck towering over the much smaller figure. “I would say you have done a noble deed, but I would assume you relied on methods uncouth to complete your mission. I do not consider it an honorable thing you did, slitting the throat of that steed, but you did your job, and that was what I asked of you.”

“Oh, were it so simple,” Loki muttered. “It took much more than merely slitting its throat, All-Father.

I had to trick it.”

“Of course you did.”

“So I took the form of a mare. To distract it, of course. It chased me for a full day.”

“After which it collapsed, and you killed it. I know the story, my son told me what the frost giant said.”

The zoroark hesitated, taking a moment to calm himself. “That’s…not the full story, All-Father. You see, it didn’t collapse right away. It…actually caught me before the day was up.”

“And?” the arceus insisted. “Get to the point, boy!”

Loki took a deep breath.

“I AM PREGNANT WITH HORSE’S CHILD, ALL-FATHER!”

THE

Silence.

The enormity of Loki’s statement echoed through the halls.

It took Odin a long time to process the words that had erupted from Loki’s mouth.

And then he began to laugh.

“You…you mated with the HORSE?!” he stammered incredulously. “You, in all your infinite wiles, thought the best solution to distract it was to HAVE SEX WITH IT??!! Oh, and I thought Thor was thick-skulled. Hehehahah!!”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

Loki attempted to counter. “I exhausted it so it couldn’t run anymore, and then I-” “By the Nine Hells, no more!”

Odin interjected, still giggling uncontrollably. “Please, just leave. I cannot look at you anymore without laughing.” He began to walk away, shivering in his laughter.

“Loki, Horse-Father! I think that fits you perfectly, trickster.” The inner doors slammed shut as Odin exited the room.

And there Loki stood, alone in the halls of Valhalla. A godly horse growing in his belly. He sighed, and patted his stomach.

“Horse shit.”

-011

Below: Door (from Electric Sheep), by illustriousrocket

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OPERATION GEAR:

The Gardener of Gratitude by illustriousrocket

-013

CHAPTER 2:

Brothers and Sisters A note: during the in-universe time this story takes place in, the Fairy-type doesn’t exist. As a result, Togekiss is its original Normal and Flying type.

Fernando didn’t have to take Matt, Cassy, Eleanor and Sheena very far, as it turned out. Lingote Palace’s archive was adjacent to the museum, through a door at the end of the bronze mural. It had the same marble floor as the central hallway and heavy wooden bookcases lining its stone walls. At the very end of the room, there was a fountain that created a curtain of water in the place of a window.

“As you can see, this archive isn’t accessible to just anyone,” Fernando said to his guests as he ushered them in, turning the archive’s key over in his hand. “Normally you’d have to make special reservations to come in here, but these are exceptional circumstances.

You,” he said, looking to Sheena before pointing at a large, rolled-up piece of material in a nearby container, “fetch that map for me.”

Sheena inhaled sharply when she realized Fernando was talking to her, but the surprise quickly wore off. She retrieved the map and brought it to the oak table in the center of the archive, where Fernando and the others had gathered.

“This is a map of the entirety of the land our kingdom once stood on,” Fernando explained while he spread it out across the table. “Those tourist maps won’t show you it all. If we’re going to find where the trail to the Golden City begins, we’ll need to see the whole picture.”

“Hold on a minute before you show us that clue you have.” Matt reached into his bag to get his laptop, then opened it and held its camera over the map. “I’ll take a picture of it, that way we can check it while searching.”

“Smart idea,” Fernando complimented. “You have some of your grandfather in you after all.”

Though these were words of praise, Matt still shrank back, his face reddening. Cassy, noticing this, stepped forward to take over the situation.

“We’ve got the map out, so let’s get this show on the road,” she forcefully suggested. “Let’s see that clue.”

“As you wish.” Fernando produced a piece of aged parchment, which he laid down on the table. “If you don’t mind,

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please read it without touching it.”

Cassy was the one closest to Fernando, so she leaned over and read the text aloud. “Gifts of air and gifts of earth. Without one, the other cannot be obtained. Man presses on, searching for that which cannot be found on the surface. The riches of the earth rest where man allows himself to be swallowed up by it, possessing more than he had should he return.”

“Somewhere where man allows himself to be swallowed by the earth,” Matt repeated. “It certainly sounds voluntary, right?”

“I’d agree with you there,” Eleanor concurred. “That means we can rule out something like quicksand. But at the same time, it clearly still sounds dangerous. Why talk about ‘should he return,’ otherwise?”

“You have a point,” Cassy mused.

“And this part, ‘gifts of air and gifts of earth. Without one the other cannot be obtained.’ Not only is this proverbial man going into the earth willingly, he needs a gift from the air to obtain the gifts of the earth. You know what that sounds like? Oxygen.”

“So the implication is that if one goes into this place, there could be the danger of running out of oxygen,” reasoned Sheena.

“Wait, I know what this sounds like!” Matt exclaimed, pounding his right fist into the palm of his left hand.

“A place where people voluntarily

enter the earth to gain its gifts, but face the risk of running out of oxygen if they aren’t careful… that sounds like a mine to me.”

Matt’s proposal led to a wave of realization washing over the others.

They all turned to Fernando, their stares asking him a question none of them had yet vocalized.

“I know exactly what you’re thinking,” he said, waving them off.

“There is an abandoned mineral mine out in the desert.” Fernando put his finger on a spot on the map well outside La Ciudad Dorada’s present borders. “It was operational until several decades ago, but the buildings and mine remain there to this day.”

“If it’s that far out in the desert, how will we reach it?” Matt wondered.

“Down in the palace garage we have a number of vehicles I can loan you.” Eleanor’s eyes lit up the moment Fernando revealed this. “Come, let us go now.”

Fernando left the table and headed for the exit, gesturing with his hand for the others to follow. While they walked, Cassy caught up to Matt and got his attention by tapping his shoulder.

“Listen,” she whispered to him, “I’m going to stay behind and keep researching the books here. There might be information in this archive that could help. I’ll see you off and then get right back to work here.”

-015

-:“Yahoo! This is exactly what I came here for!”

A bright afternoon sun hung in the sky over the desert outside La Ciudad Dorada as the group’s vehicle sped across the arid landscape. Fernando had provided them with what looked very much like a small truck with a flatbed behind its cab. There was, however, one big difference - instead of wheels, it had flat discs emanating the blue light of Arcane Science as they levitated the vehicle a few inches off the ground.

Inside the vehicle’s cab, Eleanor was overcome with giddiness just to have a chance at driving it.

“This is so much fun!” She couldn’t help herself from practically jumping up and down in her seat, just managing to avoid pulling on the steering handles on the sides of the vehicle’s glowing projection dashboard. “Matt! Sheena!” she called back to the others. “When this is over, we have got to see if Fernando’s got any books about these machines in that archive!”

“I wouldn’t mind reading those myself!” Matt said back to her, raising his voice over the wind.

For a while there wasn’t much else in the way of conversation between the trio. Eleanor remained caught up

in her delirious joy over the machine, while Matt and Sheena watched the landscape and some of its resident Pokémon go by. A group of Hippopotas clustered under the protection of two Hippowdon, and further off in the distance, a line of Camerupt could be seen traversing the desert.

“They all look so peaceful,” Sheena observed. “What’s going on with us and La Ciudad Dorada isn’t affecting them. I hope it stays that way.”

“That gives us something else to shoot for,” Matt said in agreement.

“The smoother our search goes, the better for everyone. Of course, Rosalita could be anywhere, so I think it’s best if we prepare for our next encounter now.”

“That’s a good idea.” Sheena moved to sit next to Matt so she could see his notes on his laptop.

“So far we know she has Heatran, Probopass, Electivire and Magmortar,” he said while reviewing images on the laptop’s screen. “All of them are weak to Ground-type moves, but they’re trained to use tactics that allow them to be competitive.”

“And they fight with coordination,” Sheena added.

great

“That’s the part I don’t totally get.

Rosalita must have trained them so well that they can execute defined roles within the attack even without her presence. We have to watch out for that Probopass to show up, for one. It was

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clearly playing support but the way it was able to levitate its allies around will be trouble.”

“Electivire certainly didn’t need Probopass’s help for that, though,” Sheena remarked, staring at the screen.

“Those Magnet Rise-powered leaps make it more of an aerial threat than you’d expect.”

“You can say that again,” Matt concurred. “Magmortar’s fighting style was pretty straightforward, and really, Heatran’s was too. What we have to watch out for with that one is just how powerful its individual strikes are.”

“Not just that,” Sheena corrected him. Matt had a hard time hearing her lowered voice and had to move his head closer to make out what she said. “You have to be very careful with that spiraling fire move it used. That’s called Magma Storm. If your Pokémon is hit by it, it’ll keep doing damage for a while afterward.”

“That’s just great,” Matt sighed.

“Between that and how easily Probopass can make it fly, Heatran’s going to be the biggest danger when Rosalita sends it to attack again.”

“Hey, you guys!”

Eleanor interrupted. She didn’t turn her head, instead just yelling loud enough for Matt and Sheena to hear. “I think we’re here!”

Matt shut his laptop and joined Sheena in looking out at the small

village they were approaching. A dilapidated factory stood tall above the surrounding buildings, themselves in similar states of partial ruin.

Eleanor slowed the vehicle to a stop as soon as it entered the village, sending a cluster of Skorupi scattering as the three disembarked to explore the area.

“There’s more to it than I even thought,” Matt said to Sheena as he surveyed their surroundings. Neither of them noticed Eleanor wander off to investigate a nearby object covered by a huge tarp. “I was expecting an ordinary mining facility, not a whole community like this.”

“I imagine life was tough for them here,” Sheena ruminated, “but they got by. Maybe in a sense, the people who lived and worked here were the closest to living the way the original settlers of La Ciudad Dorada did.”

“You guys?” Eleanor interrupted them, her voice quivering. “I think you should come here and look at this…”

When they turned around, both Matt and Sheena could see how heavily Eleanor was breathing. They ran over to join her at the tarp as she held its corner with a trembling hand.

“What is it?” Matt asked her.

“See for yourself.” At that, Eleanor threw the tarp back with all her strength. It didn’t lift all the way off, but it was enough to give Matt and Sheena a look at what was underneath.

-017

An Arcane Science vehicle identical to their own greeted them.

“You see what I see, right?” Eleanor nervously wondered.

“Oh, I think do.” Matt was careful to lower his voice as he examined the machine. “No way is a vehicle that was abandoned here decades ago going to look like it just came out of the garage yesterday.”

“You mean it was just brought here recently…” Sheena’s eyes grew wide as the realization of what this meant dawned on her. “Someone’s here… right now.”

The trio closed around each other and again inspected the ruined buildings surrounding them. They were searching not with curiosity, like they had been before, but with fear. Every partially standing wall, every broken beam, there was virtually nothing that couldn’t be hiding a potential threat.

Aside from the gusting wind, the air was silent. Yet, that silence was more deafening than any sound could have been.

“You see anything?” Eleanor asked Matt and Sheena.

“No, but I bet whoever’s probably sees us,” Matt replied.

here

“I was afraid you’d say that,” added Sheena.

Suddenly, a loud crash in the house right next to the group pierced the

silence. All three of them jumped, and they nearly fell over each other because of how close they all were.

“We should go investigate that,” Eleanor suggested, recovering from the shock first.

“Yeah, you’re… you’re right about that.” Matt slowly took one of his Poké Balls out of his bag, an act Eleanor copied for herself. “Stay close to me.”

The group clustered together with Matt in the lead, warily approaching the building. Their steps went from crunching sand under their feet to making the floorboards creak as they got close to the door.

“Workers’ Quarters, Section 9,” Sheena quietly read from the sign next to the entrance. It was hanging lopsided by one nail, the other having rotted away long before.

With his free hand, Matt gently pushed the door open. It groaned loudly, making the trio cringe, but the dimly-lit room beyond was empty.

As if on cue, another crash from further down the hall told them exactly where to go.

No words were exchanged between the three as they made their way to the source of the noise. The door to the room in question was ajar, and once near it, they could hear some sort of rustling behind it. Matt pushed himself against the wall next to the door, and while Eleanor and Sheena mimicked

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his action he rolled the Poké Ball in his hand so his thumb was on its button.

Finally, after a quick nod to Eleanor and Sheena to ensure they were all on the same page, Matt inhaled deeply, then burst through the door.

Inside was a Cacturne surrounded by over a dozen cans of food he’d knocked off the shelves. He had one in his hand that was torn open, and when Matt surprised him he dropped it, sending the colorful beans within it scattering everywhere.

“Oh…” Matt uttered, dumbfounded.

The Cacturne backed toward the window while Eleanor and Sheena looked over Matt’s shoulders at the scene. “Oh.” “Sorry about that, Sheena apologized.

Cacturne…”

“I saw in the brochure that Poké Beans are grown in La Ciudad Dorada…” Eleanor said, “so I guess it’s no surprise they were canned for use at the mine…”

“We better get back to our business,” Matt urged. “There’s still someone here wh-” Matt’s words turned into a startled scream when something seized his ankles from behind. Both Eleanor and Sheena were grabbed by the same entity seconds later and reacted similarly.

Matt and Eleanor’s Poké Balls both clattered to the ground, and Cacturne fled through the window with a can

of Poké Beans in his hand. All three of them were then hoisted into the air and left hanging upside down when the substance restraining them - which they could now see was thick, sticky silk - was attached to the ceiling by the Pokémon that attacked them. Their attacker was an insect with a thin body covered in vivid green leaves.

“Well done, Elena,” the Pokémon’s trainer said as she emerged from another room. Her features were completely obscured by the black, hooded cloak she wore, leaving her voice as the only way Matt, Eleanor and Sheena could tell anything about her identity. The mysterious woman walked right up to the three as they hung by their legs, showing no fear in her forceful, deliberate steps. “Who are you? Why have you come here?”

“I should ask you the same thing!”

Matt choked back at her.

“Difference is, I’m in a position to make demands. You aren’t.” She turned to her Leavanny, Elena, and said, “Take his bag, we’re searching it.”

Elena complied and started working Matt’s bag off of him with her spindly hands. Matt tried to pull it back from her, only to earn a sharp rap on his wrist for his trouble. The Leavanny then took his bag and passed it to her trainer.

Almost instantly upon looking inside, the cloaked woman froze. She stared into its confines for several long, tense

-019

moments before pulling out the puzzle box and confronting Matt with it.

“Where did you get this?” demanded. “Just who are you?”

she

“My grandfather was murdered by someone trying to take that, and you’ll have to kill me if you want it!” he fumed.

“You’re one of the people looking to steal La Ciudad Dorada’s treasures, aren’t you?!” Eleanor snapped at the now-confused woman.

“Where did… no, I know where you heard that. You talked to my brother, didn’t you?”

“Did you just say… your brother?”

Instead of answering Sheena’s question, the woman said to her Leavanny, “Elena, cut them down.

They aren’t enemies.”

Elena daintily stepped forward and extended one of her arms, which glowed with green light and lengthened into a sharp blade. She then jumped up and cut the three lines of thread with a single graceful motion, sending Matt, Sheena and Eleanor crashing down. Eleanor recovered first and stumbled into the storage room to retrieve the Poké Balls she and Matt dropped.

The woman then put the puzzle box back in Matt’s bag and pushed it toward him. “Here. I’m sorry.”

“What does it matter?” Matt kept the Poké Ball in his hand once Eleanor

returned it to him. “You’re just going to kill us now that we found you, just like you did to your parents!”

“Now I know you definitely talked to my brother. He’s lying!” She reached up and removed her hood, revealing billowing, cloud-like blonde hair and the same intense green eyes Fernando had. “I didn’t kill them, he did. I’ve been hiding here since then, with what I could conceal from him. But you must be Sutter Chiaki’s grandson… why are you here? Did Fernando send you to find me?”

“If he killed your parents, then…”

Matt trailed off briefly, lost in thought.

“He killed your parents, then he wrote to me… but…”

“Answer my question!” Rosalita interrupted to demand. “Why are you here and why do you have that relic?”

“My grandfather left it to me after he was killed, alright? Fernando wrote to me and asked me to bring it here so we could find the Golden City and protect La Ciudad Dorada!”

“So you could find the Golden City and protect La Ciudad Dorada…”

Rosalita repeated. “I knew it. He’s making his move…”

“If Fernando is the murderer, then what about Cassy?” Sheena asked.

Matt froze. He had been so caught up in what he was doing that he forgot Cassy was studying in the palace archive - under the same roof as a man

THE UNDERGROUND

who he’d just discovered very likely murdered his own parents.

“What are you talking about?”

Rosalita questioned Sheena. She didn’t wait for an answer before turning to Matt, who was fumbling to get his laptop. “Who is Cassy?”

“My friend who came with me on this trip,” Matt answered. “She stayed behind when we came to this mine to do research in Lingote Palace’s archive.

And now she’s there with Fernando…”

“He won’t hurt her,” Rosalita said, “or at least I have no reason to think he will. He gains nothing by doing it.”

“Fine, I’ll be the one to say it,” Eleanor declared, crossing her arms.

“How do we know you’re not lying to frame him? Why’d you come out here instead of doing something to bring him to justice?”

“Rosalita would not lie, yes?” a tiny voice said. Matt, Eleanor and Sheena all turned to see a white-bodied, hedgehog-like Pokémon with grass and flowers growing from its back peeking out of the room Rosalita had been hiding in. “I stayed with her because she is the worthy one, yes?”

“Shaymin…” surprise.

Sheena

gasped

“You’re the Pokémon from mural!” Eleanor exclaimed.

in the

“Wait, if Shaymin’s here with Rosalita, that means…” Matt trailed off as he took a moment to think

about what he was hearing, though something Shaymin said quickly hit him. “The worthy one? Are you saying she’s the heir?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.” Rosalita leaned down and ushered Shaymin into her arms, where the mythical Pokémon curled up in comfort. “Fernando framed me for the deaths of our parents. Maybe it was wrong of me to go into hiding, but I panicked and acted to take away as many of the tools he needs to seize power as I could. I’m trying to figure out how I can convince him to stop.

How I can save him from himself.”

“Isn’t it a little late for convincing?” Matt said, a sound of disbelief breaking through his words.

“How are you able to just forgive him so easily? He killed your parents, according to you!”

“I know, but…” Rosalita lowered her sad, watery eyes, causing Shaymin to look up at her in concern. “He was a good man and can be a good man again. I wouldn’t be who I am without him and I’m grateful for that… his knowledge of our kingdom and drive to protect it is second to none. We need him. It’s just…” Rosalita had to stop herself from sobbing. “Everything he’s done, he’s done it to save our kingdom.

That’s what he really believes… I have to just get him to see that he’s gone too far. I have to save him…”

“It’s not really my place to say,”

-021

Sheena ventured, “but how has he convinced himself that murdering the king and queen helps the kingdom at all?”

“No, I don’t blame you for asking.”

Rosalita breathed deeply, trying to soothe herself. “We don’t really have time for the whole story now, but he told you the truth when he said the kingdom was threatened. He believes that he is the only one who can protect us and wants Regigigas’s help doing so, but to do so he has to become king.

That’s why I have to get to the Golden City first.”

“I’m still skeptical,” Matt said, having just finished sending an email to Cassy warning her to be careful.

“I didn’t sign up for a family feud with power and immortality in the balance. I just wanted closure for my grandfather… you’re asking me to choose a side in something where I can’t fully agree with either side.”

“What do asked him.

you

mean?”

Rosalita

“If I believe you, and with Shaymin vouching for you I have no reason not to, Fernando is a killer who betrayed his family and his home and then lied to me to help him attain power. But if it’s as you say, he did it for what he sees as a noble reason. You, on the other hand, you want me to help you stop him, but you also want to forgive him for all the crimes he’s committed.

I don’t know if I can accept that.”

“I understand…” Rosalita bitterly said. “I’m sorry you all became involved in this. It isn’t fair. I can’t ask you to forgive my brother for what he’s done, but I still care about him and I can’t just let him destroy himself.”

Rosalita’s words struck a chord in Matt’s heart, leaving him silent. As much as he couldn’t forgive Fernando for his actions, Rosalita’s dedication to helping her brother moved him.

“I know that feeling, being willing to do anything to save someone you care about…” he thought. Images flooded his memory, ones that had happened years ago but still felt like yesterday to him. He saw himself riding on Anton’s back - at the time the Rhyperior was an unevolved Rhyhorn - through a blizzard. With him was a blue-haired girl wearing goggles to protect her eyes.

