//------------------------------// // Into The Depths // Story: Celestia's Rocket Adventures // by Snake Staff //------------------------------// A lone Dark Ball, slick with sweat and half-covered with dirt, lay half concealed beneath a tuft of scorched grass. All around it were the sprawled forms of dozens of Pokémon from both sides, enemies now lying beaten and limp next to one another. On nearby monoliths hung Pokémon of the field and forest, the mountains and the rivers, listless and unresponsive. With a sour expression on his face, Giovanni stepped on it. Team Rocket’s leader silently cursed the day he had approved the prototype run of these Dark Balls, easily ignoring the cry of pain from a nearby Snubbull. If he had known how much trouble these things would cause him… “Hey!” the sound of rapidly approaching footsteps interrupted his bitter reminiscing. “Get back here! What’d you do that for?!” “What did I do what for?” Giovanni didn’t bother turning around, just continued to walk towards the next grey-black orb. “They were already down!” Another voice, this one female, also shouted. “You didn’t need to… didn’t need to…” “I didn’t need to send them screaming into whatever world awaits beyond this one?” Giovanni kept his back to the naïve children and kept walking. “Quite the contrary.” “They were helpless, you could have-” “I could have let this pointless battle rage for minutes longer, giving the madman at the heart of this more time to enact his insane plan. I could have allowed more deaths here as well – or do you suppose all of these Pokémon would still be breathing?” The silence told the hardened crime lord all he needed to know. “Alternatively, I could have ended this swiftly and efficiently, without any unnecessary theatrics and with a sort of justice.” Giovanni turned to face the group of children for the first time. “Can any of you honestly argue that they didn’t deserve it?” There were four children in all. Three he had only seen in video reports from his agents, but one he could hardly fail to recognize. The boy that his bumbling trio had been hounding for years, and the little yellow Pikachu never far from his side. He could hardly forget their meeting at the culmination of Operation Tempest back in Unova, nor how helpfully the boy had led him straight to Meloetta. Nor what had happened afterwards. He traveled with new friends now, but Giovanni saw in him that same idiot courage as before. “I am here to end this madness, and annihilate anything that stands in my way,” he declared, punctuating the sentence by crushing another Dark Ball and letting another of the bound Pokémon howl as the hold was broken. “And we’re here to stop whatever bad guys try to pull,” Ash responded immediately, noticeably placing himself between Giovanni and the multitudes of unconscious wild and newly-released Pokémon littering the clearing. That prompted a chorus of affirmations from the other three children. They were one and all meeting his gaze with determination shining clearly in their eyes in spite of what they had just seen him do. Even the little girl. Giovanni had to admit, even if only to himself, that that took guts and those he could respect. “Quite,” he said, turning away with a faint smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Well, if you’re quite finished with reprimanding your rescuer, I’ll remind you that there’s still work to be done.” “We’ve gotta get all these Pokemon down from the pillars,” the blonde-haired boy in glasses noted immediately. “Yes. You may not have seen the mechanical systems layout of this place, but I have. And I assure you whatever Team Flare wants up, we want down.” He looked further afield. “Domino.” “Sir?” the young, blonde Elite Officer of Team Rocket popped out from around a nearby stone pillar, black and grey debris falling from one clenched fist. “You heard the boy.” Giovanni’s smirk widened. “We ought to cut these poor Pokémon free.” “I’m all over it,” she matched his sardonic grin with one of her own. “Roserade, come out and help the poor things with your Petal Dance!” She tossed a Poke Ball into the air, and a small green flowery Pokémon appeared, elegantly poised in its green leaf cape and the white bud emulating hair atop its head. Fittingly for the agent nicknamed “The Black Tulip”, it featured darker leaves and the telltale purple and black roses at the end of each arm that marked it out as a rare shiny Pokémon. It was the fruit of one of Domino’s many successful heists, stolen as an egg from a professional breeder some years ago when the fool thought she could back out of an arrangement with Team Rocket. Roserade spun with the natural grace of a ballet dancer, hopping atop her mistress’s shoulder and then balancing perfectly with one leg atop one of Domino’s hands, purely to show off. There she spun even faster, generating a whirling storm of purple and black petals flying off in all directions. The children covered their faces or each other, though Giovanni remained right where he was. True to form, the apparently uncontrolled attack proved impeccably precise, seemingly delicate blooms slicing almost gently through chain links without even touching people or Pokémon. By the time Roserade did a backflip off of her trainer’s fingers and landed nimbly on both feet, almost twenty Pokémon in all directions were dropping to the ground with jangling lengths of broken chains. “Well done as ever, but there are still more,” Team Rocket’s leader indicated. “Come now children, won’t you help my friend here?” However little they liked him, or his employee for that matter, at least the four of