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“You‘re Kalosian?”
The Aether white trailer went quiet, save for whatever kind of device that giant tube in the middle of everything was, by all means looking like it should be full of green goo, half formed clones, and humming at least another ten decibels louder than it already was.
“Yes.” Said Sina.
“Oui.” Said Dexio, proving a point.
Sina smacked him.
They both stood there behind their dark, dark sunglasses and Alolan fashion senses only befitting college seniors who somehow weren’t tired enough but yet were so very tired. The tube burbled.
Selene smiled like it was perfectly normal and logical, and honestly, after all the Ultra Beasts, or aliens, or whatever had been going on, this was really and truly perfectly normal and if you told her otherwise you’d best run and be non-flammable. Just a fair warning. From the girl sitting on the cold, sterile floor.
There were chairs, also of the cold and sterile variety.
A Stufful that belonged to no one gnawed on an armrest.
“And your legendary snake -”
“That was extra credit.” Said Dexio.
“- Exploded?”
“Our extra credit exploded so, so badly.” Sina pushed up her sunglasses to wipe away an imaginary tear. “We’re going to fail Developmental Biology.”
“Unless I find your snake pieces?”
They shared a look, a tired, sunglasses, college kid look that moonlighted as a long sigh.
Selene did not share a look because she was only kind of tired, but she was always kind of tired, so that didn’t really count, and she was only eleven, and she didn’t even own a pair of sunglasses, just a cross between a potted plant, a chicken, and the worst shade of pink that called itself a hat. She did share a blank stare with the world though.
She always did.
“Put the snake pieces in this cube.”
Dexio pulled something somewhere from the base of the tube. A drawer or something. Hopefully.
When it hit the fluorescent lights, it glowed. Green. He held out the polyhedral nightmare with both hands, touching it as lightly with his fingertips as he could without dropping the thing. The dark shine around the edges said it was slick.
Probably with test tube goo, Selene thought, shoving the shape that was not a cube deep into her purse that was not a watermelon slice but definitely shaped like one.
Out the door she went.
Correction: into the door she went because it stayed shut. And locked. As was completely not suspicious.
“Can I leave now?”
“We still kind of need to tell you about cells and cores.” Said Sina. Very donely.
Dexio pointed. “There’s a lock.”
Selene wiggled the handle like a loose tooth that wasn’t supposed to be loose.
“It - it’s on the side.” He sighed into his hands. “Professor Sycamore said if we hospitalize another kid we’re getting arrested.”
“Jail means no college diploma.” Sina pried the Stufful away from its tasty metal snack. It screamed.
“I mean, personally, I think I could get a jail diploma for most prison food eaten.”
“Are jail diplomas even a thing?”
“They should be.”
“You’d get the one for stupidest name.”
“And you’d get one for worst fashion sense, Sina.”
“I’m disowning you, you -”
Selene raised her hand politely, continuing to try and kick the door into submission. “So, are we talking about plant cells and apple cores? Nuclear cores? Parkour…?”
“Zygarde cores.”
“The exploded snake bits.” Selene said. The not-cube in her bag vibrated.
“Yeah, just stuff them in the cube.”
“Can I,” she held the cube somehow, certainly not correctly, “please ask how?”
“Basically, they’re mostly squishy, green snake things.”
“Mostly?”
“Sometimes they’re pink.” Dexio nodded like a man who had seen many a pink snakes in his lifetime.
“And I just...put them in the,” she could feel her eyes glazing over at the sight of the slick shape beneath her fingertips. “I put them in the cube.”
“Yep.” Said Sina.
“They’ll be okay in there?”
“Yeah, they turn into snake soup.”
“Dexio, for the love of Xerneas and all that is living, if you call it that one more time - ”
“Snake soup?” Selene repeated, as she was shoved out the door.
Nobody unlocked it.
How she fell to the green, green ground was a mystery.
The green, green thing at her foot sparkled and stared up at her with one big eye.
“You want in the cube?” She held it out, and with a pop and hiss of pea soup colored steam, the lid slid away.
The snake piece crawled onto her outstretched hand, slime slick and wet against her skin. Diamond scales glittered.
It disintegrated. Right in her hand.
A puddle of liquid slime ran thick and tacky between her fingers, slipping away.
The Zygarde Cube glowed greener than before.
“We must hurry,” said a voice.
One voice of a soon to be many.
“Telepathy,” Professor Kukui had once tried to explain to her, sitting in his shack of a house, a cup each of steaming Tapu Cocoa marshmallow topped on the wonky legged table.
