Buizel shot upright in bed, panting and sweating bullets.
His breathing slowed as he looked around his completely ordinary room, just as he had left it the day prior. He blinked slowly, trying to remember what happened. “Wasn’t there…?”
The memory of the dream fading, he slipped downstairs and through the front door. The sun was just barely beginning to crest the ocean’s surface, lighting the world in shades of cyan. The smell of familiar sea air was nice, but Buizel was preoccupied with something else.
Searching the rapidly fading night sky, he found what he was looking for: a single red star, directly over the island. Buizel stared at it for a while, processing what had just happened in his dream. “Was that all just a dream?” he muttered. “It all felt so real…” Automatically, his paws drifted up to the scarf around his neck. Buizel froze and looked down at the scarf he didn’t remember putting on.
It was made of a very shimmery purple cloth, closer to a shade of lavender than true purple. As he stared at it, it seemed to glimmer in the dawn’s light. Shimmer Scarves, his memory told him. I’m not sure what they do, but they hold great power.
He returned inside, his memories wrestling with reality. “But that red star,” he murmured. “What about that red star…?”
A memory that seemed very important seemed to walk up and slap Buizel in the face. Shaun! How could he forget about Shaun?
His last, faint memory of him touching the Time Gear in the odd temple place seemed to strike Buizel as important, somehow. Time seemed to freeze for a second before Buizel had woken up in his house, the end of the world nowhere in sight.
Buizel, suddenly remembering something else, collected a sheet of paper and some ink and sat down at the dining room table. He carefully wrote out four names; Lucario, Audino, Meowstic, Cinccino, and stared at them blankly. “What am I supposed to do with this?” he muttered.
The rapid clicking of machinery from the base of the lighthouse drew Buizel’s attention. Ampharos stretched as he stepped off of the elevator before walking into the living room and seeing Buizel at the kitchen table. “Oh, good morning, Buizel. You’re up early.”
“Hey dad, can you come look at this real quick?” Buizel asked.
Ampharos obliged, walking into the kitchen. “What do you need help with?”
“Who are these Pokemon?” Buizel asked, handing him the sheet of paper. “I… they seem important, somehow.”
Ampharos stared at the contents of the paper for a long moment. “How did you get these names?”
Buizel squirmed uncomfortably at an undertone in his father’s voice. “Really weird and long… dream,” he said. “Met these specific Pokemon in it.” Ampharos continued to stare at the paper until Buizel was thoroughly sure that he had done something wrong. “Um, do you recognize anymon here…?”
Ampharos silently took the chair opposite Buizel. “Buizel,” he began, “I don’t know how you got these names, but I need you to forget them, alright?”
Buizel shook his head sadly. “Can’t.”
Ampharos looked like he wanted to raise an eyebrow. “What do you mean, ‘can’t’?”
Buizel untied the scarf from his neck and laid it gently on the table. “I just can’t, dad. Can’t explain it, don’t know how, but… I know things.”
“Like what?” Ampharos seemed to be a mixture of confused and genuinely curious as he eyed the bunched up square of cloth on the table.
“The Time Gear’s gone missing,” Buizel said, suddenly feeling exhausted. “And Shaun…” He put his head into his paws. “Oh Arceus, how could I forget about Shaun?”
A Sucker Punch could not have been more effective than Buizel name-dropping the Time Gear. Ampharos seemed to reel back a bit in his chair before regaining his composure. “Buizel?” he asked gently. “What happened?”
“A dream? But I don’t know if it was a dream.” He took the scarf and tied it around his neck again, feeling a little mournful. “A giant meteor fell out of the sky and threatened to destroy the entire island. And then Shaun touched a Time Gear…” He trailed off. “And then I woke up, I guess.”
Ampharos eyed the list with names on it again. “And this dream somehow provided you with a list of names.”
“We went around meeting them. Accidentally, I guess.” Buizel stared at the table. “I only liked Cinccino. Everyone else was at best distant, and at worst straight up antagonistic.”
