Chapter 41

It's impossible to say how long you hang in red agony. You're trapped in an instant without beginning or end, a long glowing present that holds you pinioned. Or, that's how you would describe it, looking back later. In the moment it feels like this is all you've ever known.

An eternal second later the red clears, but the pain doesn't. You gasp in air and choke, your chest spasming and shooting lightning pain. It feels like one whole side of your body just doesn't work. Your muscles strain pointlessly against each other to produce the hitching, shallow breaths that are all you can bear to take. There's blood, from somewhere, all over your arm and face. You have to heal, despite panic-jangled nerves. Something, anything to fix the strangling feeling in your chest. It takes all your willpower to focus, to drag together thoughts and energies into a recover. A burst of energy floods your body, followed by a lingering cold feeling and light-headed elation.

You hack and cough up shreds of mangled tissue, and then at least you can breathe. Nebulous pains linger, but it's not like you're getting stabbed anymore.

There's cold under you, hard cold, and glaring light from above that shows the dinge around you. Tile, that's what you're sitting on, pitted and yellowing here, there gray instead. You start at the sound of a pokéball opening, a flash of light taking shape into a gardevoir. She towers over you, ethereal in her flowing cloak. You only have a moment to be shocked before a voice says, "Heal pulse!" and you're engulfed by waves of pink, soothing energy. Your pain recedes, and you're dimly aware that your arm's stopped bleeding, but for the moment you're preoccupied by the people standing behind the gardevoir, watching you like you're a specimen in a zoo. They're people you recognize.

Not that you've ever met them. You've seen them on television or on the covers of magazines, or at best from a blurry distance: Lance, Karen, Will... The only familiar one is Koga, which does nothing to reassure you. Neither does the master ball in his hand. A master ball or... yours? But that can't happen.

How do you feel? the gardevoir asks. You can't really say you're better, with your insides all upended from anxiety now rather than actual injury. Before you can answer, the gardevoir glows red and is pulled away to a pokéball held up in Will's hand. The elite watches you, inscrutable behind his mask, while behind him Koga and Lance argue. The xatu by Will's side mimics her trainer's stoic expression, or maybe it's the other way around.

"--wrong with the damn thing?"

"Nothing! It's the same as any of the others. Obviously I've never used it before, but it's brand new," Koga says.

Meanwhile Karen's leaning up against the wall, arms crossed over her chest while she regards you. "You said this is supposed to be a mew, then?" she asks. She's in casual clothing like everybody else except Lance, though her outfit isn't so far off what she wears on TV. Either Lance got called away from an official appearance or he just wears capes all the time.

"No," Will says. "It has no psychic potential whatsoever."

"And it's not hiding it?" Karen asks. "You know a psychic doesn't have to go spilling thoughts everywhere if it doesn't want to."

"I do know. I'm not talking about the psychic field, I'm talking about psychic potential. This pokémon doesn't have any."

"The energy analysis said normal-typed," Koga says, turning away from a scowling Lance. "The best match was Mew, based on the records from the Cinnabar lab, but this one would have to be much weaker, however that works. Damn hard to get any insight from Oak without letting on too much."

"We know it can transform," Karen says. "A ditto with ambitions, then?"

Do they realize you can hear them? There's a wall of fine metal mesh between you, the air around it shimmering with energy. They'd be stupid to try and contain you in anything without a shield. Maybe they think it's soundproof, standing around talking about you like you aren't right there.

You swallow. Your mouth's dry and sticky, tasting all of copper. Let them talk. You have to figure out what happened to you. You have to figure out how to get away.

You poke at your blood-slicked arm. It's hard to even tell what happened to it underneath everything. What did happen? You shouldn't--you shouldn't have been able to go into the master ball at all. Clearly it's no good for you.

You sit back on your heels, nauseous. The elites are still arguing about what you are, without even bothering to ask. It's hard not to feel intimidated when you're confronted by some of the best trainers in the world. Will, especially, seems to always be watching you, no matter whether he's talking to someone else or not. His xatu's psychic field brushes against you, a feather-light touch compared to Mewtwo's. You shift around, glancing from one elite to the other, hoping for something like a friendly face.