them had the sense to begin running off to sick their own Pokémon on the bindings. Giovanni couldn’t help but notice as they did that the black-haired boy from Kanto alone of them seemed to be giving Domino almost as much of an evil eye as he gave Giovanni himself. If he weren’t busy, he would have wondered what that was about. The two had never met, as far as he could remember. Speaking of oddities, as Giovanni resumed his search for Dark Balls to destroy, he couldn’t help but consider that unusual purple equine Pokémon that had been staring down warily at him from atop one of the monoliths. He had other business today, but spotting opportunities was largely a reflex to him. One unusual and unknown species of Pokémon showing up out of the blue could be coincidence, but two so similar right around the same time? Perhaps when the madman and his dreams had been dashed, that might be a matter worth looking into. “Xerosic, sir,” an olive-skinned Team Flare technician in a white coat said, “I have an important matter requiring your attention.” “You and half the occupants of this room!” the older man, face drenched in sweat and visibly haggard, snapped at her. “Half of that rabid horde is still running wild across our compound, security footage from above sublevel eight is completely dead and patchy below it, power regulation is nearing critical levels, over 60% of base personnel aren’t responding to hails, I’ve had to direct the final repairs to Yveltal’s array from up here, and Lady Malva is refusing contact again!” he wiped his forehead with a white cloth. “So, deal with it yourself!” “But sir,” the technician protested, “the energy inflow from the forest accumulators is continuing to drop! It has been for several minutes now but in the last ninety seconds it’s been reduced by over 66%!” She gestured desperately at the graph in front of her, but Xerosic was already bent over some other console and had his back to her. “Contact Bryony and Aliana, that’s their responsibility!” he said without even looking over his shoulder at her. “Now then, connect the last piece to the base of the creature’s spine and the arrangement should be-” “That’s just it, sir, I can’t raise them!” her voice sounded frantic. “Neither is responding to communications and the input continues to drop with every second! I don’t know what to do! Master Lysandre will be furious!” “Urgh, fine,” Xerosic stood up to his full height. “You’re competent to pack up your tools and get out of the way down there, I trust?” he barked into a headset, nodding at whatever answer he received and putting it down. “Xerosic, sir,” a red-suited man on the opposite side of the observation level called out from behind a security feed. “I have an urgent matter requiring your immediate attention!” “Shut up!” the exhausted and overstressed scientist screamed back at him. “But sir, I-” “Figure it out!” Xerosic shouted again, wiping more sweat off of his brow as he hurriedly walked over to the technician, who flinched as he half shoved her aside to look at her console. He blinked. “How did this inflow get so low?” “I-I don’t know sir…” she said nervously. “It j-just started dropping a few minutes ago and it hasn’t stopped and inflow is below required levels and we’re not gonna be able to do it and the new world won’t be born and we’re all gonna get arrested and-” she was starting to hyperventilate. “Easy there,” Xerosic put a gloved, comforting hand on her shoulder. “We haven’t come this far to stumble at the finish line. Don’t panic. We’ll make it.” She just nodded back, unable to suppress her tremors and unwilling to trust her voice. “Now then, as a starting measure we can cut power to all systems above sublevel seven and redirect the flow to the weapon for a small boost,” Xerosic said, tapping in high-level officer codes into the screen. “Second, we need a status report from the forest team. If Bryony and Aliana can’t be reached then try-” Who she was to try, that technician never did find out, because the door behind them both chose that exact moment to be torn right from its track by a wave of raw force. By sheer ill-fortune it landed squarely on Xerosic’s back, smashing his face into the console hard enough to crack the lenses of his red goggles. She shrieked as her superior slumped weakly to the floor. The remaining staff inside Team Flare’s observation level were not, in the main, combatants. The admin team had been dispatched to fight various fires across the facility what felt like hours ago, both out of necessity and to stop them giving out contrary orders to Xerosic’s. What was left was technical staff and communications operators, not skilled trainers. “Go Celestia!” James shouted. “Use Psychic!” “Pumpkaboo, Leech Seed!” Jessie commanded. As was only right, Celestia had been the first one in the door, and her eyes were already glowing. Startled men and women were torn from their seats by a brilliant golden aura and simply tossed into what amounted to little more than a pile of bodies in the room’s center. Jessie’s Pokémon floated over her head, spitting little seeds that exploded into entangling vines upon contact, soundly enveloping the hapless Team Flare personnel and rapidly draining their energy. Some tried to run. A few tried to go for Poke Balls. In the very near end, that made no difference either way. Team Rocket soon stepped into the observation level filled with bound, twitching Team Flare staff rapidly drifting off into unconsciousness. The room around them was immense. Its most prominent feature was obviously the enormous, curving glass window looking out on the central chamber