Destiny Village ~ Central Crossroads

[Dragonfree]

After parting with Brisa and Starr, Dave hurried in the direction of the guild. Mia? Where are you? I'm closing in on the central crossroads.

I'm in the training rooms at the Colosseum, she responded. It's nice. I've been there a lot. Nate has been teaching me sometimes.

Hold the fucking phone. Sorry, Nate has what?

He's good at battling. He doesn't like genetic engineering and still thinks you're lying about why you made us, but when we talk about fighting he makes sense.

Dave gritted his teeth. Mia, what the fuck. What -- why are you hanging out with that little dipshit out of all fucking people? The one who's like seconds away from trying to report me to child protection services?

I told him you just have brain problems but I don't think it changed anything. He said maybe we should leave you in the Voidlands if you wanted to be dead.

He just about had a fucking heart attack on the spot. You fucking WHAT, Mia.

He could feel her frowning in his head. You don't want me to talk about the brain problems.

I swear to God, stop saying 'brain problems', I feel like a fucking five-year-old having a stroke.

He felt her frowning again, but for the moment she didn't respond. Thank fuck for that. She did generally get that sometimes she shouldn't talk to particular people about particular things; she just didn't have a very good intuition for which things. He should've thought to just tell her explicitly: hey, Mia, maybe don't walk around explaining my 'brain problems' to people, and especially not people who think I'm pedophile Frankenstein?

He sprinted in the direction of the Colosseum, but before he could get very far he saw a familiar black shape zooming towards him and skidded to an awkward halt on the road. Mia landed smoothly in front of him, cocking her head, looking up at him.

It hit him all at once how small her familiar self was. He thought of her younger self, misshapen head, weird conical feet, no scythes yet, when he first started taking her out for hotdogs, and his breath hitched. "Hey, Mia."

Before he was quite sure what he was doing, he'd reached out a paw and pulled her to his chest. She stayed stiff, scythes down at her sides where they wouldn't touch him, and her body had the weirdest unsettling jellylike texture, but for the moment he didn't care. After a second, when he knew she'd be getting impatient, he released her carefully, let her step back.

"You're taller than me now," she said. "That's not right."

Before he could respond to that, her body started distorting and changing, growing. A strangled noise emerged from his throat, but all that happened was her body settled into a larger, more proportionate form, more like a regular Scyther with her head.

She looked at herself, satisfied. "Now we're both bigger. That's nice."

"...Sure. Yeah, that's nice."

"It's good that you're back," she said. "I like training with Nate but I didn't like that he wanted you to stay dead. I want to talk about science. And fix your brain."

Dave blinked at her for a moment, something tugging at his heart, then shook his head, chuckling. "Okay, Mia. Yeah, sure. We can do that."

"I won't talk about your brain to more people."

"That'd be great. Thanks."

The two of them walked back towards the guild.

<><><><><>​

 

[Ambyssin]

With Cola still on his person, Bahamut flew into the air. The problem with his new form was that there were few places he could float without attracting stares. He might've attributed it to his size, but it was far more likely that he looked too much like the guy who almost cratered the city.

... of course, being up in the sky was probably an even worse idea, but whatever. He was already up.

"Technically speaking, nobody ever plans on being created." Bahamut looked at his bag as he spoke. "It's the creators that do the planning. Whether it's two parents conceiving an egg or... some big fuzzy thing with his gut stuck in a fence making a gaseous cloud. In some respects, you're a unique case, having all this sentience at a young age. Both a blessing and curse."

 

[Namohysip]

Cola was curled up around the inert Ultra Stone in silence, huffing. "...It's dumb," he said. "How come he couldn't just make a new god entirely? It haaaad to be himself? Talk about ego." The irony that he was criticizing, technically, himself, was lost on him.

Bahamut was not alone in the skies. Several Pokemon flew at higher or lower altitudes, apparently regularly enjoying the cold skies for morning flights of leisure. Among them was a great, black dragon with a crackling turbine for a tail, who seemed to, perhaps by coincidence, be drifting in-step with Bahamut on similar paths.

 

[Ambyssin]

Bahamut hummed. "As I said, blessing and a curse. You have a lot to think about. Something ninety-nine percent of people don't have to deal with when they're born. Maybe you should try to consider some of the positive aspects of your... current existence. You're surrounded by others. Potential friends."

His ESP wasn't tricking him. Zekrom was flying along. Well, that saved him the trouble of searching for her. "Speaking of which," he spun around, "good day, Zekrom."

 

[Namohysip]

"Bahamut!" Zekrom replied in her usual, cheerful tone. "So good to see you! On a leisure flight as well?"

Cola shrank down and decided to say nothing. Whether he was considering Bahamut's words or not was a mystery.

There was an electrical crackle to a lot of Zekrom's flight patterns, and she radiated quite a lot of power. Looked like she also hit the gym often, somehow.