You should be scared after what just happened, with all these strangers discussing you like a specimen under a microscope. But you're sick and tired and headachey, and increasingly nothing more than annoyed that they're ignoring you.

"Hello," you say, loudly, when Koga starts in on a scientific discussion of psychic abilities with Will. "What happened? Where am I?"

They all actually look at you then, like at your face, even.

"It's a good mimic," Lance says.

"As I told you," Koga says. "It's obviously put a great deal of work into its act."

"I said, where am I? Let me out. I did not do anything wrong."

"Yes, I would say remarkable," Will says after a pause.

"Are we sure it's a pokémon?" Karen asks. "I've never heard one talk like that. Even chatot, you can tell they're just reciting."

"If a pokéball works on it, it's a pokémon." Lance is firm.

"I think I'd call 'worked' generous in this case," Koga says.

"Something obviously went wrong," Lance says.

"I am not a pokémon," you say, getting to your feet and moving towards the elites' end of the cell. Because you're not--you're not. You might have Mew's memories, but you have human ones, too. And everybody knows pokémon can't talk.

"Anything a pokéball can capture is a pokémon by definition," Lance says.

"By definition. But definitions can change with new evidence," Koga shoots back.

"It used recover. I was standing right here," Will says.

"I thought the mewtwo could speak like a human as well," Karen says.

"Ah, well, the going theory is that Mewtwo can create the illusion of speech by stimulating the language centers in a person's brain," Will says. "Other psychic-types can do that, too, albeit to a much lesser degree. They aren't actually speaking as such."

"Okay, but Mewtwo's related to Mew, so why couldn't it--"

"Besides," Will goes on, "Mewtwo isn't an ordinary pokémon. There's far more human in it than there has any right to be, for one thing."

"Does it matter?" Lance says. He's standing with arms crossed, head tilted back. Looking down his nose at you. "We didn't come here to decide what this thing is. You... Whatever you are. What do you know about Mewtwo?"

"Let me out," you say. "I will not tell you anything if you keep me in a cage."

"You understand why we can't do that, don't you?" Karen asks.

"I do not want to fight! I could not fight all of you anyway. I did not do anything wrong. You have to let me go."

"If you didn't do anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about," Lance says. "Tell us what you know, and you can leave. We don't want to keep you here."

"I already told Ninja Master Koga everything!" You turn to look at him, hoping for some kind of agreement. Even if he doesn't like you, even if he is, somehow, the entire reason you're here, that's the truth. But he only stares back with unflappable calm, like he's never seen you before in his life.

"How did you know about Leo Kerrigan?" Lance asks.

Did they find him? They can't have--they can't have, or he would have told them everything about you already. How long has it been?

"I saw him on my way home from the Indigo Plateau! That is all! I told Officer Feldhorn, ask him!"

"Really? You happened to be wandering the deepwilds and saw, what, some other person stumbling around and then something like a week later you decide to go and tell somebody in Fuchsia about it?"

How long has it been? You're going to miss the boat to Orre. You've missed the boat to Orre. Mewtwo's got to be up by now, and what is he going to do?

"Oh, I'm sorry. Did you need more time to invent something?" Lance asks.

You have to get out of here. You, you--what are you even supposed to do? You want to throw yourself against the mesh, twist and break it between your fingers--it's reinforced, yes, but you want at least to try--and then what? Fight your way through every single one of the elites?

Lance keeps talking, but for a moment you are a pokémon, confused and grasping at words in a foreign language. The cage closes in around you, rank with the smell of your own blood. What are you going to do? What can you do?

Think--what happens when somebody gets arrested? What happens when the government locks them up? What do they have to do?

You draw your knees up against your chest and wrap your arms around them. You try to be as loud as you can, to be confident, even disdainful, but even so your words come out freighted with unshed tears. "I want a lawyer."