several floors below, revealing a red and black avian nestled in a cradle of wiring, a blue sea serpent of prodigious size, and a whole heap of battle damage whose source none of them could even guess at. But beyond just the observation portal, the room also featured rack upon rack of control banks, communications arrays, and screens showing a dizzying array of numbers, charts, graphs, security footage, and diagrams so obtuse that Celestia couldn’t make heads or tails of any of it. “All right, team,” Jessie shoved one of the limp red-suited Flare personnel off of one of the apparent control panels. “We’ve taken the control room! Now all we have to do is…” she looked around the room. “All we have to do is…” she looked a little more. “Uh, James?” “Search me,” James was staring at a fluctuating series of numbers and colored bars waving up and down at apparent random on one of the screen, unhelpfully labeled 211-B. “Meowth, got any bright ideas?” “We could smash everything an’ see if dat works.” Meowth was looking quizzically at a pie graph with five sections in green, orange, yellow, purple, and red, apparently trying to figure out if the slow growth of the red section meant good or bad things. “If we smash everything without thought then we might inadvertently start some cataclysmic chain reaction that ends with all of the world-destroying energy being unleashed right here in an explosion of unknowable size,” Celestia pointed out, nudging Meowth to translate. “The potential repercussions of that don’t bear thinking about even besides the certainty of our own instant disintegration. You saw the firepower this thing can unleash. Whatever energy it has built up must be safely dissipated, and for that we need these controls… I think.” “Well then what are we supposed to do, twiddle our thumbs in here and call tech support? Jessie put her hands on her hips. “If we don’t know what’s what how can we be sure it can’t still fire?” “We do what we were always gonna do, duh,” Meowth said, hopping up on a panel by the massive window and pointing down. A human-sized figure was hard to pick out at this distance, but one could still be faintly made out in the enormous shadow of Gyarados. “We go down ‘dere and kick Lysandre’s rear end from here ta Kanto and back again!” “Of course, I see.” James said, rushing to take a look himself. “In anything this big the boss is sure to have his finger on the biggest button!” “That’s just how Giovanni would do it,” Jessie nodded. “So it’s settled, we beat the stuffing out of him, take the keys away, and figure the rest out as we go.” “A perfect plan!” James and Meowth cheered. “Uh… I hate to rain on your parade, but are you sure you should be so cocky?” Celestia interjected. “From the looks of that room someone or something else already tried that and it didn’t pan out.” “Then they just softened him up for us!” James declared with a clenched fist. “We’re unstoppable today!” “We faced a member of the Elite Four and beat her like a cheap drum!” Jessie said, “There’s nothing we can’t do!” As I recall, you had some help with that… Celestia found a drop of sweat forming on the back of her neck. “Lady Luck is finally on our side today!” Meowth nodded emphatically. “I bet we could even catch Pikachu today if we tried!” “Yeah!” his teammates cheered. “So we can definitely take some two-bit punk wid’ a lousy haircut and a overgrown Caterpie!” “Yeah!” the two cheered louder. “So Team Rocket, let’s get down dere and mop da floor with dat loon!” “YEAH!” all three of them cheered at once. Celestia smiled despite herself. Their confidence was infectious. As if on cue, one of the many speakers embedded in the multitude of control panels chose that moment to blare to life. “Lysandre to Observation Level,” a very familiar voice said. “Why is no one responding to my communications? What’s happening up there?” Jessie, James, Meowth, and even Celestia herself shared a grin. Jessie grabbed for the microphone nearest the speaker without hesitation. “Prepare for trouble, what’s happening is us!” her voice boomed out to the wide central chamber several stories below. “And make it double, we’re causing a fuss!” While he spoke, James nodded once at Celestia, and her eyes lit up. The wide glass window overlooking the heart of the ultimate weapon at first warped, then cracked, and then finally shattered under her telekinetic touch. Moved by some unseen instinct, Jessie, James, and Meowth did a simultaneous acrobatic forward flip out the shattered portal. “To protect our world from absolute devastation!” “To bring your schemes to complete ruination!” The trio were smiling even as they fell, apparently oblivious to the apparent wind whipping through their hair. “To denounce the evils of burning it all!” “To unravel your hopes ‘til you start to bawl!” A soft golden aura appeared around the three of them as they dropped closer to the bottom. So thin and light as to be almost a simple sheen, it slowed the trio’s descent noticeably. “Jessie!” “And it’s James!” Both immediately struck poses the moment they landed. “Team Rocket blasts off on the side of light!” “Bow down in defeat or be crushed by our might!” Jessie and James had their backs to one another, arms folded across their chests and heads facing Lysandre with confident smiles. “Meowth, dat’s right!” “Wobbuffet!” Angelic wings unfurled for a gentle glide, Princess Celestia touched down softly in a regal pose just in front of Team Rocket, rainbow mane unfurling to shine brilliantly amidst the darkness. The accompanying shower of golden sparkles was just for effect. “Celestia, let foes take fright!”