“Matt?” Eleanor asked.

“Sorry, I got… caught up in thinking about something,” he admitted. “I’ve decided. I’ll keep going and help you find the Golden City. But I’m leading this expedition with Sheena and Eleanor’s help. Rosalita, you’re coming with us but we call the shots.”

“That’s acceptable, yes?” Despite sounding like a question for Rosalita, Shaymin’s statement was actually aimed at Matt. “It will be like when I traveled to the Golden City with the professor, yes?”

THE UNDERGROUND

“If Shaymin says so, I have no reason to disagree with your terms,” Rosalita agreed.

“Then we should get goi-” Matt cut himself off when the meaning of Shaymin’s words dawned on him.

“When you traveled to the Golden City with the professor? What do you mean by that?”

“It was a great many years ago, yes? While I was serving at the side of Rosalita’s grandfather, the professor and his apprentice came here, and together we all went on a grand adventure to the Golden City. It was a very fun time, yes?”

Matt took a step back and put his hand over his mouth. His evident shock made Shaymin stare at him with its head cocked to the side.

“What’s wrong?” Sheena asked him.

“Sutter told me many stories of his adventures searching for the Golden City,” he answered, his voice faint. “He never told me he found it.”

“Wait, I don’t understand,” Eleanor intervened. She turned to Shaymin and said, “If you went to the Golden City before, you should know where it is.

Why don’t we just go there now?”

“None will find the Golden City without first walking the path of the Three Pillars.” Shaymin’s response was automatic, almost robotic, and even lacked its typical verbal tic.

“The

body

shaped

from

the

mountains themselves,” Rosalita added. Her recitation was less rigid than Shaymin’s, sounding more like the careful recollection of a student than a reflexive response. “The body forged within the blood of the earth.

The body carved from the waters of life. So stand the Three Pillars, eternally guarding and being guarded by the great protector. Whence man steps forth to commune with the protector in its shrine, the path shall only appear to those who have gathered the light of the Three Pillars.”

“Regirock, Registeel and Regice?”

Eleanor deduced.

“You are very wise, yes?” Shaymin said, its normal manner returning.

Rosalita couldn’t help but smile.

“Yes, that is correct. Even with the location of where the Golden City should be, we cannot reach it without first finding Regirock, Registeel and Regice. That’s what the three clues and the puzzle box are for. Now, with all of that said, tell me why you came here.”

“Fernando showed us the clue he had and we decided it referenced this mine,” Matt revealed.

“That makes sense,” Rosalita said, putting her finger on her chin. “I had my own suspicions about this site. That’s why I came here to hide. I thought that if Fernando followed the clue himself, it would be safer to stop him out here away from the city. But since you’re here, Matt, and you brought the puzzle

-023

box, we can follow the trail ourselves and get there before he does!”

gasped in surprise. “Yo, and that Shaymin’s with her!”

“Then we best get going,” Sheena suggested.

“Jackpot on that one, Sis!” This news so excited him that he pushed himself forward off the tree with his foot before spreading his arms and looking to the sky. “It ain’t gonna be long before our fortune is ours! Ya know what we should do with it?”

“You’re right.” Rosalita recalled Elena to the safety of her Poké Ball, then turned away from the three and gestured for them to follow her, much like her brother had done earlier in the museum. “The elevator to go down into the mine isn’t far from here. Come on, I’ll show you.”

Rosalita led Matt, Eleanor and Sheena back out of the workers’ building and across the village, toward a large building next to the abandoned factory. Not one of them realized that a Yanmega wearing a glowing collar was flying overhead, watching them.

-:The siblings who directed the attack on Lingote Palace’s garden had trekked a short distance into the desert beyond La Ciudad Dorada, leaving the city behind. They were huddled under the shade of a lone palm tree while the sister monitored what their Yanmega was seeing using her wrist device and a camera on Yanmega’s collar.

“Looks like they found the princess, Bro,” she said to her brother, who was fanning himself. Just as she finished talking, she squinted to examine the projected image more closely and

“What?”

“So if we go on back home, what do ya think of gettin’ our old gang back together? There’s gonna be so much cash in our pockets when this job’s done, ain’t gonna be a problem to help ‘em out, too.”

The young woman stopped to ponder her brother’s idea. It was true, the riches they stood to gain were far beyond what just two people would need for a more than comfortable life.

Her mind wandered back to memories of their youth.

Pyrite Town in those days was an incredibly bleak place that offered its residents only three real options for supporting themselves. You could go to work in the mines of a city underneath Pyrite, appropriately known as The Under. If you preferred to stay in the sun, battling at Pyrite Colosseum was an option. The problem with both of those choices was that Pyrite Town was corrupted to its core. No matter what you did, at some point your livelihood intersected with the culture of crime that so permeated the city.

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It was that reason for why so many residents of Pyrite Town chose option number three: abandoning all pretense and simply becoming criminals themselves.

Those were the circumstances the pair found themselves in. For as long as they could remember, they only had each other to rely on, and with no better choices they turned to stealing food and money to survive. Other children on the streets were drawn to her decisive leadership and his surprisingly gentle, compassionate personality, and together, they created the family none of them really had. Those in their orbit grew deeply loyal to the pair they dubbed “Big Sis Noel” and “Little Bro Leon,” names that stuck even after Leon grew to be much taller than his sister. “’ey, Sis, you awake?”

Noel shook her head as Leon’s questions snapped her back to the present. “Sorry, Bro, I’m here. I feel ya on that one. Wouldn’t be right if we just head home and forget where we came from.”

“Ain’t who we are,” Leon agreed.

“And I gotta be honest, Sis, I miss ‘em. We’ve been flyin’ solo for way too long.”

The devices had buttons on their straps that caused pairs of wings to spread out from them once Noel and Leon pressed them, and the bulbs on them emitted a blue glow as the siblings lifted into the air.

-:On their way down into the mine using the rickety work elevator, Eleanor released a Litwick, a Pokémon that looked like a candle with a blue flame. She sat on Eleanor’s shoulder, giving light to the group as they started to explore. Matt, meanwhile, had taken out his laptop in order to record their search.

There was little discussion of anything among the four while they made their way deeper underground, following the narrow tunnels.

Unable to focus on the exploration, Matt couldn’t help but let his mind wander to what he’d seen and heard over the course of the day.

“Rosalita, I’ve been wondering about something,” he finally said, breaking the uneasy quiet over the group.

“Hm? What?”

“You can say that again, Bro. C’mon, we gotta get going.”

“Your brother, does he have any Pokémon?” Matt narrowed his eyes. “I have to know.”

Noel shut off the projection, then joined Leon in putting on backpack-like machines they’d brought with them.

“I don’t understand where that question is coming from,” Rosalita answered, putting her hand on the side

-025

Above: Rosalita (from The Gardener of Gratitude), by illustriousrocket

THE UNDERGROUND

of the tunnel for balance while Shaymin held onto her head. “But since you asked, no, he doesn’t.”

“Oh…” “What is wrong?” Sheena asked him.

His lack of a significant response left her unable to tell what kind of answer he actually wanted.

“I needed to know if Fernando had a Dragonite,” he admitted, though his voice remained bland and lifeless.

“After Rosalita said he killed their parents I started thinking that maybe he killed my grandfather, too. His killer attacked him with a Dragonite that was wearing one of those collars.”

“So that’s what you meant in the garden…” Sheena murmured to herself.

“I don’t know how much it means coming from someone like me,” Rosalita gently said, “but I’m sorry.

What happened to him was horrible.”

“Yeah, I liked the professor, yes?”

Shaymin added. “He helped us keep our secrets safe.”

“Since he found the Golden City and never told anyone, he sure did.” Matt sighed in resignation. “Not even me…” he thought, “but why?”

“Keeping them secret was the right thing to do back then,” Rosalita said to Matt and Sheena while they kept walking. “Times have changed. Since Sutter was killed, I’ve realized more than ever that all the secrecy is causing too much harm. I hope you’ll forgive

me for saying this, but two families being destroyed over all of this is too many. It has to change.”

“Heads up, guys,” Eleanor called from the head of the group, interrupting the conversation before Matt or Sheena could press Rosalita for more details.

“I found something.”

Eleanor had stopped at the end of the tunnel, which appeared to open into a much larger cavern. Matt, Sheena and Rosalita joined her there, but none of them could see through the darkness to what lay beyond.

“You hear that?” Rosalita put her hand to her ear to help focus her hearing. “I think I hear water.”

“I hear it too,” Matt said, mimicking Rosalita’s action before picking up a small rock and throwing it. It bounced off something deep in the murk and made a sound that echoed all around them.

“There’s no way we can safely explore that big an area in such darkness,” Sheena commented.

“Then we have to make it not be dark. Simple.” Eleanor extended her arm, allowing Litwick to climb down onto her hand. “Litwick, Flash!”

The blue flame on Litwick’s head flared several times greater than normal as its owner let out a cry that echoed through the cavern. She put all her energy into it, but was unable to light very far into the vast space.

-027

“This isn’t going to work…” Rosalita turned to Eleanor and saw how Litwick looked disappointed. “Oh, no, Litwick, you did a good job!” she said to the Pokémon. “I’ll get you some Poké Beans when we’re done here.”

Rosalita’s words of praise cheered Litwick up, and the candle Pokémon smiled at her.

“What’s that?” Matt pointed at a box he’d spotted on the wall of the cave a few feet away when Litwick used Flash.

It was made out of rusted red metal and had two unlit bulbs sticking out of it.

Eleanor approached the box and started examining it. “It might be just what we needed… a generator. If it still works we’re set. Can one of you help me get it open?”

“I think so,” Matt said. He took one of his Poké Balls from his bag and opened it, allowing Anton to materialize. “Anton, use Smart Strike on that generator’s latch, would you?”

The Rhyperior assented to his trainer’s request with a grunt, then fixed his stare on the rusted latch Matt indicated. His horn started to glow with a metallic sheen as he lowered his head, and he headbutted the latch, breaking it off in one blow.

Eleanor used both hands and all of her strength to pull the cover open. It made a horrible grinding sound as it moved, but she still managed to make it give way so she could look around inside.

“How does asked her.

it

look?”

Sheena

“Like it’ll still work,” replied the engineer. “Everything’s still in place. I think it’s time for my number one rule when it comes to trying out machines like this - give it a go and see what happens.”

“Is that a good thing or not?” Matt couldn’t help himself from thinking.

Eleanor pushed the generator’s switch handle all the way down.

Almost immediately, the two bulbs on the bottom of the box filled with the expected blue glow, and all around the cavern strings of lights flickered to life.

For the first time, the group could fully appreciate just how vast the mine truly was. The cave spread out all around them, making them notice that the cliff they were on was even smaller than they first thought. The lack of space on the ledge prompted Matt to immediately recall Anton to open up more room.

“Well done, Anton. Thank you,” Matt said, giving his Pokémon a pat on the arm.

When Matt went to put away Anton’s Poké Ball, Sheena caught a glimpse of golden light shining out of his bag.

“What’s that?”

With that task done, Litwick jumped off Eleanor’s shoulder to sit on top of the generator and provide light to her.

“What?” Matt hadn’t been looking at what he was doing, and when he did look, he immediately saw the light as

THE UNDERGROUND

well. He furrowed his brow, handed his laptop to Sheena and reached in to retrieve the source of the light - the puzzle box. “It’s certainly never done this before,” he said, lifting it up.

“Rosalita, do you know why?”

“Not for certain,” she answered, cocking her head, “but I have an idea.

I think I remember reading something about it in the palace archive once… ‘the key shall show the road ahead,’ I believe.”

“It sounds like the puzzle box is going to guide us,” Eleanor reasoned.

“Matt, see if it does anything to show us the direction we need to go.”

“Right, good idea.”

Following Eleanor’s suggestion, Matt stepped up to the cliff and held out the puzzle box as far as his arm could stretch. Nothing noticeable happened at first, so he moved to point it in different directions. After a few moments, its light suddenly intensified.

“There,” Matt said, must be over there.”

“something

Eleanor joined him and peered out at the area the puzzle box was indicating. “That looks suspicious,” she commented, pointing at a ledge below that was connected to the main landmass by an old, rickety wooden bridge. “We should go check that out.”

“That bridge doesn’t look safe,” Sheena observed, having come up alongside Matt and Eleanor with Rosalita behind her.

“You’re right,” Matt agreed. He put the puzzle box back in his bag and took two more Poké Balls out. “But there’s one thing we have in our favor… how big this mine is.”

When he threw the spheres, Sally appeared alongside Matt’s Magnezone, both hovering over the edge of the cliff.

Rosalita quickly tossed one of her own Poké Balls as well, releasing a Staraptor to join them.

“Sally, bring Sheena and I down to that ledge, would you?” he asked his Salamence, gesturing to the cliff below.

He then said to his Magnezone, “Zero, please take Eleanor.”

“And we’ll follow them, Reyes,” Rosalita informed her Staraptor.

Sally was the first of the Pokémon to land on the precipice, allowing Matt and Sheena to climb onto her back. She then lifted herself back into the air and pulled away so Zero could take her place and collect Eleanor. Rosalita was last to get on her mount, but Reyes pushed to the front of the pack before the group started their descent.

“This place really is incredible,” Eleanor marvelled as she looked around at the cavern. “This isn’t what I was expecting a mineral mine to be like at all.”

“A mineral mine? I guess Fernando told you that.” Rosalita smiled sadly to herself. “The truth is, this mine yielded many more types of treasures than that. Matt, you’re Sinnohan

-029

so you might understand this the most. In the past our kingdom mined precious artifacts, stones and even fossils here.”

“Like the Sinnoh Matt realized.

Underground,”

“Yes. From what I understand there are also mines in Alola that are similar,” Rosalita continued.

“It doesn’t matter now, though.

The mining industry stopped being viable for us years ago, so this mine was closed.”

When the group arrived at their destination, Rosalita jumped off of Reyes’ back before Matt, Sheena and Eleanor disembarked. Shaymin ran right to the sheer rock face and stared at it. The four humans followed and started examining the wall as well.

“I don’t see anything,” Matt said to the others. “Is this not the right spot?”

“It doesn’t look like there was any excavation done here,” Rosalita reasoned, “so why is there a bridge to this spot? What is this?”

“Matt, your bag!” Eleanor exclaimed, pointing at him.

He hadn’t noticed, but the light spilling out of his bag had intensified so much that the shape of the puzzle box could be seen through the material. The sight made him gasp, and he quickly took the cube out. Unsure of what to do with it, he simply held it up toward the wall.

The reaction was almost instant. A light matching that of the puzzle box emanated from the wall, and a golden archway and set of doors materialized right in front of the explorers’ eyes.

“What?” Matt uttered, gasping for the second time in under a minute.

“How does that even work?”

“Did the ones who built it use Gaia’s power?” guessed Sheena. “If they did, making a shrine that only appears with a key would be possible.”

“It is possible,” Rosalita agreed.

“The wanderer who came to this land seven hundred years ago left texts behind on how to use Gaia. As far as I know nobody has ever had the same talent in channeling it as he did, but construction of a vanishing shrine is probably within reason.”

“Then let’s investigate it before it disappears again.” Eleanor marched right up to the stone doors, which bore the same ‘H’ shape pattern of dots that appeared on the puzzle box.

Sheena followed right after her, while Matt and Rosalita hung back with their Pokémon.

“Sally, Zero, I’d like for you to guard the shrine while we’re in there,” he requested, earning cries of agreement from the pair. “There’s always the chance we were followed.”

“Reyes, you too, please,” Rosalita said to her Staraptor, who replied with a determined squawk. She then

THE UNDERGROUND

turned to Matt and started walking with him to the doorway. “That was good thinking, I have to say. I’ve been expecting Fernando to follow us here the entire time…”

Matt opened his mouth to say something, but when he looked down at Rosalita next to him, he realized that her eyes were watering again. She had turned away from him and was staring rigidly at the doors.

“She expects it, but she doesn’t want it to happen… she still hopes there’s a way to fix everything with him, I guess…”

“Let’s get going,” Rosalita said to Sheena and Eleanor, her voice hard and emotionless. She marched straight past them and pushed the doors open.

Eleanor stepped inside after Rosalita, allowing Litwick to illuminate the chamber. Matt and Sheena followed, all of them carefully looking around at their surroundings for any sign of what to do next. It was a simple stone room whose only features were the colorful paintings of Regigigas, Regirock, Registeel and Regice that spread across the walls and floor.

“Come here,” Eleanor called out to the others, “look at this.”

The engineer beckoned Matt, Sheena and Rosalita to the back wall, where Litwick’s flame shed light on the writing inscribed on it.

“This writing… I’ve seen it before,” Rosalita said after leaning in closer to

examine it. Instead of ordinary written language, whatever was recorded on the wall was in patterns of dots. “But I don’t know how to read it.”

“I do.” Matt stepped past the others, who looked at him with surprise on their faces. Lowering himself to be level with the writing, Matt began to read it, running his finger along the lines of text as he went. “Whosoever shall wear the crown, here begins the road.

Walk this path with resolve and face the three trials that await. Here lies the first of the three trials. The body of rock shall only awaken for one whose gratitude blooms before us. Beware, for if gratitude does not bloom, destruction shall be at hand.”

“Shall only awaken for one whose gratitude blooms before us,” Sheena repeated. “It sounds like it wants us to express gratitude, but that wording is a little odd.”

“I don’t know what will happen to bring destruction if we get this wrong,” Matt warned, “so we best think about what our next step is before we take it.”

“Bloom, like a flower,” reasoned Eleanor. “Maybe that’s wordplay. What if it doesn’t want our gratitude but a flower that represents gratitude? We could try Shaymin.”

“It’s not Shaymin,” Rosalita realized. “Shaymin is the Gardener of Gratitude, but the gardener only plants the flowers. This message is referring

-031

to the flower of gratitude itself the Gracidea.”

single, scarf-like set of red petals, and its legs more than doubled in length.

Shaymin sat on Rosalita’s shoulder and smiled proudly as she approached the wall. Matt, Sheena and Eleanor backed up to give her space. When she stood directly in front of the message, she reached into her cloak and took out a small box. It bore the image of a canine Pokémon with wing-like ears, which was holding three spears colored brown, silver and blue. Behind the Pokémon was the shape of a flower with six petals.

“There is no need to be afraid, you!”

Shaymin exclaimed, floating into the air once its transformation was complete. “This is the first trial on the road to the Golden City. The message said that, you!”

The same flower as the one in the coat of arms was inside the box when Rosalita opened it. It was a vivid pink color with yellow stamens and a pair of green leaves sticking out of it. Rosalita held the box up to the dots on the wall, and in response to the pollen that wafted out, the symbols started to glow.

A strange light whose source could not be identified filled the shrine.

“What’s happening now?” Eleanor wondered, putting words to the confusion all but Rosalita felt.

While the humans were distracted, the pollen of the Gracidea had also drifted over to Shaymin. Its body started to glow and change shape, becoming the Pokémon who was in Rosalita’s coat of arms. The grass on the back of Shaymin’s original form transformed into a mohawk-shaped tuft between its long ears, the two flowers surrounding its head became a

Eleanor was unable to stifle her laugh. “Thanks, but you sure have changed.”

“It’s Shaymin’s Sky Forme,” Rosalita revealed. “When Shaymin gets exposed to a Gracidea flower, it transforms and gains the ability to fly.”

“I get a lot stronger too, so don’t underestimate me, you!” Who Shaymin was talking to was unclear, but none of the four had much time to think about it. The doors of the shrine suddenly slammed shut, trapping them inside. “Don’t focus on me now, you!

He is here!”

“Who is here?” Matt nervously asked, though Shaymin didn’t answer.

A beam of light erupted from the floor in front of the blocked exit, forcing Matt, Sheena and Eleanor to shield their eyes. Rosalita, on the other hand, wasn’t bothered by it. She stared straight into the light as she readied one of her Poké Balls, her eyes burning with determination.

“This is my fight now, so stay back,” she told the others. A shape was emerging from the light, though its

THE UNDERGROUND

features remained obscured at first.

“I must do this if I am to prove my worth for the throne.”

Finally, the light began to fade. A deep, robotic voice echoed through the shrine as the figure emerged from the glare, its rough, craggy body constructed of what appeared to be stones of various shapes simply stuck together.

