Yonowaru in Chaos
gaspard de la nuit
Repost, since the last one went pear-shaped. Anyway, the most dramatic change is my deciding that first-person already dominates my other fics, so I decided that a change (for the better, hopefully) is due. Universally centric me aside...nothing much. Read, enjoy if you're not offended.
Rated [PG:15+] for sexual themes, racism, violence, coarse language, fakemon and mature themes (though I don't really care how old anyone is, so long as you understand that there are things potentially offensive). But hey, it's all mild, so it's nothing to rave about anyway. This wasn't meant to be controversial in the least.
So: down it goes.
*flush*
[zenith’s approach]
Aric had only realised how tall he had grown in the last six months when he tried to fit inside the bathtub without bending his knees. Pitiful, he thought, like an Alaskan deep sea Kingler stuffed into a fish bowl. Though he didn’t have as many legs, even his four growth-spurt-overdriven appendages were enough to make his joints buckle at odd, uncomfortable angles, taking advantage of the little surface area available.
To make matters worse, the water was blistering hot; no, it wasn’t just a fish bowl, it was a ceramic pot – and this deep sea Kingler was on the menu tonight. The steam was reducing Aric to a feverish drowsiness (as chefs would often do to make their victim’s ordeal a bit less painful), which, even though it made accidentally drowning in sleep a creepy problem, at least, was somewhat relieving his fatigue.
Eh, who cares if he drowned, Aric thought, the water was fucking relaxing, even if he was being slowly cooked alive with his legs shrivelling up with the restricted blood flow. At least it was better than cold showers and improvisations in the Japanese wilderness (hot springs had turned out to be less universal in trainer-centric Japan than his first impressions of the country). He would never forget that horde of peeping Psyduck perverts at Lake Valour, with their obsessive, cyan gazes and murmuring quack-chants.
Trying to throw the memory out of his head, he rested his head on the side of the bath and slowly closed his eyes until he could only see the tips of his knees curving out of the tranquil water.
He breathed in.
And breathed out.
Strange, he hadn’t really expected to be this indifferent – why was he distracting himself with complaints of how tired he was?
Ten years. Really, that was his whole childhood lost in the hands of propaganda and plastic dreams. Pokemon Master indeed – humans aren’t given an awful amount of ten years, so why did he waste his most important ten years at the hands of the tycoons running the various Pokemon Leagues? He had given up his education, his family and friends, his virginity…
“You’re one goddamn motherfucker, Sinnoh Champion #473,” he muttered under his breath.
Sniff.
Aric jolted upwards from his sluggish trance, wide awake and clearly, quite upset. The water had gone slightly cold now and the hairs on the back of his neck stood up as if struck by an electric current.
Water. Does not belong in the nose.
Considerably wound up, Aric got up slowly and lifted up the plug, letting the water drain out into the hungry pipes below. Both his legs felt tingly as the blood reclaimed his bluish calves, shaking like thin, fragile stilts. Careful not to slip (and the bathtub was marbly like hell), he turned on the shower and drew back the curtain to avoid the prying eyes of his mirror self.
The whole bathroom outside of the curtain was adorned with an unnerving amount of mirrors – unnerving because of how little opaque wall there was, and unnerving because of how little opaque floor there was. The bathroom must’ve looked three times its size as a result of them.
Really, he did not need to feel like he was undressing in sync with fifty other mirror selves. And what if there were cameras behind mirrors for the sake of keeping overworked security personnel (or Psyducks) from leaving their posts? Those eyes were too prying for their own good.
Actually, Aric didn’t mind these omniscient surveillance cameras whether they existed or not – he had lost enough of his innocence to have a well-established paranoia, even if he would later find pictures and videos of his captured content on the internet. What more could one lose if they had already lost their own soul to a mindless, money-driven mega-corp?
Aric twisted the shower node until he found himself soaked in goose bumps and nose gunk.
Huh, cold showers, Aric thought, with a nagging hint of nostalgia.
But instead of dumping all sorts of discontented memories on him, Aric felt them wash away like sand down a dial, leaving behind a heartless husk resonating with nothing but the harsh rhythms of Bulgarian metal. He made his routine quick – before the sensation of cold water stagnated and the memories sank back in, and most importantly, before he contracted pneumonia.
As opposed to the bath, which must have taken half an hour by the state of Aric’s fingers, the shower only took a few minutes. The soap and shampoo provided by the hotel were all encased in colourful little plastic tubes which could’ve been edible if not for the large “DO NOT CONSUME” sign on the back of them. Each one of them bore the smell of citrus, except heavier in scent than any sort of overripe fruit, clinging themselves to his body like parasites.