Lance snorts. There's another discussion about you that doesn't include you, the elites arguing back and forth and ignoring your attempts to interject. But at least after that they leave you alone for awhile.

---

The elites can't even agree on how to keep you. Lance insists that there must have been a problem with the master ball, a malfunction that ground you up somehow. Another is obtained and, over your strident protests, his theory is put to the test. At least when the second master ball releases you vomiting blood, nobody seems too eager to try putting you in a different one.

Pokéballs are where pokémon usually go between interrogations, though. A pokémon cage like this isn't intended to hold anything long-term, and the elites' human cages aren't designed to contain anything that can bend metal. More arguing, and in the end what you get is a cot and a bucket and a lot of time to think, alone. It's not what you want and not what you need, and the intermittent interrogations are almost a relief. The elites always ask the same questions: what you know about the great Nathaniel Morgan, and Mewtwo, and Leonard Kerrigan. They won't answer back when you ask why they don't just bother Leonard Kerrigan about it, which you hope doesn't mean he's actually dead. Not that you care personally, but that would make all the great Nathaniel Morgan's complaining right, and that would suck.

They don't like that you keep asking for a lawyer, even after Lance snaps at you that you don't get a lawyer, they're not the police. That should probably make you nervous, but you have other things on your mind. Like how they even caught you in the first place--pokéballs shouldn't work on you, even master balls. It isn't right. Or, well, they don't really work, like Koga said. You don't know what it means that they seem to put you back together wrong, but it's not like you care--all you care about is never going back in one of those things, ever again.

Then there's your pokémon: gone. As they would have to be, because occupied pokéballs can't go into other pokéballs. When the master ball captured you, however impossible, they would have stayed out while the rest of you went in, so Officer Feldhorn must have picked them up, or Koga. Koga won't say anything when you demand to know where they went. So after everything, you finally got them back, and then you didn't even get to see them before you lost them all over again. Your fault.

And then Mewtwo. Obviously he knows you're gone by now. What will he do? Go looking for you, or try to get to Orre on his own? He didn't even really want you around, but he'll need you once he finds Mew. You wish you could set him aside as nothing to worry about, none of your concern, but all too often the clone finds his way into your thoughts, his awful wild laughter echoing in your head. Stupid Mewtwo. If he does come to get you, there probably aren't even words to describe how mad he's going to be.

You test the mesh across the front of your cage and find it sound, despite prolonged applications of physical force, of flame, of ice or psychic power. Inevitably these bring someone running to threaten you with true confinement, a master ball again. Your teleport won't work, and the few shadows left under harsh interrogation lights look flat, like dark slicks on the surface of water instead of the black open mouths of tunnels. So that way's blocked, too. No surprise. They've held legendaries before, pokémon from other worlds, even, stronger than any that live here. You've seen shows about all their secret government programs on TV.

Escape attempts can only occupy for so long. The elites won't let you have a TV, claim one wouldn't get a signal anyway, but they grudgingly turn over a few old dog-eared books, stacks of out-of-date magazines nobody cares about anymore. You can't even concentrate on the books, mostly old novels with tiny print and no pictures, but some of the magazines are okay, about science and pokémon and training. You can find a nice picture of mountains or the ocean and stare at it for hours, retreat into unfeeling and think of nothing at all, most especially not Mewtwo, who usually nags at your mind if you actually try to read. If only you could turn off your feelings all the time without worrying you'd say something damning to the elites, not realizing how important it was.

At least the elites either don't know or don't care that your hearing's much better than a human's. The energy shield doesn't block it, although when you're listening really hard its drone starts to shade out of annoying and towards painfully distracting. You endure it, though, for the glimpses of the outside world that come with, faint murmurs of sound that remind you of real life.

You can't hear any other prisoners. You suppose that if they keep humans here they're probably somewhere else, and of course any pokémon are in storage. What you can hear are guards, people you rarely see but grow to recognize by voice and the sound of their footsteps. There's one who watches old movies during his shift with the sound down so low you can catch only odd snatches of loud action, another who keeps calling her husband to argue about how she doesn't like the way their kitchen's getting fixed up, one who hums sometimes and is bad at it. You suppose you might be able to keep track of who's working when and use that to figure out what time it is or how long you've been here, but what would be the point?

