※
My dear sister, Kobo told you once,
I have learned a terrible secret.
Kobo broke your pack’s rules, and with that breach came a terrible price. There wasn’t punishment from the pack, for the truth he learned was a horrible one—the world had punished him enough. But it didn’t punish him swiftly, didn’t stop him from spreading his secret to you.
As far as humans are concerned, zoroark and their children no longer live in Unova. At first it was a choice; in recent years it had become necessary. Your kind wasn’t meant for fighting, but that was all humans thought you would be good for. Companionship was such a scant reward for what they wanted to make you do—it was safer to never come down the mountain again, and let the memory of the skinchangers fade from their minds until they stopped seeking you. Your great-grandparents were the last of your kind to be close enough to a human to know one, but the stories persist. Humans are spiteful, horrible creatures, whose fragile bodies cannot even contain all the hate they hold within, so they must instead inflict it onto others.
When Kobo returned, he told you the other version that the humans told themselves: long ago, a pokémon forswore herself to a human, and promised that she would always hear when that human called. And from that day on, pokémon would always appear when humans cried out.
But one day, a young human, callow and foolish, fastened a sword, with which he smote many pokémon. He continued sundering with no remorse until finally, he searched far and wide for more pokémon to fight and found none. In that moment, a pokémon appeared to him, and bowed low.
“
If you continue to strike down my siblings with your steel,” the pokémon warned,
“from your kind with our fangs and claws we will extract our toll.” And in that moment, the pokémon transformed, opened her mouth, and bared her wicked fangs.
The human, horrified, threw his sword into the sea, and pokémon once again agreed to live peacefully alongside humans so long as humans never again took up the sword.
This, Kobo told you when he returned, is what the humans told themselves. You responded that it was a stupid story. If humans were so good that they could fight their own battles, why did they have the need to capture pokémon? You liked the part where they human tried to kill everything he could see, because that at least made sense, but what human had ever stopped because someone had asked him nicely? Who could be both helpless and all-powerful? What did it matter what your ancestors promised? What did it matter what theirs did?
Kobo spent too much time with humans. The zoroark version of the legend goes a little differently.
Mitama, the first zorua who was gifted with the ability to change face, ventured down to the human villages one day. She found in suffering a human boy, about her age, who cried for her aid. Touched, she offered him one of her tricks, and showed him the secret of how she could appear as one thing and be another.
The boy took it eagerly, and honed it. He learned to craft her illusions into his words, and fashioned himself a pretty lie: that Mitama’s kindness bound pokémon to humans for the rest of time.
Kobo’s secret is simple, but as soon as you hear it, you understand why it has remained a secret all this time—it simply makes no sense.
Inari, the humans love us more when we serve their whims, but they have been loving us this whole time.
It is a stupid lie. It has to be. But after you saw what they did to him, after you realized what learning their secrets had made him become, you couldn’t help but follow him down the slopes as well.
You’ve heard the legends. Humans are full of hate. How else could they so effectively ensnare pokémon? If they ever doubted themselves, if they ever thought they were trying to be kind, surely they’d pull back from the cruelty they were inflicting. So they
must know what drives them. Right?
Mitama is a warning to those who would forget that zoroark are predators. Her lesson was passed down for the rest of time, so that all of you could understand where she erred. You do not pity a blitzle before you kill it, after all. You do not claim you love it.
You know what lies at the heart of your illusions, even if you hide that heart from others. Zoroark can deceive each other, but they cannot deceive themselves. This is only logical, after all. You create the illusion. It does not create you. You have mastery over it, and you can choose when the illusion falls and your true self remains.
If humans think what they do now is love … then they have crafted a very powerful illusion indeed.
The boy who took Mitama’s gift never took her heart. He was never raised to understand what it means to change your skins; to have one face for prey, one for battle, one for family. Your face can never fool your own eyes, but spoken lies can reach your ears, and through there, your heart. This was Mitama’s revenge, although she did not know it at the time: humans crafted lies so strong that they fooled even themselves.
You looked through Kobo when he told you that secret, and you stayed with him until the day turned to night.
And in that moment you knew: you would have to find this out on your own. So you, too, crept alongside the sun down the mountainside to find what illusions the humans have woven in your centuries apart.
※
You aren’t quite sure what starts it, not from where you’re pressed in the throng of humans. But you’re halfway through twisting your way around a palpitoad’s legs when you hear a scream, and then a pop, and you turn just in time to see a gas cannister strike a scolipede in the thorax. The cylinder lodges between the chinks in its reddish armor, and then it begins seeping burning-hot gas while the scolipede shrieks in pain, bucking around wildly.
The rest dissolves into chaos. A water bottle goes flying. Someone is trying to calm the scolipede, which is an impossible task in itself given that she’s five times the human’s size and receiving second degree burns. The air thickens to white haze. More shouting.
You hiss, already scrambling to double back the way you came in, but now that the crowd’s twisting into motion, it’s a lot harder to push through unseen. Should you even try to break through the herd? Every hunter's instinct tells you no; the first one to run is the first one to be picked off.
But this isn’t a hunt; this is humans, you have to remind yourself, and you are not prey. But you can look like one, if that’s what it takes.
