Chapter Text
A lever swung down in her consciousness. She was missing something. Nothing a glass of water couldn’t fix. She opened her eyes.
There was nothing in front of her. An empty void. She felt completely weightless. Her breath caught and she began to flail, hoping to catch onto something, anything.
“Wake. Awake with ye.”
She shut her eyes to prevent the expanding bright light from scorching her eyes. The voice was deep and somber, but at the core was a love she felt coursing through every part of her.
“What… no… who are you?” She began to adopt a pindrop form.
“By mortal beings, I am known as Arceus.”
A faint bell rang in her brain. Exactly why she could not pinpoint.
“How…” she tried to remember what she had last been doing. Nothing. Nothing at all. “How am I here?”
From out of the light stepped a creature like she had never seen. It was pure white, save for the grey underside, face, and gold hooflike feet.
“I request that thy heed my words. Soon thou will find thyself in a world strange to thee… a world inhabited by wondrous creatures that humans call ‘Pokémon.”
Involuntarily, she stepped towards Arceus. A silver ring echoed from the point of contact, and from it ballooned a swirl of every colour anyone could think of, papering over the darkness. She could now see that she was standing on top of an impossibly large transparent platform.
“Seek out all Pokémon, and thou shalt find me once more. This is your duty.”
She tried to take another step forward, but her head was seized by brutal pain. She saw a kaleidoscope of images, all distorted and mashed together. A drab grey corner. A boy wearing a white knitcap. A burned polaroid photo. Blood smeared across a countertop. A short metal dragon.
When the girl regained the strength to open her eyes, she started. Countless glass figures in countless shapes, all staring at her. The void had returned. Arceus was nowhere to be seen.
“ARCEUS!” She yelled. “ARCEUS!” She could’ve sworn one of the figures had moved towards her. Her breathing had become short and shallow, twisting her head back and forth to make sure they wouldn’t creep up on her.
A blue object flew out of her pocket, one she immediately recognized as her phone. It dipped and fluttered to a break in the crowd, then hovered there, beckoning her. She looked behind her, out of some vague hope there would be a ladder out.
Glass statues as far as she could see. At the edge of her sight was one built like a colossus, with great long gangly limbs and an massive indentation in place of a face. The girl stopped, took three deep breaths, and whispered a prayer.
She bolted. The figures moved too, running directly at her, but the moment she collided with any of them they collapsed into fragments. She was closing in on her phone.
Everything happened at once. Another explosion of golden light fried her vision and momentarily stopped her in her tracks. She felt a thudding in the ground that was coming up on her very quickly, and in response stumbled forward in hopes of retrieving the phone. She felt herself gaining height, recovering her sight just before a would-be trip on an invisible stair.
The phone flew directly into her palm. Three lights, one blue, one yellow, and one pink, erupted out the screen and began to drill back down. The phone started to morph, the metal rippling and changing in her palm.
A cold, clammy hand grabbed her from behind, bringing her face to face with the colossus statue. In the indent, an eyeball began to form, cracks breaking through the rest of the statue. She tried looking away, squirming and thrashing against the glass, only for the giant to bring her closer. Once they made eye contact, the corners of her vision drowned in visual snow, hailing further and further in till the only thing she could see was the eye. She outstretched her arms, straining for the eye. The cyclops continued to lower her into the socket.
Five blasts of light from the three orbs rocked the statue, shattering it into a million shards, one of which grazed the girl's cheek. She fell no shorter than three metres directly onto her lower spine.
Her throat burned with the fury and hate of one thousand dying suns, she clutched her phone in vain, as though it could somehow deliver her from her misery. She could feel her legs being liquefied, turned to soup. Her heart was thudding so rapidly it was alike a continuous hum.
"Please..." she said, looking up at the orbs. "Please..."
Her eyes fluttered shut and she felt no more.