“No.” It’d been hot on her tongue, that word, the same way a swallow burned her throat with cream and sweetness.
“That’s how the Tapu communicate with the Kahunas, yeah! It’s actually really interesting because -”
“I’m not a Kahuna!”
“Well, that’s right, but you are our first Champion, and -“
“I’m a kid.”
“You’re an amazing kid who heard the voice of Tapu Koko!”
“...thanks…?”
She’d stared into her Tapu Cocoa and the steam.
The steam told her in a voice like a thunderclap, as dry and cracking as lightning, “Child of the moon, you must continue the fight.”
She’d gone home and been invited to an alien hunting mission at the nearest motel, Interpol sponsored and everything.
Pokecenter oatmeal tasted syrupy and sweet like the world’s thickest, lumpiness cough medicine. The warmth seeped into her hands, the bowls clutched close in those predawn hours where the nurses stuck on this unfortunate shift would give you food if you’d rented a room but still strongly advised you to actually sleep.
So Selene clutched that bowl of oatmeal as tight as she could and tiptoed back to her room, the syrupy spoon stuck in her mouth.
She fumbled into the room, pitch black after the too-bright glow of that little room with the pink haired nurses and the scratchy tables and the microwave lit up a dull color and spin, spin, spinning. Something hit her shin. She hit it back.
The motion activated lights did not turn on, and were quite frankly broken, and that was also probably the fault of A Month Ago Selene, but A Month Ago Selene saved the world, and Right Now Selene was also saving the world by first saving her poor, crying for food stomach so. Screw it.
She sat down with the oatmeal. The glass bowl, too, too hot hit her bare thighs and stayed there, pajama shorts too thin and pinstriped to help at all.
The bed, soft as it was beneath her dangling legs, sock clad feet barely brushing the floor, was not for sleeping.
Not for Selene, which usually, emphasis on the usually part, she had absolutely no trouble sleeping.
She had trouble sleeping too much.
Way too much. To the point of falling asleep standing up. Falling asleep during dinner. At a friend's house.
They’d always been pretty nice about it though.
And she had medicine for the whole narcolepsy thing, honestly a way better alternative for staying awake a normal amount rather than sitting around with “the powers that be” trapped in a cube, shoved deep inside your purse, and hidden under a pillow all the way across the room, wedged right in a corner.
She couldn’t see it. But it was there.
They were there.
They could see her.
The oatmeal smelled watery, the way you could just tell it was a glorified puddle of liquid oats without even looking, but dehydrated berries crunched dustily in her mouth, bursts of sickening sweetness.
The bed smelled like lemon scented bleach and not enough fabric softener.
The air smelled like rain, smelled like Ula’Ula, the window cracked open to the faintest sliver of orange-gray daylight.
There should’ve been Pikipek chirping. Murkrow screeching. Cutiefly buzzing. The sound of Yungoos and Alolan Meowth hissing and spitting and overturning the trash can out back.
But there was quiet. And the smell of rain.
A single crooked finger of lightning lit the dark.
“The veil thins, and the curtain between the worlds lifts higher.”
“Ultra Wormholes?” She asked, not at all bolting upright, and not at all yawning into her hands.
“Rips in the fabric of reality. Creatures of unimaginable horrors -”
“Listen, the living origami already scarred me for life.”
(Literally. She had the stitches to prove it, right along her spine. Honestly, the fact she wasn’t anything more than sore was a miracle.)
“Worse beasts will come.”
“Worse than the literal metal tower that flew around and set things on fire?”
Things included her eyebrows. She missed them.
“Believe me, child of the moon.”
“But can it really one up the sentient power lines?”
“Yessss,” it - they - hissed. “The weaker the veil, the stronger the unbalance.”
“Do I…” She yawned, flopping down, much to the agony of her stitches. “Do I get a break?”
“By the time Mother Moon is anew, I must have my strength gathered, for the next dawn will shine upon the most vile creature.”
“So, I have a week until the new moon.”
“Do - do we look like a timekeeper to you?”
Selene buried her head under a pillow just so she wouldn’t be tempted to check.
Mostly, they looked like snake soup.
Po Town Police Station stayed unlocked all the time. Downright constantly. Unless Kahuna Nanu was in a mood, and that mood happened to be, “Screw off.”
Those were the days when you crawled in through the back window, you meaning Selene.