You drop to all fours and begin bounding out of the crowd, heedless of the way that the illusion of the human child is far too small and hairless to be responsible for the people you’re shoving away from you.
A man in red clothes is reeling back, coughing into his elbow, and he almost trips over you but you dart left, just in time to avoid a sparking zebstrika, her stripes glimmering gold through the haze. Someone keeps launching more cannisters of gas into the crowd. Other people are shouting commands in great, artificially-booming voices, but you can’t hear them over the chaos, and even if you would, it’s not like you’d listen anyway.
Away. You have to get away. There’s a watchog on the ground, lying limp and making no attempt to pull himself away from the feet that stray too close to crushing him. You stare after him for a moment before a beam of red light envelopes him and he’s gone, and then you’re on the run again, cursing yourself for wasting precious time.
You’re almost out when the gas finally gets in your lungs, sends it festering and burning deep, deep in your chest. You pull up short, gagging, and in that moment your illusion shatters and the child is replaced with the predator.
A roar erupts and you pull up short as the scaled neck of a hydreigon spirals out of the chaos, eyes bloody and wild. His words have no meaning to you; your people forgot the tongue of dragons long ago, but you feel all eyes turn to him. There’s another dragon by his side, her form easily dwarfed, and she lashes out with tusks each as long as your forearm.
That’s all you need to see, you have to remind yourself. You know what happens to dragons. Everyone does. If this is where they choose to make their stand, then it will be their last. Your world will be none the brighter for it, but what are you going to do about it? You need to go; anyone left in the square in the next five minutes will be in a bloodbath. Your breath tries to sear its way out of your throat; the air is burning,
burning—
Who is responsible for this? There’s a wall of humans in front of you staring back like they’ve been carved in place; there isn’t a shred of empathy that you can see as they fire and fire and fire—
“Mistralton PD! This is unlawful assembly!” someone shouts into a metal cone. “Please return to your homes!” And it’s when you hear that
please that you realize Kobo might be right after all, if they think this is what a request looks like. What else would they think, these humans who have forgotten how it feels to hunt another? You should’ve known better; of course humans would be the only people cruel enough to do this to themselves.
More shouts. Cannisters spiraling through the air, dark spheres converging on the hydreigon and his companion—
Behind you the crowd has scattered as well; some are charging at the line of black-bodied, uniformed humans in front of you; some are fleeing towards the back. You skirt around a pair of uniformed ones who pay you no heed and burst out from beneath the wrought iron entryway again. You don’t know the geography around here. Another mistake. But you’re out of the thickest part, and you’re sprinting through the streets, lungs burning, legs about to give out. With a glance back you toss the image of a herdier onto yourself, blue fur flaring out behind you into a cape as you dash headlong forward on all fours. The air is clearer here. You’re almost out.
“Herdier, halt!”
The image stops, but
you certainly don’t. You hobble forward, trying to keep the coughs from crawling up your throat, your claws from clicking on the cobblestones. The problem with illusions is that they can never cover up the noise.
“Blue, is this one of ours?” the human voice says. You can’t see their face or who’s next to them; some of the excess haze is leaking out of the street behind them and cloaking them as well. “Hey, Herdier! Where’s your officer?” He’s fumbling at his shoulder for a black box.
Too late, you realize your mistake when you recognize the pokémon at his side, blue and brown fur and hackles. You’ve dressed up as one of them.
The herdier has his nose pointed straight at you, and you know you’re doomed. You can smell like
a herdier if you want to, and with this much gas floating around you’re sure his nose is just as shot as yours is—but can you smell like
one of ours?
You inch back slowly, leaving the illusion staring patiently at the two of them, until cold bricks settle up against your hind legs and you’re pressed up against a wall.
The herdier growls, and then the sound deepens into a bark. {You are no herdier,} he says.
Can you scare him off? You know how this works. They have packs because they’re poor hunters alone. He’ll try to intimidate you; he might even trust his nose before his eyes, but as long as you stand your ground, he’ll be too afraid to close the distance; no power on earth would compel a lone herdier to lash out against cornered prey. You puff up the illusion’s fur and let a hissing growl of your own accompany it. {My kind has haunted yours since the beginning of time. Try me, mutt.}
“It must be one of theirs. Retrieve, Blue.”
The human. The
human. You forgot about—
The herdier leaps forward in a blur of brown, and you see now that he’s not aiming for the illusion. He has your scent.
Could you outrun them? Probably not, and they can see through you now. Fight? You square your shoulders, claws at the ready for the incoming impact—
“Stop! Hey! That’s my pokémon!”
You’re in a daze, so time seems to skip ahead a few moments until there are shoes in front of your face, a human figure standing in front of you, arms outstretched. The purple silhouette of a liepard twines around her ankles. The herdier pulls up short as soon as it sees the girl, and his attack fizzles out immediately.
“This is a restricted area! Get back!” the man is shouting. But he’s not commanding an attack point-blank, not yet, not with another human in the way.
“Herdier,” the interloper says, trying and failing to sound stern. “Let’s go.”
What is she talking about? Go where?