“Regirock…” Matt uttered as he took his laptop back from Sheena to continue recording what was happening.

“I’ve waited a very long time to meet you, Regirock. My name is Rosalita, princess of the House of Fernando and current heir to the throne of La Ciudad Dorada. I have come to prove myself and claim my birthright!”

To be continued

-033

COLTAR THE PROPHECY by

Cavespider_17

THE UNDERGROUND

Chapter 1 – Scars of Marsten Hall

Part 1 Date: 15th June 1989 Fehahra was beautiful in the summer. It was so peaceful before the incident at Marsten Hall. The wind was always blowing through the greenery.

It waved to the trees as it blew past.

The berries on the trees were starting to ripen. They were plump and looked so delicious it was impossible not to pick one. As the boys crept past the bushes by the lake Lioa couldn’t help but take a few.

The creamy full-moon was only four days away.

There were very few street Lampent.

They would hover above the ground at two metres up. Their black body was smooth. Their oval face was clear with their beady yellow eyes with no pupils inside. A purple flame which danced ran through their oval face.

The cobble paving in Fehahra was old and dusty. It was a grey sandy colour and it looked cold. The houses they hovered by were small for the

most part like most of the houses in Fehahra. They were stone bricked and rather claustrophobic. The town was pretty flat.

There were a few ways into Fehahra, most notably the wooden bridge over the waterfall which was connected to the river that flowed through the town.

The wooden bridge was tied together using rope. The drop was sheer and sickly. The water was a green murky colour.

Andrew squinted his eyes to see the spire of the house of worship for those who follow Cresselia and Darkrai alike. It was situated near the northern edge of Fehahra at the top of the one hill. It stood as a grand building. It had four long twisty pillars cut out of Wailord bones. They were engraved with glorious patterns and painted a quartz-white. Only when you pushed past the light wooden doors could you see the true beauty of the building. The walls were painted in colours of old. Their patterns were intrinsic to those of either household.

-035

In the middle of it all stood a solid silver statue of what Giratina was rumoured to look like. It had a face with a sharp beak and four stumpy legs.

Upon its stumpy legs its bug like body rested before it strained up in the form of a neck to hold its large head. The floor on which the statue stood was a cream concrete.

Those with the poorest of backgrounds would sit at the back to avoid contact with those who were richer. The richest would sit closest to the stage. The stage was made from a carved wood. Spirals and carved images of the fiercest Pokémon battles lay on the edges. Every plank of wood was cut into a jigsaw shape and joined in perfect harmony with one another to illustrate the importance of unity in the North. The walls were covered by plain wooden planks to symbolise the simplicity of the average life of a Northern citizen.

Crouched by the door of one of the shops, more central to the town, in the dark, fourteen year old James Spitz was planning another one of his hairbrained schemes. Thirteen year old Kitiku Bryson was next to him. His ice-white shirt was glowing softly in the moonlight.

“James... why did I let you talk me into this?” He whispered. His left hand was resting against the sandy brick wall by the window. He feared the worst. Breaking the rules, to him, was

obviously never going to end well. “If we get caught we will be hauled up in front of Charleston. That would be so... so bad... I mean I don’t want to be arrested or thrown in jail or given a warning and have a mark against my name in my file... or executed or thrown in jail”, he was sweating. The tropical heat wasn’t the reason for it.

He was so nervous. “It is okay for you to sneak around undetected. You are a normal height.”

“Can you just shut up? Seriously, you can’t stop complaining about jail or getting arrested or being executed.

You can’t even shut up for a few minutes while I am thinking!” James whisper-shouted. He tugged down on his brown blazer. “You know what?

Why don’t we just hand ourselves in?

I have Sutton’s number... we just have to shout “hey moron” and he will come running. Handing ourselves is the right thing to do, right? It isn’t as if these people are monsters who have invaded our home and set a wild Charizard loose at Marsten Hall that killed my mother and ate your brother and then caused this entire conflict in which Mr Takui died fighting for us!” James hissed.

His friends looked at him. He had let his mask slip. Usually he would conceal his feelings of sadness to appear strong in the eyes of others.

“Okay, so here is the plan... Kitiku, you and Rusto will open the electronic door which those Southern soldiers

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supplied. Lioa and Ruskuo you will break open the ration crates. We are going to need all the strength of that Gurdurr of yours tonight! Andrew and Nutkio will be keeping watch. Any sign of anyone we beat them in battle and then run away as soon as possible. Okta and I will be ready to deal with any trouble.” He smirked at the thought of being victorious.

“James? Aren’t you scared? I am not scared. We are on our last warning though. Charleston, she cannot execute us. She doesn’t have the power to... but the Elite Guards can. I am not scared. I just don’t know if we should keep doing this. I miss my father just like you miss your mother and how Kitiku misses his brother... but honestly, can we really afford to risk being caught again?”

Lioa was huddled behind Andrew and Kitiku. His shirt was torn at the top and his trousers were muddy. He brushed the hair from his face and then spoke, “How do you even plan on stopping us getting caught again?”

“I told you we will battle.” A determined look crossed James’ face. His teeth were gritted together.

“This time it will be different. This time we will win. Besides, we won’t get caught and after the festival I’ll break into the offices and replace our records of so called bad behaviour with blank sheets.”

James, Andrew and Lioa were often unsuccessful in their mischief-making

endeavours to the point where James had already had to do this thrice already.

Charleston was starting to get suspicious, but her poor memory and high stress levels contributed to her ignoring the nagging thoughts in the back of her mind telling her she had done this before.

“I never get in these situations. I don’t get in these situations because I don’t break the rules... I don’t even know why I am here. My father will kill me if he ever finds out. He will do worse to you James.” Kitiku tried to back himself up. “I am going home.

I am not getting arrested because of you.” His voice was squeaking in places as he spoke. “I really don’t want to die.” Lioa shunted his friend forward.

His eyes narrowed until his green eyes were black in the darkness. “I am just scared...” He sighed. “I will open the door and then I’m sneaking home before my father finds out.” James nodded, somewhat disappointed with his friend’s reaction.

“After you get home you better cover for me.” James sighed. After losing his mother and step-father at Marsten Hall, Tak Bryson had offered sanctuary to him. James quickly learned that living under the Bryson household was hard.

They were dirt poor.

Tak Bryson, once a glorified and well decorated member of the Northern Elite Guard was now a simple labourer. His ocean blue eyes seemed tired and full

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of sorrow. His hair was smooth and combed flat. Its colour was jet black.

It was obvious Kitiku had inherited his hair colour from his father.

Tak had stubble but no beard and always attempted to look as presentable as possible. He worked ridiculously long hours. He worked every day without break 6:30 am until 8:30 pm.

He claimed to only have one Pokémon, Oosho the Octillery.

He feared his old profession would risk his family’s safety, if ever the South should come. And come they did.

He turned to the bottle. He was often sober despite the large quantities he would drink. His old injuries did not help his mood. He was convinced that if he was still a member of the Northern Elite Guard he could have defended Fehahra town.

As it was, his injuries had forced his retirement. He had obtained them thirteen years before in a bloody battle with a Southern Guard. He and Oosho had fought bravely and were winning the battle. He never stated what caused the battle. Oosho was so precise with his hydro pump and the rain dance he would use would whip up a powerful storm. Whoever he had fought though was prepared for that. In the end Tak did win the battle but at a cost.

The Elite Guard he had fought and driven a short-hand sword into his left shoulder and his Houndoom had chomped down on the wound as soon

as the blade and been removed, just to reinforce the damage. The burn was agonising. Tak had cut the skin off where the burn was seeping through.

The blade wound though was still prominent. Tak often took his feeling of devastation out on his youngest and now only son. He was incredibly harsh when assessing Kitiku’s performance.

Often he referred to his shy, over-tall son as being broken or defective.

After losing his eldest son – Pierre Tak Bryson – at Marsten Hall to the Charizard, he was even more sceptical about losing his second.

“Kitiku, do you trust me?” James asked.

“I think so...” He whispered. “Let’s just get in, get out, get home and hope my father doesn’t notice. Rusto can you shoot an electrical signal along the cables using charge? That was we can release the locking mechanism.” His hands were shaking as he released his Klink, who whizzed around and made a sound similar to chirping. It had never been so excited at the prospect of being a rogue in the night. It wound up its small stubby body and started sparking small electric charges into the ends of the copper wires that were powering the door.

The boys then waited patiently for the electric charge to pulse through the wires into the locking mechanism.

Their hearts beating faster for every second they waited. The door clicked

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open. James shunted into it. The door budged just a little. It was enough to fit through.

“I’m going home now. Let’s just pray to Cresselia my father doesn’t find out.

I don’t want to be caught. I certainly don’t want to die.” Kitiku slipped out of the queue that had formed and started to dart around. He was very conspicuous, a clear novice at being out after hours. Rusto was pretending to be some sort of super spy as he followed Kitiku. He whizzed around in a spectacular fashion.

James squeezed his skinny body through the tiny gap he had created.

Lioa, who had a slightly bigger build, had to give an additional shove to the door before being able to squeeze through.

“Okay, we are in.” James puffed a sigh of relief. The store opened up into one main room. The tenants were away for the week. The plain grey walls looked as if they were closing in.

Lioa stepped heavily onto the wooden creaky floorboards.

There was a product island in the middle. It was laced with all sorts of food goodies. However, the golden meats that were available on the shop floor were nothing in comparison to the crates. James knew the crates were full of fresh berries which were perfectly ripe. His mouth watered just imagining their bitter taste. He also imagined the tender, full Qwilfish. Such a delicious

dish. His stomach rumbled as he crept towards the window. He knelt down on the floor before giving a signal to Lioa.

“Four-Seven-Two-Two-Seven!”

He whispered.

Lioa nodded. He released his Gurdurr from its poké ball. It bubbled out its battle cry as it thudded onto the floor.

The shelves shook. The door wire cracked. The window shattered. Broken glass burst into all directions. James covered his face with his hands. He then looked around. He wasn’t bleeding.

The glass shimmered in its shards on the floor.

“Did you have to do that?” James hissed. “Hurry up and break those crates!” Lioa nodded. He raised his left arm and pointed at the crates before giving a whispered command to Ruskuo.

Ruskuo thumped across the floor. The glass shards were cracking under his feet. The floorboards squealed a creak in agony. Ruskuo swung angrily at the wooden crates. The wooden was ripped off. Inside the crate was nothing. James looked at Lioa. He had figured out what had just happened.

He looked concerned. “This was a trap. That’s not good. Sutton is probably on his way here right now.

If we are lucky it will be Sutton... if we aren’t it will be Charleston.” Lioa looked worryingly back at James.

“Did you wipe our records?” Lioa asked in a hurry.

-039

“I told you I would do it after the festival...”

“So no matter what happens... if we are caught that is... the Southern Guard will have us...” Lioa gulped. “Andrew!

Any sign of Sutton?”

“Not yet.” He answered. James started to creep upstairs. He steps were soft. The wooden stairs creaked and cracked with every step he took. He was nearly at the top of the stairs. The crooked banister on his left was starting to shake. He took the penultimate step.

Crack. The step broke and he slipped.

Part 2 The step wasn’t a step at all. It was a wooden safe box. It had been concealed in plain sight.

“Lioa....” James heard. He turned around and went to leave. Something stopped him. Perhaps it was curiosity.

He couldn’t leave without looking inside the safe box. What harm could it do? He pondered before crawling back towards it. He peered inside. The tatty wooden safe box had a few photos in, a couple of Colkara which he pocketed and something else. Something else that glowed. Glowed beyond the normal lights of the Lampent. He reached in and pulled it out of the box. It was wrapped up in some sort of tatty old cloth. It was a grey colour. It looked worthless, like an old stone. He couldn’t put it down and he couldn’t

put it back. He shoved it into his pocket and scrambled away from the broken step.

Sutton was there, outside the broken window.

James held his breath. His hair flopped over his eyes for a moment. He pushed his back against the wall and edged towards the door. He couldn’t see Lioa or Andrew. They must have gotten away. James reached out and pulled himself through the narrow gap in the door. Getting out of the building was the easy part. Getting away without being caught was a little trickier. He was sweating more and more as every second ticked by.

Sutton turned to look the other way.

James sprinted as fast as he could along the cobbles. He checked back to see if he had been noticed. He had been spotted. He had a little time to find somewhere safe to hide. His heart pumped quicker and quicker. He wasn’t afraid to battle if he had to.

He turned into one of the side paths.

As he was running along the narrow path he was grabbed and pulled into a small side alley.

Lioa pulled James away from the side path. They both darted towards the tall wooden fence at the end of the alley and clumsily clambered over it. All three boys let out a massive sigh of relief.

“What do we do now?” Andrew

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quivered. “We are in so much trouble...” His hair looked as if it had been torn up by the wind.

shoulder. The fog faded and a chilling breeze whispered through the narrow street where they had been running.

“We keep running. We get back home. If he spots us we run faster. If he catches up Lioa will battle him.”

Lioa nodded. “If Lioa somehow loses to that moron we play the kid-card. Just sit and cry. Sutton is a sucker for it. He will feel guilty.” James smirked.

The street Lampent’s flames, which had been dancing a soft purple, started flickering.

“The guilt trip always works.”

Lioa smiled. They started to run northbound. Andrew was lagging behind. As one of the cross-roads came up James began to pull out a lead over Lioa. He turned back to mock Lioa but was knocked over with a thud.

“Kitiku?” James blurted out. “Hadn’t you gone home?”

Kitiku looked nervously at James, then stood. “I decided you may have needed help,” he paused. “I think you destroyed the building.”

Lioa stopped running and patted James’ shoulder. The boys looked around. There was a dirty fog around them. The clouds of black fog swirled around.

There was no sign of Sutton.

“Okay... so... where is Seargent Sutton and the Southern army?”

Kitiku said nervously and shuffled his feet.

James shivered suddenly. It was as if someone had just walked behind him and placed their stone cold hand on his

“Okay... M-mister Sutton? M-mister Sutton you have caught us now... please j-just come out a-and arrest us... please?” Kitiku squeaked. He was shaking and more timid than before.

Something was bothering him and it wasn’t the fact they would be in a lot of trouble if they were caught.

James had a sudden realisation. This was not Sutton trying to scare them.

This was something else. There were no doorways, no narrow passageways, no drains - no places for Sutton to be hiding – at least on the ground level.

James looked up at the rooves. His eyes focused. His breathing was slow and calm. There was nothing. Not even a shadow. There were no stars in the sky. He couldn’t even see the moon.

The flames of the street Lampent started to flicker faster. The flames were darting around as if they were avoiding some sinister attacker. James noticed their eyes were a deep grey.

They appeared to be lost within their own souls. He continued to scan the surrounding area.

James reached out to Kitiku. He seemed to be having somewhat of a panic attack. His face was discoloured.

James pulled Kitiku behind him. The

-041

air had turned dead. There was still a wind. James thought. There had to be. The flames wouldn’t flicker without one. He stared into the flames.

Without warning all the flames on every single Lampent in sight went out. They all fainted simultaneously.

Kitiku squeezed James’ arm incredibly tightly. James could feel his hand tingle from the blood being cut off. He quickly shook Kitiku off and pushed him to the ground.

“James? What is going on?” he squeaked.

“It’s Sutton playing a trick. Don’t worry. I will defeat him and send him back home.” He smiled at Kitiku. He could do nothing else. Then the smallest of horrors dawned on him. Andrew was nowhere to be seen.

“James? Where is Andrew?” Lioa asked. His voice was filled with fear.

James didn’t turn around, he was fixated on the wall. The sandy brown wall of the house looked out of place to James. He couldn’t put his finger on what it was.

The subtle sound of his friends breathing stopped. He was surrounded by silence. He opened his eyes and was enclosed by darkness. It wasn’t pitch black. He could tell because of the shady figure standing two metres in front of him. He didn’t recognise them at first.

His stomach felt twisted and he wanted to vomit.

“Who are you?” James asked, taking a single step back. The figure didn’t move. Its short hair blew softly. Its hat was tilted and its hand held onto the long thin edge. The figure was looking down and its legs were in a squared stance. “Where am I?” Again the figure remained still. James looked around. He could feel his heartbeat slowing down.

“I am not afraid. I am not afraid of anything. This world, it isn’t real, is it?”

The nothingness around him seemed to be moving. James wasn’t afraid, he was curious. The figure remained statuary.

James slowly reached into his pocket.

Okta was ready. If she was ready, he was ready. “Tell me who you are!” The figure suddenly looked up. The eyes James recognised immediately. Hanson Rei. James stepped back a few more steps. Something wasn’t right. Rei was dead. Simple as that. He watched the fire rage at Marsten Hall. Rei was inside when the fire took hold. James suddenly smirked. “You aren’t real.”

He blinked. His body felt as if it was twisting and being thrown around.

He opened his eyes. He was cold. He could feel again. He was now in a cave.

The narrowing passageways and low ceiling was frightfully claustrophobic.

The walls looked a dingy grey, but it was too dark for him to tell for sure.

James was confused. His head ached.

It felt as if there were a thousand rampaging Tauros running around inside it. The figure was gone but the air still felt as dead as the trees that

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loom over the graves of the victims of brutal fates. He stumbled forward in pitch black. “I cannot see where I am going...” he murmured.

He could hear himself... “I can hear though.” The old stone which was attached to an old blackened piece of thin rope around his neck felt heavier than before. Wait. He paused. He felt the stone around his neck. Its smooth crisp edges felt like the nothingness around him. “I never put this around my neck... I want to see where I am going you know...” He called out. He continued to walk forward along the uneven grey rocky floor. He heard voices up ahead. They seemed nearby. It was as if they had faded into existence slowly. “Hello?” He then listened with extreme caution. He could still hear the voices. It was a conversation. One was accented to him. Southern – he thought. The other was definitely a Northern accent.

As he turned what appeared to be a corner he saw the faintest glow of light. It shimmered a glorious yellow of hope. He ran towards it almost tripping over a Rattata. The Rattata squealed and its purple tail uncurled.

Its long sharp teeth snapped viciously at the intruder who had almost stepped on it. He continued to run into a subsection of tunnels where the light glowed stronger and stronger. He shot around the corner like an unwavering lightning bolt and slipped. He was horrified by what he saw next. He saw

himself. He was silently curled up. An arm was wrapped around him. The arm belonged to a tallish man. He couldn’t make out who. Whenever he thought about who it may be his head scolded him with sharp headaches. He looked cold but safe. “Are you my real father?”

He asked. There was no response. He turned to see Kitiku, Lioa and Andrew resting against the wall. They looked freezing cold. He closed his eyes and rubbed them. “How can you be? If I am there and I am here...”

He opened his eyes to a sharp bloodcurdling scream. He was at Marsten Hall. The fire was raging.

He felt his blood reach boiling point.

His head was pounding. “Sutton just arrest me, please. My head feels like it’s going to burst.” James clutched his head desperately, “Please, it is hurting.

Please arrest me, I think I need a doctor.” The ground he stood on felt like the nothingness before. He could feel something touching his shoulder though. He was being tapped. He spun around but nothing was there. “Show yourself!” He cried out in anger. He was in pain. His hands, his head and his elbow. They all felt sore. His face felt tingly. He suddenly jolted forward.

Part 3 James was laying on the warm cobblestone pavement.

He could feel the air brush against his skin.

Breathing it in was like a luxury. Lioa

-043

was staring at him. His face filled with deep concern. His eyes widened as James pulled himself up into a sitting position. Kitiku reached down and pulled his friend shakily to his feet.

James’s wrists were bruised.

“Are they broken?” he asked Kitiku, but was met with a shrug. His right hand was coated in blood and his face was bruised slightly just above his right cheek. He pressed the bruise with his finger and instantly regretted it. “What happened?” James looked dizzily at his friends. “I cannot remember falling over.”

“James... you just seemed to be in a trance. Then you just collapsed asleep.

You also talk in your sleep. You told us all your deepest darkest secrets,” Lioa mocked, “only little babies fall asleep in the middle of a chase.”

James scowled.

“Maybe we should call that moron, Sutton, to come and take the little baby home,” Lioa laughed before realising it wasn’t the best idea.

He heard footsteps behind him.

He swivelled sharply to see the unimpressed face of Incaresta Sutton.

He was scowling more so than James.

He straightened his uniform with his right hand. In his left he was holding Andrew Takui by the scruff of his neck.