The elites are more interesting when they're around, always two or more at a time if they're planning to bother you. And when they're arriving or leaving they talk, sometimes boring stuff like about upcoming dinners or news conferences or people you've never heard of, and sometimes about people you actually know very well.

It's from Karen you hear that there's "No sign of Morgan. Someone's been down in the old Viridian Rocket base, though."

"And what have you heard from Team Rocket?" Will asks. He talks softly, always hard to hear, but you're pretty sure of what he said there.

"Nothing, official channels or otherwise. If they've got him, they're keeping it real quiet."

"I think we'd hear about it if they had. More like they want to get him first, so they're playing it close to the chest. They have better leads than us, and they know it," Will says.

So the great Nathaniel Morgan's still out there, probably, looking for Steelix or found him. You're annoyed that they apparently went and searched Viridian even though you told them for sure he wasn't there. Why would they even do that? Maybe the great Nathaniel Morgan made a mistake and got them suspicious somehow, so your redirect was good for nothing. That would be typical, wouldn't it?

You hear about Officer Feldhorn's visit before it happens, too. "Absolutely not," Lance snaps at Koga. He's walking fast, like he always does. Ever in a hurry. His footsteps echo heavily while you can't even hear Koga's, which makes sense, of course. Ninjas have to be silent. "I know he's your friend, Koga, but this is League business. We don't need the police crawling around in here."

"We don't need anyone making noise with the higher-ups," Koga says. "Or with the press, either."

"Is he threatening to go to the press?"

"No, but I think it would be easier to grant his request. Let him take a look around. As long as he keeps it confidential, I don't see the harm. We haven't done anything wrong. And the last thing we need is for rumors to get around about the League disappearing people--"

"It's not a person!" Lance snaps. "It's a dangerous wild pokémon, and it's well within our authority to handle how we please."

"Of course," Koga says. "But I think we should keep Mike close if we can. He has some connection to the creature, doesn't he? Maybe he'll have better luck getting something out of it."

That, at least, Lance seems to like, or at least dislike less than everything else. And then Officer Feldhorn does show up, who knows how much later, with Koga by his side.

"Hello, Jade," he says, but you aren't in any mood to be friendly. "I'm sorry to see you here. I hope you understand... I didn't realize Koga's idea would work."

"You did not think the master ball would catch me?" you ask.

"No. I will admit, Jade, I could tell there was something strange about you, but I didn't think it meant you were a pokémon."

"I am not a pokémon."

Officer Feldhorn puts a hand up like doesn't matter and says, "Either way. I certainly didn't expect the master ball to do anything."

"Fine," you say bitterly. "Is that it? Did you come all the way here to tell me that?"

"No," Officer Feldhorn says. He looks around like he isn't sure why he's here, either, up at the ceiling and everything. "I wanted to make sure you were all right. Normally the elites aren't just allowed to... catch people."

Koga frowns. "It was a perfectly legal capture. The pokémon accepted the ball freely."

"I am not a pokémon!"

"Regardless. Jade," Officer Feldhorn says, "I'm afraid there isn't much I can do. But if you tell Koga what he wants to know, he'll let you go. He doesn't want to keep you here."

As if. You swallow angry bile and say to Koga, "Let me out first. Then I will tell you."

Koga merely folds his arms and stares at you, and when you glare at Officer Feldhorn instead, he sighs. "You know I can't do that, Jade."

"What about my pokémon, then? Where are they?"

"I don't know." Officer Feldhorn turns to Koga here, like he might explain, but all Koga does is raise an eyebrow and stay silent. Being silent is his answer to everything. Officer Feldhorn tells you again, "I don't know. I'm sorry, Jade."

"Then I will not say anything. You cannot keep me here. I did not do anything wrong, and when people find out, you will be in big trouble."