But the liepard around her ankles fixes you with a flinty gaze. {This is your only chance. Can you stand?}
There’s something in her voice that makes you believe them. You can stand. You’re already standing, one forepaw braced on the ground. But you push the image of the injured herdier to its feet.
{It’s not a herdier!} Blue is shouting to his human, the fur running down the back of his neck bristling a full three inches tall. {They’re all liars. Don’t listen to them.}
Poor thing. Despite your pain, that much at least brings a tiny seed of joy, which only blossoms larger when the uniformed human barks, “Quiet, Blue.” The herdier that bound himself to a human is surprised that the human is deaf. Here is another one who would make Mitama’s mistake.
“Hypocrites, the lot of you,” says the uniformed human, looking back at the three of you. His voice is muffled by his mask, so it’s hard to make out the specific words, but there’s no mistaking: “Fighting against owning pokémon and then using pokémon yourselves. Stop using them as an excuse just because you want to get ahead. Go home, kid.”
You see the human who saved you stiffen, but she keeps her hands outstretched and keeps backing up. Doesn’t turn her back to either you or the uniformed one. “C’mon, Herdier,” she says pleadingly.
What do you have to lose?
Stop using them as an excuse just because you want to get ahead.
The man doesn’t follow the three of you down the streets, but his words do. They ring in your ears as you follow the human and the liepard down a dash of side streets, the perfect image of a dog trotting obediently after her master. But the man’s words fester in your mind, bouncing around with Kobo’s.
The humans aren’t using you as an excuse. You were angry long before they were.
※
{You can drop that now,} the liepard says lazily after the girl closes the door, and you find yourself in a dimly-lit room with grungy walls and short ceiling. Ahead of the two of you, the girl fumbles her way against the bed in the center of the room—she has poor night vision, you remember belatedly—before she manages to turn on one of the lamps on the bedside table.
{Drop what?} you ask innocently.
{Skinchanger, I have met no herdier that speaks the forest’s tongue like you do.}
{We can’t all fawn around humans.} You smirk and watch as the hairs running down her spine stand on end in response. But you don’t drop your illusion, not around friends like these.
Where are you? Where have you fled to? Where will you go next?
While you ponder this, the girl fusses over every square inch of the liepard, murmuring under her breath. She’s produced strange-smelling white cloths that she rubs over the liepard’s fur until they turn yellow. Sometimes you’ll hear a hiss of pain, followed by a sharp, “Are you okay? Did that hurt?” You watch out of the corner of your eye and then busy yourself with grooming your own fur, patting the mats out as best as you can. Something stings the roof of your mouth when you lick your fur, and almost gag as the acrid scent of gas hits you again. None of that, then.
But the liepard for the most part bears her inspection stoically, and when they’re done, the girl whispers something to the liepard.
{She says you don’t look hurt, but she wants to know if she can check on you too.}
{I’m fine,} you reply frostily. To have a human run her hands over your true body, over your heart—no. You would rather lick your fur until your tongue burned itself off.
The liepard butts her head against her human, and the girl nods and moves off into the other room. You skulk in the corner, tucking yourself between a trash basket and a tall wooden box holding a black screen, while the liepard stares you down from the floral-patterned bedspread.
{Tourmaline,} the liepard says levelly.
It takes you a moment to parse that as a name. {Inari,} you say by way of response.
{Why were you at the protest at all? Do you have somewhere you want to return to? Tonight it is likely unsafe to travel, even for you.} There’s a hint of guarded derision in her words, just a hair, but not enough to spur you to respond in kind. You are tired, and hurt, and besides. If they had wanted to cause you serious harm they would’ve tried by now, surely.
{I am searching for a human. That is why I was lost in the crowd.}
That catches Tourmaline’s attention. Her head pricks up; her eyes narrow to shards of amber, glittering from the dark fur around her face. {What business does a skinchanger have searching for a human?}
You think of Kobo’s voice, the way it lilted in your ears when he shared his secret. He was always the quiet one of the two of you; he selected each of his words with pride. But before his time with the humans, he never once changed his face. He wore the skin of a zorua every day of his life, since the two of you left the womb together until the day he went down the mountain. With the others, you were used to recognizing their cadences, for you could not always see their faces—but with Kobo, you never had to, until the day he returned, with the same voice but a new face.
His thorny secret was not the only thing he received from the humans.
{I owe him a great debt.}
{Oh?} Tourmaline rearranges herself to one side, lazily rubbing her back legs up against the bed’s fabric. Dark fur mixes against the faded pattern of flowers. {Quite unlike you, skinchanger, to have any doings with those of us down here, least of all to
owe them something.}
Does her kind scorn yours? Perhaps, depending on where she grew up. Liepard were given fangs and claws, muscles that could rend tree trunks and jaws that could crush skulls. The only thing zoroark had was Mitama’s gift, and she was foolish enough to share. If the blessed wanted to look down on you for not sharing their fate, let them. Why would you care?
