Interloping
- Pronouns
- she/her
- Partners
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Interloping
One-shot / 4.6k words / Rated T for major character death and graphic violence
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The final actions I took in my world are seared into my brain forever. I was only seventeen.
It was a late shift that night. I had an essay due the next morning, but the sight of my binder on the particleboard table made me wince. I was cooking up a sob story to feed the professor for an extension as I stripped away my grease-odored uniform and brushed my teeth.
Somewhere else I awoke from dreamless sleep.
Lilac clouds swirled over a violet sky, and gentle lightning arced where the trees kissed the ground.
There’s a feeling you get inside a Distortion-Dome, a physical sensation, that is difficult to describe but impossible to forget. It’s a deep sense of wrongness that permeates your bones. Like you were somewhere you shouldn’t be and could be caught any moment. Like you’d snuck into the bedroom of God.
It’s hard to sit still with that feeling, but you must learn if you want to survive.
I don’t know how long I was in the Distortion alone. My pajamas did little to protect against the cold. I was fortunate not to have encountered any rogue pokémon—just in case, I pressed my back against a cliff, shivering as I watched for threats with wide eyes.
When I first saw Ojiisan’s silhouette cresting the hill, I thought he was a pokémon and realized I had no plan. Panic gave way to relief when I realized he was just an old man—spindly limbs, crooked gait, wide hands and generous eyes that twinkled ethereal periwinkle under the black light, like a glacier before the sun.
“Hello,” he said, bowing despite his huge rucksack. “I confess you seem—”
“You have to help me.” I clung tight to his trousers. “I’m not supposed to—I’m not...”
The old man closed his eyes and nodded deeply. “Yes.” Taking a step back, he lowered his rucksack to the ground with a groan and began rummaging. “You should not be here. In fact, this place is an aberration. I am sure you deduced this, as it’s plain to see.”
I didn’t say anything. From his pack he retrieved a fine set of clothes. The kimono was unpatterned but dyed a rich emerald.
“Th-Thank you...” I said. “You don’t need this...?”
“They call me a fool,” he said with a huff. “I always bring three outfits when I visit a Distortion. One in case of emergency. One in case of another emergency. And one in case of interlopers, like yourself.” He patted the outfit. “Too small for me.”
He looked away while I changed.
He could fit a lot in that pack, I learned. Enough to build a fire and brew tea. I accepted it graciously and its warmth healed me, made me human.
We spoke as we enjoyed our tea, and he explained to me the nature of this place: a distortion in the fabric of reality. One of many. They roamed spacetime, ensnaring the souls of pokémon and, rarely, humans. Ferrying their captive souls, they edged along the landscape for a time, a great dome over the country, and then vanished, only to reappear at another point in time and space.
“So you come to these places on purpose?” I asked him.
He took a long sip and nodded. “Yes. They are dangerous, true. But there are many materials that gather here—important materials needed to run our society. Expensive materials.” He gave a sardonic smile. “You can make a living collecting them, if you have pokémon to protect you... and I do.”
His quaking hand sent ripples through his tea.
“Isn’t it a bit dangerous for someone like you?” I asked thoughtlessly. When a grin split his face I ducked my head in shame. “Sorry, Ojiisan. I mean no disrespect. It just seems perilous, and your bag seems so heavy...”
The old man laughed heartily. “Don’t worry about me. There’s still some fire in these old bones. The day I can’t carry this pack around anymore... Well, then it will be time. My wife passed away many years ago. I have long awaited the day we meet again.” The intensity of his gaze forced me to look away.
“So...,” I said after a while. “You can get me out of here?”
The old man’s face fell, and my stomach plummeted. “Perhaps. It’s complicated, you understand. My soul is not ensnared, so I can pass through the boundary of the Distortion freely. But to smuggle an ensnared soul across the boundary, you must suppress its qi. For a pokémon, this is simple enough; one need only capture it with a poké ball. As for humans, ah...”
“So it can’t be done?” I demanded.
“Not so. It has been done. Ingo-taichou... Well, never mind him. It only requires some coordination. For now, what’s important is that you can survive until then.”
I nodded, and Ojiisan proceeded to teach me many things. He gave me a small pack of my own, for carrying the equipment he lent me: a knife, a slab of flint, twenty feet of hemp-cord, a metal jug, a sack of rice, a pound of salt, a donabe, a set of chopsticks, and a handaxe. He built me a simple shelter, demonstrating carefully how it was done, and taught me how to harvest the brightly-colored shards that materialized within the Distortion. When placed in a circle around an encampment, I learned, they formed an invisible barrier that no pokémon would cross.