“Who was your least favorite?” Ampharos asked curiously. He got up from the table and set about making a simple breakfast, possibly to help himself think.
Buizel replied like a shot. “Meowstic. I can kinda see where he’s coming from, but he could stand to be a little nicer about it.”
Ampharos laughed a little to himself, “Yes, you would think that, would you?” he murmured.
He set a bowl of berries in front of Buizel, who blinked in surprise. “Oh, thanks.” He started eating, aware that he hadn’t eaten in what felt like hours.
“You sound like you need the calories.” Ampharos settled down with his own bowl of berries. “You said earlier that the Time Gear went missing?”
Buizel nodded, taking a bite of a berry. “Yeah, time apparently sped up and slowed down randomly. It didn’t stop completely because Shaun was the Time Gear, and he was still on the island.”
Ampharos considered this. “Who’s Shaun?”
Buizel glanced at him, confused. “Didn’t you meet him?” His doubts about the dream being real grew.
“No.” Ampharos chewed thoughtfully for a moment before swallowing. “Certainly sounds like an interesting character.”
“I think you’d like him,” Buizel said boldly. “He’s not a bad ‘mon, just a little… weird…” He trailed off.
“Well, if you ever meet this ‘Shaun’ in real life, then I’d like to meet him.” Ampharos stood up and yawned. “I think I’m headed off to bed. Remember to be good at school today.”
“Alright,” Buizel replied distantly. He watched as Ampharos disappeared into his bedroom and then looked at his remaining food. “I hope Shaun’s at least doing alright, wherever he is.”
Buizel walked to school, feeling a faint sense of Deja vu the entire way there.
It was uncanny; Pokemon doing simple, mundane tasks gave Buizel the feeling that he had seen all of it before. He tried to walk to school faster, but the Deja vu followed him wherever he went.
School was much the same as always, only reinforcing his feeling that he had seen it before. He stared into the sky at the very faint red star as Mr. Breloom yammered on about something that sounded vaguely familiar.
His attention snapped back to school when he heard someone ask, “Buizel, what’s your dream?”
He stared around at the class, who were all looking at him expectantly. He felt like he had been in this exact situation before and shrugged a little apathetically. “Haunter would make fun of me for it.”
Everyone turned to look at Haunter, who looked around blankly. “Eh?”
“He’s not wrong,” Minun said. “You probably would make fun of him for it.”
“Haunter makes fun of him for anything,” Wooper huffed. “And I bet it’s pretty hard to make fun of Buizel for his dream.”
“You’d be surprised,” Buizel muttered under his breath. Something about the familiar situation urged him to stay silent.
Breloom shrugged. “Well, I guess if Buizel doesn’t want to share his dream, then he doesn’t have to. Plenty of ‘mons keep their dreams secret for fear of being mocked, discouraged, or straight up broken.” Buizel squirmed a little at this, but the lesson proceeded as normal from there.
After school, Buizel was the first to depart, as usual. He walked down the path, feeling faintly melancholic. He didn’t know why he was so sad over a dream, but he tried to avoid thinking about it.
As he set foot into the village square again, a wave of Something hit Buizel. He gasped and fell to his knees as Something Wrong echoed throughout his head.
Other Pokemon in the village seemed to feel it as well, mimicking Buizel’s reaction. Buizel slowly pushed himself up and looked around, feeling slightly disoriented. “What was that?” he heard somemon mutter.
His gaze turned towards the forest path. Any previous sense of Deja vu had completely vanished. He slowly took one step towards the path that led into the deep forest, and then another. Something important was in there.
As he continued walking towards it, he remembered what it was. I found Shaun in there.
Suddenly he was running through the forest. His mother had all but strictly forbidden him from going in there, but he had an idea of how that particular conversation would play out.
As he ran into the forest, he saw something fall out of the trees ahead of him. He floundered to a stop, nearly tripping over the unconscious Shinx that had slammed painfully into the ground.
