Chapter One
Disclaimer: I don't own Pokemon or any of the Pokemon species that appear in this story or even Cipher Corp, Michael, or any of the Pokemon XD: Gale of Darkness characters that appear with them. I only own the new and unique characters that present themselves within the tale to come. Also, I am not making any money from doing this, it is purely for my enjoyment and, at least so I'd like to flatter myself, that of the people who read it.
Author's notes: This story is my own idea of what happens after the end of the Gamecube game "Pokemon XD: Gale of Darkness." Rating given for later chapters.
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"Come and see Michael Horner, the boy who stopped Cipher once and for all and saved the world from the threat of Shadow Pokemon! Presentations to take place this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Separate shows at nine and eleven am and at five and seven pm each day." Thus read the poster hanging over the entrance to the Lillycove City Contest Hall. Persons entering the large building's lobby during a time between "showings," when the stage they were using between contests for said presentations hosted one of those contests, instead, would find the boy wonder, young mister Horner, himself, sitting on a bench in the lobby with a rather depressed look on his face.
Now, don't get us wrong. Life since the end of Cipher had not been bad to Michael. On the contrary, he'd been a celebrity. He'd done talk shows, he'd done product endorsements, he'd received riches and wide, public acclaim, he'd been the subject of many a fangirl's feminine fantasy, he'd even earned himself the occasional stalker or two. But all that glam and fab just wasn't the same. It wasn't what he truly yearned for. There was just something about the adrenaline thrill of putting his life on the line to fight the bad guys had really appealed to him in his fighting days and now that all the action was over, he missed it.
Oh, well. At least he still had these appearances and fan crazes to keep him occupied, though even that was beginning to die down, as it had been nearly three full years since Cipher fell. In fact, when the clock struck noon today, it would be three years precisely, right down to the second.
Twelve o'clock came and went in a rather lame, unspectacular way. He wasn't sure why, but this upset Michael. For some reason, he felt there should have been some big, fancy do to celebrate the fact that exactly three years ago at that moment, the world had been made safe once more. About fifteen minutes later, the first of the screaming fan girls, who had seen the annual upsurge due to the approaching anniversary of the big day, arrived on the scene to ooh and aah and just generally fawn over the boy wonder. 'Too late, missy,' thought Michael to himself, her arrival now rather than when the big moment came only serving to annoy him, rather than swelling his ego, among other things (Hey, he WAS a teenaged boy, and a fully healthy one, at that, after all...), the way such arrivals usually did.
He gave a vaguely-grunted "Not right now..." to the girl and got up to head for the emergency back entrance to the building, which he'd been using all too often over the past couple of weeks to get away from it all to think by himself up on the rooftop.
Later that evening, for the day's last, and this trip's absolute final, presentation, the girl showed up along with a small troupe of friends to watch him talk about all the grand adventures he'd had in his fight against Cipher. He couldn't help but notice and worry when he saw how the girls' intentness grew more intense and became more the interest of somebody who had plans for the information he was giving rather than that of a group of fawning fangirls when he got to the part of his speech that was all about the equipment he'd used to identify and rescue the Shadow Pokemon.
"This," he was saying, and indicating the strange eyepiece over his eye, which almost looked like one of the eye attachments seen on the Borg on the old Star Trek movies, when he first noticed the change, "is called the Aura Reader. Whenever a Shadow Pokemon was unleashed in battle, it would respond by placing an optical screen over my eye that allowed me to see the dark aura around the poor creature. Of course, it hasn't worked in years, and with any luck, it never will again."
The rest of the presentation went without incident and by the time it was over, he'd almost completely forgotten about the girls' strange behavior. That is, until he left the Contest Hall and was about halfway to the point that had been set for the helicopter to arrive that would take him to his next set of appearances in the Jhoto region, for it was there and then that they appeared before him again. Or, at least, the first one he'd seen did. As he sighed in frustration and tried to side-step her, however, another of the girls stepped out from behind a nearby bush right in his path. As he began to look around for some route of escape, he came to realize there were a lot more girls than he'd believed and that they'd made sure that whatever they had planned for him was inevitable. And from the looks on all their faces, he also concluded that what they had planned was quite probably something he wouldn't enjoy very much...
But after a short time, their plan was revealed and he relaxed visibly, for all that happened was the first girl, who appeared to be the leader, pulled out a Pokeball. Obviously, the plan was a Pokemon battle.