When he had taught me all he could, I helped him put his sack back on. My anxiety at being left alone must have been clear, because he gripped my trembling hands in his weathered ones and spoke firmly:
“I will see you again. Distortions wander spacetime, yes, but they cluster around the same locations and timeframes. I will bring you more supplies and continue working on a plan to break you free. Understand?” When I didn’t answer, he gave a gentle smile. “Be bold. You will survive.”
The fire was still aglow when he disappeared over the hilltop, but the world felt much colder.
A few hours later, the scenery around me blurred and then rematerialized in a new shape, and the fire was gone.
Ojiisan returned many times, always with fresh supplies for me. Over time I became quite adept at building and maintaining my shelters and attuned myself to the patterns of the Distortion. With each of Ojiisan’s visits, my possessions grew in number—a parcel of salted fish here, an oil lamp and a proper set of boots there, even the occasional sack of potato mochi. As the comforts I had once known became distant memories, the new life I led grew familiar and its rhythms comforting.
There is no way of knowing how much time I spent in this manner, as the sun does not set over the Distortion-Dome. It must have been weeks or months. Eventually, Ojiisan’s visits grew fewer and farther between.
“The Distortion may be preparing to migrate to another spacetime locus,” he theorized grimly. “But don’t worry. I have great confidence we will liberate you before that happens.”
Though I needed his aid less with each passing day, I grew lonely without his kind eyes and wistfully recounted stories of nights beneath the Sinnohan stars—or Hisuian, as he preferred to say. I was always craving his return, and repeated his assurances of eventual freedom to me. But as the days slipped by, I began to doubt and fear.
I found myself at my lowest point when he had been absent for what felt like weeks. His previous visits had only been a week apart at most. Eventually, I began to accept that the Distortion may have migrated, or perhaps that the old man had died.
A creeping sense of desolation began to strangle my spirit. What was the sense in living this hard life day in and day out when there was no hope of salvation? Would I die in this place? I entertained the thought of attempting an escape myself. After all, how could I know what the old man said about my qi was true? I’d never even tried to escape for fear of being attacked by a wild pokémon. But if the alternative was death anyway, it might be worth a try.
One morning I heard the distant roar of a luxray and, deciding that I couldn’t spend any more time in this place, began to prepare for escape. I packed my bag with only what I would need for a day’s journey, by my estimation, and spent some hours hunched over my fire steeling myself.
It was then that I spotted a figure rounding the hill, and my heart was flooded with relief. When I realized how closely I had just faced death, it was difficult to hold back tears.
But the figure lacked Ojiisan’s crooked gait, and stood almost a head taller. As it approached further, I saw that the man was decked in flowing indigo hakama, not Ojiisan’s utilitarian garb. The beginnings of a beard covered his lower face, and his hair was only half-tied, black unkempt bangs tumbling past the bridge of his nose. His hand rested on the pommel of a katana on his hip.
I warmed my hands by the fire and awaited his approach.
“Hello,” I said once he was in earshot. “I—”
“What are you doing here,” he demanded. His voice was low and calm, but firm.
“—have been stranded here for some time. Can you—”
“Stranded? Then where did you get all these things?”
I pressed my lips into a line. “An old man helped me. Perhaps you know him? Big backpack, blue eyes... I’m not sure I ever caught his name, somehow. Hm.”
It struck me then that, in my desperation to survive, I’d been deeply ungrateful to Ojiisan. I resolved to offer him as much gratitude as I could when and if I saw him again.
“I don’t know any old men,” the stranger said. “Not any who’d venture into a place like this. Irresponsible. Lucky he didn’t get you both killed.”
I opened my mouth to defend Ojiisan, but trailed off as the stranger withdrew something from his satchel—a banana with a shimmering golden peel.
“See this?” he said. “This is a golden nanab. Eat it and you will fall into a deep slumber. So deep you will appear dead, your heartbeat will slow to a crawl, and you will all but cease to breathe. Then, and only then, will you be able to pass through the Distortion boundary.” My heart soared, but he tucked the berry back into his pocket.
“C-Can I have it?” I asked, eyes surely wide as turtwigshells. So it was possible to escape. Unless... Was I being too trusting? I pulled my arms close to my chest.
“Not yet,” the man said. “I will bring you to the boundary. Then you will eat it. If you eat it before that, and something happens to me during the journey... Well, that will be the end of us both.”