There were three towels on the rack, and, seeing the state of the floor, Aric threw down the two unused towels to walk on. It ended up being useless – the water soaked through the towels and drowned them like quicksand. He wrapped himself in his remaining towel and proceeded to the largest mirror which, like the others, had fogged up with all the steam from the bath.
Aric restrained the immature notion of decorating the fogged-up mirror with graffiti – lest it was not wiped down after he checked out of the hotel. The edge of the mirror where the sink lay beneath was clear of fog, at any rate. Consulting the hairdryer sped things up reasonably too.
A reasonably tanned man, fresh, but by no means free, from the bounds of adolescence, looked back at Aric. Thick brows slanted pessimistically against his rounded eyes, although the overall facial expression was completed with a warmish smile that suggested no further than contentment. All in all, he seemed to be perpetually wearing an ‘Oh well, that’s life’ face, stretching his age appearance to as high as thirty-five, some fifteen years his senior.
His dark hair was unkempt, even after washing and drying it with a towel, which was to be expected, given the neglect it was subjected to for much of the last decade of constant travelling in erratic weather. It was a common journey syndrome, along with others, such as skin that any passing dermatologist would see as their ticket out of social obscurity (“Don’t worry sir, I’m a dermatologist.”) and a bowel that found fullness more dangerous than Pokebola.
Having been denied of such a large reflective surface for a while, tweaked or not, Aric saw it as a veritable update to grumble over the features of the man in front of him. Aside from the various nicks and scratches obtained from endless travelling, he was unusually thin with battling stress – there was muscle, but the slight tinges of a hollowed ribcage had begun to surface ominously. His face had also sharpened from relative malnutrition, with another shadowy tinge beneath the cheekbone to compliment his hooded eyes.
Aric knew that he was far from cheery, but he hadn’t gotten that bad, had he? Well, at least he had been shaving lately, and the last of his acne was no more.
The humidity made drying the rest of his body with a towel almost daunting, so he used the hairdryer instead. It screamed when Aric turned on the switch, but the wind that came out was weak – not even being able to make his wet locks of hair budge. He came to regret the understatement when the dasypygal was to be found massaging the scorched hairs in that shadowy place where humidity was impossible to get rid of otherwise.
Dressed in whatever attire he thought was reasonable in subtropical autumn, Aric stepped out of the bathroom into a pair of complimentary white slippers. The raging air-con blizzard forced him back into the steaming bathroom, where he found his complimentary bath robe to escort him to the panel that controlled the weather in this room. In an unlit room, that was easier said than done; his stubbornness was not inclined to turning on the lights to look for the damned switch, no way.
15°? Seriously? Aric thought, flabbergasted.
He spammed the button that raised the temperature until it was well within conditions where sleeping without the covers was beyond reasonable, before throwing open the silky curtains which shone pearly white from the city lights outside.
Being a low-lying hotel perched on a forested mountainside, the curtains and the window had given way to a balcony that overlooked the city from a distance, though some of the high-rise apartments barricaded the panorama somewhat. Neon lanterns turned the city into a kaleidoscope of reds, yellows and greens, dominating the discoloured, weather-damaged buildings, under which a hum created by traffic and bustling nightlife gave the impression of a giant, grounded Volbeat.
The moon, full and enamelled, hung low above the bustling insect, untainted by any fog or cloud. The warm, tropical air could’ve been its exhalations, beckoning Aric to the festivities under the watchful moon, but he was still too fatigued to respond to the invitation. Instead, in waiting for the room to cool down sufficiently, he stepped out onto the spacious balcony, where the fullness of stuffy air hit him like a cascade. The balcony was covered in some terracotta-like ceramic tile, lending a shaded, natural look with the help of a few potted palms and marbly pebbles.
The balcony door had turned out to be slightly refracting, fogging up much of the view with a fuzzy glare. Aric only got a good look of the city when he stepped out onto the balcony; the moon was clearer than ever and he could see individual dots travelling across a road lining the other side of the harbour. There were also pinpricks of red light floating in the night-time sky – something that had been completely blurred out by the glass door. Of course, under such a bright and enlarged moon, it was impossible not to imagine a night of mid-autumn with the night skies full of them.
Like the lanterns hung below in the cities, the Lunatone seemed to be suspended in the skies by some invisible rope – whatever movements the Lunatone made, the others were bound to follow it in perfect synchronisation. No doubt, the celebrating folk were as transfixed as Aric was on the Lunatone, floating and fluctuating with a hypnotising grace that so sorely demanded musical accompaniment – Bulgarian or Beethoven. They were gaining altitude with each sequence of ascent and descent, slowly heading towards that stark moon.
