Dischordant Celestic
Lucian and Cynthia were both somewhat depressed when I entered. Venus seemed to wilt on my shoulder and I wondered, not for the first time in the last few minutes, if all pokemon were actually empathic. They looked up as we entered.
"Where are your friends?" Cynthia asked.
"Beni has gone to hunt down Gardevoir," I said. I glanced at Lucian and he nodded, indicating that Cynthia had told him the whole story. "Cammy has gone to look for a pokemon or human who might have witnessed what happened. I don't think there's much question myself."
A part of me wondered at my behavior. As little as half an hour ago, I had been in awe of the Champion, and now I was talking both to her and the man widely acknowledged as the strongest member of the Elite Four as though they were equals.
"Beni? Cammy?" Lucian asked. Cynthia seemed likewise confused, and I remembered that I had never introduced the two of them.
"Beni is my partner, an Arcanine. Cammy is a Lucario."
"Isn't she your partner?" Cynthia raised an eyebrow.
"Sort of," I said, "But it doesn't work quite the same way, I think. She seems to see us as the two main players, while she supports us. It's easier to think that way than try to sort out what's really going on." I changed the subject with some embarrassment. Better to not explain my difficulties with the word 'partner,' in recent context.
"So, any luck figuring anything out?"
"We've barely gotten finished discussing it," Cynthia explained. "Lucian, this is, as you've probably gathered..."
"Zach," Lucian finished. "A pleasure to meet you." He extended a hand with an air of noblesse oblige, and I shook it once before turning back to Cynthia.
"And?"
"And," Cynthia continued, "We had just decided to go search for witnesses and ask you if you thought you could find Gardevoir again. She seems to know a lot about what's going on."
"Since you seem to have both aspects covered," Lucian added without missing a beat, "We can start our investigation of this hole. I've honestly, in all my days as a trainer and as a Psychic, never seen anything quite like it." He rose and strode to the door, holding it open for Cynthia. "After you," he said with a bow. I watched their eyes meet for a moment and shivered. There was a not-quite-visible malice between the two of them, something I didn't quite understand.
The three of us...
(A tugging on my earlobe.)
Sorry, the four of us walked around the outside of the chasm. Now that we had completely circuited it, I could see it was in fact a circle, more of a pit than a chasm, and that it was almost perfectly round.
"Look at this," Lucian said at one point, leaning over and staring into the depths. "The sides are perfectly cut, almost as though by a razor. You said that some fell in?" This to Cynthia.
"Yes, about twenty or so minutes after I got here."
"Incredible. Yet the sides are still perfectly smooth. I can see the fence you told me about, though, it's only about a hundred feet or so below." He frowned in puzzlement. "That's about how deep the hole is, in fact. That's very strange."
"What do you mean?" I asked, finally unable to contain myself. He didn't seem to mind. Like many very bright people I have known, Lucian seemed to enjoy the opportunity to demonstrate his talents.
"It would seem to me that it would have been more likely to have something take an entire sphere, air, earth, everything, all at once. I would have expected this pit to go nearly two miles down, if I've estimated the radius of the hole properly. Instead, it's as though something just shaved the surface, going not very deep at all."
I considered that for a moment. "The hole has grown since I got here," I said. "Is it possible that the original pit was only..." I did the math quickly, "Two hundred feet in diameter?"
Lucian paused, his face paling. "Cynthia," he asked, his voice strange. "What would be in the center of this, right now, if Celestic were still here?"
Cynthia nodded slowly, her own face blank. "You're right," she confirmed grimly, "One hundred feet in every direction from the center would have just about taken the entirety of the ruins."
Venus made a shrill sound in my ear, causing me to wince and look at her. As I watched, she made several gestures with her hands, making them into a ball and then expanding them. Then she used her trap jaws to form a plane between the two cupped hands. She looked at me expectantly.
"I think what she's trying to say is," I said slowly, and paused. "Is that Celestic Town?" I asked, pointing at the black and yellow 'leaves.' "The place with all the humans?"
She nodded emphatically.
"Then what she's trying to say is that the center of town disappeared first." Lucian mused. Venus nodded even more emphatically and then spread her hands out across the top of her trap jaws.
"And then went outward from there, but not up or down," I translated. Venus pumped her little hands in the air and held them high over her head.
"What does that mean?" Cynthia asked.
"It means 'I won,'" I finished wryly. "What ruins are you talking about?"
"Celestic was built around a system of underground vaults in which the ancients maintained many shrines to various pokemon," Lucian explained. "Legendary ones such as Mew, Celebi, and many others we are only now starting to confirm the existence of."
"The deepest two," Cynthia concluded with an angry look, "are to Arceus and Darkrai, the Creator and Destroyer."
"I never heard that." Lucian sounded surprised, and I felt a brief flash of annoyance at his apparent assumption that he knew everything.
"The other shrines are maintained by the village as a whole," the Champion explained. Her measured tone suggested to me that she'd also caught his arrogance. "Those two, however, were only entered by my family. Arceus, because we believed he deserved the respect of slumber and peace, and Darkrai, because we feared his corruption."
"I see," I said. I was exaggerating a bit, but I thought I had the gist. "You're suggesting that Darkrai took his shrine with him, and everything around it went too?"
"That's possible," Cynthia said.
"But..." I added, since she seemed to hesitate.
"But," she admitted, "I think it's more likely that he took Arceus's shrine to prevent our gifts and prayers from reaching him."
* * *
I picked a spot to make camp a few hundred yards away from the pit. Nobody wanted to get too close in case it grew again, but I couldn't bring myself to go too far from it. It was strange, almost, how the sight seemed to fascinate me. I was watching it at the time, from the cover of the trees perhaps fifty feet away, when I saw a dark figure stepping up to the cliff. In the moonlight, a golden flash of hair winked at me from under a battered cap. I crept closer, and recognized Cynthia in the gloom. She didn't notice me, however, and I reconsidered my plan to approach her when I saw a glistening on her cheek. I remembered how she had told me that her family had lived in Celestic, and I wondered, now, at the way she had seemed so calm and collected ever since. I considered a moment and realized that Cynthia couldn't be much older than I was, since she had only been Champion for a few years.
"Hard, isn't it?" I asked, stepping quietly up beside her. "Losing them all."
