Last chapter of part two of Aftershock! I never thought we'd get this far. No further ado, of course...
Aftershock
Chapter 14: The Third Act of Seymul Colt
The curtains of dusk fell over the glittering expanses, lowering their peace into the city.
It was an unusual night for the city of Saffron, and as the last rigid finger of the sun faded out of existence, those human carriers of light and life did not intensify in response to the retreating warmth but settled into slumber. The darkness was peace, release from the curse of perpetual motion. It was the inaction delivered to those weary beyond thought and emotion of the vain pursuits of life.
Not a single soul would reveal itself to winged passers-by, except me.
My ancient cloak seemed despicably shabby in contrast to my past extravagancies, but something about it seemed to cohere well with my ragged thoughts. I had never felt before how removed my assimilation was now from my self, and as it trailed behind me long chains of liquid shadow, thriving on the gloom, I felt no fraction of the crimson power that pulsed through my body but a hopeless impotency, knowing (as I had always known) that the Dark blood had never truly dissolved in my blood, that it was always a parasite on the vessel of my body. And I indulged in the occasional push into the moonlight, feeling my old strength stir marginally from its dead faint.
Wait a moment.
Do you see, reader? Do you see what I see? The narrative thus far is a reworded replica of an earlier chapter, eternities ago—here, I have it! Chapter Four, within that excerpt of memory I had found hovering around thoughts of that night, which I had speculated may have been a forgotten—and remembered—dream. “Night lowered its peace into the turrets of the forest of shimmering steel.” Ingenious!
And now I know everything, every mystery of my life has been revealed to me. The effects of an exceptional telepathic bond with a psychic-type dreams are taunting me with their omniscience. knew it from the beginning, and never thought a moment of it, as though it was something else entirely. it was indeed, but why hadn’t I
known? why hadn’t I known? why hadn’t I known?
Over the course of nearly two hundred years, Saffron City had shed nearly all its old apparel for newer trends, and the early shift from style to functionality had been only temporary. In Amaren’s time the famous steel skyscrapers dominated the casual observer’s attention, towering over the rows of identical, symmetric grey apartment flats and the efficiently active district centres, which clustered respectfully around the more ancient relics. I do not remember the monotony glaring on the senses then, each perfectly carved rectangle of plot rather implying a disciplined dedication towards a higher purpose—and the possibility of attaining such a goal deeply enthralled me then, key as it was to the first phase of maturity. (I know now the futility of such a journey and the foolish demise of those who chase it, for they are finite and their imaginary omnipotence infinite.) And all inclinations towards progress did nothing to inhibit the glory of past memories and their relics: the ancient peaks were still revered, their strengths appreciated with neither fanaticism nor lukewarm regard.
But the city had aged as I did, and foreseen the inevitable failure in their paths, though it lacked the complete knowledge I knew. Its sculptors rediscovered the ancient arts and built from there, understanding eventually all the older shortcomings but one: they had ridiculed their young naiveté but never escaped from it, they had elected to put aside the impossible dream of infinity but never truly done so, and, once labelled a canker, it spread through their cores as any canker would do. It breathed in their every breath and lived in each new work of art they accomplished, waiting for the moment they would fall and lose all their long hours of work, and despite all their efforts to the contrary this would mean everything to them.
Enough rambling from this aged husk. For the little time of my continued existence I had the luxury of seeing the city reach its peak, and knowing its inevitable downfall only in foresight. What a glorious peak it was! The great modern fortress constituted now not of
steel but
glass, a transparent mimic of glass created from some complex man-made compounds, and its glory was given full justice only at night—my time. The delicate twinkle of starlight fell onto the central spire of antiquated Silph Co. and was amplified to spread out in every direction, moving through complex pathways which somehow harnessed that faint beauty to illuminate the entire city.
Yet, I was never deprived of my dingy warehouses and dark alleys, for I suspect complete illumination came only at day. There were voids, inky passages and dark pools, in which only so much light entered as to be received by my sensitive eyes, and the necessary low life of the city had never been demolished, only demoted to an unseen underground floor in mimicry of Goldenrod across high Mt. Silver.