He reached for a Pokeball of his own and tossed it as the girl tossed her own. But when he saw what came out of hers, he became worried again. Even just seeing the creature told him all he needed to know. It was a Zangoose, but this particular Zangoose's fur wasn't right. Where white should have been, it was dark blue, instead, and where red should be was pink and its eyes were replaced by small pools of red radiance. He'd only seen such alterations of colors on one other Pokemon, before...It was on the first of the new breed of Shadow Pokemon, the XD Pokemon. Sure enough, the Aura Reader shortly afterward responded, alerting him to a dark aura around the Zangoose that, just as XD001's had, looked to be continuously-generating, rather than the limited aura seen around regular Shadow Pokemon.
"Arcanine, Flamethrower," he snarled nastily at the Pokemon that had emerged from his own Pokeball, his anger aroused by this girl's owning and usage of one of the supposedly-unpurifiable Shadow Pokemon.
"Zangoose, Shadow Rush!" responded the girl who had unleashed the XD Zangoose.
Michael loaded an Ultra Ball into the Snag Machine still attached to his right arm as he watched the battle commands being carried out. The large fire canine that had once been a Shadow Pokemon, himself, though an ordinary one, until Michael Snagged and Purified him on his last adventure launched forth a streamer of flames that hit the still-Shadowed Pokemon dead on, then, under his trainer's command, dodged to the left to avoid the Zangoose's Shadow Rush attack.
"Bite!" commanded Michael right away.
"Try again with another Shadow Rush!" responded the girl.
Both attacks hit home at the same time and both Pokemon staggered back from the contact. Both were quite obviously close to being KO'ed.
"That's my cue!" Michael whispered to himself as he gave his right arm a twitch in just the right way to let the Snag Machine know it was time to release the Snag Ball it had created from the Ultra Ball he loaded it with into his waiting hand.
Just as the girl was preparing to give her Zangoose another attack command, Michael tossed the ball with a shout of "Snag Ball, go!"
The ball struck the Zangoose square in the chest and the Pokemon vanished into it in a flurry of golden-white light. For a few moments, the ball shook and made peculiar noises, and then it fell still and chimed to indicate a successful Snag. No sooner had the chime sounded than the ball vanished into thin air, sending itself into PC storage, for Michael's team was already a full six.
He was expecting sounds of outrage from the group of girls or, at the very least, from the one who'd previously owned the Zangoose, the usual response from those he'd Snagged Shadow Pokemon from. But quite to his surprise, they all, instead, let out the excited squeals of the fangirls who were just about to start fawning over him.
He blinked a few times in confusion, but then, the girl who'd battled him explained "I found that Zangoose in the woods and promptly captured her. It didn't take long to realize, of course, that she was a Shadow Pokemon, so when we heard that you were coming to town, the girls and I hatched a plan to get you to show us how you used to do it. We wanted to watch an actual Snag in action and I have to say, I'm not disappointed! Seeing the way you battled, the sheer coolness of a Snag taking place...WOW! It was SO awesome!"
But the whole subject brought more important things to mind for Michael. "Where," he asked the girl, "did you find her? I need you to show me the EXACT spot."
"Umm...Yeah, okay, sure..." replied the girl who'd been raving just moments ago, looking extremely disappointed at how serious he was acting, but as though she were curious about what was going on.
"You," said Michael, pointing at one of the other girls at random. "You go ahead to the helipad at the edge of town and wait for the chopper that's coming to get me. When it arrives, tell the pilot what's going on and that she's to wait for my return."
As the now-sulky-looking girl he'd spoken to turned to follow his instructions, he turned back to look at the leader of the group expectantly and, when she nodded and began to lead the way off toward the other end of town, he followed her.
Some minutes later, they were in a place very deep in the forest that started at the northern edge of town and here, the girl that was leading the way stopped. "This is the place," she announced.
Michael nodded and called out his Arcanine again. "Hold up the Pokeball you held the Zangoose in," he instructed and when she had done so, he looked at the Arcanine as he pointed to the ball.
The Arcanine, knowing what his trainer wanted of him, padded up to the Pokeball and gave it a few good, solid sniffs to gather the scent of the Zangoose it had formerly held, then started to sniff around the clearing to try to find a similar scent. When he could find none but the one leading back into town, which was extremely faint, itself, Michael proclaimed "Damn! It's been too long, the scent trail's gone. We'll just have to wait until we have more advanced tracking methods at our disposal in order to track down where this Shadow Zangoose came from..."