"How could you know?" she asked bitterly. She didn't seem surprised at my presence. Perhaps I hadn't been quite as silent as I'd thought.
"Easy." I matched her bitter tone without effort; I had had plenty of time to rehearse this particular speech in my head. Eight years, now. "Losing your mother to AIDS, which she caught from having to whore herself out to men to pay the bills, not knowing who your father was except that he never bothered to stick around after dropping his load, and losing everyone else who's ever seemed to care about you except your pokemon..." I took a deep breath and calmed myself down. "I can't know precisely what you feel, but I can make a good guess. For starters, don't blame yourself for not being there, or for being alive now when they aren't."
She looked sharply at me, and I gave her a wan smile. "Trust me, I've been down that road more than once. A very wise man once told me that you can't live in the world that might have been, only the one that is." I shrugged helplessly. "It's like, you don't fight yourself over decisions and events that already happened. You can't go back, only forward."
I heard a muffled sound which might have been a sardonic laugh. I rolled my eyes. "Or you could do what I do, pretend you don't care, and secretly plot revenge and dire things against the person-slash-persons-slash-universe who did this to you. I definitely recommend the other method, though. Revenge and self-delusion are two really, really good ways to fuck your life up permanently."
Despite my teasing tone, she seemed to consider my words seriously. "You know a lot about this stuff, don't you?" she asked.
"Like I said, I've been down that road before."
"When?" she asked. I heaved a sigh of relief as I saw her step away from the edge of the abyss, both literally and metaphorically, weighed the merits of silence over the possibility of letting my own pain help someone else, and shrugged.
"It's not a long story, and I'm not much of a storyteller." I sat down and patted the ground next to me. "But I'll give it a shot." I waited until she was positioned and ready to hear. I didn't want to repeat anything.
"I'm a former Pokemon Ranger," I told her. "Beni is my partner, but you know that rangers are usually paired with other rangers for their missions, right?" She nodded. She was the Champion, after all; she probably knew as much about the Academy as I did.
"Well," I continued, "It was my first mission. I was really happy to be out of the Academy, let me tell you..."
* * *
"Yay!" I cheered, dancing a jig on the road. Claire looked over at me, an amused smile on her face.
"Tough times, eh kid?" she asked. Her partner, a rough-looking Machoke, grunted as he heaved a medium-sized boulder out of the path.
"You better believe it!" I exclaimed. "Exams for this, that, and the other. I'll be glad if I never have to touch another book again, and that's the truth."
*Your education is never finished,* Beni chided. She marched beside me, ears and eyes alert for any signs of trouble.
"Listen to the dog, probie. She's got the right idea."
"Okay, Claire," I agreed. I'd probably have agreed to a human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism to get out of the classroom, though.
"The mission should have been a simple one," I told Cynthia. "A group of hikers had been seen entering a cave near Slateport. Some of their friends reported hearing a loud crashing noise, and when they went to investigate, there had been a collapse. Claire, having the strongest pokemon at the Academy, was sent to investigate. As the ranking new graduate, I was paired with her to get some experience, and hopefully not slow her down any. The theory was that Machoke would easily clear the cave entrance, and that the hikers would then be set free. As it turned out, things weren't quite that simple."
The hikers' friends showed us to the cave. It wasn't particularly large, more of chunk out of a hillside. That's what I thought, anyway, until Machoke started to move the piled boulders. I noticed that the rock he was pulling out didn't seem to have come from the same stuff that we could see just inside the cave.
"This looks much older than the rest," Claire observed, confirming my suspicion. "It's almost as though it fell from somewhere." She looked cautiously up at the ceiling, but it was solid.
I considered making a suggestion, but held silent. My patience was soon defeated by my eagerness to prove useful. "There are some rocky areas just uphill from here," I commented, taking her arm and pointing outside. "Maybe some fell from there."
"Maybe," Claire said with equanimity, but I could tell she had already disregarded my suggestion. Machoke made some gestures and pointed further into the cave.
*Machoke says that he's found the survivors... or what should have been the survivors,* Beni translated to me. Claire required no translation; Machoke had been her partner for years.
"Come on," Claire called, already heading deeper inside. She nearly tripped over some small black objects on the floor. I recognized the shapes, but it took me crucial moments to accept that, yes, those were A) human bones, and B) had been stripped clean of flesh, blood, everything. They were as perfect as laboratory examples, but I somehow doubted that that was what they were. On top of that, they appeared to have been burned enough to give them a polished obsidian look, but not enough to actually burn to ashes.
"What the hell?" I asked the cave. The air and walls gave me no reply, but Claire thwacked me on the top of my head.
"Quiet," she whispered. "Have some respect for the dead."
We walked further in, Beni providing the light by carefully placed sparks in her fur. The stalagmites and stalactites created strange shadows reminiscent of teeth on the walls, and more than once I found myself looking over my shoulder in the conviction that something was following us. Each time, though, there was nothing there.
*This doesn't feel right,* Beni commented, crystallizing my own thoughts.
"How so?" I murmured to her, trying not to distract Claire from her own investigations.
*This hill should be honeycombed with caves. But there's only a few, and not particularly complicated ones at that.* Her expression didn't change-at that time, I wasn't skilled enough to read pokemon expressions-but her mental voice took on a hint of a thoughtful frown. *It's the sort of structure I'd expect from a pokemon lair, in fact.*
THAT, I thought Claire ought to know.
"Claire?" I called, raising my voice slightly. She looked back.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Beni thinks this cave is a lot like a pokemon lair."
Claire frowned. "There aren't any signs that anything's living here," she stated thoughtfully. She shook her head. "If it is, it hasn't been used for a while." She turned back to Machoke and continued with her thoughts. I sighed. At the Ranger Academy, we had been taught to look for signs of life in caves and in various other habitats. One of those was the bones of previous kills, and I couldn't help remembering the bones of the hikers near the entrance. I had seen bones before, and bodies, but none of them had disturbed me so much as those had.
"We traveled for a while into the cave," I continued. "It wasn't very complicated, as Beni had noticed. In fact, it was essentially just one long hallway, with small rooms branching out from it, none of which went very deep. It was in one of these that we discovered what had attacked the hikers. A large mouth gaped out at us from the furthest room, and a huge form propelled itself through the rock wall, attempting to block our escape. Without waiting for a command, Claire's Machoke jumped in front of it and used his strength to hold it back. We ran."