Barely hoping beyond hope, he rolled over the Shinx. It was terrifically dirty, and one of its hind legs was bent the wrong way. Buizel winced a little as he saw it move wrong, undoubtedly painfully.
But tied around the neck of the Shinx was a scarf made of the exact same cloth that Buizel was wearing.
Picking up the Shinx on his back, Buizel began to run. He didn’t know how fast he had run until he was at the lighthouse, gasping for air. He pushed open the door and gently laid down the Shinx on the couch. He stared at it for a moment before looking for Floatzel.
She was in the kitchen, washing dishes from some meal the prior day. “Um, hey mom,” Buizel asked, causing her to look up. “Do you know how to fix a broken leg? Because I found somemon with a broken leg.”
“Then why did you bring them here and not the clinic?” she admonished.
“He doesn’t like it there,” Buizel said knowingly.
Floatzel sighed, knowing Buizel’s tendency to be vague. “Alright, where are they?”
“The couch,” Buizel replied promptly as they walked into the living room.
Floatzel saw the Shinx and blinked a little. “That’s odd.”
“What is?” Buizel asked, preoccupied with the Shinx. Doubts were beginning to creep in that the Shinx was who he thought it was.
“I swear I’ve…” she shook her head a little. “Never mind. What matters is fixing that leg.”
Floatzel expertly directed Buizel to collect things for making a crude splint. She carefully arranged it around the Shinx’s leg in a direction that looked vaguely correct, and then took a wet washcloth to its dirty fur. “He must’ve not liked taking baths,” she remarked as she had to essentially scrape the dirt off of the Shinx.
Buizel was admiring the splint. “How did you know how to make this?” he asked.
“I was the town’s doctor for a while before Chansey moved here,” she replied, still scrubbing the Shinx’s fur. “That was before I met Ampharos, of course, but I had to know the basics for things like setting bones to, well, keep my job. Can you rinse this cloth for me?”
“Huh.” Buizel did as he was asked and brought the cloth back. “I feel like there’s still a lot of stuff I don’t know about you guys.”
“If there’s anything you want to know, you can just ask,” Floatzel said, standing up. “You of all Pokemon have a right to know about us.”
Buizel shrugged a little. “I guess.”
The Shinx stirred, causing Buizel to give it his full attention. It laid there with its eyes closed for a minute before opening them blearily and looking up at him and Floatzel. “Oh. Hi, Buizel,” Shaun said.
Shaun’s voice unlocked memories that Buizel didn’t even know he had. He knelt by the side of the couch and took one of Shaun’s non-injured paws in his own. “Shaun,” he said, his voice a little unsteady, “what in the world did you do?”
“My leg hurts,” Shaun complained before he registered the question. “What? Oh. Um, I think I reversed time. Broke something, though.”
Several things suddenly clicked in Buizel’s head. “Oh, that’s why I’ve been having so much Deja vu today.”
He suddenly became aware of Floatzel standing next to them. He looked up and grinned at her confused face mareepishly. “Uh, long story, mom. I’ll tell you later.”
“If you say so,” Floatzel replied, a little nonplussed. “Shaun, was it?” she said, turning to him. “You’re welcome to stay here as long as you need to recover.”
“Thanks,” said Shaun. “I’d be a bit more formal, but I’m not all here at the moment.”
Floatzel laughed a little. “Oh, that’s entirely fine. You need time to heal.”
Shaun stared at her blankly before looking down at his leg. “Oh. That is. Not good.”
“It was worse when I found you,” Buizel said. “It looked like it was bent backward.”
“Fun.” Shaun’s face belied that this wasn’t fun in the slightest.
Ampharos wandered into the room and glanced over at his family curiously. Buizel suddenly felt immensely nervous. “Oh, um, hi, dad.”
Ampharos walked around the couch and saw Shaun. He looked more nonplussed than anything, making Buizel slightly relieved. “Who’s this?” he asked.
“Dad, this is Shaun,” Buizel said nervously. “Shaun, I think you already know who Ampharos is.”