{The human I seek is probably twenty years old by now.} You scrunch your face up, trying to remember. Was it more? Kobo left long, long ago, when you were still a zorua and your claws were not yet grown. {Maybe more.} Another pause. {Maybe less.} You’re determined not to let her hear the hesitation in your voice. {He has hair the color of grass, and he knows the desert tongue. I followed him into your crowd.}
More than that, you watched him speak in the thick of the crowd this morning. You watched him weave an illusion into the air with only his words. You watched him tell of a future where humans did not need to be full of hate. You watched him claim to love pokémon. You had almost reached him before it all broke.
What a pretty story he told. No wonder this was the one who returned Mitama’s gift to Kobo.
{I admire that you did not run,} Tourmaline says in a quiet voice. {You are brave for that.}
You frown. What did she see? You bolted from the crowd and left them to their own squabbles. If she wanted to be like Mitama and put her lots in with humans who would attack even their own, then let her. Her kind chose to stay with the humans, and if it meant binding stones to her feet while the river took her, then she could do so and admire her handiwork the whole way down.
Her respect seems genuine, though. You watch jealously as she licks at her paw and begins to groom the matted fur of her forelegs back into place, and you finally find the question you wanted to voice: {Why are you fighting alongside them?}
She pauses in her grooming and looks down at you from the bed. Behind her, her tail twitches, an erratic hop in the slow, methodical rhythm it’s been sweeping out this entire time. {Skinchanger, your kind has fled the cities for too long. I do not fight alongside her. Rhea fights alongside me.}
{Why do you say that?}
The liepard tilts her head towards the back room, where Rhea is silhouetted in harsh fluorescent light, pacing tight circles, bare feet on the tiles. The girl holds a box to her ear; alternates between whispering words into it and letting it babble back to her. Her face is pale, and with her free hand she twines a spiral of bright purple hair around her index finger. She’s bleeding from a scrape that runs down her forearm; it’s shallow but caked over in dirt and acid; you can see how she itches to touch it.
Your kind strayed from the humans long ago, but you can recognize the panic of cornered prey when you see it.
{She would be happier without any of this,} Tourmaline explains quietly. {She has no desire to fight; she dropped out of her gym circuit long ago.} You aren’t sure what the words mean, but you imagine a blitzle who has chosen to stop running, and to fall instead into slathering jaws. {But it hurts her to see us hurt, so she fights.}
Humans that would defy their own, for their own reasons. Is this what Kobo meant by the ones that thought they knew love?
“Are you hungry?” Rhea asks, her voice drifting into your conversation, and Tourmaline mewls lazily. It’s wordless, even in her own tongue, but you can sense the affirmation.
There’s a pause, and the sound of someone rummaging through a box. “Blukberry?”
The liepard takes a moment to consider, but says nothing.
“It’s that or rawstberry, Tourm. We weren’t planning on staying in this motel long so I didn’t get us many options.”
Tourmaline huffs and lowers her head onto her front paws. After a long silence, she mewls again.
“Does our friend want some as well?”
{It’s for eating. It is sweet and tastes good,} she says, staring at you. {If you don’t eat yours I would take it for you.}
You’re not quite sure what to make of it. She would share her food with the intent to steal it back? Why even offer it in the first place? {I will try some.} You are ravenous, though. Unless it tastes like poison you will certainly eat yours, and hers if you can find it.
Another yowl.
The girl emerges from the back room, juggling a series of weirdly shaped plastic objects in her arms. She tosses something white to Tourmaline, and then a cylindrical lump lands in front of your herdier illusion. Scentless, too-white, weirdly smooth. What is this?
{The top is weak,} Tourmaline explains before stabbing her claws in through the lid. When her paw emerges, it is covered in pale blue mud, which she languidly begins licking.
What strange habits they have in these parts. You eye the container carefully, and when you look up, Tourmaline’s eyes are fixed on you as well, or at least where she thinks you are.
Mentally, it is too much effort to eat and pretend that the herdier is doing the same. You know this. Very well. If they would share their food with you, you can at least do them the decency of showing them your face. You drop the illusion in front of Tourmaline’s curious eyes, and blink slowly back at her.
{I did not ask for your drama, skinchanger,} she remarks, lazily hunting a fleck of yogurt that spilled onto the bedspread. {I was merely hoping that you were too stupid to open it, so I could have your share.}
You huff and snatch your yogurt into your claws, eyeing it before retreating back under the desk in the corner of the cramped room. Is this supposed to be some sort of fruit? You stab your claws through the top like you saw Tourmaline do, and it gives way almost immediately.
She is correct. It is sweet and tastes good. By the end of it you’ve shoved your snout into this strange, smooth fruit so that you can reach all of it, and you lick it clean.
“That’s not a herdier,” Rhea says, quite astutely, when she gets back and you’re searching for the last bits of yogurt off of the lid.
She is a lucky one. Few humans have seen a zoroark. Even fewer know they have.
But she doesn’t seem to comprehend her blessing; instead, she looks back at Tourmaline, who mutters, {I wish I could explain.} Finally, Rhea shrugs and then flops onto the bed, where she begins unwrapping a meal of her own.
“You okay down there?” she asks. “Hungry, thirsty? Anything? You wanna leave tonight?”
Your head perks up when you realize she’s talking to you, and you hit your head on the underside of the motel’s desk. You bite back a hiss of pain and shake your head pointedly at her.