Andrew was ferociously trying to get away, however, Seargent Sutton was not loosening his grip at all. Even if he

did escape from Sutton’s grip, he was handcuffed. He wouldn’t get very far.

“Run!” Lioa shouted.

Sutton lunged forward to grab one of the three remaining boys. Kitiku narrowly avoided being grabbed. Lioa and James sprinted ahead without difficulty only to find their primary exit had been cut off by Sutton’s patrol.

“Go!” Lioa squeezed himself down the narrowest passage in the town.

James followed without hesitation.

Kitiku was panicked but realised he had no choice but to follow in the footsteps of his friends. The sandy brick walls felt like they were stabbing the ribs of the skinny trio. The passage wasn’t very long. They escaped into a wider street.

Lioa and James sprinted as fast as they could towards the western quarter of the town. Kitiku was exhausted. He wasn’t cut out for running away from the law.

“James, you remember something from what happened don’t you?” Lioa panted.

“If we live, I will tell you.” James quickly replied, “Turn right!” James shouted, “We can lose them in the alley way!”

Sutton was catching up.

James was suddenly shunted by Lioa.

“No. Turn left! We can lose him in the park!” Lioa shouted.

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James shoved him back. The street was becoming wider and wider. Kitiku was starting to tire to the point where he was losing ground on his two more troublesome friends.

Sutton’s Fearow swooped in on the two leading boys from the sky.

Its stick-like legs and sharp claws came close to James’s already bruised face. Its brown wings were so densely feathered it looked as if it was made of silk. Its beady eyes focused on James.

“Electabuzz...” Kitiku heard from behind him. Sutton wasn’t far behind now. Neither was his Electabuzz. The amber yellow body of Electabuzz made it seem like a beacon in the dark. It wasn’t a beacon the boys wished to head towards though. Its pitch black zig-zags looked as if they had been scorched on by an overheating torch.

Its large eyes and small pupils were unsettling. The noise it made was horrifying. It was as if someone was scraping fingernails along a blackboard combined with a low melodic beat.

Kitiku peered behind him.

Sutton was not much taller than Kitiku. He wasn’t muscular, nor was he skinny. His snow-blonde hair was short and appeared to be neatly combed. His face was rounded and clean shaven.

His nose made his face look perfect in perspective to his incredibly pale skin. Amongst his pale skin his big dark green eyes seemed to stand out like stars in the sky. His midnight blue jacket was slightly too long for him. It

wasn’t perfectly ironed. His Southern accent was incredibly strong.

Come on now boys, don’t you think I deserve a break?” He sounded very awkward. “We do this every other night, I am sure. Kitiku Bryson, I am surprised you are involved in this... dangerous game of theirs. I am even so shocked to say I am disappointed.”

Kitiku felt a sudden sadness grip him. Everyone around him was always so disappointed in him.

“How about we make a deal boys?

We can make a deal, I am sure. If you give up now I might not electrocute you. I know you are scared. All of you are scared. That is okay,” he puffed.

“Give up and I may not electrocute you.

Being electrocuted is scary isn’t it? It sounds like a fair deal. Doesn’t it?”

“No,” James called back and sharply turned right at the junction. He saw Lioa fade into the distance as he ran in the opposite direction. James squeezed down yet another passage away. His arms brushed against the bricks. He could hear a voice behind him. It was slowly getting quieter and quieter. He peered over his shoulder. No one was following him. He had to keep going though. For his own sake.

*** “I did warn you. I offered you a chance to give up but you kept running.”

Sutton knelt down.

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Kitiku was wincing in pain. His hands were bloody from when he had skidded along the cobbles after being shocked. He was so afraid. It was as if he had been left alone in a room of starved dragons and they were circling him.

“You are slower than the others by some margin. Don’t worry, they will both be joining you soon.” Sutton reached out and carefully pulled Kitiku back onto his feet. “Once we get you in handcuffs, things will be so much easier.”

Kitiku’s legs were shaking and he seemed panicked as he slumped his head and leaned forward. Sutton felt the boy’s head touch his chest. Kitiku rarely spoke to him. It wasn’t that he was unfriendly, it was more the fact he didn’t like to interact with people outside of his friendship group.

In the North bowing your head to someone is usually considered a deep rooted apology.

Sutton waved his arms in the direction of the park. Several of his patrol set off in the dark after the troublesome Lioa.

“Kitiku? I need to handcuff you. I know you don’t like to be tugged around but rules are rules,” Sutton whispered to the boy.

Kitiku’s head was upright, but his eyes were looking at the floor. He appeared to want to distance himself

from the reality. Kitiku raised his hands slightly. He slowly ran his right index finger from the top of his left index finger down to his wrist. Then pressed his right hand knuckles into his left palm.

Sutton looked “Please...”

curiously

at

him.

Kitiku then tapped his left palm on the top of his right knuckles twice.

“Against...”

He watched carefully. Kitiku made a small circle with both his index fingers, tapped his two knuckles together and then raised his left thumb.

“Female trap. Please against female trap.” Sutton’s blank facial expression said it all. “Kitiku, I don’t understand what you are trying to say.”

Kitiku looked sadder than before.

Sutton felt an incredible amount of guilt start to boil inside him. “As soon as I arrest you, we can go to the office and then you can go home.”

Kitiku repeated his hand gestures.

Sutton stopped paying attention to his symbols and grabbed his handcuffs from his belt and he brushed Kitiku’s floppy hair out of his face. “Stay still.

Don’t move. Don’t even think about escaping. Someone will be here in a minute or so. “If you do the punishment will be much worse. Grab these two bars for me...”

Kitiku did as he was told.

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You are much easier to handcuff than the others...” He looked at the boy who now seemed more devastated.

He tugged the bar and snapped everything into place. He released his Graveller. The body of his Graveller was a light grey and was bumpy looking. Its eyes were filled with determination so strong it could light a thousand torches. The boy was already upset.

Sutton wasn’t daft, despite his frequent comical accidents. He knew the fine line between kindness and pandering to someone.

Part 4 Lioa had reached the lake in the park and climbed a nearby tree. It didn’t take long for a familiar figure to appear at the entrance of the park.

Sutton stood firmly. He had a stern look on his face.

“Lioa!” He called out, tugging his cap tightly to his head. “Parks maybe large... but they are open spaces! It will be so much easier for everybody if you just handed yourself in. We know how this is going to end... Why delay the inevitable?” He struggled to find the words for the last part. In his native tongue his rhetorical question would have been a single word.

He could imagine his children playing in a park like this one with their Machop and Oshawott. He

smiled thinking about them. The scent of the air was like sherbet, it made his nose twitch occasionally.

“Come on Lioa...” he muttered in his native tongue. Sutton felt uncomfortable in the heat. His collar was tight. Northern summers were always extremely hot. His Electabuzz was feeling the heat too and looked at him with discontent. “Lioa it isn’t too late to surrender to me. If you do not give in I will punish everyone who has been caught so far twice. Maybe even three times over.” He felt incredibly awkward making these kinds of threats, since he wouldn’t really do that.

He gazed at his reflection in the calm, gentle waters. He could see Lioa in the reflection too. Lioa was curled up on a long twisting branch.

He jumped off the branch and summoned Ruskuo to attack Sutton.

The dirt spewed into the air as he ordered Ruskuo to use a low kick. Both Sutton and his Electabuzz stepped to the side in a really calm manner.

Sutton called out a command in his native tongue. It swung a thunder punch. The sparks flew upon contact with Ruskuo. Ruskuo retaliated using reversal. Before Ruskuo could land the hit a protective shield surrounded both Sutton and his Electabuzz.

Sutton called out a command in his native tongue. It swung a thunder punch. The sparks flew upon contact with Ruskuo.

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Ruskuo retaliated using reversal.

Before Ruskuo could land the hit a protective shield surrounded both Sutton and his Electabuzz.

Vesx stepped aside and punched Ruskuo directly in the stomach with a thunder punch. Ruskuo crumbled and hit the floor with so much force. The dirt flew up in the air. Ruskuo was still awake. He began to stand once more.

He flinched.

Sutton smirked, Vesx had paralysed Ruskuo. Lioa turned to run. He forgot to call back Ruskuo. “Forgetting something Lioa?” Sutton called out.

“I guess I lose.” Lioa stopped running. Incaresta Sutton sighed a sigh of relief. He had caught Lioa offguard, or he had just gotten lucky.

“What now?”

“Well, I arrest you, like usual.”

One of his Patrollers approached. Lioa puffed his hair out of his eyes but it just fell back into place. Sutton approached him and brushed his hair aside from his eyes.

Lioa looked at him with disgust.

“Don’t touch me!”

“Take it slow,” Sutton smirked at Lioa, “It will be okay Lioa. I know you are scared,” He said antagonistically.

Lioa started to try and escape.

“No, hold still.” Lioa was definitely not making things easy. “Lioa calm down. Do I have to electrocute you?”

Incaresta’s face turned stern. His eyes

focused. Lioa returned his expression.

“Where is Hamés?”

“I don’t know a Hams. Try house 47, they know a lot of people.” Lioa snapped back in the most sarcastic tone he could create at short notice.

“So my accent is now a joke?” Sutton sighed. Lioa, handcuffed, looked like a volcano about to burst with rage.

He reached out and placed a hand on Lioa’s shoulder. “Come on Lioa.

Let’s make this a little easier. Tell me where Hamés is and I might forget you caused trouble. That sounds fair.” Lioa shuffled his feet anxiously.

“I am fourteen. I don’t...” He made his voice squeak before attempting to force himself to cry. The kid-card was very effective – if pulled off. “I want to see my father, but I can’t because of you. One of you stopped...”

“Lioa, that’s enough.” Incaresta was tired. He could feel the energy running from his brain through his body and into the floor. “I am tired. Honestly, you and Hamés and Androx have slowly worn me down.” His accent was starting to seep through. Usually James’s name was the only one he struggled with. There was no J sound in the Southern alphabet.

“I am twenty-seven years old but I look fifty. You have given me that much stress,” he joked. Lioa’s scowl turned into a smile. “Good, now if you don’t mind...” Lioa wasn’t smiling at his joke. He was smiling at Ruskuo who

THE UNDERGROUND

was standing behind Sutton. “Please recall Ruskuo. I really don’t want to ask twice.”

Lioa’s jawline dropped. “How?” he blurted angrily. “Ruskuo get rid of him!” Ruskuo swung his heavy arms with the strength of his heavy body.

Ruskuo punched without success. His fists planted into the ground as he tripped and was knocked unconscious.

“Lioa, I have a four year old boy, and a toddler at home. I am used to seeing things everywhere.” Lioa slumped against him before muttering something. “Let’s get you back to the offices. I have Hamés to still find.”

*** James panted as he continued to run down the narrow streets. He was almost safe. He just had a little further, maybe one or two streets to go. He could then break back into the Bryson household and get into bed and pretend he had been there the entire time. After all, after what happened at Marsten Hall Tak Bryson had taken him in. Tak had refused to adopt him or foster him. However, when the Southern forces came Tak had noted he was part of the household of Bryson. In the North the term household referred to the family you lived with. That was deemed more important than bloodline. Even so, Tak had assigned James his family

name of Bryson during the collection of information.

The thought dawned on him that if Kitiku wasn’t behind him, he had been caught. If Kitiku had been caught out after curfew Tak would quickly figure out he had been too.

Kitiku would be grounded until he was ninety. James suddenly had a looming feeling he would be thrown out of the household for making Kitiku break the law. He slowly gathered the energy to retrace his steps.

*** “Looks like a storm is coming.”

Incaresta Sutton held his hat with his right hand. The sky had blackened in the time it had taken him to drag Lioa against his will into the cell.

Lioa’s hair flopped over his face as he slumped against the top right corner of the cell. Andrew shuffled along the ground, nervously, to be next to his older brother. Sutton pressed Kitiku against his left side and rubbed his arm with his left hand in a repetitive format.

Kitiku’s breathing wasn’t normal.

He was stuttering breaths through his nose. He was shaking, but frozen in place with fear.

“What will we do with you? Don’t say let you go. That won’t happen.”

A sharp flash of lightning struck a

-049

nearby building. A clap of thunder echoed loudly. It entered the cell from the small grate and filled the room in a deafening manner.

Andrew jumped. His heart was racing. Lioa pulled his brother against his right shoulder and wrapped his arms around him protectively. Kitiku collapsed to the ground in panic. He made himself as small as possible and grabbed his hair by his ears.

Sutton carefully pulled the stunned and terrified boy onto the lone bed in the top left corner of the room. “I need you to breathe, you want to see your Klink? Here look at what Klink is doing”. He released Rusto from its capsule in a desperate attempt to calm the boy down. “I hope Hamés is okay.

This storm is not one to get caught in”.

*** James, soaked, had retraced his steps. No sign of Kitiku or the others.

He could hear whispers. It felt like the sounds were crawling into his ears. He was in an open crossroad.

Definitely not the best place to be, might I add off-islander, if you are trying to avoid being seen.

Before he could react the dead air surrounded him once more.

“James...” It spoke. Its lips didn’t move. “You don’t want to fight me James. You want to be part of my

household.” Its voice sounded like a hiss, but its shape resembled Hanson Rei once more. “Don’t you want to be a part of my household James?”

James reached into his pocket without hesitation.

He took a step back with his left foot before hurling Okta’s capsule towards the figure of Rei. She landed with a thud, shaking the ground and letting out an almighty rugged roar.

She could barely fit in the narrow street she had been thrown into.

Her golden body, glistening in the moonlight, scrapped against the walls of the houses.

The storm raged on.

James hated storms. They frightened him. He couldn’t be frightened right now. He had to focus on the target. The one thing that frightened him more than storms, the one thing that put all other fears into perspective stood in front of him, as a shadow.

Hanson Rei. The figure’s tone changed. “You don’t want to be in my household. You are a traitor. You are born of filth and I shall take over your soul.” It screeched, doubling into an echo of itself. As the figure lunged forward it transformed into a Gengar.

Using shadow sneak it quickly darted in and out of view. James calmly watched every shadow he could see. He was waiting silently. A lighting strike near him created a blinding light. A thunder clap louder than a thousand

THE UNDERGROUND

drums sounded. He was distracted for a moment. Gengar lurched out of the shadows. It wanted to take his soul he thought.

“Okta hit it with iron tail!” Okta cried out in anger. She swung her temporarily metal tail aggressively smashing the walls of several houses.

Debris spewed everywhere. James carefully moved out of the way of each slice that rained down. His hair was dusty now.

Gengar seized the opportunity to lash out at Okta. Gengar chose to use shadow ball. The centre of the shadow ball was a void black and its outside

was a curdled purple. James could feel it pulsing as it got closer and closer.

Okta couldn’t dodge it. She was already off balance too. She couldn’t block it.

She was hit. She cried out in pain.

“Okta use dig!” Okta’s eyes turned a burning red as she started to charge towards the Gengar before diving underground in a brown mist of sand. A second or so passed and she reappeared shooting up underneath Gengar. Her aim was to throw Gengar into the air in order to smash him back down onto the ground, or what was left of it. Gengar floated higher and higher until he was out of Okta’s reach. Okta came crashing

Right: The Long Road (Ch. 12 Cover),

by Panoramic_Vacuum

-051

back down, destroying several houses.

“If dig didn’t work I doubt sand tomb will...” A second shadow ball headed straight for James. “Send it right back at it!” he shouted louder than before.

Okta swung around again. She dented the destroyed houses even more. They were near enough flat. She was making the ground shake more and more with every turn and twist and every roar she bellowed into the narrow passage way. She struck the shadow ball with tremendous force. The smoke was so thick and it smelt like a fire... and it felt cold at the same time. Before James could react he was knocked over.

Gengar had disappeared into the shadows during the shadow ball attack and had attacked James from behind.

He felt dizzy.

“Okta get it off of me!” She roared angrily at the Gengar what had James in its grasp. Gengar bit James’ leg.

“Okta help!”

THE UNDERGROUND

Haunting

A Ghost Town Halloween Spooktacular by

eldestoyster

-053

Saturday, 29th October, 1977

It’s a long way from Saffron to Goldenrod. One of these days, they’ll finish building the maglev and it will only take three hours; until then, however, Tacoma is stuck at the cheap end of the sleeper train, crammed into a minuscule compartment with three other people and pretending not to care about the way they stare at her.

She’s used to it by now. It’s been almost a year since she died, pointlessly murdered on her way home to Mahogany for Christmas.

Since then, she’s gone back to uni in Saffron, picked herself up, started to adjust to the things that are different when you are a vaguely-human mass of purple fog. The stares. The peculiar bureaucratic nightmare of being legally undead. The money she no longer needs to spend on food.

Mostly the stares, though. And she is used to them, really. It’s just that when you’re stuck with strangers in a train car the size of a bread bin for fifteen hours, you cannot help but start to feel your difference.

But it’s over now: she steps from the train onto the platform, squinting against the sunlight – it bothers her these days in a way it never did in life – and the instant she does so, she hears the voice calling out in her head.

Heya, spooky.

And Tacoma smiles for the first time she left her apartment yesterday afternoon.

How’d you know? she thinks, as hard as she can. She’s not psychic, not really, but she’s dead, and sometimes that’s almost the same thing.

I always know, says the voice, evidently hearing her. I’m by the ticket machines.

Gotcha.

Tacoma moves with the crowd, aware of the eyes on her but no longer particularly caring, and pushes her way out past the turnstiles and onto the concourse, where— “I lied,” says Jodi, flinging her arms around her. “I’m right here.”

Tacoma hugs back, gingerly. It’s been a long while since they last saw each other, when Jodi last visited

THE UNDERGROUND

Saffron, and as always after these breaks Tacoma is a little startled to rediscover how small Jodi is, how warm and bony and fragile. She’ll need a couple of hours to get over the fear of breaking her.

“Hey,” she says, looking out over Jodi’s head at the dozens of watching faces. “Everyone’s staring.”

“At us? Yeah, Tacoma, they’re doing that whether we hug or not.” Jodi pulls back a little to show her smile, making sure Tacoma takes this the way it’s intended. “It’s so good to see you,” she says, smile fading. “I feel like it’s been forever.”

Something about the sound of her voice and the tightness of her grip cuts at Tacoma’s heart. She almost asks what’s happened, but this is definitely not the time or place, so she just hugs a little harder instead.

“Same,” she tells her, leaning in again, muffling her voice in Jodi’s hair and its rose-shampoo scent. “Been an intense term.”

“You’re telling me.” Jodi pulls away, tugs briefly on her hand. “C’mon. Let’s get back to mine.”

A shiver runs through Tacoma’s misty body, and she looks up to see a grey highland noivern clinging to the iron girders that web the space above their heads, supporting lights and departure boards and loudspeakers.

He hoots softly, satisfied he has her

attention, and launches himself into the air to glide towards the exit.

“Yeah, maybe sooner rather than later,” says Jodi, watching him go.

“The staff here hate Lothian.”

“But he’s so sweet,” says Tacoma, more out of the pleasure of being here and seeing Jodi than out of any real desire to argue, and Jodi shakes her head.

“Sure, when he has what he wants.”

She starts walking, her cane clicking on the chipped tiles. Tacoma has wondered before when this place was built; it’s nothing like its counterpart in Saffron, all iron and ceramic instead of glass and weathered linoleum. Feels colder. Although Johto always does.

“Hey, are you coming or what?”

Jodi turns, a little exasperated, still smiling, and Tacoma sees her again as if for the first time, framed against the light of the street beyond the station doors. Bright eyes, heart-shaped face.

Hair too dark and thick to be Johtonian.

Eyebrows sharp enough to kill.

“Yes, ma’am,” murmurs Tacoma, her chest tightening a little with that angry kind of love that has become so familiar to her over the past year, and follows her out into the light.

Jodi lives in Four Crosses, a slightly shabby-looking part of town but one that is conveniently close by to Goldenrod University’s Faculty of

-055

Psionics, always a bonus for a student with a bad leg and a mutant brain. Her flat is on the ground floor of a block of seven that Tacoma can tell at a glance must be inhabited by other students, although she’s only ever actually been in a couple of them.

out sofa and breathing in the smell of cigarettes, and watches Jodi dump her handbag on the coffee table with the easy confidence of someone who pays the rent on this place.

“Okay, finally,” says Jodi, leaning against the wall and going through her bag for her keys. “Sorry. I bet the Saffron buses are never late, huh.”

“Sounds good,” replies Tacoma.

“Never get much sleep on the sleeper.”