Shaun and Ampharos locked eyes for a second. “Yeah, I do,” Shaun remarked, being the first to break eye contact. “Uh, do you think if I talk about something that hasn’t happened yet, it’ll cause a paradox?”
Buizel blinked slowly. “What?”
“What kind of paradox?” Ampharos asked, more intelligently.
“Time paradox,” Shaun clarified. “Talking about things that haven’t happened yet.”
Ampharos tapped his chin thoughtfully. “Either you’re completely delusional or you’re telling the truth. And I can’t tell which it is, which scares me.”
Buizel stared at Shaun’s scarf. He carefully untied his own scarf and stared at the cloth it was composed of. “Who says we haven’t caused a paradox already?”
He had everymon’s full attention as he explained slowly, “We got these scarves around two weeks from now. By all rights, these shouldn’t exist yet.”
There was silence for a moment. Ampharos glanced at Shaun and then back at Buizel. “So this Pokemon is a Time Gear.”
Shaun flinched a little before his brain processed what he had just heard. “Wait, who told you that?”
“Buizel,” Ampharos replied. “If there wasn’t a paradox before, there is one now.”
Shaun facepalmed. “Buizel…”
Buizel desperately tried to defend himself. “Look, I didn’t know that I- we had time traveled! I just thought it was a really weird dream!”
“I feel like the scarf would’ve tipped you off sooner,” Shaun remarked. “Also, put it back on. You look cooler with it on.”
“I have to agree,” Ampharos said, causing Buizel to flush with embarrassment. “It really sets you apart from the rest of the Buizel we have on the island.”
Shaun blinked. “That sounds familiar,” he muttered. “Ah, whatever.”
Buizel reequipped the scarf, feeling a little self-conscious as he did so. He had just finished tying the knot when there was a knock at the door. “I’ll get it,” Floatzel volunteered.
“Who could that be?” Ampharos mused as Floatzel got the door. “We don’t really get visitors.”
Shaun looked a little pensive. “I thought that traveling back in time would make things a bit more predictable, but I guess not.”
“This hasn’t happened before?” Ampharos asked with professional interest.
Shaun shook his head. “For one thing, Buizel took me to the clinic instead of the lighthouse. And then I was sick for like, a week.”
“Hm. Interesting,” Ampharos mused.
Buizel wasn’t entirely listening. He watched as Floatzel cheerfully chatted to a Pokemon outside before letting them in.
It was Sneasel.
She walked directly over to the couch and seemed entirely unsurprised to see Shaun there. Her eyes flicked to his splinted leg and a mix of emotions flashed through her eyes that Buizel didn’t recognize.
Shaun looked up and went a little pale. “Oh, hi, Sneasel,” he said faintly.
Wordlessly, she knelt down next to the couch and took one of Shaun’s paws, surprising both Buizel and Shaun. “Shaun,” she said, her voice quavering, “how in the world did you destroy a Time Gear?”
There was silence for a long moment. Buizel glanced at Sneasel, looking a little shell shocked. “He what?”
“He what?” Ampharos said blankly.
Floatzel read the room and prudently disappeared into the kitchen. Shaun watched her go, slightly envious of how easily she was able to leave the conversation.
“I don’t know,” Shaun said eventually. “I rewound time by… I want to say, a week? …Maybe two weeks?”
“Two weeks,” Sneasel breathed. She looked down at her claws grasping Shaun’s paws and quickly released them, blushing a little. “Oh, sorry. That was unprofessional of me.”
“It’s fine,” Shaun assured her. “Makes you more human.”
The room went silent again as Shaun processed what he had just said. “Oh,” he said, wincing. “Too soon, huh?”
“We will talk about- that– later,” Sneasel replied, a little ominously. “What’s slightly more important is the fact that you somehow broke a Time Gear.”
Shaun shook his head. “I don’t know how. It just… shattered. And flung me through the air until I fell though like twenty feet of tree branches and broke my leg, apparently.” He glared at his leg like it had broken to spite him personally. “That is still so unfair.”