"I didn't say you had, Jade. But I'm not in charge of any of this. I don't like that they're holding you here, but there's nothing I can do about it. I'm not even supposed to be here."

That's true, sure. But it doesn't help the sour feeling of resentment blocking up your throat. "I thought you were my friend."

"I'm a police officer, Jade. I have a job," Officer Feldhorn says harshly. Which you suppose he does. He tries to ask you if the elites are treating you okay, but you don't want to talk to him anymore after that.

You can hear him and Koga while they're walking away, thinking they're out of earshot but not even being close. Officer Feldhorn's annoyed, says they can't just keep you locked up in a cage, that's illegal. You suppose he would know. So maybe he's mad the elites put you here. So what? You remember how it was with Mew. It wasn't like the scientists thought what they did to her was a good thing. It wasn't like they wanted to, particularly. But none of that was enough to stop them from doing it. No amount of Officer Feldhorn not liking this will make him actually free you, either.

You wait and you listen, to Karen joking with Koga about whether dark-types are sneakier than poison-types, to Lance pushing for more intense interrogation, to one of the guards tripping and dropping what sounds like about a million buckets that go bouncing and crashing everywhere. You can't feel much of anything about what you hear until Will tells Lance that "Kerrigan's in no fit state to talk, and who knows when he will be," which makes you briefly alive with dread. After all, Leonard Kerrigan knows all about Mewtwo, and about your plan to go to Orre, and you're sure as soon as he's able, whatever that means, he'll tell the elites all about it.

Even that can't animate you for long, though. You'd never thought prison would be so boring. You start to fantasize about Mewtwo coming to rescue you, cutting through concrete blocks like butter, ripping the cage apart and letting you walk free. But to be honest, you don't know if you really want that. Going along with Mewtwo... You don't want to. Even though you're supposed to. Even though you need to to find Mew. You don't want to. So maybe it's better to stay here, where perhaps Mewtwo can't find you. Maybe it would be better to never leave at all.

How many days? Sometimes they turn the lights off in your cage, but you have no idea if that has anything to do with what time it actually is outside.

It could be midday or midnight, then, when you hear Will out in the hall, taking his usual clipped, brisk strides. It's not until he starts talking that you realize Koga's there, too, might have been for quite some time. "...never seen him like this before," the psychic master's saying.

"I have," Koga says solemnly. "The dragon's temper is legendary, isn't it? Do your best to stay out of his way. Karen and I have more experience with this. Let us handle him."

"Warning the newbie about big bad Lance, are we?" Dragon Master Lance says. It's like he teleported right there; you didn't hear him come up, and you're sure Koga would have said something else if he knew he was there. "He's right, Will. Best to stay out of my way when Kanto's in danger."

"Lance, be reasonable," Koga says.

"Where in the hells is Karen? Does she think she can ignore my summons at a time like this?"

All four of them together. You haven't seen them all at once in ages. And Lance sounds madder than usual. You shift unhappily on your cot. You imagine they're going to come and ask you the same questions as always, but with yelling this time.

Koga's making some excuse or other, trying to smooth things over; Will seems to be taking his advice, staying out of the way. Karen you do hear coming, and Lance does, too, since he calls out to her in annoyance before she reaches the rest of them.

"What, miss me, Lance? I was only out doing what you asked in the first place."

"And?" Lance asks. "What did you find out?"

"Absolutely nothing," Karen says, and here a bit of irritation seeps into her usual blase tone. "I truly don't think the pokémon know anything, Lance. That or they're unimaginably good at playing dumb."

"None of them?" Lance says. "Some of them were at the goddamned Plateau, they fought for that Rocket scumbag. We know* that. They say they know nothing, and you believe them?"*

You sit up, suddenly listening with real interest. They have the great Nathaniel Morgan's pokémon? Well, yes, you suppose they would, since you had them when Koga caught you. His pokémon weren't all you had with you, though.