My stomach became lead and pushed up against my throat, but I nodded. I was almost ready to plunge into certain death moments ago, so why were my palms so slick now?
“Looks like you’re already packed. Come on.”
It was worth a try. I followed his lead.
The man didn’t speak as we trekked and neither did I. Watching the warped landscape unfurl before me was fascinating. Blue lightning rippled gently across the grass, sometimes even licking my boots harmlessly, sending flecks of light into the sky like cyan embers. We were fortunate enough to encounter few pokémon, but all manner of human debris could be found stashed in bushes and among branches: notebooks, pens, socks, hair ties, batteries, even a set of keys. Maybe all the small things I’d lost over the years really had vanished into the abyss. The thought made me smile.
We were passing through a gulch when the man stopped abruptly.
“What?” I said. “What’s—”
I cut the words off in my throat when he raised a fist to the height of his head. Quiet. The other fist was balled around the hilt of his sword. For the first time, I noticed a poké ball dangling from his waist strap.
Finally I heard it: the snapping of twigs and the rasp of animal breath.
The pokémon leapt from the precipice of the gulch into its trough, dust erupting from its landing point. My mind was screaming at me to run, but I couldn’t will my limbs to move. By the time the dust settled enough for me to make out our assailant, my guide had already drawn his sword, released his scyther and barked out a couple commands to it.
The enemy pokémon raised its mighty head, sniffed the air and let out a shrill scream. A gaggle of frightened porygon whirred past it and it lazily crushed four of them beneath an oversized, birdlike foot, reducing them to a pile of crackling shards. Red eyes burned beneath a crowned dome.
Rampardos .
The man’s scyther slashed and hacked away at the beast’s body with wild abandon. Although its scythes were bouncing uselessly off the rampardos’s tough skin, the blows at least served to preoccupy the mon. The man slid in front of me, shielding me with one arm.
“What the hell is this thing?” he seethed.
His words spurred me back to life. “A rampardos, I think,” I replied. “It’s a... rock-type? Dragon? Or was it ground...”
“Tch... Not helpful.”
The rampardos seemed annoyed with the scyther now. With a derisive snort, it angled its body parallel to the ground, bony skull pointed at the man like the barrel of a rifle. It pawed at the dirt with its monstrous feet.
Preparing for a sprint.
“Move!”
I tackled the man with everything I had, forcing him away; I landed hard on the ground, though he kept his footing. The rampardos was behind us faster than I could blink, tail lashing wildly. I’d never seen such speed.
When I tasted blood, I looked down and noticed I’d scraped my face on a rock; its sharp edge was tinged red.
“Today is not your day,” the man said. He sheathed his sword and then forced himself between me and the rampardos, extending an arm. “I can fight this thing long enough to slip away past the boundary where it can’t follow, but there’s no time for you.” As the rampardos rounded, he unfastened the sword from his waist and forced it into my arms. The scabbard was cool to the touch. “Go back,” he said, not looking back at me. “I will return for you.”
For an instant that lasted a lifetime I just stood there, arms wrapped around the sword, eyes fixed on the rampardos’s rippling muscles. The buzzing sound of the scyther’s wings snapped me back to reality.
I gave a shallow nod and ran.
The landscape blurred past me as I ran, and I paid it no heed. The wind whipping at my face drew tears from my eyes. Ignoring the stitch in my side, I grasped the sword close as I ran, as though holding it tight would protect me from harm. Every branch I stepped on was a spike of adrenaline; every rustle I heard was a skipped heartbeat.
It didn’t occur to me until I was almost too tired to continue that I had no idea where my camp was. After a half-hearted attempt to search my immediate surroundings, I found a creek and settled there. It wasn’t as defensible as the cliff faces I preferred, but at least I could keep watch on one side and on the other would hear any would-be attackers traipsing through the river.
Practical considerations only mattered so much. Exhausted, I fell in a heap at the riverside, my breaths ragged. After placing a ward of protective shards, I only watched and did not think until sleep dragged me away into dreams of dinosaurs and death.
I spent the next day wandering in the hopes of stumbling upon my camp. The next night the Distortion shifted and I knew most of my things were gone for good.
With only a day’s rations to my name, the outlook was bleak. I should have been terrified. But by that time, I had no more fear left to give. I foraged what little I could find, but every little sound conjured images of the snorting rampardos, so I ultimately gave up before long. I spent the second day hungry and numb.
Once or twice I wondered whether it would be better to be killed by a pokémon or starve to death.