(Or Acerola, if she’d come to visit and forgotten her key way back at the Aether House or if that one Gengar at the trial site had eaten it. Again.)
“Have you seen any weird squishy things here?!” Selene asked, bursting through the back room, the window agape.
That was, by far, one way to give Nanu a heart attack.
And oh Arceus, the sunlight. It streamed in.
It was one of those newfound days of good weather because the literal child, Selene herself, standing there so proudly had threatened the gods into stopping the eternal rain.
(“Hey, Koko?”)
(“What is it, Moon?”)
(“That’s not my name, but, since I’ve been literally saving the region since summer started, do you think you could maybe kind of. Stop assaulting Po Town with lightning?”)
(“That would take the four of us.”)
(“Right.”)
(“Did you bring an offering?”)
(“I offer my undying protection of Alola.”)
(“That is a requirement. You cannot expect me to let you walk away unscathed simply because you do what is yours to be done.”)
(“I’ll battle you.”)
(Tapu Koko had clapped and trilled a war cry, head thrown back to the heavens as the ruins had come alive.)
“Show me the squishy things! I know there’s one in here!”
Maybe having a heart attack was appropriate.
Selene threw on the lights, and there went every chance of sleep right out the nailed shut window. There went the cardboard boxes too, being rattled by the chicken-hat wearing Champion.
He sat up. Glared. “Morning’ to ya, too, kid.”
“It’s one in the afternoon.”
“Right.”
“Sooo,” she said, overturning couch cushions and lamps and a few Meowth. “It’s a piece of snake. I can literally feel those things in my bones, and let me tell you, it is terrifying.”
“That sounds,” he stood with a pop and crack of stiff joints, “eldritch.”
“You have a piece of the snake.”
“I don’t even have a bed.”
The couches looked offended. And mostly naked, stripped of their pillows.
“It goes in the cube.” She shook what was definitely still NOT a cube.
“Are you threatening me?”
“Please just give it to me, okay?”
Nanu waded through unpacked boxes, coming back with something cupped in his hand. “Fine.”
He uncurled his fist, and it sat there, a Zygarde cell as green as green could be, exactly one eye that stared and blinked.
It crawled into the cube.
“Gonna miss ‘em, the little eyesore.”
“You named it Eyesore?” Selene asked, a hand clapped over the cube as the lid hissed shut.
He shrugged. “Obviously.”
“Why do you even have a Zygarde cell?”
“Kid.”
Selene froze. Not that she’d particularly been moving, but her breath stilled in her chest, puffed up like an offended Driftloon. She said nothing.
“Did you just say Zygarde?”
(What part of “she said nothing” did he not understand?)
She nodded and nothing more.
He sighed. It was a heavy sound, the kind that could only come from a former chainsmoker with the worst posture this side of Ula’ula.
“You stay right there, and I’ll go get us some coffee, alright?”
“Do you have decaf?”
“Oh, you poor kid.” He shook his head with something like a laugh. “Trust me. You don’t need decaf.”
Selene’s cell phone rang. The sound cut through the freshly mowed hay, a field wider than her eye could see, stiff scratchy bits poking at her ankles.
She was pretty sure she’d seen a, “No Trespassing,” sign on that gate way behind her, the big red one chained to a moss growing fence post, the links gone to rust. She was also pretty sure she didn’t own a cell phone, but oh well.
More concerning matters were at hand.
At gut.
Pulling on her insides like a magnet in her stomach.
That cube, that shape, that thing once in her bag, once, twice, too many times in her slowly stained hands, that thing now fastened at her belt and pulling her shorts lopsided, it thrummed against her hip bone. It whispered things in a voice that never reached her ears.
The voice of many called.
It sat in her head entirely unlike her own thoughts.
Heavy. Heavier than the thing still bumping against her hip, surely bruising.
Many. So many, many voices, saying, “Persevere, moon child. Make haste! We have not the time!”
Hay wormed into her shoes, past her socks, stabbing her steps.
She stopped to shake them out. Crouched down, undid the laces, and -
“We are unwhole!”
“My foot’s itchy.”
“The world cannot stand! You have seen them, the creatures -”
“Yeah. The Ultra Beasts.”
“They unbalance us! They do not belong here, not in the world!”
“Yeah. Looker called me. He wants to know where the heck I am and if I’ve seen a...whatchamacallit or not.”