"Well, they've got a list of crimes as long as my arm that the guy's been a part of, but not that specific one. At least according to them, the whole Mewtwo heist was on that thing we've got sitting in custody, not their trainer, and he was never interested in any of it."

"They're lying," Lance says with the utter confidence of the completely wrong. "What about the other lot?"

"Oh, now they* go on about how they don't know anything about Mewtwo at all, except for the Charizard, he..."*

They interrogated your pokémon. Of course they would, what else would they do with them? You knew they took them, it wasn't like they were going to leave them lying on the ground, so what else would they do? They must think your pokémon are as guilty as you, and as far as they're concerned, you're guilty of everything.

Karen keeps talking, but you can't hear her anymore, a nonsense rushing filling your ears. They've had your pokémon all along, and they've been asking them scary questions, threatening them, who even knows what, and meanwhile you've been moping around here, acting like you don't even want to escape. You should have realized what they would do.

You think of Rats, confused and distressed to find herself in a cage, surrounded by unfriendly faces. Or Togetic. And it isn't fair--it's not fair, none of them even know about Mewtwo except Titan a little bit. They don't know anything, but that's not going to stop the elites from keeping them locked up, from being mean to them, asking over and over no matter how terrified they are. You know how it is.

You have to get out of here. You have to get them out of here. How long have you even been here? Anger burns hot at your core, not all of it for the elites. How long have you been frittering time away on feeling sorry for yourself, while who even knows what they've been doing to your friends?

On your feet. Look again around your cell. It doesn't take long. Three walls, cinderblock, air vents up near the top, shielded and shimmering with energy. Wall number four open mesh, close-spaced so you can't get even a finger through. Inside that another shield, tinting the air faintly pink. When you get close enough you can hear it fizzing. Generator out of sight, of course.

You try to teleport again just in case something's changed, whether the blocker happens to be off or you didn't try hard enough the first time. Still nothing, not even if you wrench and twist with your mind as well as your body, trying to wriggle free of an invisible straitjacket. You feel like your head's going to burst from thinking hard, with no more effect than a human wishing to be somewhere else.

The shadows are as empty as ever, which you confirm by skimming your fingers through the one you cast and meeting only the slick surface of the tile. You can feel a little of the dark ways' cold leaking back to you, but muted, held back by who knows what. And no doubt they've set up something to deal with ghosts, too, not that it matters--no way for you to go fully incorporeal short of actually dying.

Then all that's left is force, against the bars or against the walls, where the cinderblock is surely cladding over some energy-reinforced core. You extend a blade, wrist to elbow, gleaming steel-bright and crumbling concrete when you drag it against the wall. On the first gouge there's nothing, but when you try again, digging deeper, your blade rings against something that sends a buzzing wave of numbness up your arm, glows bright through the cut in the wall. No good, then, and no surprise.

"Hey!" Karen barks. "What are you doing?" The elites have made it to your cell, all staring at the metal protruding from your arm. You raise it deliberately and resorb the blade, which slides back under your skin with no more than a twinge of pain.

"Let me out."

They all pause, wary of you. "No," Lance says after a moment. "You know about Mewtwo, don't you? Was this your plan all along?"

He's always the bold one. Probably has to be. You can't show any fear when you're staring down dragons. The others are letting him do all the talking, though. Will actually took a step back. They're scared of you.

You bare your teeth in a bitter smile. They should be. They haven't seen what you can do. You've been acting like some kind of scared child when you're the one they should have been afraid of all along.

"Let me out," you say.

"We have ways of making you talk," Lance says. "We have been lenient--"

"I want to go home!" You raise energy between your fingers in a burning orange-white ball that hums and thrums up to a screech as a bolt leaps free. The hyper beam drowns out whatever Lance says and blots out your view of him as well, filling your little cell up with pure burning light.