 

[Ambyssin]

Bahamut's expression was naturally stoic. His eyes were tough to read with their lack of a proper contour. But he was studying Zekrom, while trying to get memories of his own — or, rather, the last zekrom in the line of Sage colleagues — out of his mind. Not as outwardly cheerful. Always focused on being courteous, because that was idealistic. Not like Reshiram, the nervous wreck whose bedhead made some forests look bare by comparison because, in his words, "I'm only being true to myself."

"It's hard to go around the town looking like this," Bahamut said. "And it's closer to the sun up here. I like light. It's one of the only pleasures I get around this planet."

He tilted his head. "Actually, Arceus has me going around recording day to day activities for Cola. Something about visual learning being more... stimulating than a bunch of journals. So, what do you do for work?"

 

[Namohysip]

"For work?" Zekrom tilted her head, eyes trailing into the bag where Cola's wispy figure tried to shrink even further. "Well, I'm the head of Destiny Village's ethics commission. It's not very often, but when something truly controversial makes its way up to the top of the system, I'm the one who makes a decision on what to do." She made a twirl in the air, grabbing something from her bag. "Though, for the time being, I don't have anything scheduled in for today. I do want to observe a conference about Porygon augmentation later today, though..."

 

[Ambyssin]

Ethics commission? Porygon augmentation? "So... you have some relation to Chip, then? The one that gave us all our badges." Bahamut scooped his out and waved it around. "We've still been trying to figure out about the glitch that led to fake messages being sent to the team. You wouldn't have any, err, ethical insight about that, would you?"

He was studying her, but his face didn't indicate as such. ESP gently probing. Not enough to be detected, but enough to try and sense if something was off. If there was a tiny shift in aura, intentional or not.

 

[Namohysip]

Zekrom did show a small shift, like she was conflicted about something. A tension. But she was oddly open otherwise, like she would be easy to read for mundane things. "Oh, well, I think I do," Zekrom said. "That was a glitch, and Chip knew about it. He had been using it for other matters... but I sorted it out, and Reshiram and Chip had already patched it out." She nodded, humming. "Poor dear overworked himself and didn't know what to do. I should have paid more attention..."

Aside from intentionally covering up what it was, Zekrom seemed entirely honest. What was covered seemed to be for confidentiality rather than anything nefarious.

 

[Ambyssin]

"I see." Bahamut's tail lazily swayed back and forth. It didn't seem like she was intentionally withholding anything. More like... she didn't want to step on Reshiram's toes? That was the impression he got, anyway. "What do ideals mean to you, Zekrom?"

 

[Namohysip]

Zekrom smiled a little. She was probably asked that question a lot. Cola peeked out from within the bag, wondering if she saw him.

"Something to strive for," she replied simply.

 

[Ambyssin]

"... tch. That answer is blander than a loaf of white bread," Bahamut said, upper wings crossed. "Where's your sense of drive? Have you been on the job so long it's bored you?" A slight smirk tugged at his beak. "The Zekrom I knew back home would need reminders to use her indoor voice."

 

[Namohysip]

Zekrom giggled. "Well, bread is bland because it's meant to go with many things," she explained to Bahamut. "It isn't as if I can be specific with something that drives my whole being."

 

[Ambyssin]

"I would think that would be something you'd want to be specific on," Bahamut deadpanned. "My whole being is driven by betrayal-induced paranoia and a sense of hopelessness leading to anger and aggression."

A long pause. "See? Easy."

 

[Namohysip]

"Well, at least you're honest about it," Zekrom said, and there was practically a sweat drop going down her forehead. "Though, you handle yourself well against the Blacklight if that's really how it goes. That power normally feeds and amplifies those feelings."

 

[Ambyssin]

Bahamut shrugged. "When one is irredeemably corrupted back home, one gets used to such experiences." His wings drooped. "It's... unfortunate that my teammates are getting things so much worse than I am. But I'm not a people person. Haven't been one in a long time. So, I can't really help them with their... whatever."

 

[Namohysip]

Zekrom nodded. "Knowing your limits is a good thing, too. Even we have limits, no matter how old we are." She drifted left to continue circling around Destiny Village. "I heard about your world. I'm very sorry for the circumstances you've come from." She nodded. "And thank you for lending a hand here regardless."

 

[Ambyssin]

A bitter laugh. "Well, our team's boss didn't give us much of a say in the matter. Tried to sucker us in with a pep talk about having heroics, but I believe he summoned us at complete random. And now we can't leave."

He shook his head. "It still amazes me that someone like him has a mate. And that she can be saved. And have a... happy ending. Which would probably hurt him. But maybe he's a masochist."

Bahamut then remembered Cola was in his bag. "Err, well, some mates like to cause each other pain. For pleasure." His tail twitched. "Mortals are weird."

 

[Namohysip]

Cola's circles twisted in confusion.

"You know, it's really odd to see someone like Dark Matter behave the way he does." Zekrom sighed. "I thought something like that would be impossible. And yet here we have living proof that maybe, with some... cosmic interference, it's not a lost cause. Maybe that's why the Dark Matter of our world gave up mid-fight..."

 

[Ambyssin]

"Gave up?" Bahamut hummed in thought. "No one mentioned that to me."