“Okay, just let me or Tourm know,” Rhea says, and produces a pathetic sandwich from the wrapper, which she begins devouring. “I think everyone got away okay,” she says to Tourmaline between bites. A few crumbs hit the bedspread, which Tourmaline noses after. “I don’t know. But pretty much everyone’s checked in by now.”
{You’re hurt,} Tourmaline responds, and begins licking at the scrape on Rhea’s arm.
“It’s nothing.” She makes a move to push the liepard away. “Don’t lick. I washed it but it could still have gas in it. You’ll be hurt.”
{I have licked my wounds before.}
Rhea flops back, her half-eaten sandwich forgotten in its wrapper beside her. The liepard shifts and lays her head on Rhea’s chest, and for a long while they are silent and motionless, save for the rise and fall of Tourmaline’s head on the girl’s stomach. In the silence you feel like you’re intruding on something precious.
“That was horrible, Tourm,” she says at last, and it’s only when you hear the shaking of her voice that you realize how young she must be. “I … I didn’t think it’d turn out like that.”
{If they escalate,} Tourmaline reminds her gently, {that means it’s working.}
“Like, I’ve seen it on the news in some of the Hoenn protests, but I never thought they’d turn on us here.” One arm has flopped uselessly onto the bedspread; with the other, she traces over the golden circles on Tourmaline’s back. “I’m scared. Jackson says he doesn’t know what to do either. I’m supposed to get in touch with the Driftveil branch tomorrow so we can get a proper gameplan together; apparently they’ve had to deal with this a little longer than we have, but … gods, Tourm. What are we going to
do? I’m not ready for this.”
A slow purr slowly rumbles through Tourmaline’s body.
“I know.” Idly, her hand resumes its slow, repetitive petting. “I know.”
Neither of them say anything else. You watch them for a while—warily, at first; for all you know, this could be another human trick. And then, as Rhea’s hand slows and they both seem to drift off into slumber, your watch changes to one of distanced interest.
This must be what Kobo meant, these humans who thought they were loving you this whole time. Are they even so wrong to believe that? Rhea, with her gentle hands; Tourmaline, with her firm convictions—this could be love. This could be a lie they’ve crafted between the two of them. Either way, you would believe it.
{Skinchanger.}
When you look up, Tourmaline’s eyes bore through you. You thought she’d fallen asleep long ago. {What?}
{You reek of poison.}
{And?}
The liepard huffs. {Come close, and I will clean it for you, since you seem incapable of doing so yourself.}
Surely the poison hurts her as well. You know how it tastes on your tongue. By tomorrow, it may dry and reach your skin, but for now, your fur is thick enough that it is harmless. {You needn’t worry.}
{You reek from here, Skinchanger,} she says quietly. {And clearly you seek to prevent both of us from resting well with your discomfort.}
The liepard is a clever one. You’ll give her that. Grudgingly, you climb up onto the bed beside them, careful to sheathe your claws to avoid snagging in the blanket, and let yourself be groomed like a kit.
She is careful and methodical, rooting around in the thick tufts of your mane to find the tangles and clumps that you missed. You wait expectantly for her to gag, to give up as you did, but she remains persistent. It is both comforting and disquieting to feel someone else so close to you—you haven’t shared your space with another in so long—but you can slowly bring yourself to relax.
You would have endured the acrid taste for Kobo, you tell yourself, or for anyone else in the clan. Just not for yourself.
{The human you seek,} Tourmaline says when she’s finished with your mane and has moved down to your lower back, pausing between licks. Her tongue is larger than Kobo’s was, so she works more quickly. {I can direct you to him.}
Your head pricks up. {Where?}
{I need a favor first.}
Carefully, you bite back a growl. You shouldn’t be surprised. You would’ve asked the same, surely. And this way you know that she isn’t just sending you into a trap; her instructions must be genuine if she is to request something in exchange. {What is your favor?}
{There is a human I am interested in as well. She is familiar with the one you seek, if that reassures you.}
{Is she a friend of yours?}
The grooming stops again. {No.} And then: {Maybe she could’ve been.}
Interesting. It isn’t like liepard to hold their sentimentality like that. {And you want me to find her?}
{I want you to steal from her. She has a strange stone in her possession. It is perfectly round, and black. I want it.}
Oh. Certainly not a friend. {Why?}
{So that she cannot have it,} Tourmaline says simply.
You mull it over. This was more what you expected from a pokémon that would permit herself to live alongside a human. Always scheming, always planning to exchange one thing for the next. It soothes you somehow, to know that this is how things are going to be. {Why would you not go yourself?}
{Rhea needs me here. I am busy. And.} She adds the next part grudgingly, like it pains her to say: {She keeps the orb directly on her person. I would struggle to steal it. But you, with your gifts, would fare much better.}
{Flattery will get you nowhere.}
{No,} she responds lightly, {but I will tell you where your human friend is, and I find that to be much more compelling than flattery.}
{Well met.} You pause, to mull over your options. You could find the changeling human yourself, you suppose. You almost had him before. But Tourmaline has been kind to you, and you will repay her favor in turn. That seems only fair. {I will do as you ask.}
{Thank you, Inari.}
She finishes cleaning you without another word, and you slowly drift off to sleep.