“They’re sometimes late,” replies Tacoma. “Besides, it’s fine. I, uh, don’t mind waiting with you.”

Jodi clicks her tongue.

“Flatterer,” she says, unlocking the door. “Okay. Come on in.”

Tacoma follows her inside, holding the door for Lothian and Nikole.

Kangaskhan are a little too big for overnight train rides; Tacoma kept her in her ball until after they were out of the station, and now she stomps in with a barely-suppressed energy that means Tacoma will have to walk her soon before she causes trouble.

It’s strange, those first few minutes of being here. Tacoma has visited Jodi here several times – it’s easier for her to travel than for Jodi, especially as these days Tacoma doesn’t really need to pack anything – but there’s still that sense of being a guest, of this being a space to which she is invited to visit rather than live. She wanders in, running her hand uneasily over the back of the worn-

“D’you want anything?” asks Jodi.

“Like coffee or …?”

“Guess they need to come up with a better name for it, then.”

“I guess so.”

They stand there for a moment, looking at each other. Behind Jodi, Lothian and Nikki are doing something similar, sniffing and shuffling as they reacclimatise to the presence of another large pokémon.

“Uh,” says Tacoma, “Something up?”

hesitantly.

Jodi beckons. Tacoma bends towards her, and maybe her head’s still a little fuzzy from the sleepless suspended reality of the train ride but she really doesn’t see the kiss coming.

“That’s all,” says Jodi, smiling at the look on her face. Or the feel of her mind. That’s the thing about empaths; you never quite know whether they’re reacting to what you say or how you feel. “Sit down, spooky. Back in a minute.”

“Um,” says Tacoma, going a deeper shade of purple. “Okay. Yes. Sitting.”

Jodi laughs and heads out into the

THE UNDERGROUND

kitchen, Lothian crawling after at her heels; behind her back, Nikki turns to Tacoma and shifts the scaly ridges on her face into a subtly different position.

“Yeah, yeah,” mutters Tacoma, throwing herself down onto the sofa with an aggressive casualness she does not feel. “It’s just weird coming here, is all.”

Nikki sniffs deeply and leans back on her tail, faking contentment. Trying to help her partner feel at ease. It’s cute enough that Tacoma is almost fooled into thinking she doesn’t need a walk.

“Thanks,” she says, reaching out and swatting lazily at her claws. “Take you out in a bit, okay?”

Nikki sniffs again and levers herself back up, stalking off in search of something to do. Tacoma watches her go, wondering if she can be trusted not to break into Jodi’s flatmate’s room and cause havoc, but before she can get up to follow her Jodi is back, holding a chipped mug carefully in her free hand.

“Here,” she says, passing it to Tacoma and lowering herself stiffly onto the sofa. “Oof. Okay.”

“Lot of walking?”

“Late night.” Jodi drags her bad leg carefully up onto the sofa and curls up against Tacoma’s side, leaning her head into her shoulder. “Concert in the Dark Lantern. Standing room only.”

“Even for you?”

“Even for me.” Jodi wriggles a little,

like a cat making itself comfortable on a favoured cushion. One of those things she does that Tacoma forgets about during the months they spend apart, and which hits her when they meet again with doubled force. “It’s fine,” she says. “I had fun.”

“With your terrible music?”

“Yeah,” says Jodi. “With my terrible music.” A tiny little sigh: happiness, or relief? Tacoma can still feel the edge of the thing that’s bothering her, whatever it is, but the moment is just too precious to interrupt. “I missed you.”

“You’re saying that literally as I insult you.”

“Wrong answer.”

“Oh.” Tacoma blinks, startled, then puts her arm around her. “I missed you too, Jodi.”

“Better.”

It is better. Tacoma sips her coffee, feels its warmth dissolve through her fog. Lothian watches them for a moment, chirping to himself, then turns away and peers down the passage after Nikole. Still won’t leave Jodi alone, even now. He screamed his ball into little pieces after what happened last Christmas so nobody would be able to take him away from her again.

Okay. This is starting to feel real again now. It’s been a while, and that makes it weird. But it’s Jodi, and she

-057

really loves her, and despite the fact that they live in different countries for six months out of twelve this thing might just work, if they’re willing to put in the effort.

has no idea how she does it. ESP takes a lot of energy; most psychics just can’t get the calories to build muscle.

But somehow Carmine’s body is almost as strong as her psionics.

Jodi can feel it too, it seems. She looks up and smiles.

“Hey, lovebirds,” she says, as her jolteon flickers through the room in a vivid yellow blur. “Hang on, I’ll say hi in a minute, gotta eat or I’ll die.”

“Feeling better, spooky?”

Tacoma smiles back.

“You know one day I’m gonna finally come up with a pet name for you as well,” she tells her.

Jodi snorts, shakes her head.

“Yeah,” she says, with that sarcastic gleam in her eyes that Tacoma finds so infuriatingly irresistible. “I’ll believe that when I see it.”

And now she’s being made fun of.

Yes: this is definitely it. That sense of being at home. And look, Jodi seems happy too.

Tacoma sighs.

“Okay,” she says. “I really hope you weren’t planning on doing anything this morning, ‘cause I’m not sure I’m moving.”

“Funny,” says Jodi. “I was just thinking the same.”

They’re still there half an hour later, when Jodi’s flatmate Carmine bounces in with the godawful cheeriness of someone fresh from exercise that they have, in contravention of all the laws of nature, actually enjoyed. Tacoma

“Uh, you might want to—” A sudden, startled yowl, and the yellow blur zooms out of the passage and into the kitchen after Carmine.

“—check on Naomi,” finishes Jodi, wincing. “Sorry. Nikki’s here.”

Nikki lumbers out after her, claws held out in that particular about-tomake-trouble kind of way, and Tacoma is just thinking that she might finally have to get up when Lothian jumps in front of her, ears and wings spread, and she pulls back with a disappointed growl.

“Drop it,” Tacoma advises. “You’re either gonna get electrocuted or thrown through a window.”

“What’s that?” Carmine comes back in, holding a plate piled so high with food it’s almost hard to see her behind it. Tacoma always wonders how these two manage to keep the pantry stocked; two psychics and a dragon all in one flat must make for a hell of an expensive household to feed.

“Oh. Right. You again.” She wrinkles her nose. “Naomi, get back, it’s just Tacoma’s asshole partner.”

THE UNDERGROUND

“Rude,” says Tacoma. “But, uh, fair, I guess. Nikki?”

She snorts and stalks off towards the door, swinging her tail back and forth.

Lothian hoots into the kitchen, calling Naomi; a moment later, she creeps back in, looking hunted, and huddles down at Carmine’s feet.

“You know it.” Carmine drops comfortably onto the other sofa, cramming bread into her mouth and lifting her plate for Naomi to jump into her lap. “Mmph. God. Having fun?”

“Lots,” says your run?”

Jodi.

“How

was

“Gumffgph.” Carmine gestures at her overstuffed mouth, switches to telepathy. Great. It’s a beautiful day.

“Good. I’m glad.” Jodi frowns.

“Maybe stick to talking for now, though?”

Carmine rolls her eyes. She doesn’t actually say yes, Mum, but then, she doesn’t exactly have to.

“Mmph,” she says, swallowing. “Not gonna comment. So, Tacoma, you in town long? Thought you med students were busy.”

“Yeah, don’t remind me.” Tacoma sighs. “I’m hoping I have time to catch up a bit on the train back. But, uh, yeah.

Four days. Going back Tuesday night.”

“Groovy.” She bites off a piece of cheese so big Tacoma could swear she can see it going down her throat. It’s hard not to stare. Tacoma can still

drink, if she doesn’t move around too much and dislodge the droplets from within her mist, but food will only dissolve inside her if she sits there and concentrates on it for twenty minutes. She misses being full, even as she knows she’ll never hunger again.

“Jodi’s been looking forward to this for ages. When Tacoma comes this, when Tacoma comes that. Be nice to get some peace and quiet for a bit.”

“Hey, so you do listen,” says Jodi, raising an eyebrow. “I thought maybe you couldn’t hear over the racket you and Sorayya make at night.”

Carmine almost chokes on her crust.

“Uh, well,” she says, coughing crumbs into her palm and nearly dislodging Naomi from her lap. “God. I actually did not think you were capable of saying something like that.”

“She’s said worse,” says Tacoma, although she’s pretty sure she hasn’t.

“Oof.” Carmine shakes her head. “I don’t wanna know.”

A brief pause. That thing is back again, slinking around the room in the shadows, making Lothian shift uneasily on the rug and Jodi tense under Tacoma’s arm. Is it time to ask about it? No. Probably not in front of Carmine.

“So,” Carmine says, one hand scratching absently between Naomi’s ears. “Coming to the party?”

Jodi sits up suddenly, grabs Tacoma’s

-059

hand with an enthusiasm that seems a little misplaced.

“Right, the party! You remember we talked about it?”

Tacoma pulls a face.

“I mean …”

“C’mon, it’ll be fun. And it’s all cool people, you know? Like it’s a real Redmonk party.”

“Can confirm,” says Carmine.

“Gonna be the 88 crowd. So, y’know, you two won’t even be the weirdest people there.”

“And that’s supposed to make me feel better?” asks Tacoma, but it’s a losing battle, she knows. She avoids parties these days – avoids people, really, same as she avoids mirrors, and open spaces, and sunlight. But part of what it means to have Jodi care about you is that you do not get to wallow in your own self-loathing any more, and so she’s aware that there is only one way this conversation can end.

“No, just supposed to be true,” says Carmine, grinning. “Seriously, nobody’s gonna give you a second glance. ‘Sides, it’s Halloween, dude.

There’s gonna be a lot of ghosts there tomorrow night.”

“Carmine,” says Jodi, her voice hovering right on the edge of a warning, and Carmine sighs.

“Yeah, okay,” she says.

Didn’t mean it like … that.”

“Sorry.

Tacoma doesn’t need to be psychic to know that that isn’t true. But if Carmine did mean it like that she doesn’t now, and she’s sorry, so fine, Tacoma will take the apology. “‘S all right,” she says, trying and failing to keep the bitterness from her voice. “I get it.”

Carmine forces a smile.

“Cheers,” she says. “Look, uh, I’m gonna leave you guys to it, have a shower. But it’s good to see you, Tacoma.”

“Mm.” If Carmine left the room any faster, she’d probably be sprinting. Tacoma watches her go, and keeps watching long after she’s gone, too ashamed to look at Jodi and see her disappointment or disapproval or whatever the cold thing is that’s seeping from the edges of her mind.

The shower comes on, and only then, with the water to mask her voice, does Jodi speak.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “She’s probably not thinking straight at the moment. She’s trying really hard to act normal and I think it’s mostly coming out as kinda rude.”

There is a right response to this statement. Tacoma can see it, hanging there before her, but even as she does she knows she’ll never take it.

“So you’re saying it was okay for her to say that?” she asks.

THE UNDERGROUND

Jodi breathes in, and out. Lothian stands up suddenly, making Nikki tense, but Jodi holds out a hand and waves him back down.

“No,” she says, in that calm voice she only ever seems to use when dealing with Tacoma’s bullshit. “You know I would never do something like that.”

This is a second chance. There is a right response here too, and this statement is a warning to Tacoma that she should take it, now, because if she doesn’t she is going to end up fighting over this and neither of them want that to happen. And she’s right. Tacoma doesn’t want to fight, ever. It’s just that her emotions have other ideas.

Say it, she orders herself, and maybe the last year has had some kind of an effect on her because she actually manages to obey.

“Sorry,” she says. “I know that’s not what you meant.”

Jodi’s mouth moves a little at the corner. Not a smile, but not not a smile, either. It has some kind of strain behind it – more than can be explained by Tacoma being an argumentative little shit, for sure.

Jodi kneads her forehead for a moment. Lothian forces his way up onto the sofa next to her, unbidden, and pushes his head underneath her arm.

“Let’s take Nikki for a walk,” she says, hugging him close. “And, um, I’ll tell you all about it.”

There are eyes on them the second they step outside, of course. Four Crosses is student territory, where Jodi has some allies and a not inconsiderable number of enemies, but Tacoma can tell herself that she’s stopping anyone fucking with her and feel okay(ish) about the stares. Redmonk, when they pass through it, is a little quieter, a little friendlier; here, some of the looks are from people who wave and to whom Jodi waves back. Hi, Max, she calls, and a woman whose piercings and leather jacket Tacoma half fears and half covets calls back for the two of them to get a room. Already have one, Jodi tells her, and Max laughs. Right on, kid, she says. Right on.

Jodi turns back to Tacoma, glowing a little, and takes hold of her hand.

She probably ought to ask about it.

After all, she’s already spoiled things.

That golden moment of reunion is over now.

“Is that okay?” asks Tacoma, looking around nervously.

“So,” says Tacoma, slow, uncertain.

“Uh … what’s wrong? Sorry, maybe I shouldn’t ask, but I know something’s up. Has been since the station.”

And it is okay, and Tacoma does know when. Redmonk has a very definite kind of end; you turn a corner and see the barely-contained chaos

“For like two blocks,” says Jodi.

“You’ll know when.”

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of King’s Junction up ahead, crawling with traffic and tourists here for the statue and tired Goldenrodders wishing they’d had the good sense to avoid this place on a Saturday. And Jodi quietly but firmly takes her hand away.

“C’mon,” she says, without apparent emotion. “This way.”

They skirt around the edge of the Junction, sticking to the side streets where there are no tourists but a lot of rich girls with expensive hairstyles and flared jumpsuits lounging in front of cafés, coffee and cigarettes in hand.

It’s probably the lesser of two evils, considering the alternative is cutting straight through the grotesque crush; still, it’s not pleasant. Sometimes Tacoma goes to this kind of place in Saffron, in the evenings when her powers wax and she can spook assholes like these by flying from rooftop to rooftop, disappearing when looked at. Here in Goldenrod, with Jodi, she cannot help but be aware that their eyes are cutting her girlfriend to ribbons.

Neither of them speak. They haven’t really since they left the apartment, but this is not the companionable silence of the first twenty minutes.

But Tacoma is scary, and Lothian keeps gliding overhead in a way that tells people that he is with Jodi, and Nikki looms as only seven feet and five hundred pounds of claw and muscle can; and so they keep going, keep not speaking, until they pass under the

trees bowering the path across the Old Rath Common and Tacoma has to smile at the sight of Nikki thundering across the green, chasing Lothian as he zooms away overhead.

“He misses her, you know,” says Jodi. Her face is pale, serious. “Nobody else’s pokémon is brave enough to chase him.”

Tacoma knows what she means.

They’re not the only ones who have come to exercise their partners today, and already she can see smaller pokémon scattering before Nikki and Lothian like fish fleeing dolphins. Some people look a little annoyed about it, but she refuses to feel bad. You just have to learn to accept these things, with partners like theirs.

“I’m coming back,” she says, as they leave the path and start following the pokémon. “When I graduate.”

“Here?”

“Yeah.” Shrug. “No ties to Saffron, really.”

“Not what I meant.”

Tacoma thinks for a moment.

“Mahogany?” she asks. “What, you think I’m going back there?”

“I don’t know,” says Jodi. “I guess not.” She glances up at Tacoma, biting her lip. “I’m sorry, I … it’s home.”

She needs a hug. But there are too many people right now, pausing in their walks to stare at the freaks, and

THE UNDERGROUND

Tacoma just isn’t brave enough to stand that.

“You know we can’t stay there,” she says, trying to put all her feelings into the tone of her voice instead. “You feel it too, right? Every time we go back for the holidays.”

“I know.” Jodi takes a deep breath.

“Did you hear that Sam and Gabbi are moving away?”

“What? No. Are they?”

“Yeah. Think they’re just waiting for a buyer for the station now.”

“Shit,” says Tacoma, “Where are they going?”

hopelessly.

“Here, I think.” Jodi sighs. “They really love Mahogany, Tacoma. Or they did, before we found everything out. I really wish I hadn’t …”

“It’s not your fault.”

It’s mine, she wants to say, but of course it isn’t, and she doesn’t.

“No,” agrees Jodi. “I know. But I wish it anyway.”

They stop in the middle of the green, Lothian swooping back towards them.

Nikki drops briefly to all fours, trying to catch up, and skids to an inelegant halt at their feet, pushing herself at Tacoma, demanding her attention.

“Hey,” says Tacoma, rubbing her snout. “Go on now, keep playing. We’re fine over here.”

Jodi stares up at Lothian without speaking, some arcane communication

passing between them, and all of a sudden he ceases to circle and flings himself back across the sky. Nikki pulls away suddenly, watching him go, and then when she is sure he has a decent lead charges off again, sending someone’s growlithe running for the cover of the trees.

“I guess I wish we hadn’t too,” says Tacoma, keeping her eyes on Nikki, ready to intervene if she gets too close to the children playing tag on the other side of the path. “Dunno what else we could’ve done, though.”

“I know.”

Jodi starts walking again, moving slowly. It’s always a struggle to readjust, after months alone in Saffron; Tacoma is a fast walker, and when it’s dark finds it hard to resist the temptation to flex her powers and fly. But it’s just work, right, like everything else, and if she cares enough to want to be with Jodi she figures she cares enough to make an effort to be someone Jodi can be with, too. So. Slow it is.

“Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to talk about,” Jodi continues, fumbling in her bag for cigarettes. “I was gonna tell you what’s wrong.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Jodi holds out the packet; Tacoma takes one, and lights both hers and Jodi’s with a brief burst of pallid spectral fire. “Um, so.” Long drag on her cigarette. Her hand is

-063

shaking, just a little, and Tacoma is filled with a sudden violent desire to declare someone responsible for this and hurt them. “Every night for the last month and a half, Carmine’s had the same dream.”

This cannot be anything good. Jodi and most of her psychic friends score between fifty and sixty percent on the psychic test; Carmine is a seventyfour, and her formidable powers are evenly split between telekinesis and precognition. When she has a recurring dream, it usually means something horrible is going to happen to someone.

“Or not exactly the same dream,” Jodi clarifies. “But almost. She’s been out of town for a while, and she’s just got back, right? And she goes to visit one of her friends, a different one every night. Some people she hasn’t met yet, a bunch she has. Lots of the Redmonk guys, lots of … women like me.” Her voice shakes then, just for a moment, but when she continues it’s firm again. “And they’re having this conversation about what’s been going on while she was gone, and every time she ends up asking about someone and the other person goes quiet and shakes their head.”

Jodi closes her eyes for a moment, her cigarette drooping in her hand.

“And Carmine can hear something outside, like waves. She sees this shadow fall over the room through the window, and she’s trying to get

up and get her friend away but she’s moving really slowly, you know how it is in dreams. She never manages to get to the door before the window breaks and this wave of blood comes in, really thick and sticky like it’s turning to scabs right there around her, and then … then she and her friend get sucked in and drown.”

Long silence. A pair of spearow flutter out of the trees to land nearby, looking up at Jodi with curious eyes.

Pokémon are like that with her. Tacoma is pretty sure it’s an empath thing.

“Last week she was visiting me,” says Jodi, watching the birds. “I drowned with her in the blood.”

Tacoma breathes out.

“When?” she asks.

“Not sure. Four years from now, maybe? Five? There are symbols, Carmine knows how to read them better than me.” Jodi turns her attention to Tacoma, eyes wide. “People are gonna die,” she says. “So many people. The kind of people who … it’s something in the blood, we think, some kind of disease. Carmine doesn’t remember who she’s asking after, but the people she meets are … and they’re gonna keep dying for years, and … and I don’t even know what we’ll …”

Her voice dries up in her throat, and just like that Tacoma no longer cares about the people looking; she puts her arm around Jodi, pulls her close.

THE UNDERGROUND

“Hey,” she says, death-glaring a passing jogger into breaking eye contact and hurrying off. “Hey, it’ll be okay.”

“No, it won’t—” “No,” she agrees, feeling stupid.

“Guess it won’t. But we’ll figure it out, okay?”

“Okay.” Jodi sniffs and pulls away quickly, blinking hard. As if by magic, Lothian appears and lands next to her, humming something that makes Tacoma feel strange inside.

“Thanks, Lothi,” she says, bending to pet his head. “You’re sweet. And you,” she adds, straightening up. “Thank you. I’ve, um … been sitting on that for a while.” “‘S fine. What else am I here for?”

That one gets a smile at least.

“I dunno,” she says shyly. “I can think of a couple of other things.”