Sneasel glanced at his broken leg again and her eyes flickered with some emotion that Shaun couldn’t pin down. “Shaun, I don’t think you understand,” she said, redirecting the conversation. “Time Gears don’t just ‘break’. Pokemon have tried to break them. They’re practically impervious to anything but straight up being thrown into an active volcano.”
“Hyperbole,” Ampharos remarked, “but she is correct. They’ve been physically impossible to break.” He glanced strangely at Shaun. “Until now, apparently.”
“Okay, elephant in the room,” Shaun said, trying desperately to redirect the topic. “We have a giant meteor headed for our current location. I’ve bought us two weeks. What the hell are we going to do about it?”
Silence. Shaun wasn’t entirely sure what he was expecting.
After a minute, Ampharos wandered over to the bookshelf and pulled down a book Shaun vaguely recognized. “Oh hey, that’s that one fairytale book.”
Ampharos nodded, his attention somewhere else. He sat down in the armchair and began to slowly and methodically flip through it as Buizel suggested, “Um, somehow find Rayquaza and convince him to destroy the meteor?”
Sneasel shook her head. “Too impractical. I don’t even know where we’d start looking.”
“Sky Tower, probably,” Ampharos supplied, “but it’s far too dangerous for most Pokemon to go waltzing in there with no plan. Besides,” he added, “it’s somewhere on the Air Continent, which is extremely far away from here. It’d most likely take two weeks just to get there.”
“It was just a suggestion,” Buizel said, rubbing the back of his neck.
“Hey, it was a decent one!” Shaun said, trying to cheer him up. “Just… a little impractical!”
Sneasel snorted. “You can say that again.”
Shaun tried to think of any solution that could possibly stop a falling hunk of rock. Instead, his mind wandered to the untranslated manuscripts. He groaned, causing everyone to look at him. “I just remembered that we’re going to have to translate all of those Unown manuscripts again.”
Buizel shared in the groaning, but Sneasel and Ampharos just looked confused. “You did what?” Sneasel asked.
“Translated Unown scripts,” Shaun said. “They’re about the only thing I can read.”
“Really?” Ampharos suddenly sounded extremely interested.
“Yeah, weren’t you there?” Shaun asked absentmindedly. He facepalmed as he remembered, “Oh, yeah, duh, right, time travel. My bad.”
“Happens to the best of us,” Ampharos remarked. “I don’t think many ‘mons have time traveled before, so you’re excused.”
“Thanks,” Shaun said gratefully. “But we still kind of need to prevent the entire reason for time traveling in the first place.”
The room descended into silent thought again. Shaun didn’t really want to think about preventing the end of the world and sighed. “I have literally no ideas.”
The other two Pokemon echoed this sentiment. “It’s like trying to stop the sun from falling,” Buizel said. “How the heck do you even do that?”
“You kids don’t have to worry about this right away,” Ampharos said, surprising them. “You should probably take it easy for a few days.”
“Easy for you to say,” Buizel muttered. “You didn’t have to stare it down.”
Shaun was looking Sneasel up and down. “I’ve been meaning to ask. How on earth did you not lose your memory? Or Buizel, for that matter?”
Sneasel grinned a little. “The scarves.”
“Well, I’ve gathered that,” Shaun huffed, “but there’s only two scarves.”
Sneasel, still grinning, bent down and untied something from around her ankle. As she held it up, Shaun realized it was a scrap of the same cloth that his scarf was made of. He mouthed a silent “O”.
“There was a little bit of cloth leftover, so Meowstic gave it to me.” Her grin faded as her vision clouded for a moment. “I still haven’t worked up the courage to tell him everything yet.”
Buizel considered the scarf he was wearing. “So how did these keep us from losing our memories?”