"It's blocked, Claire," I shouted, pointing forward. The violence of the battle behind us had collapsed the entrance again, and Beni wasn't strong enough to move the rocks by herself. I had a sudden image of the bones we had passed on our way in, and shuddered.
"This way," Claire ordered, pulling on my collar. I recalled Beni into her pokeball as I turned to follow my instructor. She led me to a room we had passed earlier, with a small hole in the wall, like a window, opening out onto the hillside. It was too small for Claire, but not quite for me. I looked at her.
"Git, boy!" Claire shouted at me, pushing me away from her. I stumbled on my way to the window, and she snarled with frustration. "Here," she said, picking me up by my belt. She started shoving me through the hole and I scrambled with my hands and elbows as soon as I could reach the other side. I fell out into fresh air and grass, and looked back inside.
"It's safe!" I shouted at Claire, oblivious to the impossibility of the task. "Give me your hands!"
"Machoke's not back yet!" she said, shaking her head. "Go get help!"
I nodded, and summoned Beni.
"Find those picnickers we saw a few days ago. I'll try to find another entrance to the cave." I looked back inside. "I'll be there as soon as I can, Claire!"
"Negative, 'cruit," Claire ordered. "You find that other entrance, you wait there for me, clear?"
She disappeared before I could reply, and I nodded firmly to myself. Claire needed help, not an argument. I started off on a steady jog around the hill, determined to have found that entrance before Beni returned with help.
I hadn't made it more than fifty yards when a rumbling deep inside the hill shook my off my feet. With a sense of dread, I looked behind me and saw the entire hill start to sink in upon itself. I raced back to the opening I had left Claire at. It was already shut tight, and I barely dodged as a boulder came rumbling down past me. I set my heels and slid the rest of the way down the hill, scanning each side as it collapsed in the hope that the... cave in? Explosion? Whatever it had been, I hoped it would create a new exit for Claire to get out from, once she found Machoke.
When Beni arrived with the picnickers forty-five minutes later, she found me back up the hill, trying to dig my way in. They fanned out to search for any entrances or exits I had missed, but they too found nothing. They left after an hour or two of searching, with my curses in their ears.
* * *
"They didn't deserve it," I told Cynthia, taking a drink of water from the flask in my pocket. "If I have any other regrets about that day, it's that I was so rude to those who were only trying to help.
"I waited outside that cave for four days. Beni finally had to run all the way back to the Academy to get someone to come fetch me, because I refused to leave, certain that Claire would emerge at any moment. The Academy director himself was the only one who seemed willing to break the bad news.
"Psychic pokemon at the Academy keep constant tabs on all rangers in the field. The Kadabra whose job it had been to watch the two of us had been actively linked with Claire at the moment of the final collapse, and had been unconscious for three days afterward. When it awoke, it told the director that Claire had been killed by a piece of the cave's ceiling as it fell, just after she helped me get free. The council delivered a verdict against Claire, deciding that she had refused to heed several warnings that the investigation was growing hazardous and had also refused to request assistance from the Academy when it became obvious that the job would be much larger than it had seemed.
"It's taken me years to believe that it wasn't my fault that she died, that saving me hadn't delayed her too long to escape, and there are still nights where my dreams make it hard to accept that," I concluded. "Ultimately, though, Beni had as much to do with that as I did. There was only so much self-loathing and self-pitying that she was willing to put up with, and I was almost relieved when she stopped being sympathetic and snapped at me instead."
Cynthia was silent for several minutes after I finished my story. Then she leaned over and hugged me fiercely.
"Thank you," she whispered. "I know that can't have been easy for you."
"Hun," I said, putting a finger on her nose and tapping it gently. "Haven't you heard? I'm a Pokemon Ranger, Coordinator and Trainer. I can't do anything the easy way."
That startled a giggle out of her, far more of one than my feeble joke deserved. She hugged me again slightly more gently and stood, brushing off her coat.
"I should go to bed," she said. "Good night, Zachary."
"Zach," I corrected firmly. "Zachary is for when I'm in trouble."
"I've not known you for very long, but I'm fairly certain you're always in trouble." She left without a backwards glance, and I wondered briefly if there had been an invitation somewhere in there that I had missed. Well, no matter, I told myself as I stood. My life was complicated enough already. Myself took some convincing, however, and so I was distracted when Cammy snuck up beside me.
"You like her, don't you?" she asked, almost accusing. Venus was on her shoulder, looking at me cutely.
"I respect her," I corrected, after willing my blood pressure below breech levels. "And I respect her grief. I know what it's like to lose everything you once knew."
Cammy considered that for much of the walk back. "I see," she said as we arrived by the banked campfire. She didn't say another word, but slipped inside the tent with the Mawile. I smiled. Now that Cammy was gone, I was willing to think, quite privately, that Cynthia had had a certain pleasant amount of squish to her when she'd hugged me. Her outfit had been too thick to feel much through, but there had definitely been curves in all the right places.
I finished kicking dirt over the fire, having placed several coals in the sand-filled box I carried for the purpose. I hadn't used it in years, since I'd gotten Beni, but old habits die hard. That done, I hung my shirt and duster over a tree branch to air, and slipped inside the tent in just my jeans. It was a cool night, but not brisk; the air felt nice on my skin.
"Hiyas, Zach!" Cammy said as she jumped up. Somehow she felt different from how she normally did, and I realized why as I inspected a corner of the tent. Her limited clothing was piled there: shorts, tank top and charm bracelet. Which meant that Cammy was...
"I'm naked!" she informed me happily.
"I see that," I said, cautiously.
"I want you to be naked too!" And without further warning, she yanked my jeans down to my ankles.
"Ow!" I yelped as the zipper caught the hair on my legs.
"Sorry," Cammy apologized contritely. She took much more time removing my boxer shorts, and she clapped her paws together cheerfully as Little Me sprang to full attention in front of her. "Oh, did I do that?" she mused. I rolled my eyes.
"Definitely time to start locking up my magazines," I said to nobody in particular.