It was along the higher and lighter passageways that I flitted this particular midnight, and the sheer darkness was broken every now and then by wavering points of blurred white, partially focused starlight, a diamond’s flash or a shard of the pearly moon reflecting off high surfaces to blind the traveller’s startled eyes. How I would have loved to cup the otherworldly fluid in my hands, ignoring the spikes of pain! But I was beginning to abhor this not only physically, but in my very essence.
I entered the third offshoot of Apricorn Alley, and turned right on the first intersection thrice, before moving instantly through the pool of utter black and stopping short.
As the high walls fell away, I saw once again the open field of the reconstructed Pokèmon Laboratory, cradled in the mountains of innovation. Despite the two centuries of age, the only change this timeless scene suffered today was in me.
For my time was drawing to a close, I knew it without proof, and as my parasite sought about in frenzy for continued existence its host’s frenzy was of glee. I had high plans for my finale, and they would have to rest only a while longer.
Luphinid Remana Silnaek glided into the penultimate chord of his journeys.
It was in the older stretches of the pokèmon hold that I found him, as he paced along the masses of shelves and their thousand ancient pokèballs, wasting away the eternity. Recalling my instincts, I tailed his tottering figure for minutes with only faint signs to announce my presence, and the parasite laughed quietly as the professor tried to banish that invisible shadow of terror. At last, overtaking him, I materialized inches before his face.
“Hello, Professor Oak,” said the cat to the mouse.
“Amaren!” he stuttered. “You shouldn’t have frightened me like that…what were you thinking…”
“Oh, just my games,” I dismissed. “I must say, professor, you’re looking in fine form today.”
The ancient man was staring a fair few inches to my left, witless entirely. I looked into his erratic eyes to see tiny points of milky white at the centre of each iris.
“Fine form,” he repeated, “fine form… yes…”
“Do you know,” I supplied, “your speculations were right? All the way back. The telepathic bond between Amaren Kelanis and Ytarrik stimulated psychic activity in the human, albeit aimlessly. I foresaw this very scene before it happened! You must remember, I was relating it to you shortly after we met Lepena, I should think.”
The researcher stood dumbfounded for a moment, his expression not comprehending. I stared at him, and
blinked.
At the reopening of my eyelids stood a different man, old but wise, commanding—the true Kalens Oak. He had decided to end his own games.
“Of course!” he said in scholarly fervour. ”The most common manifestation of inadvertently stimulated psychic abilities is premonitory dreaming. It’s very likely that Ytarrik’s fascination with his own future sparked a similar interest in your subconscious, inevitably resulting in a series of partially forgotten dreams very similar to events in your future. And the gap in yours and your past self’s memories would make the dream appear as though of another person entirely. You knew it all along, Lu—Amaren!”
He paused to regard me with a direct, firm look of scrutiny.
“And what business led you to my home today?” he asked. “You never come unless it’s business.”
“Why, of course, professor. I want you to tell me a story.”
“The story? Why on earth would you want to listen to the story?”
“Well, why not?”
“You’ve already heard it fifteen times already! Surely it’s getting old.”
“Oh, no, this time will be different. This time, I want you to tell me the whole story. Complete, unabridged, in the original manuscript.”
His amiable expression fell. He sighed. “All right, then. I suppose we should begin. It’s not even technically a story, you know that?
“It was at his one hundred and ninety-sixth year that Seymul Colt received the final warning and was alerted to the rapid disintegration of his body within two months’ time. Understanding the effects of such a time upon a righter’s body, he decided to perform his final righting: Anomaly 0A1. He had suffered at the hands of this wrong early in his life, before he was introduced to his profession, and he felt it fitting that he would end this elusive mother of all wrongs, given the highest rank in the anomaly nomenclature for the four earlier masters of righting who had failed to eliminate it.