Sneasel held up a claw. “Simple. We didn’t really lose our memories. They may have gotten a bit cloudy, sure, but something about these scarves kept them mostly intact. Everymon else, though…”
“Do they just get really bad Deja vu?” Shaun asked curiously. “Also, Buizel pointed out earlier that the scarves shouldn’t exist yet.”
Sneasel glanced at Buizel, surprised. “He did?” She folded her arms and looked thoughtful for a moment. “I guess they shouldn’t exist, yeah.”
Shaun stretched, suddenly and uncomfortably reminded of his splinted leg. “Oh. That’s going to make it a bit hard to do things.” He glanced at Ampharos, who was still slowly flipping through the book. “I thought you’d be a lot more bothered by all this.”
“Hm?” Ampharos looked up. “Oh. When three different Pokemon start asking and talking about things they shouldn’t know about, it puts things into perspective. Can’t say I believe it entirely,” he added, “but three different Pokemon with corroborating stories about the same seemingly impossible event? It does grow more and more likely the more I think about it, which is unnerving.”
Buizel blinked. “Because we know what’s going to happen?”
“Because he doesn’t know how much you know,” Sneasel interjected.
Ampharos flashed a warning look at Sneasel before returning to his book. “I suppose.”
Buizel suddenly stood up straighter and looked around. Shaun watched as he very methodically positioned himself near the bookshelf and looked into the living room. “What’s up?”
Buizel didn’t reply, instead collecting the paper and ink from its usual place and returning to the same spot, carefully drawing something.
Sneasel finished tying the scrap of shimmery cloth around her wrist before looking up and watching in interest. “What’s he doing?”
Shaun watched him closely. “I think he’s getting another message.”
After a few moments, Buizel finished drawing and looked at what he had drawn, confused. “What even is this?”
“Don’t keep us waiting,” Shaun said. “Is it another message?”
Buizel shook his head. “I have no worldly idea what this is. Here, look.”
He walked over to where Shaun was lying down and displayed the paper for him. Shaun blinked at the almost completely random squiggles drawn on it. “Well, if this is a language, it’s not one I can read.”
Sneasel snatched the paper out of Buizel’s paws and stared at it. “What the heck?”
“I thought it’d be another message,” Buizel admitted, “but it was just a collection of strange lines.”
“May I see it?” Ampharos asked, surprising everyone. Sneasel obligingly handed over the paper, whereupon Ampharos scrutinized it. After about a minute, he flipped through some more pages of the fairytale book before seemingly coming to a page he was looking for and putting the paper on top of it. “Aha.”
“What is it?” Shaun asked as the other two Pokemon serendipitously drifted behind Ampharos’ chair to watch. “I, uh, can’t exactly move.”
Ampharos moved from his armchair to the couch so Shaun could see, causing Buizel and Sneasel to drift behind the couch. “There was one story in this book that always intrigued me. It has some of the oddest phrasing I’ve ever seen in a book before, and I always wondered if there was some kind of deeper meaning behind it.”
Shaun looked uselessly. “I, um, can’t read this.”
“Forever and ever moreover, the sun will shine upon the sky away and melt the glacier frozen,” Ampharos recited. “It’s full of odd phrasings like this, almost poetry but not quite.”
“So what does that have to do with the paper?” Shaun asked.
Ampharos put the paper over the page and pressed it down so that the words of the book were just barely visible. “The lines on this paper correspond with words in this story.”
Buizel stared at the book with newfound awe. “How the heck did you even figure this out?”
“The patterns looked familiar,” Ampharos answered vaguely. Shaun thought that Ampharos was being a little too vague.
“Well, what does it say?” asked Sneasel, a little impatiently.
“Beneath the island, lies forgotten, an answer,” Ampharos read choppily. “Do not, forget, and remain, courageous. Use me, as your strength, and guide.”
Shaun blinked. “What the heck does that mean?”
“Several things,” Ampharos said. “For one, it means that we’ve just received a message from outside our dimension.”
Buizel shuddered a little. “That sounds ominous. Who wrote this story, actually?”