※
Mistralton is strange, even for a human city. It hums periodically, and then it whines, and then the sky is split apart by enormous metal creatures that don’t move as they fly overhead. None of the humans seem to care. You make your illusion flinch back at the first one, since that seems like the only truly logical response, but when you notice that the rest of the humans trickle about their day, you make your illusion pay it no mind either.
Kobo sought out the humans to return one of their own, their strange laughing cub that they’d left to the elements. As you look at the quiet morning, creep around the rows and rows of shops, you see now that it was the perfect task for one someone who regarded the humans with curiosity rather than fear, but it was so ill-suited to one who had yet to learn how to hide his face. Kobo never learned how to hide his face properly, and could cast no illusions on his behalf. Without his skinchange, the deerling and the blitzle saw him as a predator. The liepard saw him as competition. So he went further down the slopes instead, but down here, surely at best he was just something rare and pretty to be put up behind a glass case and admired.
You decide to wear the changeling’s face as you saw it in the crowd yesterday, to remind yourself what you’ve been looking for. Idly, you cast yourself in the illusion of a tall male human with a puff of green hair, a slight slouch, distracted fingers that fidget with the skin of his pants. It’s the details that matter. He had a quiet face, one that you don’t think anyone would take offense to or even approach. A slightly lilting way of walking, very careful and seemingly random at the same time. The voice doesn’t matter, but his words still ring in your ears.
When asked about the nature of a pokémon’s plight, a human can never know the truth. How can we, if we don’t listen? But when it comes to the nature of their own suffering, this much is clear: pokémon never tell lies.
How can we possibly claim to know better than all that they know?
The crowd you watched believed him. And, standing confidently on his makeshift stage and addressing a crowd that was about to shatter, he certainly seemed to believe himself. But they all would, of course. That’s what lies are for.
“N?” someone calls. You prick your ears slightly. She sounds tentative, but certain. It’s possible you could change your face in time. You pull up short but don’t turn around, struggling to remember the details of a man you’d passed before. He was old and had golden hair. Hopefully she won’t notice that his face doesn’t match your stature. “N, what are you doing here? I … I saw what happened yesterday. Are you okay? I thought Skyla said you all had to leave town.”
There are footsteps on the pavement, and you turn around with your new face just as she runs up to you. Her face falls when your eyes meet, and she stops short of touching you.
“I’m so sorry,” she says. Her face reddens and she looks at her feet. “You just … you looked like someone I thought I knew. Sorry.” And before you can consider if grunting will make the illusion even more unbelievable than it is, she’s hurrying off, her face flushed bright red.
You stare after her while you keep the illusion smiling peacefully at its feet. Thunderous eyes. A proud chin. Dark brown hair, poofy enough to hold many secrets. The description doesn’t quite fit the apologizing, embarrassed woman in front of you, but you’re sure this is the
Hilda Tourmaline told you about.
Right after she rounds the corner, you cloak yourself as a purrloin and pad after her.
Hilda is very boring for a human. She walks around downtown for a bit while talking to her phone. She visits her injured zebstrika in the healer’s building—it’s
injured just
cut it loose—and now she’s just milling around downtown again, looking in all the shop’s windows and never once going in.
By sunset she retrieves her supplies from the healer’s building and sets up a camp on the edge of town. A fire follows soon after.
Your real issue will be the bird, Tourmaline warned you. She’ll usually make camp with all of her pokémon. Her psychic stargazer will be blind to you, not that it matters—his eyes are always on the constellations, cryptic whispers but never open ears. The grass snake will have her eyes on Hilda and Hilda alone. The zebstrika might’ve given you issues, but she’s spending the night at the healer’s building. The bird, though—always quiet, always watching. You were warned.
She releases the three of them from their pokéballs, and you’re careful to keep your distance—now that the sun is set and her fire is coaxed into a warm, crackling roar, the shadows on the trees are harder to imitate. You’re good, but why take the risk?
It goes just as Tourmaline said it would: the bird immediately takes to the trees, his overlarge feet finding purchase on a branch. Her grass snake stays close, and when you see her emerge you can see she’s too small to be a proper threat anyhow. The stargazer burbles something and floats off into the trees, and you’re happy to let him.
Meanwhile, Hilda props a metal box up on a rock, and light surges across its surface until it forms the face of a smiling, blonde girl.
“Hey, Bianca.”
“Hi, Hilda! Oh, and hi, Vaselva!” the image, apparently named Bianca, says cheerfully, and then her face contorts into a frown. “Are you okay? I saw what happened on the news and I was so worried, gosh. I know you were in Mistralton …” She leaves the rest unspoken.
Hilda was in the crowd. You know, because you saw her and her zebstrika, lancing cannisters down with spears of lightning. So you weren’t expecting it, but you aren’t shocked, when she says, “Don’t worry about it, I was nowhere near.”