There were so many of them that their fluctuations felt like a series of ripples along a surface of water, silently submerging the city. There was something worth appreciating in the Lunatone's synchronised movements – seemingly mindless creatures irrefutably subservient to one greater cosmic cause. It was ineffable, as with a lot of things Aric found himself appreciating when he was alone.
Before he knew it, Aric’s body was halfway over the balcony rail, with his head protruding well over what could be considered safe. Thank God this was such a stout hotel, he thought, capping off at only three levels, so he was guaranteed to survive even after falling from such a height (head-first, no less). Slowly, cautiously, he withdrew his head and torso back into the safety of the balcony, before heading back into the hotel room, which was now considerably warmer than the air outside.
In deciding what was optimal, he turned the air conditioning off completely and left the balcony door open, where he was still able to see a vast portion of the city view. In particular, the Lunatone troupe could still be seen when he laid down on his bed, serenading the masses like a crimson aurora.
The sheets were smooth as hotel bed sheets should be and the pillow, as yielding as a sponge cake. It enticed Aric to daydream (except that it was night), but he resisted; he wanted to watch the Lunatone a bit longer before they departed through the atmosphere. It was supposed to be spectacular, with the sky growing so viscous with bloodthirsty eyes that the sky would like that bastard country’s flag with its colour scheme inverted.
Oh, those bastards, Aric thought, until he thought about nothing but those ten wasted years. It was going so well too – until the sky suddenly became bleeding red and ten wasted years became a causeless, but enduring, grudge, like an ice sculpture melting into a huge amorphous puddle. As Psychics under stimulation, Lunatone were supposed to elate memory and emotion beyond human control and reason, equating them to beasts driven by nothing but instinct and emotion, but Aric didn’t care – those Japs had wasted ten years of his life!
And then, like an arrow shooting through a pack of loose balloons, each droplet of blood burst in perfect harmony, setting the sky on fire for a split second. It was almost magnificent – grand like a display of fireworks, with will-o-wisps that failed to disintegrate in the air, and instead fall down to earth like the wishes of mankind.
But as silently as it began, the sky at once returned to its cold, inky camouflage with the moon, a slight tinge of red. Aric was pulled away from his trance and reality sank in.
It began with a crash, as the Lunatone, eyes devoid of spirit, collided with the terracotta balcony.
Rated [PG:15+] for sexual themes, racism, violence, coarse language, fakemon and mature themes (though I don't really care how old anyone is, so long as you understand that there are things potentially offensive). But hey, it's all mild, so it's nothing to rave about anyway. This wasn't meant to be controversial in the least.
So: down it goes.
*flush*
[zenith’s approach]
朧 [clair de lune]
Aric had only realised how tall he had grown in the last six months when he tried to fit inside the bathtub without bending his knees. Pitiful, he thought, like an Alaskan deep sea Kingler stuffed into a fish bowl. Though he didn’t have as many legs, even his four growth-spurt-overdriven appendages were enough to make his joints buckle at odd, uncomfortable angles, taking advantage of the little surface area available.
To make matters worse, the water was blistering hot; no, it wasn’t just a fish bowl, it was a ceramic pot – and this deep sea Kingler was on the menu tonight. The steam was reducing Aric to a feverish drowsiness (as chefs would often do to make their victim’s ordeal a bit less painful), which, even though it made accidentally drowning in sleep a creepy problem, at least, was somewhat relieving his fatigue.
Eh, who cares if he drowned, Aric thought, the water was fucking relaxing, even if he was being slowly cooked alive with his legs shrivelling up with the restricted blood flow. At least it was better than cold showers and improvisations in the Japanese wilderness (hot springs had turned out to be less universal in trainer-centric Japan than his first impressions of the country). He would never forget that horde of peeping Psyduck perverts at Lake Valour, with their obsessive, cyan gazes and murmuring quack-chants.
Trying to throw the memory out of his head, he rested his head on the side of the bath and slowly closed his eyes until he could only see the tips of his knees curving out of the tranquil water.
He breathed in.
And breathed out.
Strange, he hadn’t really expected to be this indifferent – why was he distracting himself with complaints of how tired he was?
Ten years. Really, that was his whole childhood lost in the hands of propaganda and plastic dreams. Pokemon Master indeed – humans aren’t given an awful amount of ten years, so why did he waste his most important ten years at the hands of the tycoons running the various Pokemon Leagues? He had given up his education, his family and friends, his virginity…
“You’re one goddamn motherfucker, Sinnoh Champion #473,” he muttered under his breath.