“Huh? Oh. Right. Yeah.” Tacoma scratches her head, embarrassed.

Why are there always so many people around to see the scary ghost get all tongue-tied and awkward? “Well, uh … maybe later?”

Jodi’s smile broadens for a moment, fades away.

“Yeah,” she says. “Maybe later.”

They turn together, looking across the green. Children, joggers, a young couple who do not have to hide their affections. Wild pokémon and

partnered. A harassed-looking squirrel watching the spearow from the safety of a tree.

“So I don’t know,” says Jodi. “I guess I just wanted to go to a party with you and forget about everything for a while.”

Tacoma considers her response, wanting to make Jodi smile again the way she just did, then scrunches up her face in faux-thought.

“Hmm,” she says. “What’s your Halloween costume?”

“A witch. Thought about being a vampire because I already have a giant bat, but then I realised my cane could be a magic staff or a broomstick.”

“That sounds sufficiently cute,” announces Tacoma. “Guess I’ll have to come.”

She’s done her job well for once. Jodi smiles, and the horror of Carmine’s dream recedes a little, back into the future.

“Thank you,” she says, letting her hand oh-so-accidentally brush against Tacoma’s. “I promise it will be fun.

Or at least that it’ll have music and alcohol.”

Tacoma takes a melodramatic drag on her cigarette and sighs out a mouthful of smoke.

“Guess that’ll do,” she says. “C’mon.

I can’t see Nikki any more, which, uh, considering she’s a kangaskhan, that’s probably criminal negligence.”

-065

“Probably,” agrees Jodi. “Lothi? Go find Nikki and make sure she hasn’t got in trouble, would you?”

He hangs back a little, nose vibrating in a way that Tacoma assumes means he’s arguing, but Jodi gives him a firm look, and after a few seconds he squeaks petulantly and jumps back up into the air, the wind from his wings blowing little wisps of fog out of Tacoma’s body.

“We will do something,” Tacoma says quietly, as they start walking again. She’s fairly sure Carmine is on the government watchlist of dangerously powerful psychics; there must be someone who’d believe her if she went to them with apocalyptic dreams. The question is whether they’d care. After last Christmas and the disastrous aftermath, Tacoma does not really think that they would. “I promise.”

“I know,” says Jodi sadly. “I know.”

*

Sunset comes earlier every day. It’s dark now, and in the gloom of Jodi’s unlit kitchen, Tacoma concentrates and sucks in shadows from the countertop, forcing them out through her brow and shoulders. They put up a fight – they always do – but it’s after dusk and two days before Halloween, and Tacoma’s powers are more than sufficient to subdue them. She twists her new horns

into place, flexes her batwings, and gets to work on a tail.

There’s no need for this, of course.

Tacoma could show up at a costume party as her usual spectral self and nobody would think anything of it.

But being a ghost isn’t a costume, it’s what she is, and the idea of turning up and saying she’s come as a spooky ghost girl sickens her. So: demon it is.

Simple, but impressive – especially the wings; she did them once before and scared the shit out of some drunk kids hanging out at a Hungry Knight. She’s not proud of it, but sometimes Tacoma just can’t help but give in to her ghostly urge to terrify people.

A few minutes later, after shaping her fingers into talons, she steps experimentally back into the light of the living room, and is relieved to find that the grafted shadows don’t immediately melt.

“Whoa,” says Carmine from the sofa, eyes wide. “Nice one, Tacoma. Do they move?”

Tacoma spreads her wings and lashes her tail. Naomi hisses, moves to jump from Carmine’s lap, but her partner holds her back.

“Just Tacoma, dude,” she says.

“With a killer costume, gotta say.”

Tacoma smiles, self-conscious.

“Thanks,” she says. “‘S not all that.

Takes like five minutes.”

“And, y’know, literal magic powers.”

THE UNDERGROUND

“Hey, you’re the one who can pick people up with your mind.”

Carmine grins wickedly.

“That’s why you’re the demon and I’m Darth Vader,” she says, flicking a finger and making her helmet jump off the table. “You think people will recognise this?”

Tacoma considers. The black is about right, as are the cape and combat boots; the cardboard buttons on her chest are somewhat less impressive, and the helmet looks exactly like a threepenny skull mask painted black and extended with papier-mâché. Which Tacoma suspects it probably is.

“No lightsabre?” she asks.

“It broke,” admits Carmine. “I may have tested it a bit too vigorously for something that cost fivepence. But hey, still got my Force powers, young Padawan.”

“Hah. Yeah.”

An awkward silence. Tacoma sits down, immediately discovers her tail and wings mean this is not a good idea and moves to the arm of the sofa instead, where they aren’t so much in the way.

“So,” says Carmine, after a few more uncomfortable seconds. “Jodi seems happier.”

Tacoma tries to smile.

“Yeah,” she says. “We, uh. It’s been a good day.”

Carmine nods. Her gloved fingers move restlessly through Naomi’s fur, crackling with static.

“She, uh. She talk much about what’s been bothering her?”

Ah. So that’s what this is about.

What’s Tacoma meant to say here?

The truth, probably. As awkward as that is.

“Yeah. I … know about the dream.”

Carmine nods again. Something about the movement seems strained, and as if this is the key Tacoma suddenly detects the tenseness in the way she holds herself. She might be sprawled over the sofa, but she is not at all at her ease.

“Okay,” she says. “Can I, uh, ask a favour?”

“Sure,” replies Tacoma, afraid. “What is it?”

a

little

“Make sure she has a really good night tonight.” Carmine sits up a little straighter. “You know what empaths are like. She’s taken this really hard.”

“What about you?”

Carmine laughs.

“I,” she says, “am gonna take some pills, do some shots and make out with Sorayya, so y’know, I think I’m pretty good.”

Tacoma isn’t sure she believes her, but she also isn’t sure that she knows Carmine well enough to call her out on it. Fortunately, she doesn’t have to:

-067

Jodi’s door opens at last, and both of them turn together to see her make her way down the hall, looking nervous in her tattered black dress and artfullybent hat.

“Cutie,” says Carmine, raising her eyebrows. “Like the magic staff.”

spooky,” says Jodi, her cheeks flaming.

“I like your horns.”

“Thanks. I like your hat.”

“That’s not even the best bit.” Jodi clicks off her magic staff and looks over her shoulder, back towards her room.

“Lothi!”

Jodi’s relief is palpable. Tacoma doesn’t quite get why she’s so anxious about this – she has more style in her little finger than Tacoma has in her whole body, and her make-up is never anything less than flawless – but she’s glad anyway. Jodi is beautiful.

She would like her to know this, utterly, forever.

He bounds out after her, humming merrily to himself. For a moment Tacoma doesn’t get what she’s looking for, and then she notices it.

“Thank does this.”

“I like it,” says Carmine, craning her neck to stare past them. “See, Naomi?

Lothian’s a good sport.”

you,”

says

Jodi.

“It

She leans against the wall and lifts her cane up, showing the wicker ball taped to the end; something clicks under her thumb, and inside the ball a coil of fairy lights turn on.

“Abracadabra,” she says, in a selfdeprecating kind of voice. “Kinda dumb, but I had fun making it.”

“It’s great,” says Tacoma, jumping up. “You’re great.”

She grabs her hand and leans in for a kiss. Tonight Jodi’s eyeshadow is like storm clouds, dark and extravagant, and her lipstick is the kind of purple that you could mistake for black.

Tacoma can taste it, dissolving through the fog inside her mouth.

“You’re

pretty

great

yourself,

“You’ve put … little fake wings on him? On your noivern?”

Jodi grins.

“He’s dressing up as a bat.”

“He is,” agrees Jodi. “And we are running late, ‘cause I screwed up my eyeshadow twice. So, um – we’re not waiting for Sorayya, right?”

Carmine shoves Naomi off her lap and jumps up, her helmet flying to her hand.

“Nope. She’s meeting us there.”

“In which case!” Jodi glances at Tacoma. “Nikki’s settled in her ball?”

“Yep. All tired out; shouldn’t cause any trouble.”

“You ready to make my friends jealous, spooky?”

Tacoma isn’t sure if she’s teasing or not; who wants an ugly shadow

THE UNDERGROUND

monster for a girlfriend? But Jodi’s smiling, so she decides to smile back and nod anyway.

“Sure,” she says. “Let’s go.”

Lothian. Tacoma tenses, half expecting trouble, but he just grins.

“You dressed him up as a bat?” he asks.

Jodi flashes him a smile.

Honey Street only really comes to life after dark, when the bars and clubs open and the monsters come out to play. All the way along the last stretch to the 88, Tacoma can feel a weird electric tension bouncing around inside her, part fear and part excitement. Look at all these people, these vampires and werewolves and Princess Leias: these people are all like her, like Jodi and Carmine. People who skulk, who lurk. All those who’ve learned to shun the light.

Jodi glances up at her from beneath the brim of her hat, eyes bright. Kind of excited, kind of desperate.

“I’m really glad you came,” she says.

“Me too,” replies Tacoma, and right now at least she thinks she means it.

The 88 itself is an unassuming little place with heavy shades over the windows and a tiny neon-pink sign above the door; it doesn’t look big enough to host a party this size, but Tacoma is familiar with buildings like this, the way they seem to mushroom to startling new sizes once you get through the door. The bouncer, in green make-up with a fake bolt through his neck, stops the three of them at the door and glances at

“Sure,” she says. “He was gonna be a cat but I didn’t know where to stick the tail.”

The bouncer laughs.

“Okay,” he says. “Sorayya told me she’s waiting at the bar. You four have a nice night now.”

“You too, Craig. Don’t work too hard!”

Jodi tugs on Tacoma’s hand, drags her inside. It takes a long few seconds for Tacoma to realise that Craig never even seemed to notice the fact that she was dead. She doesn’t have much time to dwell on it: the inside of the 88 is a riot of sound and light and laughter, dozens upon dozens of people drinking and dancing and trying to make conversation over the pounding of the opening to ‘Spirit in the Sky’. Tacoma stares, caught between the flickering glare of the disco ball and the wonderful, terrifying realisation that the gorgeous woman tending bar is almost certainly as gay as she is, and doesn’t manage to recover until Jodi pulls on her hand again.

“Come on,” she says, smiling at the look on her face. “We’re in the way, spooky.”

-069

“Oh,” murmurs Tacoma, letting herself be dragged deeper into the club. “Uh, sure …”

Everything seems to be happening by itself, moving along tracks she cannot seem to make out. Lothian and Naomi seem to have disappeared somewhere along the way; Carmine has her helmet on, is moving on ahead with great stomping Vader steps. Tacoma drifts, wincing as the disco ball tosses fragments of light across her face, and surfaces only when they all arrive at the bar and a girl with ragged clothes and stitches drawn all over her face pops up in front of them.

“Mr Vader,” she says. Tacoma can’t place her accent. Somewhere far away, for sure. “Missing a lightsabre, huh?”

Carmine shakes her head.

“Please,” she replies, in her best Vader voice. “Mr Vader was my father.

Call me Darth.”

The girl snorts. She has made up her face in a dozen different skin colours between the stitches, as if she was sewn together from remnants.

“Sure thing, Darth.” She pulls off her helmet and kisses her (and nobody cares, Tacoma realises, nobody even notices), then turns to Jodi. “Hey, you,” she says. “And this must be Tacoma, huh? Sorayya, nice to meet you.”

“Hi,” says Tacoma, trying to sound like this is all completely normal for her. “Likewise.”

“Heard a lot about you. Not that you were so good at costumes, though,” she adds, casting an admiring eye over Tacoma’s horns and wings. “Gotta say, that is particularly cool. You know there’s a costume contest, I think?

Grace is going round taking pictures.”

“Oh,” says Tacoma. “Uh, cool.”

Sorayya grins, a little mean but mostly kind, and nods her head at the bar.

“What are you drinking?” she asks.

“First one’s on Carmine.”

“Oh, thanks,” sighs Carmine. “Just ‘cause the government pays my rent—” “Full stop,” interrupts Sorayya.

“Just because the government pays your rent. What are you drinking?”

Jodi wants a dark and stormy; Carmine and Sorayya are doing tequila shots. Tacoma murmurs that she’ll have a shot too, wanting to give herself as little to dissolve as possible, and Sorayya nods in approval.

“Your girlfriend has excellent taste,” she tells Jodi. “Okay, I approve.”

“Thanks,” says Jodi dryly. “I know we were both waiting for that.”

Sorayya laughs and gets the drinks, motioning for Carmine to pay with a royal sort of gesture, as if she herself is above base coinage. Tacoma stares at the bartender’s dark eyes and bright blue hair for a few moments too long, gets an amused smile and

THE UNDERGROUND

a raised eyebrow, but before she can try to come up with any kind of excuse they all have glasses in their hands and Sorayya is holding hers out, saying cheers.

Here’s one cue she can take at least.

A clink! and the spreading warmth of alcohol billowing through her substance like cream swirling into coffee. Sorayya smacks her lips, puts her glass carelessly down on the bar and throws her arm around Carmine.

“Okay,” she says. “Carmine and I have some business to take care of.

Catch you in a bit, yeah?”

Presumably this is code for taking ecstasy. Tacoma glances at Jodi, wondering what she thinks of this – she seems very much like she isn’t a drugs person, though Tacoma has nothing to base this on – but she’s just nodding like this is every night out for her. Hell, maybe it is.

“See you,” says Jodi. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“We’ll do a fuck of a lot more than that,” says Sorayya, grinning.

“Allons-y!”

She spins Carmine around and marches her off, the two of them vanishing in among the wookiees and witches so completely that it half seems they were never there at all.

Maybe they weren’t. Maybe none of this is real and Tacoma is just dreaming— “Hey,” says Jodi, touching her arm.

“You okay?”

Right. Empath. Tacoma gives her the best smile she can manage; it feels uncomfortably nervous.

“I think so,” she says. “I just … it’s weird, you know?”

“Yeah, I know.”

A pause. The crowd ebbs and flows, intelligible only in tiny fragments: two guys dancing in the corner there, one a Dr Jekyll and the other a Mr Hyde; a Barbarella who really does look like Jane Fonda; two butches who are both Luke Skywalker, clashing their lightsabres in a jokey kind of way as a cover of ‘Black Magic Woman’ that Tacoma doesn’t recognise hums through the air around them.

Sometimes Tacoma thinks there are people looking at her, but nobody seems afraid, or even surprised.

Does everyone here really know Jodi that well?

“Where did Lothi go?” she asks, after a while. “I thought he wouldn’t leave you.”

“Only when you’re here.” Jodi smiles. “And, well, he doesn’t like loud noises. There’s a room upstairs where pokémon can hang out. Not the best soundproofing, but he refuses to wait at home, so here he is. Keeping an ear on me.”

Only when she’s here. That’s a hell of a responsibility; Tacoma hopes she’s up to it.

-071

“C’mon,” says Jodi, taking another sip of her drink. “Let’s not just hang around by the bar being afraid. I wanna introduce you to Damien. Oh, and Rochelle. Oh, and— wait, that’s Sam!” “Sam?” “Goldenrod Sam. C’mon!”

Sam,

not

Mahogany

Jodi moves away from the bar, towards the crowd. Tacoma hangs back for just a second, watching her say hi to her friends and luxuriating in how superfluous she feels, and then makes herself shove her self-loathing aside and follow.

Goldenrod Sam is a man a few years older than them, dressed as a homebrew Jedi of uncertain provenance and bearing an uncanny resemblance to Bert Convy. He is delighted to see Jodi, starts to tell her about someone called Yvette and her recent promotion, and then interrupts himself to make conversation with Tacoma. Apparently he agrees with her about how awful Jodi’s taste in music is. They joke about this for a few minutes, the conversation getting easier as the tequila diffuses through Tacoma’s mist, and then someone catches his arm and peels him away from them back into the smoky noise of the crowd.

It doesn’t even matter. Jodi is already moving on, lighting up her magic staff and waving over someone else, and

Tacoma trails after, hypnotised by the light in her eyes. Some of it is what she expected, that desperate kind of excitement, but some of it is pride.

And in the absence of any alternative explanations, Tacoma is forced to conclude that she might actually be proud of her.

An uncomfortable thought, but fortunately not one she has much time to consider; there are too many people to meet, too many sets of eyes to negotiate. Tacoma shakes hands, smiles, tries to deal with the fact that most people don’t seem to be scared.

One of the few who does is Damien, a handsome young man whose fangs keep falling out when he opens his mouth to talk. He is nervous, in a helpless kind of way that informs Tacoma immediately that Jodi has taken it upon herself to be his guardian angel; she suspects he would be afraid of literally anyone, and that the scary ghost girl is probably the least of his worries. Jodi hovers protectively at his shoulder, and when they part carefully hands him over to his boyfriend, like she’s been babysitting for him.

“You’re the cutest motherfucker on the planet,” Tacoma tells her, as they turn away, and Jodi laughs and tilts her head back to kiss her.

“Only so I get to hear you say it, spooky.”

Rochelle is a girl like Jodi, made up as a ghost bride with some kind of

THE UNDERGROUND

glow-in-the-dark face paint that she immediately tells Tacoma is probably radioactive and taking ten years off her life. Tacoma laughs, the sound half lost in the sound of Mick Jagger introducing himself as a man of wealth and taste, and gets a gratified smile in response. Rochelle says she has a sense of humour, huh, can we keep her? And Jodi says well, what do you say? And Tacoma says I guess I could be persuaded.

So it goes, this delicate little threeway flirtation, and it’s not what Tacoma was expecting at all but damn if it isn’t fun; and afterwards as they find a seat so Jodi can rest she can be fake-jealous at her like so you flirt with other girls often? and Jodi can be fake-defensive back like oh not that often; and then a woman in a catsuit with whiskers drawn on her face is there with an instant camera, telling them to smile. Jodi asks her to turn the flash off please, Grace, and Grace nods in understanding, aims a finger gun at Tacoma.

Gotcha covered, Tacoma, she says, although they haven’t been introduced.

Right, light up your staff, Jodi, and if you can just spread your wings …

A click, a whirr, and they get a Polaroid to wave around and stare at happily – but only for a second, because then that goddamn music from the cantina in Star Wars comes on and the half of the party who came in costumes from the movie pile onto the dance

floor, laughing and cheering.

“I didn’t even know it was out in Johto,” says Tacoma, watching them.

The two of them saw the Kantan release, when Jodi spent a weekend with her in Saffron a few weeks ago.

“It’s not. We’ve just all seen bootleg Kantan versions.”

Jodi is swaying a little in her chair.

Drunk on one dark and stormy? She is a lightweight, but that’s probably not it; Tacoma thinks it might be the atmosphere.

This desperate excitement, the joy everyone here takes in this special time of year when monsters like them are the heroes – that’s got to Tacoma, and she isn’t even psychic. It’s almost surprising that Jodi’s still upright.

“Kantan, huh.” Tacoma shakes her head. “Is that what it takes to get Johto and Kanto talking to each other? Space wizards?”

Jodi shrugs.

“I think we all just have crushes on Carrie Fisher.”

“That’s fair,” says Tacoma, laughing.

“That’s more than fair.”

She lounges against the wall, one wing curled a little around Jodi.

This is about as long as she’s ever maintained shadowy prosthetics like these, and they’re not even starting to flake. Sometimes her powers sicken her, but tonight, here with all the other freaks, she’s definitely proud.

-073

There’s Carmine and Sorayya over there on the dance floor, flinging themselves at each other with an ecstatic kind of energy with Carmine’s helmet flying around in circles above their heads. Tacoma is about to point them out when she realises Jodi is already looking at them.

“We danced once,” she says, kind of wistful, kind of sad. “Remember?”

Tacoma squeezes her shoulder with one taloned hand.

“Yeah,” she says. “We did.”

Jodi sighs.

“Well, never mind,” she says, rubbing absently at her bad leg. “Cigarette?”

“Sure.”

They light up, sending their own plumes of smoke climbing into the haze above their heads. The moment is perfect, an insulating peace welling up from the glowing tips of their cigarettes and pooling around them, pushing the party back a little.

The cantina music is over; now it’s something Tacoma doesn’t recognise about not fearing the reaper.

Carmine is still dancing – dancing even faster, actually, far faster than is appropriate for the music, her hair lashing at the air around her like a nest of angry serpents. She doesn’t look like she’s enjoying herself. Next to her Sorayya stumbles, coughing and clutching at her chest, and then the guy on the other side of Carmine, and a

vampire drag queen next to him— Jodi’s fingers tighten on Tacoma’s arm.