For the second time in a week I felt Cammy put a paw on my cock, but instead of taking it into her mouth, she started pulling on it.
"Is this how you do it?" she asked me, sounding for all the world like she was asking for instructions on fishing or pitching a tent, rather than sex.
"Not quite," I admitted after a moment of having my foreskin tugged around. I reached down and positioned her paw properly. "Now, gently slide up and down."
She began to obey me, and I started to relax, lying back and stretching out. Cammy went with me, still gently jerking me off. As soon as I was lying down, she put a paw under my balls and started massaging them in time with her strokes. I was enjoying the sensation of not rushing; my first time, with Beni, had been mostly about her urgent need, and my inexperience, and had been over before it really started.
Cammy bent over my shaft and started licking the head. An electric jolt went through me at the first contact, and I moaned softly, resisting the urge to try to force her into closer contact. I wanted to let her choose the pace this time, and so she did, speeding up slightly on her own accord. Her soft paws molded my flesh like a sculptor molding clay, gently, delicately, but with the firmness of someone who knows what they want and knows how to get it. It occurred to me, in my somewhat hazy mind, that locking up my magazines might not be the brightest thing to do. Perhaps instead I ought to see that she got variety?
"Does that feel good?" Cammy asked me. I was not able to decide if she was still copying from my magazines or if it was a genuine question. I decided to answer it anyway.
"Very good," I admitted, my hands clenching the sleeping bag beneath me.
"Yay!" she exclaimed, and bent to her task with new vigor, such that I clenched my teeth to keep from crying out in sudden ecstasy.
"If you keep that up," I warned her slightly breathlessly, "I'll... on your face..."
She nodded understanding but didn't slacken her pace. Apparently, that was exactly what she wanted, and so I let go of the last bits of control I had summoned and sank into the waves of pleasure emanating from my groin.
I felt the first spurt of cum just as she pulled back; it hit her on the top of her snout, and she giggled as more landed in her open mouth. That giggle was almost painfully erotic to my ears; I'd always been a sucker for porn where the girl seemed to be enjoying herself.
Cammy licked her snout with her long nose, grabbing every last drop of my cum.
"I kinda prefer that," she said with a smile. "It's like a game!"
I couldn't help myself. I burst out laughing at the idea. Cammy seemed to understand and she started laughing too. The bizarre concept of a cumshot as a game was one only Cammy could suggest, but my amusement stemmed from the realization that it was perfectly in form for Cammy, and Cammy's laughter was the result of mine. One or the other of us would stop laughing and then start again, and so it was several minutes before we managed to catch our breath and settle in to serious business. It's a memory I knew I'd always treasure.
"I want to feel you inside me," Cammy said breathily. She was still trying to recover after laughing.
"Your wish is my command," I told her. "But the mind is willing and the body isn't." Cammy followed my gaze and grinned up at me.
"I can work with that," she informed me proudly, and proceeded to demonstrate. Soon, I was hard again, and Cammy lay down on the bedroll and spread her legs in invitation.
"Be careful," she whispered. I met her eyes and she winked. "The girls always say that in the movies," she explained.
I placed the tip of my cock at her entrance and she shivered at the foretaste of intimacy. Her legs reflexively tried to close, and she seemed to try to force herself closer to me or me closer to her. I smiled and pushed in. I met with an obstruction as soon as my head popped inside, though, and I blinked. I didn't know pokemon had hymens.
"It's okay." Cammy had divined the reason for my stopping... well, probably she actually felt me there, and knew why.
I looked up suddenly to see Venus perched on my backpack, watching. A paw was over her mouth, and I wondered if she was shocked. Then I looked down slightly and saw another paw held somewhere under her fur. Well, if she was doing what I thought she was, we couldn't have shocked her too much.
I lifted Cammy off the sleeping bag and held her closely against me. She wrapped her arms and legs around me and hugged me, licking my ear as I started trying to push further in. Her hymen gave almost without warning and I sank in an inch or two more before I could stop myself. I felt her flinch slightly, but she didn't say a word. It was hard to keep from moving inside her, but I wanted to wait until she was ready. She gave me a silent nod after a moment, and I flexed my hips and buried my entire shaft in her. She was far, far tighter than Beni, and I nearly exploded on the first stroke, despite having already cum. Fortunately for both of us, her arousal meant lots of lubrication.
"I. Love. This!" Cammy murmured, each word timed to my thrusts. I couldn't help but smile. Her tone was so innocent, as though she felt nothing wrong with simply enjoying sex. I let my mind pinwheel off as I considered the irony; it took sex with a pokemon for me to be willing to accept that it could be a loving, fun thing to do, rather than one fraught with guilt and pain.
"I do too," I whispered honestly. I was doubled over slightly to avoid pressing my head into the canvas of the tent, my back hurt, my legs hurt, and Cammy's weight was making my arms sore, but I had never felt better in my life. All pain was forgotten, and even the sadness in my heart at my memories faded into insignificance beside that meeting of mind and body that man and woman of any species can achieve. For an instant, I felt as though Cammy was sharing a little of her unfaltering cheerfulness and strength with me. It was a feeling too intense to last, however.
Cammy tensed suddenly, and I felt her muscles grip me. Her legs pulled me as close as she could and her arms tightened almost painfully behind my neck. She tilted her head upward and her muzzle met my lips. I opened my mouth and her tongue darted in to toy with mine. She cried out in ecstasy, twining her tongue with mine, and I felt her pussy grow very warm and very wet. She started shivering, and I would have worried that something was wrong, except that she was still moaning and pulling me closer and deeper. Her wriggling as she tried to force me in deeper in the aftermath of her climax rapidly brought me to my zenith. My head hit the top of the tent as I thrust my hips forward in one last motion and came deep inside of Cammy.
Afterward, we toppled slowly to the bedroll, breathing heavily and groping each other gently. My softening penis was still inside of Cammy, and we lay like that, eyes half-closed, for several minutes, before:
"Maw! Maw maw! Maw-wile!"
"Venus," Cammy relayed with a yawn, "wants to know if this means Beni isn't your mate anymore."
As exhausted as I suddenly was, I didn't consider my answer before replying. "I can have more than one mate," I mumbled, snuggling Cammy closer to me.