[˘˘˘˘˘˘˘˘]
Sniff.
Aric jolted upwards from his sluggish trance, wide awake and clearly, quite upset. The water had gone slightly cold now and the hairs on the back of his neck stood up as if struck by an electric current.
Water. Does not belong in the nose.
Considerably wound up, Aric got up slowly and lifted up the plug, letting the water drain out into the hungry pipes below. Both his legs felt tingly as the blood reclaimed his bluish calves, shaking like thin, fragile stilts. Careful not to slip (and the bathtub was marbly like hell), he turned on the shower and drew back the curtain to avoid the prying eyes of his mirror self.
The whole bathroom outside of the curtain was adorned with an unnerving amount of mirrors – unnerving because of how little opaque wall there was, and unnerving because of how little opaque floor there was. The bathroom must’ve looked three times its size as a result of them.
Really, he did not need to feel like he was undressing in sync with fifty other mirror selves. And what if there were cameras behind mirrors for the sake of keeping overworked security personnel (or Psyducks) from leaving their posts? Those eyes were too prying for their own good.
Actually, Aric didn’t mind these omniscient surveillance cameras whether they existed or not – he had lost enough of his innocence to have a well-established paranoia, even if he would later find pictures and videos of his captured content on the internet. What more could one lose if they had already lost their own soul to a mindless, money-driven mega-corp?
Aric twisted the shower node until he found himself soaked in goose bumps and nose gunk.
Huh, cold showers, Aric thought, with a nagging hint of nostalgia.
But instead of dumping all sorts of discontented memories on him, Aric felt them wash away like sand down a dial, leaving behind a heartless husk resonating with nothing but the harsh rhythms of Bulgarian metal. He made his routine quick – before the sensation of cold water stagnated and the memories sank back in, and most importantly, before he contracted pneumonia.
[˘˘˘˘˘˘˘˘]
As opposed to the bath, which must have taken half an hour by the state of Aric’s fingers, the shower only took a few minutes. The soap and shampoo provided by the hotel were all encased in colourful little plastic tubes which could’ve been edible if not for the large “DO NOT CONSUME” sign on the back of them. Each one of them bore the smell of citrus, except heavier in scent than any sort of overripe fruit, clinging themselves to his body like parasites.
There were three towels on the rack, and, seeing the state of the floor, Aric threw down the two unused towels to walk on. It ended up being useless – the water soaked through the towels and drowned them like quicksand. He wrapped himself in his remaining towel and proceeded to the largest mirror which, like the others, had fogged up with all the steam from the bath.
Aric restrained the immature notion of decorating the fogged-up mirror with graffiti – lest it was not wiped down after he checked out of the hotel. The edge of the mirror where the sink lay beneath was clear of fog, at any rate. Consulting the hairdryer sped things up reasonably too.
A reasonably tanned man, fresh, but by no means free, from the bounds of adolescence, looked back at Aric. Thick brows slanted pessimistically against his rounded eyes, although the overall facial expression was completed with a warmish smile that suggested no further than contentment. All in all, he seemed to be perpetually wearing an ‘Oh well, that’s life’ face, stretching his age appearance to as high as thirty-five, some fifteen years his senior.
His dark hair was unkempt, even after washing and drying it with a towel, which was to be expected, given the neglect it was subjected to for much of the last decade of constant travelling in erratic weather. It was a common journey syndrome, along with others, such as skin that any passing dermatologist would see as their ticket out of social obscurity (“Don’t worry sir, I’m a dermatologist.”) and a bowel that found fullness more dangerous than Pokebola.
Having been denied of such a large reflective surface for a while, tweaked or not, Aric saw it as a veritable update to grumble over the features of the man in front of him. Aside from the various nicks and scratches obtained from endless travelling, he was unusually thin with battling stress – there was muscle, but the slight tinges of a hollowed ribcage had begun to surface ominously. His face had also sharpened from relative malnutrition, with another shadowy tinge beneath the cheekbone to compliment his hooded eyes.
Aric knew that he was far from cheery, but he hadn’t gotten that bad, had he? Well, at least he had been shaving lately, and the last of his acne was no more.
The humidity made drying the rest of his body with a towel almost daunting, so he used the hairdryer instead. It screamed when Aric turned on the switch, but the wind that came out was weak – not even being able to make his wet locks of hair budge. He came to regret the understatement when the dasypygal was to be found massaging the scorched hairs in that shadowy place where humidity was impossible to get rid of otherwise.