“The beast has teeth like a mountain range, thick, stinking breath, its hide, its rotten, swollen gut a living void. Its hunger remains undaunted even now as it scourges the land dry and vast! The island cannot take it; we cannot take it-”
“That’s it.” Selene snapped her fingers. “UB Glutton. Guzzlord. Poni Island.”
“Make us whole again, and deliver us unto the unnatural, for only then will it be made undone.”
“Or I could catch it.”
“Insatiable, the vile beast -”
“It’s scared.” She said. “And I’m going to fix it.”
The air hissed.
Everything hissed. Even the trees, a rustling like fangs shown wide and sharp.
“Let the powers that be be.”
“This is my job, too, you know.”
“Power mayhaps the moon child seeks.”
“The ‘moon child’ seeks a nap!”
“Hurry!”
“I’m working on that, if you’d just gimme, like, five seconds.”
She turned her shoe upside down.
A pink thing fell out.
It glittered like a Z-crystal, pinker and brighter and with more eyes than the one that sat fastened at her wrist.
“In the mental breakdown cup you go.” She said.
The Zygarde Cube vibrated in a bone shattering way, but Selene’s bones told it to shut up and get over itself.
Pink and all, the Zygarde core slithered up her leg and melted with its brethren.
The sunlight caught the cube, shiny and slick, a glow of green-pink snake soup, of dozens of eyes floating in a glorified jar.
Her phone rang again.
She still didn’t own a phone.
But she did own a Rotom-Dex, and it flew out of her bag, already answering the call because dang it, marimba music on an endless repeat hurt.
“C’est un diastre!”
“What?”
The screen stayed fuzzy, but she could definitely see Looker. His poofy hair made it easy.
Whatever shade of pale his skin was though, that was not a reception problem.
(The heck was video chat working in the middle of nowhere anyway?)
“Es est -”
“I speak neither of whatever the heck those languages are.”
“Es est - es est -” He shook his head, shook his head, shook his head. “Es -”
“Please breathe.”
“My words fail.”
Selene grinned, ear to ear, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes. Not that she looked unhappy. She looked perfectly, far too happy.
As always.
“I feel that on a spiritual level, Mr. Looker.”
“Please come.” He said, looking like he was leaning against something that was some shade of probably a wall.
“We recognize this one.”
“The snake soup says they know you.”
“Wha-”
The signal died and took Looker with it.
Fifty percent.
The night before had been simple and dark, a new moon, a circle of absence amongst the cloud covered stars. (The news said Mt. Lanakila had been aglow. Selene wouldn’t know because she’d been busy coaxing a snake out of a tree with a peanut butter coated celery stick.)
(Selene had also listened to Nanu and Looker argue like they were ready to absolutely knife each other. She was pretty sure Nanu carried around a switchblade just for the occasion. That sounded nice and illegal.)
(But she knew for a fact Looker carried around a literal crowbar in his trench coat. And a gun. So. Oh well.)
(“Come to the floating restaurant on Poni Island. This mission desperately requires your assistance,” he’d said, like someone who wasn’t a literal Interpol agent.)
And here she was.
Here she was on Poni Island, right on the docks, sandals smacking against boards that wobbled with her every step. Every step brought her closer to the floating restaurant. To Looker. To Nanu.
To her final mission.
To whatever the snake soup hanging at her waist wanted. To the fact it was only at fifty percent.
The sun beat down on her bare shoulders, and she sweated through her flowery tank top, and the stinking Zygarde Cube was only at fifty percent.
“You have done well,” said the many voices, as she stepped into the floating restaurant.
The Noodle House, apparently. The literal boat shaped like a Wailord.
“You’re. At. Fifty. Percent.”
“Our brethren have already amassed themselves, those who stayed in Kalos, and are arriving now. Your duty’s end draws nigh.”
“Oh, thank Arceus,” she muttered, flopping herself down at the only table with far too many bowls of ramen noodles, and two too many men glaring daggers at each other. “Food. Finally.”
“The beast’s end is nigh!”
Selene picked up a bowl and dumped lukewarm noodles directly into her mouth. Because that was how you ate noodles. You drank them like a bowl full of cereal milk, and not like something you might get choked on.
“We can finish our little conversation now.” Said Nanu.
Peeking around the glass rim showed. So much hatred. Hatred that was in the furrow of his brow, in his jagged smile, in the way his hands balled tight shook and shook.
Looker simply nodded and adjusted his tie. Over and over.
“You got another Faller right here.” He said, in the way that you’d go about announcing a death sentence.
Selene went on autopilot until her legs were carrying her away, away, away.