On the third day, when my hunger was just beginning to morph into desperation, Ojiisan returned. I wanted to run to him, wrap my arms around him and bury my head in his chest and sob. But before I could do that I noticed his gait was even more skewed than usual; that had to be a limp. Once he was close enough that I could see the pallid color of his face and the way he clutched at his ribs, I rushed ahead to him.
“Ojiisan,” I said, voice trembling. “I thought—oh, I thought I’d never see you again.”
“What happened to your face?” he asked. He took on an oddly intrigued expression as he investigated the wound.
I touched my scabs involuntarily. “Oh,” I said. “It’s... a long story. A man came and tried to rescue me, but we encountered a wild pokémon that separated us. I fell while he was fighting it, but the cut is only shallow. I guess that wasn’t that long of a story. What about you? You look...”
“Ah, something else to say about my frailty?” He offered a grim smile. “It’s nothing, really. I encountered an aggressive pokémon too. These things happen in the wilds. I’ve bandaged it temporarily, and they’ll patch me up properly when I return to base camp.”
“Ojiisan...”
“Did you plan on bandaging me up? I see most of your gear is gone. Trade it for that sword you’re holding? Hmph.”
“I left it all behind. I didn’t think I’d need it anymore. I thought I was going to escape.” I frowned. “The sword was given to me by... by the man who tried to save me.”
The old man nodded thoughtfully. “Well, leaving everything behind was quite foolish of you, wasn’t it. Now you understand why I always carry around such a large pack. Hah!” I looked away sheepishly. “So this savior of yours had a plan, did he?”
“Yes,” I replied, “a golden nanab. He claims it puts you in a sleep so deep that you can penetrate the boundary.”
“Mm. He’s correct,” the old man declared. “Quite a rare fruit indeed, or else I would have brought you one myself. Well, I hope he returns for you. Sounds like he’s gotten you closer to freedom than I’ve managed.”
“I have his sword,” I said. “And he said he’d be back.”
“Well, he might at that,” the old man agreed. Finally he removed his pack with a groan. “You must be hungry. I’ve brought a bit of food, but no gear for you... You must forgive me, your camp was well-established last I saw it. With luck your savior will return soon anyway.”
I watched with relish as he started a fire and washed his rice.
“Sorry to ask this of you,” he said eventually, “but might I spend the night at your camp? I’d like to rest a bit before making the journey back. I’ll be fine, but a little time to heal would benefit me.”
“Of course, Ojiisan,” I said. “You’re free to stay any time. I only wish I could offer better hospitality.”
“Hospitality? Bah. There’s onsens for that,” the old man said, his piercing blue eyes twinkling. “Now, tell me about this savior of yours...”
We continued on in that manner for the rest of the day, chatting away to our heart’s content. I really had missed Ojiisan, and would miss him again when he left. After so long alone—not counting the company of the standoffish ronin—his company mended my soul. I hoped that he would be present at whatever point in spacetime I escaped to when this was all over. Imagining life without him now was just as hard as trying to recall my life before him; a whisper, a shadow.
When at last we grew too tired to carry on, we settled into our sleepskins and chatted a little more before we drifted into sleep.
When I awoke the next morning, he was gone. Left behind were his pack—fully loaded—and a sleepskin caked in dried blood.
I built Ojiisan a memorial of stone and wood and finished it by planting my katana in the ground. To my dismay, it was shortly swept away by the shifting of the Distortion, but I managed to hold fast to his pack and was able to survive off its contents for a good while. There was even more inside than I expected—poké balls, medicine, fishing supplies, desserts, even a collapsible chair. It was nonetheless difficult to enjoy its contents or handle them at all without being overwhelmed by the feeling that they had been tainted.
My faith in the other man turned out not to be misplaced. He arrived wordlessly after what I estimated to be a few weeks. It was hard to sense his intent as he silently watched me reduce my pack’s load to the bare essentials. For the last time, I realized with a start. If we failed this time, that was it. No more deliveries from Ojiisan to retrieve me from the depths. I swallowed hard.
“You lost my sword,” the man noted. A new one hung at his waist.
“Oh,” I said. “Yes. Sorry. I... gave it to someone who needed it more than me.”
“Another interloper?”
“No,” I said.
He gave me an incredulous look, but didn’t seem interested in pressing the matter further.
When I was ready, we departed without a word. We encountered a few wild pokémon as we journeyed, but none so ferocious as the rampardos; the sound of the man’s sword lifting a few inches from its scabbard was enough to cow them.
“So you just carry around a golden nanab all the time?” I asked as we walked.
“Yes.”
“Just in case?”