Dressed in whatever attire he thought was reasonable in subtropical autumn, Aric stepped out of the bathroom into a pair of complimentary white slippers. The raging air-con blizzard forced him back into the steaming bathroom, where he found his complimentary bath robe to escort him to the panel that controlled the weather in this room. In an unlit room, that was easier said than done; his stubbornness was not inclined to turning on the lights to look for the damned switch, no way.
15°? Seriously? Aric thought, flabbergasted.
He spammed the button that raised the temperature until it was well within conditions where sleeping without the covers was beyond reasonable, before throwing open the silky curtains which shone pearly white from the city lights outside.
Being a low-lying hotel perched on a forested mountainside, the curtains and the window had given way to a balcony that overlooked the city from a distance, though some of the high-rise apartments barricaded the panorama somewhat. Neon lanterns turned the city into a kaleidoscope of reds, yellows and greens, dominating the discoloured, weather-damaged buildings, under which a hum created by traffic and bustling nightlife gave the impression of a giant, grounded Volbeat.
The moon, full and enamelled, hung low above the bustling insect, untainted by any fog or cloud. The warm, tropical air could’ve been its exhalations, beckoning Aric to the festivities under the watchful moon, but he was still too fatigued to respond to the invitation. Instead, in waiting for the room to cool down sufficiently, he stepped out onto the spacious balcony, where the fullness of stuffy air hit him like a cascade. The balcony was covered in some terracotta-like ceramic tile, lending a shaded, natural look with the help of a few potted palms and marbly pebbles.
The balcony door had turned out to be slightly refracting, fogging up much of the view with a fuzzy glare. Aric only got a good look of the city when he stepped out onto the balcony; the moon was clearer than ever and he could see individual dots travelling across a road lining the other side of the harbour. There were also pinpricks of red light floating in the night-time sky – something that had been completely blurred out by the glass door. Of course, under such a bright and enlarged moon, it was impossible not to imagine a night of mid-autumn with the night skies full of them.
Like the lanterns hung below in the cities, the Lunatone seemed to be suspended in the skies by some invisible rope – whatever movements the Lunatone made, the others were bound to follow it in perfect synchronisation. No doubt, the celebrating folk were as transfixed as Aric was on the Lunatone, floating and fluctuating with a hypnotising grace that so sorely demanded musical accompaniment – Bulgarian or Beethoven. They were gaining altitude with each sequence of ascent and descent, slowly heading towards that stark moon.
There were so many of them that their fluctuations felt like a series of ripples along a surface of water, silently submerging the city. There was something worth appreciating in the Lunatone's synchronised movements – seemingly mindless creatures irrefutably subservient to one greater cosmic cause. It was ineffable, as with a lot of things Aric found himself appreciating when he was alone.
Before he knew it, Aric’s body was halfway over the balcony rail, with his head protruding well over what could be considered safe. Thank God this was such a stout hotel, he thought, capping off at only three levels, so he was guaranteed to survive even after falling from such a height (head-first, no less). Slowly, cautiously, he withdrew his head and torso back into the safety of the balcony, before heading back into the hotel room, which was now considerably warmer than the air outside.
In deciding what was optimal, he turned the air conditioning off completely and left the balcony door open, where he was still able to see a vast portion of the city view. In particular, the Lunatone troupe could still be seen when he laid down on his bed, serenading the masses like a crimson aurora.
The sheets were smooth as hotel bed sheets should be and the pillow, as yielding as a sponge cake. It enticed Aric to daydream (except that it was night), but he resisted; he wanted to watch the Lunatone a bit longer before they departed through the atmosphere. It was supposed to be spectacular, with the sky growing so viscous with bloodthirsty eyes that the sky would like that bastard country’s flag with its colour scheme inverted.
Oh, those bastards, Aric thought, until he thought about nothing but those ten wasted years. It was going so well too – until the sky suddenly became bleeding red and ten wasted years became a causeless, but enduring, grudge, like an ice sculpture melting into a huge amorphous puddle. As Psychics under stimulation, Lunatone were supposed to elate memory and emotion beyond human control and reason, equating them to beasts driven by nothing but instinct and emotion, but Aric didn’t care – those Japs had wasted ten years of his life!
And then, like an arrow shooting through a pack of loose balloons, each droplet of blood burst in perfect harmony, setting the sky on fire for a split second. It was almost magnificent – grand like a display of fireworks, with will-o-wisps that failed to disintegrate in the air, and instead fall down to earth like the wishes of mankind.
But as silently as it began, the sky at once returned to its cold, inky camouflage with the moon, a slight tinge of red. Aric was pulled away from his trance and reality sank in.
It began with a crash, as the Lunatone, eyes devoid of spirit, collided with the terracotta balcony.
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