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"Fuck off," Dave snapped at Bahamut. He looked around at the crowd of spirits grappling with the Blacklight puppets. Owen was telling them telepathically, urgently, to call on people they knew, get them to help. Dave rolled his eyes. "You know what? Hey, Arceus?" he shouted, trying to find if...

Dave struck the thing, and then fell back, Shadows curling around him, shaking on his feet with exertion. Moving was like swimming through sludge, his head pounding. Maybe he could manage one more strike. But then again all his body wanted to do was stand, right here, and wait for whatever was...

Dave sat there, holding Mia, in the vortex of everything, and listened to his teammates prattling on about hope and faith and defiance, and Soda's dead, his heart pounding in his ears, nausea crawling in his throat. Half a foot in the grave. He'd been run ragged just by a fucking Colosseum...

The cannonblast was deafening, and one moment Soda was there and the next he just wasn't. Dave looked wildly around for where he'd pop back out of the air. Owen was yelling that he couldn't find him. "Soda...? Hey, Soda!" Didn't mean anything. Soda'd spent half their Colosseum fight fucking...

Dave glanced back toward where the Light Power had been, where Soda was still struggling with his powers, mind racing over whether to ask him to do whatever it was he was going to to protect them against the oncoming barrage, but before he could ask, he noticed the small blue Pokémon crawling...

"Well, your dad managed it somehow, didn't he?" Dave pointed out. His gaze lingered on Koa. This kid, off to fight a god, befriend them, and... have fucking Pokémon battles apparently. Sounded like something Jean'd declare her intention to do if legendaries were real. "...Probably won't...

Dave peered at Koa. For a moment he wondered if he was just fucking with him, but no, Koa was way too earnest about all this. At least he did insist you could only catch it if it wanted you to. "Well, uh, if you did catch a legendary, you'd better be real careful. Even if you only have the...

Dave blinked. "Catch one? Like, in a Pokéball? You can do that?" Well, there was an unsettling thought. "I mean, improving legendary-human relations sounds great if you've got to have legendaries, so long as nobody's encouraging them to do any rewriting of realities or murder or brainwashing...

Dave raised an eyebrow. "I mean, yeah, I care about a lot of things. Dunno if they're the same things you care about." Change things a little. "So what is it you want to change, anyway?" Dave asked, casually.

Dave took a sharp breath. "I mean, who the fuck doesn't want the world to be better." "Wanting the world to be better means you care about something. Wanting the world to be perfect is delusional. Going out to make it perfect by seizing the power of legendaries to rewrite reality is fucking...

Maybe if I’d— Did Koa think this was his fault somehow? That archetypal thing where children of divorced parents think they’re somehow responsible for their fights, but on steroids? Christ. “Look… when you say you want to save him, what’s that mean? You’re hoping to get him out of the Reverse...

Dave squinted at him. “Well, I don’t know about you, but to me ridding the world of imperfection sounds like a euphemism for fucking eugenics or something. If he didn’t mean it that way he really needs a better PR team.” Koa still looked miserable, staring downward. “I mean, wanting less...

Oh. Oh, shit. What the fuck. "Uh. Jesus, that's..." He paused. Koa was looking away like he wished he hadn't said it at all. "I mean, why did he want to rewrite reality? Soda had that whole warped justification about saving his partner from a universe he thought she was trapped in, and wanting...

...Right. That was called the Reverse World too. Should've connected that, even if his universe wasn't like Cibus otherwise. Not like it sounded like actually the same thing, but. "Well, if you say he got what he wanted, and he can't try to rewrite reality anymore, doesn't that mean everyone...

"So is that, uh, some kind of hell-dimension?" Christ. Was that why the kid was asking? The notion of infinite punishment for finite sins?

Legendaries. Of course. And this kid had previously insisted having legendaries was good actually? "Okay, Jesus. So Giratina, what, killed him?"

'Team Galactic'. Of course. Sure, why not. "Okay, so this guy wanted to rewrite the universe. I'm guessing the reason we're talking about him and not some other random nut is that he actually got somewhere with that? He get some weird powers like Soda or what?"

...Where exactly was he going with this. "I mean, we have cartoons featuring a 'Team Rocket'. Maybe there's a 'Team Magma' there too, I don't exactly pay that much attention to it. Our actual existing criminal organizations have less stupid names. Why?"

Dave narrowed his eyes at him. "Look, what are we really talking about here? Because it doesn't sound like it's Soda."

Dave peered at Koa. Were they still talking about Soda? "Redemption, I mean, what's that even mean? It's not like there's actually some grand cosmic ledger where once you've done X amount of good things you've officially made up for whatever bad things." He rubbed at his eye. How did he get...