//------------------------------// // 11 2/2. Catch Me If You Can // Story: Alola to a New World! // by Tapu Meme //------------------------------// As Paige flew overhead a beach packed with luau-goers, she caught whiff of grilling food and looked down. Tourist ponies and pokemon alike were gathering around a circle of bonfire grills. They stood in a disorderly queue, holding up plates and drooling mouths but doing their best not to clamour and earn the ire of the chefs. Just as Paige decided that it would be rather rude to circle overhead, especially since she could just eat at home, she locked eyes with a familiar face. Milotic was sitting on her coils next to a weird floating plush rat monster with a shiny silver fox sleeping on its head. She looked ghostly pale in the fading light of the sunset, leaning away from the two floating pokemon but too tired to move to another place. But as soon as she saw Paige, she perked up and waved wildly at her with her tail. Paige landed on the beach in a puff of sand. She eyed the two floating pokemon as she walked up to Milotic. “Hey, Auntie!” Paige said to Milotic, the new floating monster catching sight of her. “How the search is going? Any new leads?” Milotic sighed, dropping her tail back into her coils. “I may have a lead on a lead, if this gentlemon behind me is telling the truth.” “I dunno if ‘gentlemon’ is really me, brah,” the floating monster cut in with a sleazy smile, leaning against Milotic’s coils as the sleeping fox on his head mumbled in its sleep. “I’m more of that ‘bad boy’ type, if you catch my drift.” “He claims he knows a powerful psychic named Rose whose specialty is tracking and locating lost people and pokemon.” Milotic continued, completely ignoring him. “And the only reason I am humoring him is because he claims he can locate her.” “So…?” Paige looked around at the three very stationary pokemon. “So we are waiting until daylight to foolishly charge into that forest over there,” Milotic pointed at the part of the beach where the sand gave way to a ticket of trees. “And until then neither I nor my entourage have slept as much as we would like.” Paige was about to make an excuse to leave when a loud snort from the sleeping fox interrupted further conversation. It perked its head up, squinting around at the scene in front of it. “Wh...Raichu…? How’d you get such a big head…?” “Awh, the eevee lives!” Raichu excitedly pulled the fox off his head and set him down on his surfboard tail. “Did you have a good rest my shiny dude? Didja remember anything?” “So this wasn't a dream.” The eevee grumbled. “Great.” “Ah, yes.” Milotic sighed with a dramatic wave of her tail. “Allow me to introduce to you, missus Paige, the soap opera amnesiac eevee.” “This dude’s a real character.” Raichu explained, sitting down next to the fox and patting his shiny head. “He thinks he used to be human, and can’t even walk right. I think a mean psychic type is playing a prank on him, muddlin his memories. That’s one more reason to find my sister from another mister, Rose. She can help him.” “Rose…?” The eevee blinked a few times, then his eyes widened in panic. “Rose?! I was just dreaming about her! Raichu!” the eevee looked left, then right, then finally looked down. “Raichu, we need to get to Rose right now!” “Uh...yeah…?” The Raichu laughed confusedly. “we were thinking of heading out tomorrow---” “NOW!” The eevee screamed, suddenly leaping off of his head and stumbling like a newborn deer towards the forest. “We gotta help her now!” “Whaoh!” Raichu grabbed the fox with Psychic. “Chill! What’s your problem?!” “Raichu, you gotta belive it’s me, Maika! Rose is in big trouble! I saw her in my dream, she was in a big cage with a ton of other brainwashed pokemon!” “Calm down, little one.” Milotic reached over with a pink head-hand-fin to gently pat the eevee. “It as just a dream.” Maika shook her off, almost Scratching her in his frenzy to escape Raichu’s hold. “It wasn’t! Rose was sending a psychic message, she’s been trapped by some ponies with bat wings! Raichu, don’t you remember?!” Ponies with bat wings? That got Paige’s attention. “Excuse me, you saw ponies with bat wings? In your...psychic...dream? How many?” The eevee blinked and looked over at her. “Uh, there was two with wings that I could see. There was a big one and a little one, and one that had a Rapidash’s horn.” Paige’s face lit up. “And you know the location of where these three ponies are keeping a lot of pokemon and mutants in cages?” “Yeah, he signals coming from that fores---Mutants?!” Paige had said too much, but she was too excited to stress about an information leak. She scooped up the eevee in her arms, plopped him on her back and took off towards the treeline. Raichu and Milotic blinked twice. “Did she just…?” “Oh no.” Milotic groaned. The two exchanged a worried glance and chased after the rogue police pony. Maika clung to Paige’s feathers as she galloped through the forest. “We’re on the right track! Keep going!” Paige bowed her head to avoid low hanging branches and kept running. “Turn left now! It’s not much farther.” Maika pointed with a paw. Paige turned and slowed her gallop to a sneaking trot. “There’s a fake boulder covering a trap door.” Maika said, Paige shushing him roughly. “It’s the only way in or out.” the eevee lowered his voice to the point here Paige had to concentrate to hear him. Paige tucked Maika under her wing and stalked forward, keeping low to the ground. “That the boulder?” Paige asked, pointing to a moss-covered rock half-buried in the dirt. “Yeah, that’s the one.” Maika managed to say even through the muffling feathers. Paige smiled. “Bingo.” An arrow shot into the ground just by her talon. She would have jumped away in surprise, but she couldn’t move at all. Maika, however, could, and he tumbled to the ground with a surprised yelp. Another two arrows followed the first, aimed at the exposed eevee. Paige was almost certain one had gone through his tail, but his fur