“Oh, it really is,” Ampharos replied, a hint of amusement in his voice. “I’m not entirely sure who wrote this. It’s one of those stories that’s probably as old as the island.”
“It does look vaguely like a map,” Shaun remarked as Ampharos handed the paper back to Buizel. “Maybe it’s for a mystery dungeon?”
To Shaun’s utter astonishment and faint annoyance, the other three Pokemon in the room burst into laughter. “Okay, okay, I’m wrong,” he said, feeling slightly hurt. “You don’t have to laugh about it.”
“Sorry, sorry,” Buizel said, trying to calm down. “It’s just that the layout of mystery dungeons change every time they’re entered, making them practically unmappable.”
“Hence the ‘mystery’ in the name,” Ampharos added. “I do agree with your observation that it looks like a map, but I can not for the life of me discern for what or where.”
“Doesn’t help that there’s not that much detail,” Sneasel observed. “It’s just a loose collection of lines, there’s not even any arrows or anything.”
Buizel looked at the paper he was holding for a moment. “Dad, why is there a lighthouse on Fifty Island, anyway?”
Ampharos glanced at his son, surprised. “Why, you know it’s because of the currents and unpredictable weather, right?”
Shaun understood immediately. “Wait, you’re saying that it’s a map of the currents?”
They were interrupted by Floatzel poking her head into the living room and asking, “Sneasel, will you be staying for dinner?”
Sneasel smiled and shook her head politely. “No, I’m afraid not.” As Floatzel ducked back into the kitchen, Sneasel said, “Well, if you figure out where around the island those specific currents are, then let me know. Those squiggles could mean anywhere.”
“Oh, you’re leaving?” Shaun asked, slightly sad about this.
Sneasel was already moving towards the door as he spoke, but she turned to face him. “Yeah, I still need to explain to Meowstic that the Time Gear was shattered.”
Shaun inhaled through his teeth. “We who are about to die salute you.”
Sneasel quickly glanced at Shaun with such a strong emotion that it caught him off guard, but it passed so quickly that Shaun wondered if he had seen anything. “That’s a fitting phrase.”
She departed amidst farewells from the other Pokemon in the house, leaving Shaun feeling slightly worried.
Ampharos was staring at the fairy-type tale book.
After the family had eaten dinner, they had gone their separate ways. Buizel to his room, Shaun to the couch, and Ampharos to the lantern room.
But Ampharos had made sure to take the cypher from Buizel’s room first.
Meowstic’s words still echoed in his mind from when he had first shown him the book. “This specific story isn’t a story. It’s an encoded message.”
Ampharos had been a little taken aback. “I beg your pardon?”
“Look.” Meowstic pointed out several odd spacing issues and seemingly missing words. “This isn’t normal. But I can’t read it without a cipher.”
“Where would I find one of those?” Ampharos asked, half jokingly.
Meowstic had shrugged inconclusively. “Maybe your newborn son will find one. I doubt anymon will ever find anything, though.”
Intentional prophecy or not, Buizel had fulfilled it today. And that was terrifying.
Ampharos scanned through the rest of the story with the cipher. It was hard to see it properly with the light from his lanterns reflecting off of the pages of the book, but he managed.
A Pokemon claiming, the impossible, will save all, from eternal, destruction, one page read. But it, will not, succeed without help.
Do not be afraid, of what you, do not understand, another said. For that, is what truly, is understandable. Ampharos had been a little confused by this passage, but he continued on regardless. He flipped to the last page of the story and moved the cipher accordingly, and then stared at the decoded page’s contents.
I will be, awaiting your presence, underneath, the ocean.
He shuddered a little, the ominousness of the final passage worrying him. Glancing at the cipher curiously for a moment, he began trying to see if it decoded any other stories in the book.
It didn’t. All he saw was gibberish. Feeling a little miffed after a few pages turned up nothing, he tried one last page.
Ampharos, I have stated, my message, in full.
He slammed the book shut, the noise reverberating throughout the lantern room.