Gods, I'm so sick of Fashionably Late.
That was the first thing that struck me as I blinked my eyes open into an at first, unfamiliar room. I got up from my chair and walked over to the wall on which sat a phone plugged into a pair of speakers to turn off the gods-awful sound of Alone ringing out through said tinny headphone-jack speakers. Upon getting up and as soon as I started moving, an unpleasant and unwanted weight on my chest became apparent and I lurched forward. Suddenly, the rest of the room cut into familiar view -- a dusty, dark, cramped Pokemon Center basement, oppressively hot on every side and not well-ventilated. On one side on what may have at one point been a GTS counter but had evidently been long disused sat the docked phone, speakers, and my old laptop. The opposite wall held a row of aquariums filled with Corphish. In half of them, the water was murky with Shadow Pokemon aura. In the other half, it was murky with floating bits of food. And bits of Corphish, although those were present in all of the tanks. A fridge stood at the end of the row of tanks, struggling to maintain its temperature against the surroundings and making a loud, unpleasant whir. It couldn't quite withstand the Orreian heat and outdated power grid, so the whole room smelled unpleasantly like a midsummer fish market.
The other most obvious smell came from me -- a delightful mixture of teenage body odor and horrible body spray, all mashed together into a mat of face-covering hair that was probably trying to look like The Drug In Me Is You's Ronnie and utterly failing. I stared at myself in the glass of one of the Corphish tanks in disgust, promptly turning away. What little benefit I got from the fabric-wrapping chest binding technique Candela had taught me was undone by my button-up shirt and the strategic positioning of the text "sorry about fucking all your friends" on the T-shirt underneath it. At least I got a solid wardrobe of horrible Falling In Reverse shirts when we went to Subject Debate, and some pants with them -- the store had held them for 2 years, was on the verge of closing, and was unable to get rid of their line of Fashionably Late shirts, so literally paid me to get rid of them. So I took them all, except the Bad Girls Club shirts because Candela said she'd disown me.
Speaking of which...
Right on cue, a version of Candela who didn't really look any less gross and dysregulated than I did descended, carrying a fast food burrito box, chewing on a churro, and smelling strongly of weed. She turned straight towards me after depositing the box on the counter next to my laptop.
"I came down to bring you lunch, because I went and got it and realized I hadn't seen you leave the basement in 6 hours...wait, there's no bathroom down here. So how are you..."
Candela held tightly onto her churro, but it left her mouth and didn't re-enter it as she looked around, her eyes widening with shock and horror as her eyes rested on all of the tanks, then the fridge full of dead Corphish and their food, and then the whiteboard recording my experimental results. She narrowed in on the tank right behind me, where a darkness-wreathed Corphish absently stared forward with its vibrant red eyes.
"Are you fucking making Shadow Pokemon?"
"It's good technology -- the problem with Cipher is that they abused their Pokemon. I think with the right formula and proper raising techniques, it could non-harmfully raise power potential. Plus, if we figure out how it works, that can be applied to understanding how evolution and growth themselves work, which --"
"Are you trying to get us both arrested?! Not only is producing Shadow Pokemon a felony, so is harboring anyone who is! I bring you in from the desert, and THIS is how you repay me?!"
That wasn't how this conversation went last time. Unsure what to say, I gaped forward. The Corphish, meanwhile, seemed to have been watching with some interest. It turned back to its tankmate, who was missing both an eye and a claw, and clacked its claws a couple of times. Perhaps it was commenting on the goings-on?
"All your life, I've been waiting for you to improve and sticking my neck out for you -- do you know how much I've sacrificed to provide for you and to support your silly and useless Pokemon ambitions, and your unhealthy obsession with Ronnie? I keep hoping that one day you'll make something constructive and be a DaUgHtEr I can be proud of, but no -- you just keep rehashing the same bullshit, fixating yourself on whatever rEtArDeD thing suits your interest, without thinking for one goddamned second about who it hurts! Your special interests have body counts! When are you going to learn that you can't just do whatever you want? When are you going to fucking grow up? I thought that cutting you off would teach you some decency so you would actually act like a human being for once, but I guess not. I should have killed you."