If I had been any more awake, Venus's sudden unmistakably calculating look would have set off alarms in my mind. Instead, I ignored it and fell into a comfortably dreamless sleep.
"Where are your friends?" Cynthia asked.
"Beni has gone to hunt down Gardevoir," I said. I glanced at Lucian and he nodded, indicating that Cynthia had told him the whole story. "Cammy has gone to look for a pokemon or human who might have witnessed what happened. I don't think there's much question myself."
A part of me wondered at my behavior. As little as half an hour ago, I had been in awe of the Champion, and now I was talking both to her and the man widely acknowledged as the strongest member of the Elite Four as though they were equals.
"Beni? Cammy?" Lucian asked. Cynthia seemed likewise confused, and I remembered that I had never introduced the two of them.
"Beni is my partner, an Arcanine. Cammy is a Lucario."
"Isn't she your partner?" Cynthia raised an eyebrow.
"Sort of," I said, "But it doesn't work quite the same way, I think. She seems to see us as the two main players, while she supports us. It's easier to think that way than try to sort out what's really going on." I changed the subject with some embarrassment. Better to not explain my difficulties with the word 'partner,' in recent context.
"So, any luck figuring anything out?"
"We've barely gotten finished discussing it," Cynthia explained. "Lucian, this is, as you've probably gathered..."
"Zach," Lucian finished. "A pleasure to meet you." He extended a hand with an air of noblesse oblige, and I shook it once before turning back to Cynthia.
"And?"
"And," Cynthia continued, "We had just decided to go search for witnesses and ask you if you thought you could find Gardevoir again. She seems to know a lot about what's going on."
"Since you seem to have both aspects covered," Lucian added without missing a beat, "We can start our investigation of this hole. I've honestly, in all my days as a trainer and as a Psychic, never seen anything quite like it." He rose and strode to the door, holding it open for Cynthia. "After you," he said with a bow. I watched their eyes meet for a moment and shivered. There was a not-quite-visible malice between the two of them, something I didn't quite understand.
The three of us...
(A tugging on my earlobe.)
Sorry, the four of us walked around the outside of the chasm. Now that we had completely circuited it, I could see it was in fact a circle, more of a pit than a chasm, and that it was almost perfectly round.
"Look at this," Lucian said at one point, leaning over and staring into the depths. "The sides are perfectly cut, almost as though by a razor. You said that some fell in?" This to Cynthia.
"Yes, about twenty or so minutes after I got here."
"Incredible. Yet the sides are still perfectly smooth. I can see the fence you told me about, though, it's only about a hundred feet or so below." He frowned in puzzlement. "That's about how deep the hole is, in fact. That's very strange."
"What do you mean?" I asked, finally unable to contain myself. He didn't seem to mind. Like many very bright people I have known, Lucian seemed to enjoy the opportunity to demonstrate his talents.
"It would seem to me that it would have been more likely to have something take an entire sphere, air, earth, everything, all at once. I would have expected this pit to go nearly two miles down, if I've estimated the radius of the hole properly. Instead, it's as though something just shaved the surface, going not very deep at all."
I considered that for a moment. "The hole has grown since I got here," I said. "Is it possible that the original pit was only..." I did the math quickly, "Two hundred feet in diameter?"
Lucian paused, his face paling. "Cynthia," he asked, his voice strange. "What would be in the center of this, right now, if Celestic were still here?"
Cynthia nodded slowly, her own face blank. "You're right," she confirmed grimly, "One hundred feet in every direction from the center would have just about taken the entirety of the ruins."
Venus made a shrill sound in my ear, causing me to wince and look at her. As I watched, she made several gestures with her hands, making them into a ball and then expanding them. Then she used her trap jaws to form a plane between the two cupped hands. She looked at me expectantly.
"I think what she's trying to say is," I said slowly, and paused. "Is that Celestic Town?" I asked, pointing at the black and yellow 'leaves.' "The place with all the humans?"
She nodded emphatically.
"Then what she's trying to say is that the center of town disappeared first." Lucian mused. Venus nodded even more emphatically and then spread her hands out across the top of her trap jaws.
"And then went outward from there, but not up or down," I translated. Venus pumped her little hands in the air and held them high over her head.
"What does that mean?" Cynthia asked.
"It means 'I won,'" I finished wryly. "What ruins are you talking about?"
"Celestic was built around a system of underground vaults in which the ancients maintained many shrines to various pokemon," Lucian explained. "Legendary ones such as Mew, Celebi, and many others we are only now starting to confirm the existence of."
"The deepest two," Cynthia concluded with an angry look, "are to Arceus and Darkrai, the Creator and Destroyer."
"I never heard that." Lucian sounded surprised, and I felt a brief flash of annoyance at his apparent assumption that he knew everything.
"The other shrines are maintained by the village as a whole," the Champion explained. Her measured tone suggested to me that she'd also caught his arrogance. "Those two, however, were only entered by my family. Arceus, because we believed he deserved the respect of slumber and peace, and Darkrai, because we feared his corruption."
"I see," I said. I was exaggerating a bit, but I thought I had the gist. "You're suggesting that Darkrai took his shrine with him, and everything around it went too?"
"That's possible," Cynthia said.
"But..." I added, since she seemed to hesitate.
"But," she admitted, "I think it's more likely that he took Arceus's shrine to prevent our gifts and prayers from reaching him."
* * *
I picked a spot to make camp a few hundred yards away from the pit. Nobody wanted to get too close in case it grew again, but I couldn't bring myself to go too far from it. It was strange, almost, how the sight seemed to fascinate me. I was watching it at the time, from the cover of the trees perhaps fifty feet away, when I saw a dark figure stepping up to the cliff. In the moonlight, a golden flash of hair winked at me from under a battered cap. I crept closer, and recognized Cynthia in the gloom. She didn't notice me, however, and I reconsidered my plan to approach her when I saw a glistening on her cheek. I remembered how she had told me that her family had lived in Celestic, and I wondered, now, at the way she had seemed so calm and collected ever since. I considered a moment and realized that Cynthia couldn't be much older than I was, since she had only been Champion for a few years.
"Hard, isn't it?" I asked, stepping quietly up beside her. "Losing them all."
"How could you know?" she asked bitterly. She didn't seem surprised at my presence. Perhaps I hadn't been quite as silent as I'd thought.