“Hey,” she murmurs, struggling to her feet, “hey, help me up—” A sharp crack of fingers on flesh, and Carmine staggers backwards into the vampire, staring at Sorayya and her raised hand as if at the risen dead. Her hair falls back down to her shoulders, and as the breath rushes back into the people around them Sorayya puts an arm around her and takes her swiftly away into the crowd.

“It’s okay,” says Tacoma, turning back to Jodi. “It’s okay, Sorayya’s got her— hey, are you – watch your—” She catches Jodi’s falling cigarette with a shred of shadow, crushes it out before it can hit the alcohol and polyester.

“Okay,” she says softly, holding her close. “Okay, Jodi, we’re gonna go outside, okay?”

“Okay,” mutters Jodi, so quietly that Tacoma does not hear but only feels it, in the movement of Jodi’s mouth against her side. “Okay.”

It’s clearly not okay. But it’s the only thing Tacoma can think of.

Outside, the night has thickened, left Goldenrod a different city to the one they walked through to get here: distant traffic, the humming of the bass through the walls, a deepening chill that Tacoma is aware of without

THE UNDERGROUND

truly feeling. She guides Jodi past Craig, who is dealing with a brace of late arrivals, and a little way down the street to the safety of a dark recess between two buildings. Only once she’s there does she remember that live humans generally don’t feel as safe in the dark as she does, but whatever, she’s committed now, she’ll just have to stick with it.

“It has been.” Is it okay to lift Jodi’s face so they can see each other?

Probably; Tacoma thinks she might have done that before. She does it now, and is relieved to see that Jodi doesn’t seem to mind, just stares nervously at her like she thinks she’s about to be told off. “I’ve had a great night. Am having a great night.”

Something chirps. Tacoma looks up and sees Lothian crawling around the wall of the 88 like a spider, his cardboard wings hanging limply off his back. Of course he knows. With his ears, he probably heard it coming before any of them even realised.

“No, really. You were right, it’s fun.

And the people are cool.”

“Hey, you,” she murmurs, beckoning him with a jerk of her head. “Do your thing.”

He hums a note that makes her insides feel strange and comes a little closer, leaning away from the wall to put his head against Jodi’s. Making those soothing vibes Jodi’s always on about, presumably.

“Thank you,” says Jodi, looking up a little. “Thank you, Lothi.”

Tacoma says nothing, just hugs her.

She thinks about stroking her hair, but she doesn’t know if that would be comforting or patronising. These are the disadvantages to spending half the year apart.

“I’m sorry,” says Jodi, without meeting her eye. “This was meant to be fun.”

“Hmph.”

“And they’re all gonna …”

“We don’t know that,” says Tacoma, trying to sound firm. She’s not used to this at all. This conversation usually goes the other way around; she’s the depressed one, the dumbass trapped between her guilt and her undeath, who needs to be talked back to life by Jodi every time they meet. Only once or twice has she ever had to comfort Jodi.

“Not all of them.”

“A lot of them. And poor Carmine—” “Carmine’s got Sorayya,” interrupts Tacoma. “Okay? Let’s deal with you first.”

This sounds like something Jodi would say. Maybe Jodi hears it too, because she sighs and squeezes Tacoma’s arm.

“You’re right,” she sighs. “She’s her own person, I can’t – shouldn’t try to look after her all the time.”

“Uh. Not what I said, but okay, that sounds smarter.”

-075

That one gets a smile. Just a little one, but still. Tacoma will take that.

“I just don’t want it to end,” says Jodi, eyes wet. Behind her, Lothian peels a little off the wall, the intricate flaps of his nostrils quivering with ultrasonic vibrations.

“Whatever’s coming, Tacoma, it’s gonna be so …”

“Not tonight, though. You said you wanted to forget about it and have a good time, right?”

Jodi sighs again.

“Right,” she says, reluctantly.

“Right. That was just … harder than I thought it would be.”

“Carmine?”

“Yeah. That wasn’t the drugs. Or it was kind of the drugs? Probably they took her out of her head enough for her to have a vision, and then the feedback triggered her telekinesis.”

Tacoma nods, giving herself time to figure out some kind of answer, and says: “Does she need your help with it?”

Jodi hesitates. “… no.”

“Then let it go,” says Tacoma. “Just for a minute, okay? We can, uh, talk to her in a little bit. I’m guessing she probably just wants to get over it and head back to the party, right?”

Jodi opens her mouth as if to argue, but when the words come out, there’s no argument at all.

“I guess this is how you earned that scholarship, huh,” she says. “Yeah.

Yeah, that’ll be what she wants.”

Thank God. Tacoma really didn’t know what she was going to do if that didn’t work. Jodi can probably tell this – could probably tell even if she wasn’t psychic – but whatever. One of the things that Tacoma is trying to learn is that it’s what you do that matters, not what you feel.

“Okay,” she says. “In which case, I have a suggestion. We go back inside, check Carmine’s okay, and I buy you another drink while we watch people dance and meet some more of your friends.”

For a long moment – too long – Jodi stares. The water in her eyes thickens into tears, trailing eyeshadow down her cheek, and if Tacoma had a heart it would have stopped, because clearly she has somehow managed to fuck this— “I love you,” says Jodi.

Now it’s Tacoma’s turn to stare. This is pretty much exactly the opposite of what she was expecting.

“Sorry.” Jodi bites her lip. “I guess I made things weird.”

“No! Um – I mean no, it’s not weird, I just—” She breaks off, tries to recover. “What I mean is, um … I love you too.”

It’s the first time. Tacoma knew how Jodi felt, of course – it spills out

THE UNDERGROUND

from inside her – and as an empath Jodi certainly knew how Tacoma felt, but, well. For one reason or another, neither of them have ever actually said those exact words.

Until now.

“So yeah,” says Tacoma, feeling a little like she wants to die again and a little like she wants this moment to last forever. “There’s that.”

“There’s that,” “There’s that.”

agrees

Jodi.

Silence. Someone goes past their alcove without seeing them, whistling loudly. Further away, a bus coughs along down the street, the light spilling from its windows in that unearthly night bus way. Tacoma has always thought that would what a UFO would be like, if you ever saw one. That same flat, alien glow.

“We beat the bad guys once,” she ventures. “Whatever’s coming, we’ll fight it. Until we stop it or we die.”

Jodi laughs briefly.

“That much I already knew,” she says. “But, um … thanks. It’s good to hear you say it.” She turns to Lothian, still dangling weirdly off the wall.

“You’re in, right Lothi?”

He stretches his head out toward her hand immediately, chest puffing out as if insulted she even had to ask, and Jodi smiles and scratches between his ears.

“Knew I could count on you,” she says. “Okay. Back in, spooky?”

“Back in, pumpkin.”

Jodi draws her head back, eyebrows raised. “‘Pumpkin’?”

Tacoma shrugs, embarrassed.

“I did say I’d come up with a pet name …”

“Maybe go back to the drawing board on that one,” says Jodi, putting her arm through hers. “C’mon. I think you said something about— a drink?”

She almost said Carmine, Tacoma can tell. But all right. This is good enough for now.

“Yeah,” she says, as they go back around the corner to the 88, towards the sound of music and a roomful of delighted dancers. “I did.”

Friendly nod from Craig. Lothian lingering for a moment, then vanishing off to the pokémon room. And then: into the dark again, the flickering lights, the excitable crowd, the grave and unmistakeable intonation of Bobby Pickett.

“They did the mash,” sings Jodi quietly, her eyes searching the crowd for a homemade Vader and a ragged zombie. “I like this one.”

“Everyone does,” replies Tacoma.

“Look at them dance.”

“I am,” says Jodi. She sounds wistful

-077

again, but Tacoma does not think she is thinking of their one dance this time.

“I am.”

There: that’s Carmine and Sorayya, back on the dance floor, next to Goldenrod Sam and some guy whose costume seems to chiefly consist of being painted blue.

“See?” she says. “It’s okay, Jodi. Just let her—” “Yeah. Yeah, I will.” Jodi slips her fingers through Tacoma’s. “Mine’s another dark and stormy, by the way.”

“Right,” says Tacoma, squeezing gently. “Coming up.”

Still a few years to go, right? At least.

And tonight, the music is loud and the company is good, and she and Jodi love each other.

Maybe it’s not much, but it’ll do.

THE UNDERGROUND

-079

TOXIC BONDS by

Human Soul Engineer

THE UNDERGROUND

Astrid gazed longingly at the multicolored water and wondered how a lake could look so delicious. She gradually oozed over to the water’s edge and stuck one of her sludge tendrils in it.

A little spicy, a little savory, a little bitter, she’d never tasted a cocktail like this before.

“These liquids... They’re like the ones...From long ago!” Kasimir said, groaning out each phrase as was natural for a Muk. Kasimir retracted his slimy claw from the lake before wading in, his “Alolan rainbow” sludge body mixing with the water. He released contented sigh as he floated on top, soaking in the nutrients. Unlike Astrid’s dark purple “Kantan” form, Kasimir’s blended in with the lake’s chromatic surface.

“You know...About these tasty liquids? I have never...Consumed such a--” Astrid let out, before Kasimir cut her off again.

“Because... you are young! I have seen...This world...I know it...Much better...Than You...These sorts of foods...They are rare...But they Benefit...All of Muk-kind!”

Astrid stayed silent at the water’s edge as Kasimir made animated gestures while talking. She knew better than to interrupt when he got this way. He was larger and had jagged claws, so she just let him talk over her. She had no idea why his rambling amused Hanako so much.

She’d brought both Astrid and Kasimir to the lake as part of her job.

Astrid wasn’t sure what the exact nature of Hanako’s job was, but today it involved dressing up in heavy clothes and talking with a bunch of other humans outside, while Astrid and Kasimir examined the strangely appetizing lake.

And so far, the lake felt fantastical and looked dream-like. Its existence pleased Astrid greatly. She just wished she had someone else to enjoy it with.

What she could see below the surface was devoid of any life, Pokémon or otherwise.

Minutes passed by as Astrid waited for Kasimir, still enjoying his float on the surface, to let her dive and properly investigate the water. Biding her time on the shore, Astrid noticed a dark blob approach the surface, separating into smaller parts before breaching through surface, attracting Kasimir’s attention too.

The cluster of Amorphous Pokémon crept out of the water and reformed into their usual shapes. Astrid stared at the familiar-looking group of poisonous sludges long enough that they too began to stare back. She couldn’t help it; Astrid had never seen so many Grimer and Muk amassed in a single location in a long time.

Kasimir was the only other Muk she regularly interacted with, and even then, his bright pattern and protruding

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shards showed that they weren’t the same. But these Grimer and Muk, the mostly homogenously colored ones approaching her, they looked like her.

“Welcome, friend...You are unfamiliar,” spoke one of the Muk among many. “Are you from...

Another family?”

Astrid was, but not one entirely of Muk. It was her and Kasimir and also her Human Hanako with her parents, Judith and Ben, and siblings, Levi and Tamiko, and their Farfetch’d, Daisy. But Astrid knew that what he asked about was her family of Muk and Grimers, Pokémon who were only distant memories to her, despite shared DNA. She gurgled in place while trying to formulate an answer.

Kasimir injected himself in between the two. He out-massed even the biggest of the other Muk, which let him dominate the conversation.

“Friends...I came here...To investigate...This bountiful lake...”

Kasimir stated. “This chemical mix is like Ambrosia...I have tasted it.”

“You know...Of Ambrosia?” asked an odd green-colored Muk, who seemed to be deteriorating from age. “To think...A stranger...Would know this legend!”

Kasimir raised his dominant arm in the air, showing his toxic claws.

Astrid knew he was just posturing, but she didn’t feel any safer seeing this behavior repeated here. Kasimir let the others regain their composure

before continuing.

“I am...No Stranger! I, Kasimir, am...

Just as much of...A Muk...As you! I may live...With humans...But my Heart is...

Of a Muk!” Kasimir’s dramatic display stirred up a wave of support from the crowd.

The green Muk approached his Alolan counterpart with arms wide.

“Brother...You are a true friend...It is good to hear...That we are blessed by Ambrosia.” More Grimer approached to hear the stranger, splitting off from the more cautious group. Astrid could see Kasimir was dragging her into a divisive argument she wanted no part of.

“The lake is definitely...The Ambrosia of legend...Its taste is too succulent...I felt my body...Revitalize,” Kasimir expounded.

“Yes, yes...Our nest in the deep...

It is rich in sustenance...I feel this is true...Brothers!” the green Muk concurred, speaking to the others as much as to Kasimir.

“Zelen...I doubt...The words of the stranger,” an orange-ish Muk spoke up. “Ambrosia...Will bring Bounty...

The lake...Is now empty...Except for Muk...Is this bounty?”

“Burtuqali...you doubt the presence...of our bounty?” Zelen accused. “You forget...our stories!”

“She clearly does...The Lake is a bounty...We have all tasted it,” Kasimir

THE UNDERGROUND

added, shooting Burtuqali a haughty look and drawing mummers among the present Grimer and Muk. Burtuqali grimaced and shot back.

“I do not forget! I am the storyteller...I know these stories...

Better than all of you!” Burtuqali responded pointing her dripping fingers at Zelen and Kasimir.

“Ambrosia is life...The story of ...The Old Lake and Pond...Is plenty proof! Do you stoop so low...As to believe...This Stranger who speaks of Ambrosia...But gives us bog water?”

Clamoring from both Grimer and Muk filled the air. Astrid had never seen Kasimir look so dumbfounded or angry before. Burtuqali was surrounded by the parts of the family that supported her, so Kasimir couldn’t just swing at her. Astrid knew that he couldn’t do anything, but just try to shout over her.

So that’s what he did. Kasimir groaned loudly and Burtiqali responded in kind and Zelen and the rest tried to keep the two separated. As the debate degraded further, Astrid slowly slinked away from Kasimir’s side, trying to find an excuse to move elsewhere.

In the distance, two floating Pokémon were that excuse.

--------------------------

Further away, Hanako was speaking in a crowd of humans dressed similarly

to her. Astrid couldn’t hear what they were saying from this distance, but imagined she wouldn’t understand them anyway. Most of them were recognizable. They were Hanako’s coworkers, locals who’d accepted her into her new job.

While Astrid had tried to be friendly with them, they had mostly kept their distance from her and Kasimir, who frightened them.

One of the strangers released a couple Pokémon, attracting Astrid’s attention again. The Starmie and the other one, a large floating metal creature resembling a human-made bell, after listening to that stranger talk to them, levitated to the shore.

Astrid transferred herself over to that part of the lake as quick as she could, leaving Kasimir with the rest of the Muk family.

The Starmie dipped its blue points into the shore of the water, no longer levitating, but instead absorbing some of the lake water. Neither the Starmie nor its companion moved as Astrid approached them, but instead remained almost completely motionless, not even facing each other, until the Starmie shifted colors momentarily and sharply removed itself from the lake.

“Ah friend! Are you okay?” Astrid vocalized, rushing over to the Starmie, who stood on its points in the sand.

The large metal one turned to face her, Astrid assuming the colored engravings on their side was their face. “What

-083

happened...Did something...Hurt you?”

“Who are you? What damaged the lake? Was it you?” Astrid heard

rapid fire in her brain, understanding the words, but feeling uncomfortable about the intrusion.

“Friend...If you are hurt...I can help...The lake is... Very comfortable...

For Muk...Do you not...Like it?” Astrid asked, reaching out to help, only for the Starmie to recoil away.

“Do not touch me. This lake is poisonous. You are poisonous,” It psychically communicated to her.

“O young Muk, do not be deterred by my ally. Baoshi is a forthright soul only startled by the noxious character of the lake,” The sentient floating

object communicated at Astrid, staring at her, unblinking.

“Let me bridge the gap between us. My name is Jinyou.

We are the companions of Xiao Qing and hail from the Gold City in the west. Tell us your name, Muk.” “I am Astrid...From this City...

Celadon....I live with...Hanako...The woman over there,” she gestured towards the group of people. “I also live...With Kasimir...That brightly colored Muk...Approaching us.”

“It is wonderful to make your acquaintance, Astrid from Celadon. I presumed that

you were of the same clan as the rest of the Muk at this lake. It is only natural, considering the nature of the lake at the present moment,” Jinyou elucidated.

“You have already...Met the other Muk...In that family?” Hanako asked.

“We already knew about them.

Qing told us. She said that the lake has Muk. That it is toxic. That it needs to be cleansed,” Baoshi informed her, now upright and detoxified.

“Cleansed...of Muk?” Astrid almost shouted, understanding Baoshi’s words, but not its logic. This place was the perfect home for someone of her species. Where would that family live without that lake?

“Who dares...

Threaten...

The Cleansing of Muk?” Kasimir made himself known to the three of them.

“Astrid...Who are the strangers?”

“Aaaa...This is Jinyou...and Baoshi,” Astrid told him. “They are from...The east...They are here...To clean up...

The lake.”

“Clean up?!” Kasimir growled at the pair of strangers, baring his claws.

The sight provoked Baoshi to spin its second set of points rapidly and increase the intensity of its gem’s light. Jinyou merely fixed their gaze on Kasimir while transmitting their thoughts.

THE UNDERGROUND

“O Astrid--”

“Big Muk rejects psychic transmission!

Why?” Baoshi interrupted as it stared down Kasimir.

“Astrid’s companion is surrounded by a darkness that voids our powers,” Jinyou informed the two. “It would benefit us all, Astrid, if you could convince your friend to cease his aggression. This confrontation would have a grim ending.”

Astrid’s brain hurt trying to understand the pair sending overlapping thoughts into her head, but tried to stop Kasimir regardless.

“Kasimir, please!...They do not mean that...I only...Said it wrong,” Astrid pleaded, waving her stubby arms in front of him. “They can only...Talk to me...They don’t want to fight.”

Kasimir stared back at the levitating Jinyou, whose eyes resembled the headlights of an automobile, and at Baoshi, whose spinning slowed slightly and core glowed more gently, and lowered his claws.

“Hear me, psychics!...Do not trifle...

With me...Or with the Muk! This lake...Is ours!” Kasimir yelled. Jinyou attempted to nod in response while Baoshi simply shot a simple “Fine” to Astrid, which she dutifully relayed.

Convinced of his success, Kasimir turned to leave.

“Astrid...

Come...

We

must

investigate... Further... The bountiful lake.”

She hesitated before following in his footsteps. The pair of psychic types returned to their analyzing the lake, Jinyou sending a parting “Farewell, Astrid” at the crestfallen Muk. -------------------------Hanako and Qing’s voices rose until their argument devolved into shouting.

Qing stormed off, accompanied by her only two friends, while Kasimir remained at Hanako’s side. Astrid pretended not to be there the whole time. She couldn’t really understand the details of what the two of them were arguing about, anyway.

A day had passed since Astrid had first seen the lake and its inhabitants and she was still processing what she had heard from the other Muk and those two psychic Pokémon. Tensions between the humans and between the Pokemon seemed volatile today, with some of the Grimer and Muk more aggressively patrolling the shore, realizing something was coming.

Astrid had spent most of the day so far avoiding Kasimir, who acted more domineering than usual, and waiting for Hanako to take a break for even a moment.

Hanako sat down for a smoke break, Kasimir soothed by the cigarette’s

-085

fumes. Qing seemed to have secluded herself in the comforting hollow interior of her companion Jinyou’s body, as the lines in their body glowed with an ethereal light. Astrid wasn’t sure why she’d hide most of her body in the bell-like floating structure, but none of the other humans seemed to understand either. Not wanting to be with any of them, save Hanako, Astrid distanced herself from everyone. Maybe Hanako would come then.

She did not come. No one else did, either, too preoccupied with whatever human business they came here for.

Astrid considered returning to the lake for a dip in its waters, but figured that’d only provoke someone. She just stewed in her own spot for a little bit.

“I apologize, Astrid, for what had transpired in front of you.” The only amicable one

of the bunch, Jinyou floated next to Astrid and struck up a conversation.

“It was not our intention to cause such an uproar. Qing just becomes emotionally invested in these matters.”

“It’s not a problem...Really...I’m okay over here...I’m just...A little overwhelmed...It’s been a long...Couple of days.” Jinyou remained silent, Astrid unsure how to interpret their actions.

Changing their tone to one more wise and teacher-like, Jinyou spoke.