Somewhere midway through that monologue, Candela switched to Kantonian, which I knew for a fact she couldn't speak. Also, she got substantially shorter, her skin lightened, and she got conspicuously harder to look at, as her face kept shifting between her own and my mom's. A buzzing noise kicked up in the back of the room, which definitely wasn't the fridge, and kept getting louder, but despite how much I wanted it to, it never drowned out her voice. The meaning, and the sound, was drilling itself straight into my head and projecting itself into me, surrounding me on all sides. The room darkened and its doors vanished. Even the Corphish and my phone disappeared, leaving me with no options. I wanted to run; my heart pounded against my ribs and my legs and arms hurt with the anticipation with which they tensed up like coiled springs, but my feet remained rooted to the floor. I knelt, wincing with pain. My head felt like it was being split open as the female figure's bones cracked and jaw dropped inhumanly wide and she lunged towards me, blazing with hatred. I felt a cold blade push up against my neck and closed my eyes, hoping at least I didn't have to see the blood and my mother slash girlfriend's eyes as my last thought, trying to think of something more pleasant, something that I had memorized in order, something to keep track of time so I would know exactly when I died --
I was lost, now I'm found
I'm sustained by the sound
Of the angels singing me to sleep
When my feet are leaving the ground
The album continued in my head, and I got most of the way through Pick Up The Phone before realizing that I wasn't dead. In fact, the sensation of the metal against my neck and oppressive dry heat of the Pokemon center had been replaced with a much softer warmth. I was floating in a warm liquid, the boundaries of my body dissolving -- was this what being reborn, or the afterlife, felt like?
I felt someone else's breathing against my face and opened my eyes, to find myself face to face with and held in the arms of none other than Ronnie himself. The Drug In Me Is You version, from the combination of tattoo coverage and my feeling his hair against my shoulders. He turned down towards me and planted a kiss on my forehead, before smiling, although it was still a little too wide and his teeth were sharper and larger than a human being's should have been.
"It's okay. You don't need her. You have me. You're safe now. You're safe here. You'll never need to worry about them again. You'll never need to leave."
The obvious question was "where IS 'here'?", since I couldn't see much of anything besides an unsettlingly liquid and viscous-looking field of darkness. However, I was too relieved at not being murdered to question that, so I couldn't stop myself from crying and burying my head in Ronnie's chest. He chuckled under his breath, which didn't come off as particularly warm.
"Obviously, you can stay as long as you like. Or, if you want to be your own man and stop humping my leg like a sad, stray dog, I can help you with that, too..."
Any warmth that had once been in Ronnie's voice had vanished. All that was left was a disturbingly calm contempt, every word calculated to get the maximum response. What had initially seemed like a smile was now much more clearly a smirk. I was exactly where he wanted me, and I couldn't do a thing about it.
"I know you want it. Hell, you've already started to turn. Just look at yourself."
I turned around, against my will, towards a mirror, exactly as black and as viscously fluid as the rest of my surroundings. I didn't look like myself in 2016 anymore, but I did still have the same haircut. The uncomfortable weight on my chest persisted, although I think it might have been oversized pectorals. Regardless, the text on my shirt, stained with both tears and black slime, was far further forward than I would have preferred it to be, my button up barely fit over my shoulder and as such had slid back, and most jarringly, my nipples stood out fully visible even through the T-shirt. Not only did fluid patterns of Shadow smoke surround me, those patterns projected themselves downwards onto my arms and neck, oozing over every part of me and shifting as I continued to look at them. As I expected, something was written across my forehead, which I brushed back my bangs to look at, but couldn't read because the text kept rippling. On a surface level, this would have been affirming, but the breathing down my neck, the feeling of being fundamentally stained and covered in slime on every level, and how my arms and pecs were out of proportion with the rest of me and frankly made me look like I had larger boobs than I had when I had them made it the exact opposite. My voice shook, or rather, it wasn't mine. There wasn't anything necessarily off about its pitch or intonation, but it came out distorted, hollow. I wasn't the one in control here.
"No... this isn't what I wanted..."
"If it wasn't, then you wouldn't be here. You chose every part of this. So why don't you close your eyes and think about The Drug In Me Is You? This might sting a bit."