Bianca isn’t very good at detecting lies, so her sigh of relief is audible even from where you’re lurking. “Thank goodness. I remember you’d been interested in some of the Plasma, um, stuff, so when I heard …”
She trails off again, and you idly wonder if this is a good distraction to steal the stone or if you should wait until they all drift off to sleep. Hilda’s voice doesn’t shake one bit when she says, “I mean, they have good ideas, but after what they did to you? I can’t just stand with people like that.”
There’s a long pause. Bianca mumbles something like, “Actually, I was planning on—”
{What are you doing?}
You spin around to see the stargazer, his eyes glowing with a strange blue light.
You don’t hesitate. Your claws sink through his shimmering green ectoplasm and up against his chest, and a pulse of dark energy knocks him out in an instant. You look up over your shoulder, worried that perhaps your cover has been blown, but the grass snake is just resting her head on Hilda’s knee, and Hilda’s enraptured with the screen in front of her.
“—Bi, you can’t be serious. Can you even drop a fellowship like that?”
“I’d do research; it’s fine,” Bianca replies calmly. “Juniper won’t mind as long as it’s for her, right?”
“Yeah, but you can’t
know—”
“I do know,” Bianca says, with enough conviction that Hilda stops short. “Look. I thought a lot about what they told me after they gave Munny back, and … they’re right, you know? I’m not cut out for this. And honestly I don’t think any of my pokémon want it that badly; they all seemed happy when I broke the news to them. That stuff you told me, about how my pokémon get hurt if I’m not good enough to protect them? That’s what Plasma told me too. And even Iris. And … I think all three of you are right.”
You tune them out a little, and instead set your focus back on her backpack. The stone’s in there. They’re probably distracted enough, and besides—you’ve only got until she tries to recall the stargazer before Hilda notices something’s up. You narrow your eyes at the lump of fabric. Would it be in one of the pockets? Tourmaline didn’t know, and you can’t be sure either.
“That’s not what I
meant,” Hilda’s saying while you calculate the angle of her backpack from here, trying to gauge the type of illusion that’ll cover enough of it while you go through the side pockets. “There’s a way to do this without being a bad person, you know? Good people can demonstrate good training.”
“Is there such a thing? And what if bad people don’t listen?”
The changeling’s words ring in your ears again.
How can we possibly claim to know better than all that they know?
“I don’t know, Bianca. I’ll make them listen. At some point you can get strong enough that people can’t ignore you, and when I do, I’ll change things.”
The air ripples, and you tense. For a moment you’re afraid that the stargazer is back, but then you see everyone else has felt it too—both Hilda and her grass snake are staring at the bag.
But Bianca, safely protected by the screen, doesn’t feel a thing, and blithely continues, “And I’ve always been really impressed with you for that, you know? But that’s not for me.”
While they’re distracted, you creep closer to the bag, delicately undoing the side pockets as quietly as you can. You can
feel something now, humming at the bottom, dormant and forgotten. You reach forward, and your claws clasp on something smooth and round.
In that instant, it feels like lightning strikes you. Your fur stands on end, and there’s a clamoring roar in the back of your mind, inexorable as a waterfall, screaming for attention—
You shriek and scramble back, your outstretched arm hanging useless and numb.
“What’s that?” Hilda’s turning around; her grass snake is faster on the uptake, already funneling green energy around the leaves of her neck. You see Hilda’s gaze sweep across the campsite, across your shattered illusion, the stargazer’s limp body at the edge of the clearing.
Before she can say anything else, you’re gone.
※
Tourmaline is kind. She holds up her end of the bargain, even if you only tried to hold up yours. {I didn’t know what I expected from you, skinchanger,} she says tightly, but you sense a tinge of concern in her words. {Truly, I thought you would’ve just run.}
So you put on the illusion of Hilda—any human would do, really, but she’s the one whose face you remember the best—and Tourmaline takes you to see the changeling human. Up close, you see the details you would’ve gotten wrong in his face the first time—his jawline is softer than you imagined; his smiles don’t quite reach his eyes.
You remember the stilted, transitive conversation between you and her and Rhea, and you sigh. This might take a while. {Tell him I want to ask him a question.}
{He knows,} she responds archly. When you turn around, the human is waiting patiently, his hands in his front pockets as he watches your conversation with polite but distanced interest.
{How does he—}
{He listens,} Tourmaline answers simply, and bounds away.
“My name is N,” the human says in a carefully-controlled voice. “What’s yours?”
{Inari.} You make the image of the girl’s mouth move alongside yours, twist the growls out of her lips, and you’re sure from his reaction that this is the most frightening illusion you’ve cast today. Have you messed up her face again? Humans are hard. Do they only have two fangs, or are they supposed to have more?
Idly, you try shoving in more, so that the next time she smiles her mouth is just a mess of pointed teeth. Judging from his reaction, you went in the wrong direction.
His jaw and eyes aren’t all you would’ve gotten wrong if you’d taken his face instead, though. This one has shapechanged quite a bit since you last saw him. Humans are weird—they change slowly, instead of all at once. But if he’s who you think he is, you haven’t seen him in almost a decade. {I wanted to talk to you. You’re the one who changed my brother.}
He has trouble looking the illusion in the eye; he ends up looking somewhere at her midriff, which, coincidentally, leaves him staring blindly into your face. “What?”