"Easy." I matched her bitter tone without effort; I had had plenty of time to rehearse this particular speech in my head. Eight years, now. "Losing your mother to AIDS, which she caught from having to whore herself out to men to pay the bills, not knowing who your father was except that he never bothered to stick around after dropping his load, and losing everyone else who's ever seemed to care about you except your pokemon..." I took a deep breath and calmed myself down. "I can't know precisely what you feel, but I can make a good guess. For starters, don't blame yourself for not being there, or for being alive now when they aren't."
She looked sharply at me, and I gave her a wan smile. "Trust me, I've been down that road more than once. A very wise man once told me that you can't live in the world that might have been, only the one that is." I shrugged helplessly. "It's like, you don't fight yourself over decisions and events that already happened. You can't go back, only forward."
I heard a muffled sound which might have been a sardonic laugh. I rolled my eyes. "Or you could do what I do, pretend you don't care, and secretly plot revenge and dire things against the person-slash-persons-slash-universe who did this to you. I definitely recommend the other method, though. Revenge and self-delusion are two really, really good ways to fuck your life up permanently."
Despite my teasing tone, she seemed to consider my words seriously. "You know a lot about this stuff, don't you?" she asked.
"Like I said, I've been down that road before."
"When?" she asked. I heaved a sigh of relief as I saw her step away from the edge of the abyss, both literally and metaphorically, weighed the merits of silence over the possibility of letting my own pain help someone else, and shrugged.
"It's not a long story, and I'm not much of a storyteller." I sat down and patted the ground next to me. "But I'll give it a shot." I waited until she was positioned and ready to hear. I didn't want to repeat anything.
"I'm a former Pokemon Ranger," I told her. "Beni is my partner, but you know that rangers are usually paired with other rangers for their missions, right?" She nodded. She was the Champion, after all; she probably knew as much about the Academy as I did.
"Well," I continued, "It was my first mission. I was really happy to be out of the Academy, let me tell you..."
* * *
"Yay!" I cheered, dancing a jig on the road. Claire looked over at me, an amused smile on her face.
"Tough times, eh kid?" she asked. Her partner, a rough-looking Machoke, grunted as he heaved a medium-sized boulder out of the path.
"You better believe it!" I exclaimed. "Exams for this, that, and the other. I'll be glad if I never have to touch another book again, and that's the truth."
*Your education is never finished,* Beni chided. She marched beside me, ears and eyes alert for any signs of trouble.
"Listen to the dog, probie. She's got the right idea."
"Okay, Claire," I agreed. I'd probably have agreed to a human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism to get out of the classroom, though.
"The mission should have been a simple one," I told Cynthia. "A group of hikers had been seen entering a cave near Slateport. Some of their friends reported hearing a loud crashing noise, and when they went to investigate, there had been a collapse. Claire, having the strongest pokemon at the Academy, was sent to investigate. As the ranking new graduate, I was paired with her to get some experience, and hopefully not slow her down any. The theory was that Machoke would easily clear the cave entrance, and that the hikers would then be set free. As it turned out, things weren't quite that simple."
The hikers' friends showed us to the cave. It wasn't particularly large, more of chunk out of a hillside. That's what I thought, anyway, until Machoke started to move the piled boulders. I noticed that the rock he was pulling out didn't seem to have come from the same stuff that we could see just inside the cave.
"This looks much older than the rest," Claire observed, confirming my suspicion. "It's almost as though it fell from somewhere." She looked cautiously up at the ceiling, but it was solid.
I considered making a suggestion, but held silent. My patience was soon defeated by my eagerness to prove useful. "There are some rocky areas just uphill from here," I commented, taking her arm and pointing outside. "Maybe some fell from there."
"Maybe," Claire said with equanimity, but I could tell she had already disregarded my suggestion. Machoke made some gestures and pointed further into the cave.
*Machoke says that he's found the survivors... or what should have been the survivors,* Beni translated to me. Claire required no translation; Machoke had been her partner for years.
"Come on," Claire called, already heading deeper inside. She nearly tripped over some small black objects on the floor. I recognized the shapes, but it took me crucial moments to accept that, yes, those were A) human bones, and B) had been stripped clean of flesh, blood, everything. They were as perfect as laboratory examples, but I somehow doubted that that was what they were. On top of that, they appeared to have been burned enough to give them a polished obsidian look, but not enough to actually burn to ashes.
"What the hell?" I asked the cave. The air and walls gave me no reply, but Claire thwacked me on the top of my head.
"Quiet," she whispered. "Have some respect for the dead."
We walked further in, Beni providing the light by carefully placed sparks in her fur. The stalagmites and stalactites created strange shadows reminiscent of teeth on the walls, and more than once I found myself looking over my shoulder in the conviction that something was following us. Each time, though, there was nothing there.
*This doesn't feel right,* Beni commented, crystallizing my own thoughts.
"How so?" I murmured to her, trying not to distract Claire from her own investigations.
*This hill should be honeycombed with caves. But there's only a few, and not particularly complicated ones at that.* Her expression didn't change-at that time, I wasn't skilled enough to read pokemon expressions-but her mental voice took on a hint of a thoughtful frown. *It's the sort of structure I'd expect from a pokemon lair, in fact.*
THAT, I thought Claire ought to know.
"Claire?" I called, raising my voice slightly. She looked back.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Beni thinks this cave is a lot like a pokemon lair."
Claire frowned. "There aren't any signs that anything's living here," she stated thoughtfully. She shook her head. "If it is, it hasn't been used for a while." She turned back to Machoke and continued with her thoughts. I sighed. At the Ranger Academy, we had been taught to look for signs of life in caves and in various other habitats. One of those was the bones of previous kills, and I couldn't help remembering the bones of the hikers near the entrance. I had seen bones before, and bodies, but none of them had disturbed me so much as those had.
"We traveled for a while into the cave," I continued. "It wasn't very complicated, as Beni had noticed. In fact, it was essentially just one long hallway, with small rooms branching out from it, none of which went very deep. It was in one of these that we discovered what had attacked the hikers. A large mouth gaped out at us from the furthest room, and a huge form propelled itself through the rock wall, attempting to block our escape. Without waiting for a command, Claire's Machoke jumped in front of it and used his strength to hold it back. We ran."