“As I have told you more than twenty times, the difference between an existence and a consciousness in the theoretic plane is that the consciousness has self-evolving mechanisms which make both its capacities and its contents
infinite. There is a time restriction, of course, as with all constructs, but otherwise the amount of energy and thought curled into systems within its core is infinite. However, to compensate, surrounding the great network of purposes is a void of purpose.”
As could be expected, thoughts within a construct were assembled and kept together by shapes taken by the very fabric of the plane called purposes, like to the warping of space-time which produces gravity. These organized the raw energy into distinct purposes, hence the name. Scientists of this field had been confused by a species of greater super-purposes which seemed to encompass entire semiplanes within the theoretic plane, organizing nothing at all.
“This void of purpose is still utilized by the consciousness to store the rare thought or idea which it can find no place for within the mind. Under any three boundary conditions, however, while the consciousness is halfway between any three pairs of states, for unknown reasons a generator construct is created which spreads its purpose through the mind’s void of purpose and uses the stray thoughts and emotions to create a new unstable consciousness. This consciousness usually disintegrates within milliseconds, and the generator, deprived of energy, also falls apart.”
This would be digested keeping in mind that a generator was a construct which swallowed raw energy within its proximity circle of purpose and spat out a fully-formed consciousness.
“However, in certain cases there is enough thought hanging in the void to supply the generator with just enough energy to create a more stable organism, termed Missingno. This remains existent so long that it is indeed projected onto our complex plane, at which point it wreaks havoc.”
Perhaps hypocritically, I held up a hand. “Stop,” I said, “this is where you always skip ahead. You try to make it look seamless, but I know you’re hiding something.”
“If you can’t find it yourself, I see no reason to waste a perfect opportunity.”
“Are you coming to abuse now, professor?”
“You know it’s not that. You’ve done many things in the past, but this is a step too far. I won’t let you destroy yourself righting anomaly
0A1! Men greater than you have tried and failed.”
Something rose within me, an Ursaring stirring from a hibernation of one hundred and seventy years. “What do you mean…?”
“Only a reminder, dear Amaren. I can’t allow—“
“It’s about allowance, is it?” I shouted. “Have TWO HUNDRED YEARS given me no right over myself? Am I still little Amar, too young to touch the forest outskirts? I learned to handle an anomaly when I was barely out of puberty! And now you tell me YOU WON’T ALLOW—“
“’Can’t’, Amaren, not ‘won’t’,” he interrupted as calmly as possible, looking at me with bewilderment showing around the corners of his mask.
“What difference does it make? WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE?
WHAT DIFFERENCE IN ANY PLANE, HIGH OR LOW, DOES IT make?”
As my anger fell into the lowliness of deep sorrow, I felt the bitter tang of tears roll down my face, and suddenly I was weeping like a fool with not an idea why.
Wordlessly, my mentor moved forward, offering the necessary—but, in an instant, I was myself again, with a glint in my eye visible to myself.
“You will tell me what conditions are required to supply the anomaly with enough thought to create Missingno.” I said this all coolly, without a hint of emotion on my face but a dangerous look in those luminous eyes.
“I will not,” he said firmly.
“You will tell me what conditions are required to supply the anomaly with enough thought to create Missingno.” I repeated, advancing on the shorter figure by inches.
“Now, listen here, Amaren…”
“I will listen only to what is necessary, no less, no more.”
As the vapours around me thickened, drawing myself to my full height, I required only the momentary tighten of the professor’s expression to prove to me that I had taken on a positively menacing appearance, such as to faze the very pokèmon professor of Kanto.
“What are the conditions?”
He had backed into a wall, shelves on either side and
I before him. I focused Mightyena blood into one palm, unfeeling of the difference between my assimilation and I.
“
What,” said I, “are the conditions?”
I dug my fist into the wall, a hair’s length away from the professor’s chest, and the shelves around me rocked. Pokèballs shook, rocked, dislodged from their places to come tumbling down and release their pokèmon, which tensed at the feel of my foul presence.