{We found you in the forest. Your parents were careless to have let you wander so far when you could barely walk.} Your voice is rising in excitement; you’re sure he doesn’t even understand everything that you’re saying, but you want him to
know. {Some of us wanted to raise you. You babbled in the desert tongue. A good trick for a human, especially one so young. Some of us thought otherwise. Where one human wanders, a thousand more will follow. That has always been the rule of the wild. When you find a stray cub, best to throw it back before the rest follow the scent.}
He doesn’t answer for a long moment. His brow goes slack. It’s like he’s staring off into the distance, into a time years in the past. “You aren’t the zorua who took me back, though. He sounded different, but … like you, as well.”
You try not to sound stiff. {Kobo and I shared one womb.}
“Is he …” He trails off.
Kobo came back from his time with the humans with a horrible secret and a new face. Both were equally terrifying, and both drove you to seek out the changeling. The secret, for what it said. And the face, for what it didn’t. When Kobo left, he could cast no illusions. When he returned, he refused to show you his true face, or his false face, or any face at all. He was just a voice lingering in the wind, staying with you but never showing itself.
He had learned something from the humans, you’d decided once he’d fallen silent and you could no longer find him. He’d finally learned how to lie even to himself, hidden his face so well that no one could coax him out of it.
{He lives,} you say, which is both the truth and easier than explaining the truth. You narrow your eyes as you survey this human. He has a nice face. Could you peel it back with one claw to find out what he hides beneath? You aren’t sure what there would even be to hide. He is a poor illusionist. You see why Kobo pitied this one. All of the emotions are on the surface, plain for everyone to see.
It must’ve taken a long time for this one to return Mitama’s gift. Kobo left with the changeling in the fall. Winter came, then spring, then summer, then fall again. Over and over again, until one day, Kobo came with the seedlings pushing their way through once-frozen soil. He came with a new face and a sad smile and a horrible secret.
{After he returned you, did he stay?}
“A bit,” he responds. “He was very kind.”
{Why did he leave you?}
The human swallows nervously, but he doesn’t try to lie, which is wise of him. “He learned—I should start from the beginning. I was led to understand that Kobo and the rest of your family live far away from humans,” he begins, which doesn’t answer your question at all. “Is it because you don’t wish to be bothered by them?”
{Your family is arrogant, cruel, and blind,} you retort proudly. Let him fight you, like the human who tried to put pokémon to the sword. Let him try. {Me and mine have no desire to bow to your whims.}
But he doesn’t seem surprised by your response. Instead, he blinks placidly, and continues: “My … brother thought much the same. And my father as well. Between them I was never permitted to look away from the atrocities of what humans have done to pokémon. Kobo was more optimistic.” He pauses here, and has to pick the rest of his words carefully. You imagine him carefully crafting his lies into words. “For a while. He firmly believed that it was just the evil humans doing the bad things, and once we rooted all of them out, we would fix things. For a while I believed him too.”
There’s a cut on his cheek that gleams red in the streetlamp.
“Kobo is a fast learner, faster than me. He realized you don’t need to hate someone to be cruel to them. If you ignore their pain, you can watch them suffer and still claim to love them. Many humans do that. When he learned that, he left us. He said among his clan there is no sympathy for those whose lies fool themselves, nor is there any for those whose lies cannot fool others.”
{And what do you think now?} you ask carefully.
“I’m not sure.”
It’s when you look him in the eyes and see the dejected despair that you understand: your poor, sweet brother was right all along. You’d wanted to see the strange human who had returned to him Mitama’s gift, who let him hide so well, but you should’ve known—Mitama’s gift can only be given, not shared. If this human gave such a perfect version to Kobo, he could have kept none for himself.
This one wants to fight for pokémon. You gathered this much from him and Rhea and Tourmaline. But he lacks the conviction still, lacks the ability to convince others to change. He used all of that power on your brother instead.
{You gave my brother a great gift, although you may not know it. I do not understand how, but you taught him what we never could: you taught him how to change.} You shift your weight, your snout tilted defiantly up so it almost touches his chin. {But I see now you have forgotten how to teach that lesson.}
You may as well have raked your claws across his face for the way he stiffens and then looks away. There’s a slouch in his shoulders, you notice. If he could hold himself upright, he’d be at least an inch taller. You want him to respond. He needs to say something. He needs to
know.
But instead he stands there, silently, doubting. What had he expected in that pretty speech on his grassy meadow? What did he think his words would get him? He certainly didn’t get it, and when he didn’t, he faltered.
You owe someone deeply for what they tried to do for Kobo, but that someone is not the human in front of you. You are not like the pokémon in the human’s legends; you will not be forsworn because you gave your word to another.
But—perhaps, if he can become that person again, your debt can be repaid to its original holder.
{My brother owes a great debt to someone who taught him to change. I travelled far and believe that person to be dead. But if you find that human again, if you find him ready to show others how to change, then call to me, and I will hear. I will fight for
that human until the end of the world, so that the kindness that was shown to my brother is repaid. Until then, you are a stranger, and I owe you nothing.}