“Are you aware of the great turmoil that engulfed the

land for the past decade? We Bronzong have long memories and longer lives, but that is not a gift that many have received.”

“Turmoil? I do not know...But last year...I do remember...It was very scary...We didn’t leave home much,” Astrid responded, trying to piece things together.

“I have existed on this plane for a long time and been the partner of Xiao Qing for a decade and a half. During my years, I endured miseries, but none greater than the Great Catastrophe, the horror from the East.

“Many Pokémon fled and perhaps even more were annihilated. I was Qing’s steadfast companion for all of those years, years that we spent struggling to eat and to live,” Jinyou recounted,

their words conveying what their face could not. Astrid was unsure of how to respond, defaulting to waiting for Jinyou to recompose themselves before continuing.

“With the descent of darkness upon our lands came the destruction of our city and the lands around it. Malefic rain turned the water fetid and the fields barren. What was once verdant decayed and those of a biotic nature were afflicted by

THE UNDERGROUND

illness. Qing’s skin degraded and Baoshi spent many a day motionless on the ground, flushing the toxins out of its systems. I prayed to Lugia, chanting and gonging every day to heal my companions. I fear what would have happened had I not.”

“I...Oh Mew...” Astrid was still unsure how to comprehend all of this.

“The land the Xiao family worked became void of mint berries.

Her brothers and many others left for the city. Qing was too afflicted to leave. All we could do was work to heal the land. With what little strength she had, she would curse the easterners as she examined the fields at my side. Month by month, I called forth rains from the heavens with Baoshi to cleanse the fields of their sickness.

After four years, the tiniest weeds penetrated the surface.

After five years, sickly crops emerged.

After seven, our harvest had been completely revitalized. I still remember Qing picking the first berry and weeping at its taste.”

“What we did to that field, we did to ten other fields, and soon a hundred more. And now, we’ve come to restore this lake to its former glory,” Jinyou told

her, wrapping up their story. “Perhaps

you can comprehend the basis of our actions now.”

“Your tale...Is hard to believe...But I think...I can understand you,” Astrid replied. “But I don’t know...If I want you...To change the lake.”

Astrid swore she saw Jinyou shooting her a curious expression, despite their face being largely static.

“Your opinion on this matter is still like that of your companion.”

Shaking her head vigorously, she mustered up the courage to explain her thoughts.

“No...I...There is a Muk family here...It is bigger than any...That I have seen before...They need this place...The water here...Is nearly perfect...I want them...To have healthy lives...Just as you want...For your family.”

Astrid paused for a breath after letting out such a statement. Jinyou, still floating and expressionless, replied when she was ready.

“I respect your perspective.

No one wants to be devoid of a home,” Jinyou replied. “But I cannot in good faith, let the lake remain in its current state. The foul water may be salutary for the Muk, but the water is not for Muk alone.

Consider the barren state of this place right now. Is it not empty, save for that family?”

-087

Astrid recalled her brief investigation of the lake and Burtuqali’s words. The lake was silent the whole time, even lacking the usual Pidgey and Oddish who thrived in these environments.

Even humans gathered here only in small numbers and in strange garb.

“This lake...It is only...For Muk...But other lakes...They are for everyone,” Astrid realized.

“I have restored multitudinous water sources in my life and all of them support diverse peoples. A lake that supports only one species is anathema to our principles.”

Astrid could feel the conviction in their voice inside of her mind. It was strange that this object could contain so much emotion. If Kasimir could hear Jinyou’s thoughts, Astrid swore they would come to blows. She wasn’t sure how to continue in the face of such passion, but she tried anyway.

“I saw...That Muk family...They were arguing about the lake...Kasimir said it’s made...of sacred Ambrosia...

Some agreed...Others thought more like you.”

“Ambrosia?”

“It’s something...Kasimir always talks about...A legend passed down...

In stories... About an environment perfect for Grimer and Muk...like this lake.”

“And you believe you must safeguard this land based on that?”

“I don’t know,” Astrid admitted.

“From what I’ve seen...In the last day...I just know...That I want some place...Where they can have...A good home.”

Astrid wasn’t sure how to continue so she stuttered and gesticulated until Jinyou spoke again.

“Myself and my companions, we intend to purify this lake regardless of your decision. If we don’t, the pox that affects this lake will seep into the whole water table. This is the nature of things.” Astrid received the Bronzong’s silent gaze for a moment. She shifted uncomfortably for a moment before they continued.

“Knowing that there are Muk with whom we have a common sentiment, such as yourself, allays my worries, if only a little.”

“I think...I need some time.”

“Please reflect upon the situation we are in. Later today will be the beginning of the cleanup operation. It would hurt me to see you as an enemy.”

Jinyou heard their name called from the distance in a sharp tone. Qing was waiting, accompanied solely by Baoshi. They made some eloquent

THE UNDERGROUND

parting words and floated over to their companions. Astrid, alone, pondered.

-------------------------“Astrid, Kasimir, my sweets, are you ready?” Hanako asked her Muk, crouching down to look them both in the face. Kasimir let out a long, calm “...Yes...” while Astrid merely smiled back. The two of them had already been briefed by the water’s edge. Hanako had told them to dive into the lake and locate the source of the chemicals affecting the water and begin cleaning it. Both her and Kasimir went hungry that day so that they could consume more.

Baoshi, the agile Starmie, would accompany the two of them underwater and help communicate back to shore.

“Keep alert, keep in touch, and come back in one piece,” Qing said to her Starmie before patting one of its points. Baoshi made some sort of delighted noise and calmly spun its secondary blades in preparation for the task ahead. Jinyou floated nearby and telepathically explained further.

“Oh Astrid, in our expedition, I shall be the conduit for communing between the land and the water. At such depths, I cannot reach the psyche of one such as yourself. Baoshi has a natural sense for these things.

It can receive my thoughts and

respond with its own. If the depths frighten you, rely on Baoshi as I have. No one is more capable in the water.”

Astrid thanked the hovering Pokémon, only to be chided by Kasimir for trusting such a strange metallic intruder, or its enigmatic watertype friend. Astrid silently returned to her position at the shore, focusing on the mission instead of Kasimir’s incensing actions.

“Muk, prepare to dive.

I will monitor. Find the source. Eliminate the others if they become aggresive,”

Baoshi broadcasted to Astrid, not even bothering to face towards her. “Keep

an eye on strange Muk. He is an anomaly. Situation could be dangerous.”

With that last piece of advice, Baoshi flung itself into the lake, followed by Astrid and Kasimir oozing their way in. Once submerged, the pair found navigation had spiked in difficulty. Their physiology allowed them to remain submerged for much longer than other poison Pokémon, but movement was restricted to an awkward creeping forward. Astrid made her way through the murkiness, relying on her perception of toxicity levels to guide her towards the source.

Keeping away from the pair, Baoshi easily navigated the waters, but twitched every so often, its gem losing a little luster. Astrid changed her

-089

coarse to check up on it, only to receive

“Do not worry. Toxin level is tolerable.” broadcasted into her mind.

As they approached the source of the contamination towards the bottom of the lake, Astrid could make out the outline of a large, pulsating dark mass. The image exhumed memories of Astrid’s youth, when she was only one Grimer among many huddling together for safety. The closer they got, the more distinct each Muk and Grimer became. Baoshi’s reaction to the sight opposed hers. It made a sound that Astrid figured was the psychic-type version of hissing.

Many among the mass notice Baoshi’s approach, separating and slowly drifting towards it from different angles. Astrid felt “BACK OFF” echo in her head when the soon to be surrounded Starmie released a pulse of psychic energy from its core.

But not enough of them did, and Baoshi was forced away from the Muk’s home, darting about while firing warning shots from its energy-filled gem.

“Wait!” Astrid its futility.

shouted,

despite

“Let them...Pursue the Starmie,” Kasimir said, moving in Astrid’s path close enough to speak underwater.

“Why? We can stop them...From attacking Baoshi,” Astrid asked, sick of Kasimir’s attitude. “I must get through.”

“That thing will destroy...Our people...Their home...Our home,” Kasimir explained, unmoved in rhetoric and location. “It is best...This way.”

“Baoshi and Jinyou...Both want what’s best...For everyone...Whatever it is....that give us life...It hurts everyone else...The water here...Hurts Baoshi.” Astrid felt a pit in her stomach as she argued, but persisted.

“This is the best home...For our people...If it hurts others...It does not matter...Only Muk matter.”

“If only Muk matter...Then Listen to me!” Astrid felt possessed by new emotions. “Or to that Orange Muk...

They must live...In coexistence with nature...Just as we do...With the rest of our family.”

“They are not...Our true family.”

Astrid felt a profound shift in her psyche and held back no longer.

“How dare you!...After all of the things...We’ve lived through...

Together!”

“Don’t talk to me...Like that...

You traitor!” Kasimir moved to strike Astrid, just like did to all the other things he didn’t like. Only an amorphous orange blob intercepted him. Burtuqali slapped his hands away and struck a fighting pose.

Kasimir, with great resistance. her anger,

enraged, swung his claws fury, despite the water’s Burtuqali, too, unleashed tangling with Kasimir and

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forming a furiously vibrating blob made of two distinct color patterns.

Astrid, still acting on impulse, moved to charge into the fray, but one “Go!” in Burtuqali’s voice brought her to her senses. She had a mission to do.

The lake’s taste became more pungent as Astrid dived further towards the bottom, reminding her of the emptiness in her stomach. The flavor that had delighted her at the surface now unsettled her, but she pressed deeper regardless. Chasing Baoshi left the Muk nest unguarded and unobscured by the usual mass of Pokémon. Through the haze, she could make out the source of all of the Lake’s changes.

Before Astrid lay a field of plastic drum barrels, lids off and contents leaking out. On closer inspection, the barrels all had labels, illegible to her even without the persistent stinging in her eyes. She didn’t know what any of this was or what it meant, but she was too hungry at this point to care.

Reaching into the closest barrel, Astrid began to shovel handful after handful of the toxic goop into her maw. The taste and the spiciness overwhelmed her senses as no other food had.

“Get away! That is our Food!” Astrid heard from closer than she wanted, turning to see Zelen hurtling towards her. The green Muk tackled her, forcing Astrid against one of the barrels and beating on her with his viscous fists.

“Get off me!” Astrid fought back, trading blows with Zelen. Each hit hurt, but she’d been pushed around too much by other Muk that day to relent.

“What is your problem?!”

Zelen could only spout gibberish over the sound of the limbs colliding with other body parts. Astrid had no idea what he said, but it wasn’t important because in that split second of thought, Zelen landed another blow, pinning Astrid again.

“You threaten...Our food...You have to go!” He cried, Astrid flailing in vain.

“Remove yourself from her. I will use force!”

Astrid heard the familiar voice within her head. Zelen must have heard it, too, because his attention shifted to Baoshi, who floated nearby, gem radiating a threatening energy. Zelen let go of Astrid, only to charge Baoshi instead.

“I’ll kill you, freak!” was the last thing Astrid heard before a luminous ray shot through Zelen, disintegrating his midsection and sending his form plummeting to the ground.

In its moments of triumph, the powerful Baoshi , relieved of its duties, collapsed on the ground.

“Ah Mew!...Are you okay?” Astrid called out as she rushed towards the now sickly-looking Baoshi. Its core’s light dulled and its star-shaped body lost its usual firmness and began to droop in Astrid’s hands.

-091

“The fighting draiNeD My enErGy. ToO MaNY tOXins In mY BoDy. mUSt ReCOver rIgHT nOw oR ElsE.” “Let me...help you!” Astrid declared, barely comprehending the noise Baoshi transmitting, but knowing how to help. She laid her hands upon its body and methodically started to absorb the savory poisons. As she extracted the toxins, Baoshi’s gem glowed and began to allocate energy to the rest of its body, filling each point with vigor and firmness. After a couple minutes, the most egregious of pollutants resided in Astrid’s body rather than Baoshi’s.

“I return. The poisons are not too strong,” the Starmie

communicated, attempting to spin its rear blades and producing only a pathetic half-rotation. “My body

needs rest now.”

“Please...Friend...Let me bring you...

To the surface...Rest there,” Astrid offered, hoisting the exhausted Starmie on top her before it could reply. Her mode of propulsion, an amorphous sludge vigorously waving back and forth, was barely enough to gradually lift Baoshi from the depths. She was a vulnerable target and she knew it, and from the appearance of Grimer closing in on her, everyone else knew too.

“Back off!” she yelled, doing her best to look threatening with unwieldy cargo. When they didn’t back off, she yelled again and again. She wouldn’t stop until they did.

“That’s enough!”

Another, more commanding voice halted everything. Burtuqali, ragged but victorious, made her way to Astrid’s side. The Grimer glanced at each other, wondering what happened and who was in charge.

“We’re getting these two...to the surface. Anyone...Who opposes this...

Can get one...Of these!” Burtuqali announced, tearing through the water with her arm at high speed. Having no opposition, Burtuqali grabbed on to Baoshi and sped up the extradition process with her powerful “kicking”.

“Thanks...For this...and for before.”

“You’re welcome...I understand the urgency...Of your task...This Starmie...Was attacked first...

And avoided fighting...It deserves some rest.” Despite her vigorous swimming, Burtuqali spoke as if they were normally conversing. “You need some rest also...Your argument with that Muk...Kasimir...You were brave...To stand up to him...He’s quite imposing...Compared to you.”

“I just...Got sick of listening to him...It all came out at once,” Astrid replied sheepishly.

“Why do you...Put up with him?”

“He’s him.”

family...My

human...likes

“Rough...Well, at least...I sent him scrambling...To the surface,” Burtuqali said with this pleased look. “He won’t

THE UNDERGROUND

be...Bothering I think.”

you

for

a

while...

“What about...You all...The green Muk...He’s hurt at the bottom...I’m sorry...I fought him.”

“Don’t be...He needed a good thrashing.” Burtuqali seemed awfully nonchalant about the whole thing.

“We’ll figure it out...ourselves...

We know...This can’t last forever...

Maybe now...He realizes that...We’ll all discuss it...Muk can live...In other places, too.”

The surface approached more quickly after they started chatting.

They shoved Baoshi on the dry sands and parted with pleasantries. Qing rushed over to Baoshi’s side, feigning stoicism around the other humans, despite tightly hugging it. Baoshi got in a few words before it was returned to its Pokéball.

“Thank you, Astrid.”

-------------------------Kasimir was confined to an indefinite time-out. Attacking another member of the family and inciting a brawl in a delicate environment was nothing to scoff at and when Hanako heard about the whole thing via Jinyou, she gave Kasimir the sternest lecture Astrid had heard from her. Astrid felt a warmth tempered by guilt as she enjoyed Kasimir getting chewed out and locked away. Hanako had a lot

of uncomfortable things to explain to Qing, so Astrid made herself scarce. It was a good opportunity to admire the beach before it was cleaned, anyway.

“It brings me great satisfaction seeing you safe and on firm ground. I wish I could have aided you during the great frenzy underwater,” Jinyou informed her, each word warmed with cheer, as he hovered over to her. “I must thank you again,

young Astrid, for rescuing my companion from that perilous situation in the toxic depths.

It means the world to me, and to Qing as well.”

“It was nothing...Baoshi did all the fighting...After all,” Astrid understated, retreating into herself a bit.

“We both know, friend, that you contributed much more than you admit. You can walk proud.”

Astrid had never been called out like this before, but it was a pleasant change of pace.

“There you two are. Qing noticed your absence. Sent me to look.” AS familiar terse voice entered Astrid’s head, accompanied by Baoshi’s floating to join them.

“Are you...Feeling better?”

“My body is healthy now.”

“Thank you for your help...I was a goner...Without you.”

-093

“Eliminating threats is my job. Only doing my duty.”

Starmie paused for a moment. “You didn’t need to help me. You cured my poison. You carried me to safety. That was just as useful.”

“Making friends, Astrid?” Hanako approached the group, stooping down to Astrid’s height and beginning to rub her head with rubber gloves. “Thanks again to the both of you for saving my little Astrid. I don’t know what I’d do without her.”

Baoshi and Jinyou probably replied to her psychically, but their stoic poses conveyed no information whatsoever.

Astrid was too busy enjoying the head rubs to really care that much. Not far behind, Qing approached, straightfaced as always.

“Hey there, Ms. Xiao. Come for your Pokémon? Or perhaps one of mine?”

Hanako, smirking, gestured at Astrid.

Her own Pokémon came first, and after accounting for their safety, Qing walked directly to Astrid and stared down at her with a straight face and unyielding gaze. This gave way to a flood of emotion.

“Thank you...Thank you!” Qing got as close as possible to Astrid without touching her and expressed her gratitude through a few tears. “I don’t know how I can repay you.”

Astrid groaned words of reassurance at her, knowing Qing could understand

only her tone anyway. Qing wiped the tears from her eyes upon remembering Hanako still there and hastily recomposed herself.

“If you’ll excuse us, we still have work to do.”Qing didn’t bother to face either of them. “Baoshi, Jinyou. Now.” Jinyou and Baoshi both faced Astrid before communicating their parting words, then silently floating off. Astrid would be seeing them again soon enough anyway.

“Wow, I didn’t think I’d get to see an emotion other than irritation from her.” Hanako settled back on the ground, gentling rubbing Astrid again. “You know, I’m real proud of you. Saving that Starmie was a really wonderful thing to do. Plus, maybe Ms. Xiao will be less of a stick in the mud now. Maybe.”

Astrid made the closest approximation of cooing a Muk could make. This praise was more than she’d expected, but she could get used to it.

Astrid just hoped this was the worst of things for a while.

THE UNDERGROUND

E R

I V

W E

S

S

-095

“Aquifer: A Prophet’s Guide to Dungeoneering” by FifthQuin Aquifer:

A

Prophet’s

Guide

to

In names like Pete and Cindi, the

Dungeoneering is a PMD fic following an

long

amnesiac human who wakes up having

pass themselves off as humans-turned-

been transformed into a pokémon, is

pokémon to set themselves up as prophets

immediately accosted by one of the starter

and the ways by which a wily pokémon

pokémon from the main series, and ends up

can differentiate between them and the

plunging into a mystery dungeon in search

real thing, Aquifer conveys a powerful

of a lost … yes, okay. You’ve heard that

sense of a world of which, five chapters

one before. Aquifer is, in fact, a nuzlocke of

in, David has barely scratched the surface.

Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Blue Rescue Team;

While it has a mild tendency to introduce

in a sense, it’s even more familiar than

its worldbuilding information in slightly

your standard PMD fic, which by and large

too-long

are not straight retellings of the games.

partner, Sobek, the information itself is

But nor is Aquifer: David, our heroic human-turned-pokémon, is all too easily

tradition

of

pokémon

monologues

from

trying

to

David’s

more than interesting enough to command attention regardless.

convinced that he isn’t and never has been

The characters are striking too: David,

human – isn’t it more likely that he’s just

of course, the ebb and flow of whose

a cubone suffering from amnesia, after

memories is fascinating to watch, but

all? – and, after his first hellish taste of

also Sobek, whose name hints at a culture

a mystery dungeon, decides to leave the

with strong human influences, and who

rescue team business to someone more

carries with him more than a few secrets;

foolhardy and settle down to renovate an

the Duchess, whose favour is a poisoned

old house instead. Around him, the world

chalice; irascible, opinionated Pete, who

begins to take shape as something at once

has answers and is not inclined to share

very similar to and far more complex than

them. Rough around the edges Aquifer

that presented by the games: the initial

may be, but despite the occasional lack of

encounter

polish, the ideas at its heart are rock-solid,

with

Butterfree

that

starts

the first mission of the game becomes a

and well worth a look.

meeting with an eccentric aristocrat, whose attention does as much harm as good.

Accidental recognition as a dungeoneer draws him away from his home renovation project towards danger – and into the social web of a world with a real depth of culture and history to it.

(Review by eldestoyster)

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Pokémon © Nintendo, Game Freak 1995–2018.

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Cover and blue halftone (page 94): Designed by Freepik Green halftone (pages 2-3): Designed by Starline / Freepik Black/beige halftone (page 4): Designed by rawpixel.com / Freepik Old street (page 33): Francesco Ungaro / Pexels Red triangle (pages 52): Magda Ehlers / Pexels Red bar (page 77): mentatdgt / Pexels Muk comic (pages 78-79): Pokemon Special Gallery (https://jb2448.info/) Interested in contributing art or writing to the next issue?

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