Frontier Town Sun Stone Saloon

[Inkedust]

Another long pause followed. "The lives of trainers hardly interested me," she began. "I had no interest in recalling the names of the region's league or its gym leaders." Maybe not the right question to ask, although the mention of a league and gym leaders could help Koa narrow the time frame down more.

Bellatrix folded her arms and hunched over in her seat. She found herself recalling a couple extra details. "They tried to make a spectacle out of it. Tried to throw every piece of speculation at the wall about the how and the why to see what would stick, as one does when deprived from answers. I thought nothing of it."

She paused, appearing deep in thought again. "I thought that a wild absol had gotten to the body before any person did."

 

[Tetra]

Koa wasn't sure if he was relieved or more uneasy from the lack of answers. It had to be even worse for Bellatrix though... His mind started trying to slot all the pieces together. It had to be somewhat modern times if there was a Champion... And she thought an Absol got to the body? Could it have been a natural disaster? The image of her red chains came to mind again. His skin prickled.

He blinked, realizing he'd spaced out. "Sounds kind of like my world," he said with a snort. "Not giving the whole story to the public I mean... But I think thats because they didn't want to panic everyone I guess, since they knew what happened. Just told everyone it was.... Well, just failed ploy by some villains," he said dismissively.

"Why an Absol? That seems kind of specific, maybe its important? Could he have survived?"

 

[Inkedust]

"I think that was one of the baseless rumours being spread," Bellatrix noted. "The 'official' reason, I believe, was recent tremors made the mountain too dangerous to climb. High avalanche risk combined with poor weather is a death sentence. As for absol, well, it's one of the few predators that reside on the mountain. I doubt that that person even made it up halfway, so no. I don't think he did." A believable explanation but didn't that contradict what her Shadows said? That he was lost at the summit? It wasn't like Bellatrix was trying to deceive Koa either, it sounded like she genuinely believed what she was saying.

There was a lot more to the story here than what Bellatrix knew, she didn't even seem to consider why absol lived on the mountain, why it was one of the first species that came to mind when thinking about pokémon that lived up there but given what Koa knew about his version of events...

 

[Tetra]

If only he had been died halfway up and gotten eaten by an Absol. Koa nodded, his expression thoughtful, even as his insides roiled. Absol, disasters, someone lost at the summit, red chains... There had to be another way to fit those pieces together, right? Maybe he was looking at the puzzle the wrong the way. It could have been anything.

He tapped his paw, then made himself sit back as if he wasn't worried. Just casually considering the mystery before him. "Your world didn't happen to have a group called... Galactic?" he paused as recalling the name casually. "Team Galactic or something?"

 

[Inkedust]

Bellatrix rubbed the bridge of her nose, deep in thought... yes it seemed that it did ring a bell. Immediately, she looked frustrated, disappointed. "Is that what he called it?" she asked bitterly. She crossed her arms and looked out a nearby window. "Just when I couldn't expect anything less, he goes ahead and drags the good name of the Galaxy Team through the mud just to spite me. Typical! How typical."

 

[Tetra]

Is that what he called it?

"Cyrus?" The name slipped out like a boulder off a precipice, triggering a landslide of emotions that buried any logical thought. Koa reeled and he felt suddenly too hot and too cold all at once. He stared at Bellatrix, trying to contort the bits of information he knew around everything else he knew about her, but his thoughts were too scattered.

Finally he scraped together whatever remnants of will remained and forced himself to sound less stunned. More like a regular person who just didn't like bad guys. "I think that was the name of the Team Galactic's leader. Maybe that was who you were looking for? I think he vanished up there in my world." He abandoned-

 

[Inkedust]

Koa could pretend, he could pretend well, in fact but Bellatrix was sharp, especially in her current state of mind. She noticed his stunned silence, his body language and the attempt to keep things casual. That or she was close to discovering something, very close and was jumping on the first lead given to her.

Slowly but surely, the Shadows returned to her and she said, "A name that means nothing but everything at the same time. What does it mean to you, I wonder..."

 

[Tetra]

Everything. "Nothing. Just a name." Liar.

He shrugged. Tried to adopt the usual disaffected tone he took when talking about him. It felt harder. Closer to the surface. "He's just another crazed egomaniac trying to use legendary power or whatever. Didn't succeed though, obviously. Kind of reminded me of what you described, that's all. Like uh... team Rocket and stuff, Giovanni." He was rambling slightly now, he realized. "I guess there's some common events between worlds. Maybe Team Galactic did something in yours too."

...If she'd been looking for him, what did that mean about who she'd been in her past life? The rest of them looked too. Unconsciously, he sat back slightly, away from Bellatrix.

 

[Inkedust]

Bellatrix shut her eyes again, deep in thought. It seemed like she was unconvinced by Koa's words but her mind was focused elsewhere to bother calling it out. The shadows were creeping up her form again. "He took something from me," she growled, voice venomous. "And when I found it again—"

Her claws dug into the table's surface, she plunged herself back into her fragmented sea of memories. Desperate, so desperate to dig and find more but then...

"That's it..." she finished, voice weak. The harder she looked, the quicker it faded away. She slumped back into her seat defeated. "I'm sorry, but that's as much as I can remember."

 

[Tetra]

Koa was relieved she wasn't going to push the question any further, and that she seemed too distracted to notice him. He wasn't sure how much longer he could mantain a veneer of indifference. His stomach was churning and he couldn't help but start to imagine worst-case thoughts.