Away into the heart of Poni.
Into the heart of Resolution Cave.
The grass grew tall and yellow, brittle stalks that itched at Selene’s arms. Lavenders perfumed the air. The hot, dry air that choked in the back of her throat.
Vines drooped over tree limbs, these thin stringy things with heat-wilted leaves like curtains.
They clawed at her hair as she brushed through.
And the ground dropped away.
Sloped down and down into Resolution Cave. Its mouth yawned, open wide, stalactite teeth dripping.
Thin puddles splashed and rippled, dark and spreading.
The stones pressed themselves close, rough and cold beneath her hands, fingers trailing along the wall. Trailing along dips and bumps and the growing cold, rock and dirt turning wet and slick and sliding.
Steep, so steep, a sucking mud that only went down into the dark, the kind of thing you shouldn’t wear sandals in, and Selene was only just now realizing that little fact.
But the mud thrummed.
The Zygarde Cube thrummed.
Her heart, her bones, her very soul, it thrummed with something.
With something that was turning the darkness green.
With fear at whatever just cracked beneath her foot, fear of splinters jagged white. Fear of the rumbling.
Of the roaring. Of the screaming.
Of the primal rage and pain.
She slipped down, landing right in the lair of the beast.
A thick and flat stone sprawled the cave, a stage for the beast, for the thing with teeth, and teeth, and teeth. Give an audience for the breath that smelled like rotting meat, that gagged in her throat and squeezed. Stand in the front row, waiting for the show, waiting for the cube to stop thrumming, to stop. To stop banging against her bones.
The sky opened up.
Caves didn’t have skies, but for a moment, for a single, fleeting moment, this one did. And it was green.
“Scarf dog.” She said, too quiet over the sound of massive, rotting teeth tearing through something thick and wet.
And it was a dog, a dog with milky white eyes and no pupils, a dog tall and proud on its thin legs and massive paws. A dog that stared down Guzzlord and stared down Selene and never wagged its tail. And another dog. And another, and another, and another.
“... Lots of scarf dogs.”
If five was a lot of scarf dogs, then yes. So many scarf dogs.
The cube fell.
It rolled. Cubes shouldn’t roll but it rolled, and it stopped before the many, many dogs.
At Zygarde’s feet.
It cracked open. Like a nightmarish egg, and the snake soup poured out, thick and green and sparkling, and Guzzlord was turning around now, fangs gnashing, and the dogs turned into soup too, and Selene’s lungs didn’t feel like lungs anymore.
The snake soup towered.
The snake soup was a snake, a snake that brushed the cave ceiling with its head, with its domed eyes, and it wobbled, shifting, liquid flesh melting and changing, and what was that?!
What was that?!?
WHAT IN THE ETERNAL NIGHTMARE OF THE DISTORTION WORLD KIND OF THING WAS THAT.
“We are whole!” Said one hundred voices
One hundred voices cheering in Selene’s head, cheering against her skull.
Zygarde raised itself up, and its scales shone, a pure light, burning white.
Brighter.
Brighter.
Brighter.
Selene fell to the ground, or maybe she had already been there, already curled up in the rocks and the mud and eyes squeezed as shut as they could possibly go, blinding shapes dancing and dazzling on the insides of her eyelids.
She stayed there.
Stayed there, stayed there, stayed, time passing by the heartbeat.
The roaring stopped.
The shaking stopped.
The sound of something wet being torn apart. Stopped.
She opened her eyes, and Zygarde was gone. It was gone with a single cell in its place.
It was gone, and Guzzlord was a hulking mass of stone.
She stood, and against the very beating of her heart, the very breath in her lungs, the very alarm bells ringing and screaming and crashing in her brain, she went to it.
The stone shone and glistened just beneath her hands. A smooth blackness gone rigid and cold.
She sighed and left behind the mud and the blood and the memory.
(Or at least she tried to. Tried to put one foot in front of the other, step after step after step. Tried not to think. Tried not to hear the pitter patter of memories scurrying at her feet.)
Behind her, Guzzlord crumbled to dust.
Glass shattered.
Aether patented glass, because of course Aether had a patent on glass, shattered.
The shards tinkled, sharp and jagged on the floor.
Sharp and jagged at Sina and Dexio’s feet.
The cube sat there in the middle of it all, as not a cube as ever and with a note tacked in top: “It’s your turn.”
A Zygarde cell slithered out, grinning the squishiest of smiles.
And it laughed.