"It's blocked, Claire," I shouted, pointing forward. The violence of the battle behind us had collapsed the entrance again, and Beni wasn't strong enough to move the rocks by herself. I had a sudden image of the bones we had passed on our way in, and shuddered.
"This way," Claire ordered, pulling on my collar. I recalled Beni into her pokeball as I turned to follow my instructor. She led me to a room we had passed earlier, with a small hole in the wall, like a window, opening out onto the hillside. It was too small for Claire, but not quite for me. I looked at her.
"Git, boy!" Claire shouted at me, pushing me away from her. I stumbled on my way to the window, and she snarled with frustration. "Here," she said, picking me up by my belt. She started shoving me through the hole and I scrambled with my hands and elbows as soon as I could reach the other side. I fell out into fresh air and grass, and looked back inside.
"It's safe!" I shouted at Claire, oblivious to the impossibility of the task. "Give me your hands!"
"Machoke's not back yet!" she said, shaking her head. "Go get help!"
I nodded, and summoned Beni.
"Find those picnickers we saw a few days ago. I'll try to find another entrance to the cave." I looked back inside. "I'll be there as soon as I can, Claire!"
"Negative, 'cruit," Claire ordered. "You find that other entrance, you wait there for me, clear?"
She disappeared before I could reply, and I nodded firmly to myself. Claire needed help, not an argument. I started off on a steady jog around the hill, determined to have found that entrance before Beni returned with help.
I hadn't made it more than fifty yards when a rumbling deep inside the hill shook my off my feet. With a sense of dread, I looked behind me and saw the entire hill start to sink in upon itself. I raced back to the opening I had left Claire at. It was already shut tight, and I barely dodged as a boulder came rumbling down past me. I set my heels and slid the rest of the way down the hill, scanning each side as it collapsed in the hope that the... cave in? Explosion? Whatever it had been, I hoped it would create a new exit for Claire to get out from, once she found Machoke.
When Beni arrived with the picnickers forty-five minutes later, she found me back up the hill, trying to dig my way in. They fanned out to search for any entrances or exits I had missed, but they too found nothing. They left after an hour or two of searching, with my curses in their ears.
* * *
"They didn't deserve it," I told Cynthia, taking a drink of water from the flask in my pocket. "If I have any other regrets about that day, it's that I was so rude to those who were only trying to help.
"I waited outside that cave for four days. Beni finally had to run all the way back to the Academy to get someone to come fetch me, because I refused to leave, certain that Claire would emerge at any moment. The Academy director himself was the only one who seemed willing to break the bad news.
"Psychic pokemon at the Academy keep constant tabs on all rangers in the field. The Kadabra whose job it had been to watch the two of us had been actively linked with Claire at the moment of the final collapse, and had been unconscious for three days afterward. When it awoke, it told the director that Claire had been killed by a piece of the cave's ceiling as it fell, just after she helped me get free. The council delivered a verdict against Claire, deciding that she had refused to heed several warnings that the investigation was growing hazardous and had also refused to request assistance from the Academy when it became obvious that the job would be much larger than it had seemed.
"It's taken me years to believe that it wasn't my fault that she died, that saving me hadn't delayed her too long to escape, and there are still nights where my dreams make it hard to accept that," I concluded. "Ultimately, though, Beni had as much to do with that as I did. There was only so much self-loathing and self-pitying that she was willing to put up with, and I was almost relieved when she stopped being sympathetic and snapped at me instead."
Cynthia was silent for several minutes after I finished my story. Then she leaned over and hugged me fiercely.
"Thank you," she whispered. "I know that can't have been easy for you."
"Hun," I said, putting a finger on her nose and tapping it gently. "Haven't you heard? I'm a Pokemon Ranger, Coordinator and Trainer. I can't do anything the easy way."
That startled a giggle out of her, far more of one than my feeble joke deserved. She hugged me again slightly more gently and stood, brushing off her coat.
"I should go to bed," she said. "Good night, Zachary."
"Zach," I corrected firmly. "Zachary is for when I'm in trouble."
"I've not known you for very long, but I'm fairly certain you're always in trouble." She left without a backwards glance, and I wondered briefly if there had been an invitation somewhere in there that I had missed. Well, no matter, I told myself as I stood. My life was complicated enough already. Myself took some convincing, however, and so I was distracted when Cammy snuck up beside me.
"You like her, don't you?" she asked, almost accusing. Venus was on her shoulder, looking at me cutely.
"I respect her," I corrected, after willing my blood pressure below breech levels. "And I respect her grief. I know what it's like to lose everything you once knew."
Cammy considered that for much of the walk back. "I see," she said as we arrived by the banked campfire. She didn't say another word, but slipped inside the tent with the Mawile. I smiled. Now that Cammy was gone, I was willing to think, quite privately, that Cynthia had had a certain pleasant amount of squish to her when she'd hugged me. Her outfit had been too thick to feel much through, but there had definitely been curves in all the right places.
I finished kicking dirt over the fire, having placed several coals in the sand-filled box I carried for the purpose. I hadn't used it in years, since I'd gotten Beni, but old habits die hard. That done, I hung my shirt and duster over a tree branch to air, and slipped inside the tent in just my jeans. It was a cool night, but not brisk; the air felt nice on my skin.
"Hiyas, Zach!" Cammy said as she jumped up. Somehow she felt different from how she normally did, and I realized why as I inspected a corner of the tent. Her limited clothing was piled there: shorts, tank top and charm bracelet. Which meant that Cammy was...
"I'm naked!" she informed me happily.
"I see that," I said, cautiously.
"I want you to be naked too!" And without further warning, she yanked my jeans down to my ankles.
"Ow!" I yelped as the zipper caught the hair on my legs.
"Sorry," Cammy apologized contritely. She took much more time removing my boxer shorts, and she clapped her paws together cheerfully as Little Me sprang to full attention in front of her. "Oh, did I do that?" she mused. I rolled my eyes.
"Definitely time to start locking up my magazines," I said to nobody in particular.
For the second time in a week I felt Cammy put a paw on my cock, but instead of taking it into her mouth, she started pulling on it.