It was then that the girls finally realized what Michael was thinking: If there was this Shadow Zangoose here, she must have come from somewhere fairly close to this area, from a facility for producing Shadow Pokemon. And if that was true, Cipher was back in business and there were more Shadow Pokemon out there that needed to be tracked down...
Author's notes: This story is my own idea of what happens after the end of the Gamecube game "Pokemon XD: Gale of Darkness." Rating given for later chapters.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Come and see Michael Horner, the boy who stopped Cipher once and for all and saved the world from the threat of Shadow Pokemon! Presentations to take place this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Separate shows at nine and eleven am and at five and seven pm each day." Thus read the poster hanging over the entrance to the Lillycove City Contest Hall. Persons entering the large building's lobby during a time between "showings," when the stage they were using between contests for said presentations hosted one of those contests, instead, would find the boy wonder, young mister Horner, himself, sitting on a bench in the lobby with a rather depressed look on his face.
Now, don't get us wrong. Life since the end of Cipher had not been bad to Michael. On the contrary, he'd been a celebrity. He'd done talk shows, he'd done product endorsements, he'd received riches and wide, public acclaim, he'd been the subject of many a fangirl's feminine fantasy, he'd even earned himself the occasional stalker or two. But all that glam and fab just wasn't the same. It wasn't what he truly yearned for. There was just something about the adrenaline thrill of putting his life on the line to fight the bad guys had really appealed to him in his fighting days and now that all the action was over, he missed it.
Oh, well. At least he still had these appearances and fan crazes to keep him occupied, though even that was beginning to die down, as it had been nearly three full years since Cipher fell. In fact, when the clock struck noon today, it would be three years precisely, right down to the second.
Twelve o'clock came and went in a rather lame, unspectacular way. He wasn't sure why, but this upset Michael. For some reason, he felt there should have been some big, fancy do to celebrate the fact that exactly three years ago at that moment, the world had been made safe once more. About fifteen minutes later, the first of the screaming fan girls, who had seen the annual upsurge due to the approaching anniversary of the big day, arrived on the scene to ooh and aah and just generally fawn over the boy wonder. 'Too late, missy,' thought Michael to himself, her arrival now rather than when the big moment came only serving to annoy him, rather than swelling his ego, among other things (Hey, he WAS a teenaged boy, and a fully healthy one, at that, after all...), the way such arrivals usually did.
He gave a vaguely-grunted "Not right now..." to the girl and got up to head for the emergency back entrance to the building, which he'd been using all too often over the past couple of weeks to get away from it all to think by himself up on the rooftop.
Later that evening, for the day's last, and this trip's absolute final, presentation, the girl showed up along with a small troupe of friends to watch him talk about all the grand adventures he'd had in his fight against Cipher. He couldn't help but notice and worry when he saw how the girls' intentness grew more intense and became more the interest of somebody who had plans for the information he was giving rather than that of a group of fawning fangirls when he got to the part of his speech that was all about the equipment he'd used to identify and rescue the Shadow Pokemon.
"This," he was saying, and indicating the strange eyepiece over his eye, which almost looked like one of the eye attachments seen on the Borg on the old Star Trek movies, when he first noticed the change, "is called the Aura Reader. Whenever a Shadow Pokemon was unleashed in battle, it would respond by placing an optical screen over my eye that allowed me to see the dark aura around the poor creature. Of course, it hasn't worked in years, and with any luck, it never will again."
The rest of the presentation went without incident and by the time it was over, he'd almost completely forgotten about the girls' strange behavior. That is, until he left the Contest Hall and was about halfway to the point that had been set for the helicopter to arrive that would take him to his next set of appearances in the Jhoto region, for it was there and then that they appeared before him again. Or, at least, the first one he'd seen did. As he sighed in frustration and tried to side-step her, however, another of the girls stepped out from behind a nearby bush right in his path. As he began to look around for some route of escape, he came to realize there were a lot more girls than he'd believed and that they'd made sure that whatever they had planned for him was inevitable. And from the looks on all their faces, he also concluded that what they had planned was quite probably something he wouldn't enjoy very much...
But after a short time, their plan was revealed and he relaxed visibly, for all that happened was the first girl, who appeared to be the leader, pulled out a Pokeball. Obviously, the plan was a Pokemon battle.