Before I could protest, a needle plunged itself into my arm. A numbness spread across my body, or, well, my body was watching the me who looked like a smaller version of Ronnie from the outside. The me who wasn't me ripped off his shirts and hunched over as his arm and chest muscles continued to expand. At the same time, the coalescing Shadow aura around him darkened further and pressed down into his skin, forming itself into a solid midnight blue skin tone. It began to spread all throughout his body, the darkness consuming him completely save for two points and a line glowing bright red -- his eyes, and the unreadable face tattoo. Following from the expansion of his arms and chest, his hands started to grow as well, fingers flattening and losing their nails as they grew to nearly the length of his arms before them and his hands grew to dwarf the rest of his arms in width. Holding himself up on his massive, flattened, nail-less fingers, the figure hunched on all fours and screamed as his spine burst through his skin, blood-stained silver spikes bursting from his back. I froze, now knowing exactly what he -- I -- was going to become. The disproportionate hands and arms had lost all human proportions at this point and were now a solid dark blue, with glossy black feathers rapidly growing over them. The voice that wasn't mine screamed once again as his spine forced itself out of the back of his body, starting as raw bone before growing its own flesh around it, expanding into a spiked tail about the length of the rest of his body. Feathers continued to grow all over his arms, chest, back, and now tail, all while his face remained conspicuously and heartbreakingly human. With a horrible crunch, his legs broke, forcing the other me into lying face down as his legs reshaped themselves, knees and ankles sliding further up his bone structure and his toes fusing together and growing into wicked claws. Last to change was the figure's face -- my glasses fell off his face as spines grew from either side of his head, projecting behind his eyes, and a third grew from the center of the still-glowing face tattoo. This was coupled with a general growth in the figure's proportions, bone cracking and skin tearing and promptly reforming as he grew to three times his original size. His voice deepened in response, screaming in pain and terror interrupted by sobs, cries for help, and pleas for forgiveness, still heartbreakingly understandable and recognizably mine even as they left the space of human vocal range. Finally, his nose sank into his head and then expanded as his neck lengthened, turning his head into a toothed beak as his screams became avian cries.
A full-sized Shadow Lugia, indistinguishable from the original XD001 save its glowing red face tattoo, looked around in confusion as Ronnie smiled up at it. I promptly returned to my -- its body, and immediately let out an avian screech of pain. All of my bones had been repeatedly broken and regrown in incorrect configurations in the space of less than a minute, ultimately turning me into a creature with a completely different body plan 3 times my original size. A massive tail stretched out behind me, my attempt to turn around smashing it with yet more pain in my still tender bones against the walls, my now being back in the Pokemon center. Ronnie had vanished, but his voice echoed in my head.
"Go. Get our revenge. Do what you've always wanted to."
Dwarfed below my corrupted body, Candela looked up at me with terror, tears welling up in the bottom of her widened eyes. She was clearly herself now, with none of the raw hatred and distorted conflation with my mom she had before.
"Arlo, please... I didn't mean it. This isn't you. We can work this --"
She didn't get to finish her sentence because against my will, Ronnie's voice in my head drowning out everything else, I lunged down and effortlessly bit clean through her neck. I felt the crunch of bone in my mouth as it filled up with blood.
I lunged awake, my skin literally and figuratively crawling and feeling far too tight. Something was growing inside me, whether that was feathers, or scales, or slime, or gods know what, but it needed to be killed posthaste. I rushed straight to the bathroom, and first, dry-heaved into the toilet for what felt like an eternity, but was granted no relief from my nausea. I then got into the shower and turned its heat up to the absolute maximum temperature, every droplet burning as my skin reddened and steam obscured my horrified face in the mirror. I scrubbed at my skin and hair with soap incessantly, but none of the disgusting feeling subsided, so I started scratching. I dug my nails deep into my flesh, trying in earnest to get whatever horrible thing was growing inside me out. I didn't notice the pain; it had merged with the burning from the shower water to produce a comfortable numbness. I started at the base of my legs and continued, making it most of the way down my non-dominant arm before the hot water ran out and I staggered out of the shower, abruptly fumbling to turn it off.
Looking down without the steam, a surprising amount of blood spiraled down the shower drain along with the water, and looking at my legs and left arm, they were nearly entirely covered in white fingernail-gashes, save a few pearls of blood rising to the surface.
Wordlessly, I wrapped myself in a towel, returned to my room, and got dressed, carefully selecting long pants and sleeves. Can't have anyone taking me for an emo stereotype, after all. I descended the stairs and walked straight out to my car. When I got out and became vaguely aware of my surroundings, it seemed that the environs were completely dark, and I hadn't seen anyone else in Team Go Rocket's building. Looking down at my phone, it was 3:30 in the morning.
The perfect time to go see an old flame, in more ways than one.