"Is this how you do it?" she asked me, sounding for all the world like she was asking for instructions on fishing or pitching a tent, rather than sex.
"Not quite," I admitted after a moment of having my foreskin tugged around. I reached down and positioned her paw properly. "Now, gently slide up and down."
She began to obey me, and I started to relax, lying back and stretching out. Cammy went with me, still gently jerking me off. As soon as I was lying down, she put a paw under my balls and started massaging them in time with her strokes. I was enjoying the sensation of not rushing; my first time, with Beni, had been mostly about her urgent need, and my inexperience, and had been over before it really started.
Cammy bent over my shaft and started licking the head. An electric jolt went through me at the first contact, and I moaned softly, resisting the urge to try to force her into closer contact. I wanted to let her choose the pace this time, and so she did, speeding up slightly on her own accord. Her soft paws molded my flesh like a sculptor molding clay, gently, delicately, but with the firmness of someone who knows what they want and knows how to get it. It occurred to me, in my somewhat hazy mind, that locking up my magazines might not be the brightest thing to do. Perhaps instead I ought to see that she got variety?
"Does that feel good?" Cammy asked me. I was not able to decide if she was still copying from my magazines or if it was a genuine question. I decided to answer it anyway.
"Very good," I admitted, my hands clenching the sleeping bag beneath me.
"Yay!" she exclaimed, and bent to her task with new vigor, such that I clenched my teeth to keep from crying out in sudden ecstasy.
"If you keep that up," I warned her slightly breathlessly, "I'll... on your face..."
She nodded understanding but didn't slacken her pace. Apparently, that was exactly what she wanted, and so I let go of the last bits of control I had summoned and sank into the waves of pleasure emanating from my groin.
I felt the first spurt of cum just as she pulled back; it hit her on the top of her snout, and she giggled as more landed in her open mouth. That giggle was almost painfully erotic to my ears; I'd always been a sucker for porn where the girl seemed to be enjoying herself.
Cammy licked her snout with her long nose, grabbing every last drop of my cum.
"I kinda prefer that," she said with a smile. "It's like a game!"
I couldn't help myself. I burst out laughing at the idea. Cammy seemed to understand and she started laughing too. The bizarre concept of a cumshot as a game was one only Cammy could suggest, but my amusement stemmed from the realization that it was perfectly in form for Cammy, and Cammy's laughter was the result of mine. One or the other of us would stop laughing and then start again, and so it was several minutes before we managed to catch our breath and settle in to serious business. It's a memory I knew I'd always treasure.
"I want to feel you inside me," Cammy said breathily. She was still trying to recover after laughing.
"Your wish is my command," I told her. "But the mind is willing and the body isn't." Cammy followed my gaze and grinned up at me.
"I can work with that," she informed me proudly, and proceeded to demonstrate. Soon, I was hard again, and Cammy lay down on the bedroll and spread her legs in invitation.
"Be careful," she whispered. I met her eyes and she winked. "The girls always say that in the movies," she explained.
I placed the tip of my cock at her entrance and she shivered at the foretaste of intimacy. Her legs reflexively tried to close, and she seemed to try to force herself closer to me or me closer to her. I smiled and pushed in. I met with an obstruction as soon as my head popped inside, though, and I blinked. I didn't know pokemon had hymens.
"It's okay." Cammy had divined the reason for my stopping... well, probably she actually felt me there, and knew why.
I looked up suddenly to see Venus perched on my backpack, watching. A paw was over her mouth, and I wondered if she was shocked. Then I looked down slightly and saw another paw held somewhere under her fur. Well, if she was doing what I thought she was, we couldn't have shocked her too much.
I lifted Cammy off the sleeping bag and held her closely against me. She wrapped her arms and legs around me and hugged me, licking my ear as I started trying to push further in. Her hymen gave almost without warning and I sank in an inch or two more before I could stop myself. I felt her flinch slightly, but she didn't say a word. It was hard to keep from moving inside her, but I wanted to wait until she was ready. She gave me a silent nod after a moment, and I flexed my hips and buried my entire shaft in her. She was far, far tighter than Beni, and I nearly exploded on the first stroke, despite having already cum. Fortunately for both of us, her arousal meant lots of lubrication.
"I. Love. This!" Cammy murmured, each word timed to my thrusts. I couldn't help but smile. Her tone was so innocent, as though she felt nothing wrong with simply enjoying sex. I let my mind pinwheel off as I considered the irony; it took sex with a pokemon for me to be willing to accept that it could be a loving, fun thing to do, rather than one fraught with guilt and pain.
"I do too," I whispered honestly. I was doubled over slightly to avoid pressing my head into the canvas of the tent, my back hurt, my legs hurt, and Cammy's weight was making my arms sore, but I had never felt better in my life. All pain was forgotten, and even the sadness in my heart at my memories faded into insignificance beside that meeting of mind and body that man and woman of any species can achieve. For an instant, I felt as though Cammy was sharing a little of her unfaltering cheerfulness and strength with me. It was a feeling too intense to last, however.
Cammy tensed suddenly, and I felt her muscles grip me. Her legs pulled me as close as she could and her arms tightened almost painfully behind my neck. She tilted her head upward and her muzzle met my lips. I opened my mouth and her tongue darted in to toy with mine. She cried out in ecstasy, twining her tongue with mine, and I felt her pussy grow very warm and very wet. She started shivering, and I would have worried that something was wrong, except that she was still moaning and pulling me closer and deeper. Her wriggling as she tried to force me in deeper in the aftermath of her climax rapidly brought me to my zenith. My head hit the top of the tent as I thrust my hips forward in one last motion and came deep inside of Cammy.
Afterward, we toppled slowly to the bedroll, breathing heavily and groping each other gently. My softening penis was still inside of Cammy, and we lay like that, eyes half-closed, for several minutes, before:
"Maw! Maw maw! Maw-wile!"
"Venus," Cammy relayed with a yawn, "wants to know if this means Beni isn't your mate anymore."
As exhausted as I suddenly was, I didn't consider my answer before replying. "I can have more than one mate," I mumbled, snuggling Cammy closer to me.
If I had been any more awake, Venus's sudden unmistakably calculating look would have set off alarms in my mind. Instead, I ignored it and fell into a comfortably dreamless sleep.