He reached for a Pokeball of his own and tossed it as the girl tossed her own. But when he saw what came out of hers, he became worried again. Even just seeing the creature told him all he needed to know. It was a Zangoose, but this particular Zangoose's fur wasn't right. Where white should have been, it was dark blue, instead, and where red should be was pink and its eyes were replaced by small pools of red radiance. He'd only seen such alterations of colors on one other Pokemon, before...It was on the first of the new breed of Shadow Pokemon, the XD Pokemon. Sure enough, the Aura Reader shortly afterward responded, alerting him to a dark aura around the Zangoose that, just as XD001's had, looked to be continuously-generating, rather than the limited aura seen around regular Shadow Pokemon.
"Arcanine, Flamethrower," he snarled nastily at the Pokemon that had emerged from his own Pokeball, his anger aroused by this girl's owning and usage of one of the supposedly-unpurifiable Shadow Pokemon.
"Zangoose, Shadow Rush!" responded the girl who had unleashed the XD Zangoose.
Michael loaded an Ultra Ball into the Snag Machine still attached to his right arm as he watched the battle commands being carried out. The large fire canine that had once been a Shadow Pokemon, himself, though an ordinary one, until Michael Snagged and Purified him on his last adventure launched forth a streamer of flames that hit the still-Shadowed Pokemon dead on, then, under his trainer's command, dodged to the left to avoid the Zangoose's Shadow Rush attack.
"Bite!" commanded Michael right away.
"Try again with another Shadow Rush!" responded the girl.
Both attacks hit home at the same time and both Pokemon staggered back from the contact. Both were quite obviously close to being KO'ed.
"That's my cue!" Michael whispered to himself as he gave his right arm a twitch in just the right way to let the Snag Machine know it was time to release the Snag Ball it had created from the Ultra Ball he loaded it with into his waiting hand.
Just as the girl was preparing to give her Zangoose another attack command, Michael tossed the ball with a shout of "Snag Ball, go!"
The ball struck the Zangoose square in the chest and the Pokemon vanished into it in a flurry of golden-white light. For a few moments, the ball shook and made peculiar noises, and then it fell still and chimed to indicate a successful Snag. No sooner had the chime sounded than the ball vanished into thin air, sending itself into PC storage, for Michael's team was already a full six.
He was expecting sounds of outrage from the group of girls or, at the very least, from the one who'd previously owned the Zangoose, the usual response from those he'd Snagged Shadow Pokemon from. But quite to his surprise, they all, instead, let out the excited squeals of the fangirls who were just about to start fawning over him.
He blinked a few times in confusion, but then, the girl who'd battled him explained "I found that Zangoose in the woods and promptly captured her. It didn't take long to realize, of course, that she was a Shadow Pokemon, so when we heard that you were coming to town, the girls and I hatched a plan to get you to show us how you used to do it. We wanted to watch an actual Snag in action and I have to say, I'm not disappointed! Seeing the way you battled, the sheer coolness of a Snag taking place...WOW! It was SO awesome!"
But the whole subject brought more important things to mind for Michael. "Where," he asked the girl, "did you find her? I need you to show me the EXACT spot."
"Umm...Yeah, okay, sure..." replied the girl who'd been raving just moments ago, looking extremely disappointed at how serious he was acting, but as though she were curious about what was going on.
"You," said Michael, pointing at one of the other girls at random. "You go ahead to the helipad at the edge of town and wait for the chopper that's coming to get me. When it arrives, tell the pilot what's going on and that she's to wait for my return."
As the now-sulky-looking girl he'd spoken to turned to follow his instructions, he turned back to look at the leader of the group expectantly and, when she nodded and began to lead the way off toward the other end of town, he followed her.
Some minutes later, they were in a place very deep in the forest that started at the northern edge of town and here, the girl that was leading the way stopped. "This is the place," she announced.
Michael nodded and called out his Arcanine again. "Hold up the Pokeball you held the Zangoose in," he instructed and when she had done so, he looked at the Arcanine as he pointed to the ball.
The Arcanine, knowing what his trainer wanted of him, padded up to the Pokeball and gave it a few good, solid sniffs to gather the scent of the Zangoose it had formerly held, then started to sniff around the clearing to try to find a similar scent. When he could find none but the one leading back into town, which was extremely faint, itself, Michael proclaimed "Damn! It's been too long, the scent trail's gone. We'll just have to wait until we have more advanced tracking methods at our disposal in order to track down where this Shadow Zangoose came from..."
It was then that the girls finally realized what Michael was thinking: If there was this Shadow Zangoose here, she must have come from somewhere fairly close to this area, from a facility for producing Shadow Pokemon. And if that was true, Cipher was back in business and there were more Shadow Pokemon out there that needed to be tracked down...