“Have you really come to this?” said my prisoner. “Then I no longer care. The most effective condition to bring about Missingno. is Dissociative Identity Disorder.”
It was only seconds later that he regained his cool, realized his mistake. But I was already out, a solitary figure on my great black Noctowl.
[{//\/\/\/\/\//\\//\\//\/\/\|/|\|/\/\/\\//\\//\\/\/\/\/\/\//}]
Ytarrik, faithful beyond compare, was waiting for me outside the city, privy to the entire tale. Ytarrik, Ytarrik, the base of my sanity, what would I do without him! What would I do without everyone who had touched me over my life? Their friendships with me had been severed by my cynicism, and now I had nothing, nothing but my Ytarrik.
I allowed him tenure in a portion of my mind, as I had so often done, and his familiar presence filled its accustomed niche within my own. In unison, I dove back into the recesses of my own mind, and he asserted himself more and more greatly, beyond all possible laws. He filled me with his very existence, layers upon layers of thought and memories piling into my own, until he was me, and I was him, but it was a terrible, dissociated unity. The dead husk of the Kadabra fell silently along its side.
Upon unspoken decision, I pushed his consciousness to the outer reaches, my void of purpose, and he relented in his instinctual resistance as long a possible. I stood, swaying unsteadily, and thrust control over all my faculties.
And suddenly I was invincible! I had the Dark element in my veins, and shadow never disappears, only flits back into non-existence to await the next fall of the light.
I flitted through the air, taking full advantage of my godly abilities, and arrived at the topmost peak of Silph Co., settling onto the crow’s nest of the great crystal ship. My flesh was open to the elements and the lights, but nothing mattered—I was invincible. I rose to my full height, dredging up all the gargantuan extent of my power—
—and saw a second figure beside me.
I stand here, removed from all creation, looking down on the frozen scene and those two immortal sculptures, the one uncertain and the other assured,
as though nothing had happened, as though the beginning had never progressed into the end and it played out eternally now, then, forever in the future—the fire could not burn me [and my deadened heart quickens again as I see the lost half of my self returned to li
f e—]
A figure several heads below me, little more than thirteen, with the palest blue and the finest porcelain
And they seem almost real as the pale hands I hold to my eyes this moment, the poison in their blood entirely obscured from view under a mask of blank white,
and it is so easy to believe, for seconds at a time, that the hulking shadow and the nimble sunlight are reunited, [but one is a ghost and the other dead,]
nearly | identical to the subtle stars above were those twinkling eyes, and such a smile! enough to mask the truth at the core, the demonic grin of a desiccated corpse
What does she say?
It is little more than a whisper. [Bend closer, for the sake of heaven!]
As my physical and my mental, my present and my past, my self and my intruder’s selves spiralled together to meet their inevitable fool’s demise at Ruki’s core, I bent down, lowering my ear, to hear:
”Jump.”
We’re falling, now, and though all the world rushes past us the cold, unyielding ground is only rising to us with open arms. As I come into the exactly calculated cue, I am dead between human and pokèmon, between life and death, between reality and illusion, for what do the onlookers in the street see but a pair of illusory ghosts? From the shattered pieces of my soul (glimmering madly off the thousand separate surfaces in the buildings around me) shoot fire and brimstone of the depths of the earth and the heights of heaven, but their creator is fading into unobtrusive non-existence, as his parasite releases him to play with every physical and moral law conceivable and wreak havoc. The slumbering white embers of the stars ignite to black flame, a tornado emerging to rage around my eerie peace.
Adrenaline rushes to stir a new peak of power within me, and I am more
alive than I have ever been before, and
so close to sweet release. The delicate glass towers are ripped apart by the assimilation’s force, my force, the force of Missingno. itself. And these two spectres laugh madly, gleefully, for they know that my endeavour is impossible, but who can care? Only twenty seconds more, and I shall be complete.
An instant before my body hits the pavement, the complete termination of all my functions ensues:
Sleep, oblivion…
…and then thought.
Existence.
TO BE CONTINUED