showed no signs of damage. Still, he scrambled to his feet and bolted out into the clearing. Paige couldn’t open her beak to call out to him, though on second thought that would probably give away her position. No, wait, she still had to save Maika! Hideout or no, she couldn’t leave him to fend for himself in the woods! “There’s nothing you can do.” A whispering voice Paige didn’t recognise seemed to appear by her head. She slowly became aware of a figure standing on her left side, bowing its head to whisper in her ear. “Watch.” The figure said, and straightened up. Maika skidded to a stop, and his head swiveled to the side like someone in the woods had called out to him. He turned the rest of himself in that direction and started running again, but he seemed a bit more...sluggish? In a few more stumbling steps, Maika had fallen over, asleep. In the corner of Paige’s eye, the boulder moved. It wavered, then disappeared, like a mirage. It left a strange, dark hole in the ground. A tall, toothpick thin fox slowly ascended an unseen stairway. It walked on its hind legs, slouched over. It looked malnourished, its movements haphazard and uncoordinated, eyes blank. It walked slowly to Maika’s crumpled form, gently picked him up, tucked him under its arm, and walked stately back into the hole from whence it came, down the steps and out of sight. The boulder reappeared, and there was no trace of either of them. A clawed hand reached out to the arrow embedded into the earth at Paige’s feet. In two tugs it came out, and Paige could move again. “What--” She yell-whispered, just before a talon clamped around her beak. Whoever was restraining her carefully guided her away from the bushes by the clearing, and a little ways away so that they wouldn't lose the location, but they weren’t in immediate danger of being caught like Maika was. “You came here to break someone out of there, didn’t you?” The claw’s owner whispered. “Someone who had been taken before that Eevee. I could tell from your body language, you weren’t about to rush in. You simply came here to confirm a location, and you were planning to retreat.” Paige couldn't say yes or nod, so she gave a thumbs-up. “Then you’re smarter, or at least more prepared than most. If your goal is to free the captured pokemon in that lab, then I would like to help you.” The claw let go and Paige breathed, “That’d be great. We need all the competent help we can get.” “My name is Shun Kazami.” The pokemon stepped forward so Paige could see him in the moonlight, and of course it was a pokemon, what else would a pony-sized owl in a green hoodie be? “I was formerly a human, although since Arceus’s exodus of I have been turned into a Decidueye.” “You can talk,” Paige observed. “Not a common feat amongst pokemon.” “I’m not very common.” Shun said bluntly. “But we’re getting off-topic. I would like to know what kind of plan you had to raid the facility, and who you’re working with.” “I won’t sugarcoat things,” Paige sighed, rubbing the back of her head with her talon. “we’re only a handful of ponies, and we lost a good minotaur to whoever’s in that hole. We might have one pokemon, but she’s new and I’m not sure if she’ll be willing to go through with a mission like this. But our team has been trying to find this place for a really long time. We don’t have a plan just yet, you see.” In reality, Paige was part of a network of nearly 30 undercover operatives, including their mapper, whose ability could get them a plan of attack in minutes. But Paige wasn’t ready to trust this pokemon with everything just yet. “So I assume you’ve run into some ponies by now?” Shun shook his head. “Not many besides you, and the bat-winged one who kidnapped my mate. I tried to raid that place once, and I barely made it out by the skin of my teeth.” Paige wasn’t sure why this owl had teeth, but she wasn’t about to ask questions she didn’t want answers to. “Well, maybe you can help me. What exactly did you see in there?” Shun was quiet for a moment. “Cages. And pokemon. And creatures I couldn’t recognise at all. And a bat-winged pony, with glowing golden eyes and fangs. It was like...the darkness of the place itself had birthed a monster.” “MAAAAAAIIIIIIIIKAAAAAAA!” A loud voice pierced the quiet conversation. "THAT'S YOUR NAME, RIGHT LITTLE DUDE?!" Two pokemon trundled through the woods, snapping of twigs underfoot, yelling at the top of their lungs and trying to be as loud and obvious as possible. Shun and Paige were both nearly startled out of their skins. “Who--?!” Shun sputtered, instinctively shrinking back into the dappled shadows of the forest. “Uh oh,” Paige groaned, getting up to run over. “Auntie and her new boyfriend came looking for me and the little fox.” Shun hung back as Paige went to warn her two friends. She explained that it wasn’t safe, but she mentioned nothing about the lab or a raid, just a vicious equestrian fox monster that she had run into while looking for Rose. Maika was mistaken for a kit and was safe, but she couldn’t guarantee it would stay that way of they attacked. She would get the animal control branch of the police to deal with it tomorrow. Paige gave Shun a reassuring glance over the shoulder as she left the woods with the to now very worried pokemon. Or, she seemed to think she was, as her reassuring glance was aimed squarely at a tree that had been nowhere near where they had been talking before. But then, just before he turned her head back again, her eyes flicked to Shun and she caught his gaze. Shun waited until they were too far away to hear, then went to inspect the tree. There was something off about it. Shun couldn’t see anything remarkable about the tree at first glance, but in the pit of his gut he felt that there was something there. Wait, he leaned closer. A bit of paper was rolled up in the crook of a branch. When he plucked it from its perch, the feeling of something important moved to his palm, right where the paper was unrolling as if being ironed out....