“Yes.” He paused for a moment, then added: “Interlopers are growing more common each day. A golden nanab is indispensable.”
“Doesn’t that get... difficult? Since they’re so rare?”
The man actually stopped to turn around and frown at me. “They’re a hundred yen each at the village market.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling heat rise to my face. “I just thought... Well, the old man told me—”
“I don’t give a shit about your old man.”
We continued in silence.
After a few hours, the boundary of the Distortion-Dome came into view. It was, as you might expect, a massive wall; it extended seemingly forever to the sides, arcing almost imperceptibly upward. It was almost completely opaque, deep iridescent violet in color, shimmering and swirling like a lava lamp. The sight of it gave me butterflies so intense I felt close to vomiting.
“Not much further now,” the man said. “Soon I’ll hand you the nanab. It’s good to eat it a bit in advance so that we aren’t standing at the boundary waiting for it to do its work. I can carry you the rest of the way.”
I nodded solemnly, though he didn’t see it. I knew that once I ate the nanab, I would fall into a death-like trance, and when I awoke it would be somewhere completely new. Another life to learn, another rhythm to memorize. I should have been excited, but I could only feel the anticipation of a person ready to crawl into bed after a punishing day of work.
“Alright,” he said at last, and he produced the golden nanab from his satchel. I took it gingerly. The peel was surprisingly slick.
Snort.
My hand froze, and my blood became ice.
The man’s heavy sigh confirmed my greatest fear: the rampardos had returned. It was distant, still, probably a quarter mile away—but we had both witnessed its incredible speed firsthand.
I began frantically attempting to peel the nanab, but the man grabbed my wrist and pulled me to a stop. “Not now. Not until this thing is taken care of. It won’t be good for anyone if you fall over in front of a rampaging pokémon.”
I didn’t know what to say. I replayed our last meeting in my mind’s eye; the scyther’s blades had been totally ineffective against the rampardos. It was some wonder that the man had escaped alive at all. And now there was nowhere for me to run, no supplies to fall back on.
The man did not seem concerned. Without drawing his sword, he unclipped a poké ball and threw it nonchalantly to the ground.
The pokémon that emerged was not a scyther, though it appeared to be one at first. Its carapace was stone-brown rather than green, and it stood eye-to-eye with its trainer rather than a head below. Its scythes, no longer slender slashing blades, had been replaced by massive flint axes.
I had seen this pokémon only once before, in a textbook: kleavor.
“Kill it,” the man commanded.
The kleavor dashed forward without a second thought, eerily humanlike in motion. The rampardos challenged it with a roar and dashed forward as well, head-dome forward. Before they collided, the kleavor planted a foot in the ground and swung the flat of its axe upward, catching the rampardos on the chin. The force of the impact lifted the dinosaur several inches into the air and sent it sprawling on its back.
The rampardos screamed and thrashed wildly, blood trickling from its chin, legs and tail lashing. The kleavor cocked its head as though to inspect it, then took another step and drove its clawed foot into the rampardos’s chest. It wheezed and screamed again, but just as it began to scramble back to its feet, the kleavor raised an axe and swiftly brought down its edge onto the rampardos’s bony dome. It let out a caterwaul of anguish, and I could only watch in horror as the kleavor bashed the pinned dinosaur’s head again and again, splinters of stone flying away with each hit. By the time it was finished, what remained of the rampardos had no head left to speak of; only a steep notch in the ground where it had once been, filled partially with an indistinct red slush.
Then: quiet.
“Good work, Kleavor,” the man said. The bug just continued staring at its decimated foe, unflinching, until it was withdrawn to its capsule. “You can eat the nanab now,” the man suggested.
But I didn’t. Instead I watched, transfixed, as the man produced a knife from his satchel and made a series of precise cuts along the rampardos’s body. With a few firm tugs, he pulled its leathery gray hide off in a single piece. Practiced hands gripped a gleaming blade that separated flesh from bone seamlessly, leaving no traces of one on the other. When he was finally done, he piled the meat into the hide, tied it closed and hauled it over his shoulder.
He was a sight, red up to his elbows and sweat dripping from his dangling hair. He raised a bloodied hand to his face and pushed his hair back, and for the first time I met his eyes.
Piercing blue, like a glacier before the sun.
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this story originally occurred to me as a wistful romance from the perspective of ojisan, who was using the spacetime distortions to visit a younger version of his deceased wife for one last time. although the seeds of that idea remain obviously this is quite a different story—i hope it was enjoyable as a survival tale too!