No, maybe she was his enemy. She sounded angry about Galactic, that was a good sign, right?

"It's fine," he mumbled awkwardly, trying to mentally shake off the dark thoughts. Bellatrix was... a good mon. "Can't expect everything to come back in one conversation, right?" he said, trying to lighten the mood.

He eyed the exit. "At least now you know more than you did before, so I'm sure you'll remember more later." He shifted toward the edge of the booth and started to get out. "Anyways, good luck with your research."

 

[Inkedust]

"No, perhaps not," Bellatrix said wistfully as she gazed out the window. It looked like she didn't want to hold Koa up any longer so she took no heed of him beginning to shuffle away. It seemed like her shift was starting up again shortly anyway. "Thank you anyway. It won't be much longer until we head off to Tyrrier regardless."

She didn't watch Koa leave, continuing to stare out the window as a pensive frown pulled at the edges of her mouth. When he was gone, she flicked a claw, igniting a shadowy wisp and letting it dance at the tip. Just who was he? she thought. Koa mentioned a name, didn't he?

Cyrus...

What did it mean to her... And what did he take?

<><><>​

 

[Shiny Phantump]

Gladion usually only came to the Sun Stone on Wayfarer business. He wasn't really sure if this counted as an exception. After all, he was here to see Odette. He'd probably owed her some acknowledgement that her idea of getting involved in the Coven had worked pretty well for a while now, especially after he'd more or less folded to it himself and ended up trusting Articuno. But the fact that she got stuck in the middle of buttfuck nowhere with his twin sister, an evil copy of him, and his weird boss? He owed her at least a drink and his pity. Especially because it sounded like the former two had given her a time of it.

Hey, Odette, he reached out over Betelnet, You back in Frontier Town too? Heart your group may've had some Mohn-related complications. I'm in the Sun Stone if you want a drink or something about it.

Now he just had to find a spot to wait here he wouldn't feel like people were watching him. Came with the species, or being a Wayfarer, or most likely both. There had to be a reasonably private booth in here or something, right? He hadn't actually poked around the bottom floor that much.

 

[Sinderella]

Odette trudged into the dining room about ten minutes after receiving the message. She wasn't quite disheveled, but she wasn't as put together as she typically was. Little wrinkles in her pants, a minutely haphazard tuck of her shirt, an uneven length of the ribbons she'd tied at the base of her tassels. The pièce de résistance of her Haute "I'm Done With Everything" Couture were the prominent dark circles under her squinting eyes and the matching yawns that came with them.

"This seat taken?" she asked him when she approached the booth. She didn't give him a chance to respond before she hoisted herself up into it and waved a waitress down for a large cup of tea. She looked like she needed it.

"Mohn-related complications is an understatement," she finally said after chugging a solid quarter of the cup. She didn't even wait for it to cool. If it burned her tongue, she didn't give any indication. "I'm still regaining brain cells, and I'm still fucking sore."

A grotesque crack sounded from her neck as she turned it, as if to provide an exhibit for her complaint.

Regarding him with a little more light in her eyes, she sighed deeply. A part of her felt some guilt--she'd been so sure at the beginning of that bullshit excursion that this was the Gladion she was dealing with. Not the asshat who nearly blew them all to bits.

Gods. Hopefully her Gladion would understand if she wanted to keep her distance from him for a few days after she got out of this mess.

"How was your excursion? Did your sister eventually find you?"

 

[Shiny Phantump]

Gladion winced. "Well, the excursion went well. Found Auriga. I didn't learn anything from it that Leaf didn't mention."

Except, well, there was that one thing...

"Gladius is 'you'... you understand that, don't you? You must. His soul may not be part of my gestalt any more than your own, but I can see your souls, I can see their likeness to each other. He seeks what you do. His path has been different to yours, but it does not lead him to seek a crown of stars, even if you fear as much. Would you, Sword-Flower, yoke the heavens to your will? The worst your mirror will do is little worse than you may do yourself – he will wound himself, and think the world has done him ill. He will do others the unkindness of earning their love, before they must watch him either bleed for them, or flee from them."

...which didn't really count. It was demonstrably false. Gladius had plenty more to answer for than what she'd suggested he was capable of.

"Lillie- Lillian is pretty flagrantly compromised by him, though. I told her what he did. She just... Augh."

He didn't elaborate. What else was there to say? He was pretty sure she was being naive, but Auriga seemed to agree with her and that was enough to make it difficult to say what he wanted to with the conviction he wanted to say it with.

"I guess we just have to hope that her having an in with him helps us more than it helps him. Barring trying to remove her as a Wayfarer, I'm not willing to go there yet. She's still my twin, after all."

Definitionally, that was true. He wasn't sure how true it still felt. He hadn't felt like they identical twins anymore for years even though that was also definitionally true. Maybe this was just another line that they were bound to cross. He hoped not. He took a sip of a coffee with enough milk that it could be mistaken for tea and still made a face like like he found it bitter.

"Damn mess, isn't it? Probably makes me the second most Coven-compromised person behind Lillian herself, for all my whinging when we first met 'em." Though if Auriga wasn't entirely wrong, then maybe he had been right to worry they'd be a corrupting influence. Just not on Odette. "Meanwhile, you're handling them just fine."

The faintest of smiles- or perhaps smirks- hid behind his eyes as he shot her the deadpan look he used when he was about to say something that he believed was funny. "For my money, that's the closest thing you're getting to an apology out of me. Enjoy."