The attack hits the energy shield with a crash so loud you hope it must have shattered, but as the hum fades from your ears you can hear the elites shouting for you to stop, so it must have held. You take a deep breath, forcing back a moment of fatigue after the hyper beam, and slam a foot into the ground. Seismic waves rattle in all directions, floors and walls cracking so light glows through in spidering veins. Your bucket tips horridly, but outside, where the elites mill and yell, nothing's shaking at all: your cell must be in total isolation from the rest of the building, a cube of energy shields absorbing the force of your attacks. No surprise. That's how they'd have to build this place if they wanted to contain someone like you. They can't have thought of everything. You just have to keep trying until you find where they made their mistake.

Lance raises the master ball. No surprise, again, and you flicker sideways in a blur of motion, so the ball's red beam sizzles uselessly against the wall. Then you burst into flame.

The air around you heats to sweltering, the uneven floor beneath you shimmering. Heat-haze obscures your vision of the elites, but you can still see well enough to evade the next recall beam. You've been tricked, and you've been weary, and confused, but no longer. In a straight-up game of reflexes, no human stands a chance against you.

You keep cranking up the heat, so every breath feels stifling, so your hair crackles like dry kindling, smoldering foully. You shift your ability so the heat only makes you stronger and redouble your efforts. The cinderblocks crumble before they melt or burn, and flake away in dusty clouds to reveal the shields beneath. These crackle and glow as they absorb the fire's fury, lending everything a hellish ruddy cast.

Pokéballs fly, and light streams through the mesh as the elites' pokémon take shape. You drop your fire for ice, plunging the cell into freezing winter while the new-formed pokémon are still struggling to adjust to the heat. Koga's crobat crashes to the ground with icicles forming on his wings, only to be seared by the bared floor-shield that still fizzes with the energy it's absorbed. Dragonite roars and raises an arm to shield her face from blizzarding frost, and you sidestep Lance's latest recall attempt and throw another hyper beam straight ahead at the elites and the pokémon in front of them. Did you imagine it, or did the shield flicker?

Umbreon pounces on you, cloaked in shadow, but in doing so trips Dragonite, while Exeggutor accidentally blocks the master ball's recall beam when he leans in to scatter leech seeds, grinning vapidly all the while. A weezing replaces Crobat, and her fumes annoy everyone; the first dragonite swaps for another, who shrugs off your crackling discharge and manages to catch you with a raking dragon claw before half Exeggutor's psybeam hits her shoulder.

They want to battle? Sure. You can do fighting. And as stray dragonbreaths wash the walls, puddles of toxin hiss against the shield on the floor, and your own flux of attacks rings again and again against the shields, you wonder how long they can last. Their glow usually faint, they now blaze bright, all the time. They spark and drone and, yes--flicker! You grit your teeth and throw an aura sphere against the front wall, and you're convinced you see a hole form where it impacts, just for a second before glowing light fills it in.

A murkrow flies at you, and you hardly notice, reaching up to claw it out of the air. A low kick topples Will's exeggutor, which smacks Weezing out of the air on the way down. The latest dragonite is clumsily bulky in the small cell but perhaps more dangerous for it, roaring in constant outrage while his scales leap with dragonfire. You can call on fairy energy so the fire merely tickles when it brushes over you, but you can't ignore the dragon's sheer physical bulk, even after his outrage ebbs and he's stumbling around, disoriented. His tail knocks your legs out from under you, and you end up square in the path of a sludge bomb from the muk who took Weezing's place.

Another earthquake makes the poison-type subside into a quivering purple blob and sets more sparks flying from floors and walls--are there cracks in the ground under the shield now, too? But while you're trying to look the dragonite bowls into you from behind. He slams you to the floor, trying to pin you, but you flail behind you and connect with an ice punch that makes him pause, growling. Another ice punch knocks him sideways, and he collapses after a third--onto you, crushing you with dead weight. You try to push yourself up, wrestling with the unconscious pokémon, only for a vile stinging pseudopod to creep up your leg, sticking half your body to the floor before you realize what's going on. You fire a psybeam into the muk and tug hard, dragging against sludge disrupted by psychic power, but you're stuck. Just for a second. And in that second the master ball's beam can reach you, and drag you back into pain.