Weightless.

This doesn't feel like the other times, when suddenly he had woken up to zombies and explosions and rattling cages. It is less a flash jump and more like his consciousness is being guided to where it needed to be, stiff fingers floating in a vast void. It is empty but full, bright colors from the past washing over his pale skin. The green of the field he played in as a child. The empty white of a hospital room. The grimy blue of a middle school locker room. Reds that froth in waves off a sunlit coast. There and open, begging to be caressed, spiraling outwards to link up with repeating patterns of that same moment, circling around other foggy figures in the distance.

Breathing hurts, only because breathing isn't needed here and introducing something so human to such an inhuman place needs punished. It feel like liquid metal gliding down his throat, clogging his nose, so frigid that it burns and hollows you out.

A roar in the distance, a flash of brightness (not light, that doesn't seem quite right), and one of the foggy bodies is gone. He blinks, slow, and, ah, he would know that beast. Dialga. A creature he's never met except in stories and worship. Someone from childhood he clung too not from belief but for a strange comfort; Chu-e had never been religious but his parents were.

It doesn't feel like when Articuno, at the ball all those years ago, judged him unworthy. It is a passing, the beast unconcerned with Chu-e. Perhaps more as a nuisance, like when he needed to wipe off crumbs from his shirt. Only Chu-e and the other people here, not that he knew who they were, were the crumbs.

Another roar, another body vanishing. Oddly enough, he didn't feel afraid.

"Do you get lonely here?" He said aloud, to the grand pokemon, as if it cared to listen. Maybe it oculdn't hear him from the distance anyway. It didn't matter. His words echoed back to him strangely, making his nose wrinkle. "Poor thing." Lifting frigid hands, he patted himself down slowly. It seemed he was mostly intact, had his things in his pockets... a cracked cell phone was pulled out, not for the phone itself. No, for the Reniculus charm, aged and cracked and faded and well loved, that hung by a dirty string. He unhooked it slowly, gripped it tight in a palm before releasing it into the open air.

"A gift, to keep you company."

Then the blast hit, and Chu-e's eyes shot open once again.

He glanced out the hospital room window that overlooked the city, monitors beeping quietly. It was October, after all, and not quite time for him to travel back to Hoenn.



- Just a lot of waxing poetic tbh
- But Chu-e feels kinda bad for Dialga and leaves it his phone charm to keep it company
- Then gets blasted all the way back to another region lol

A jolt in his gut, and Gavin is transported somewhere that feels at once familiar and foreign — the fabric of space spreads like a smothering blanket, its heavy weight offering a reminder of when Mauville's bloody battlefield had given way to a shifting, whirling wormhole. He assumes, at first, that this is a snapshot of his own timeline... but the scenes glimpsed within grey ribbons of space-time are not ones he recognizes from the war, nor anywhere else.

His amber gaze follows a twisting thread to its end, to the creature that controls it, and breath catches in his throat.

Dialga...?

Had there been any doubt that the looming sauropod was the Lord of Time, such doubts are deafened by an ear-splitting roar. The string of time Gavin follows to its end is woven with other, alternate realities, then projected forth with a physical force that he instinctively leaps clear of.

We are intruders in this realm.

Fear and fascination grapple for dominance in his thoughts, not dissimilar to how he'd felt when faced with Articuno's icy majesty. Yet this one is different; there is not simply a lust for its power but a respect for the steel-plated sovereign of time. He was not a man of religion. He did not see Dialga as something to be bowed down to, but instead looked up to. Yet no amount of reverence could halt the shiver that a second ROAR OF TIME sends down his spine. Albeit shakily, he stands his ground.

"It was not my choice to intrude upon your domain, Dialga."

His voice sounds strange to his ears. Other figures vanish as they come into contact with the rippling tides of time, and he wills himself not to flinch as one of them whips past him. Would it hurt, were he struck by one? Would it kill?

"You can understand me, can't you?" Though worded as a question, Gavin has no doubt. Articuno had spoke to him, peered straight into his soul and judged him unworthy. Gavin stares down the Lord of Time as if to challenge it to do the same. Over the hair-raising roars, he demands answers. "Why have we been brought here? What is happening to our timeline? Is it because Giratina has escaped?"

Another blinding pulse of time, and Gavin closes his eyes before it strikes him home.

He would never know if his efforts to help the Commissioner would have been enough.

Before any real clash with the Nihilego could begin in earnest, everything around him was suckled into a void, leaving him and his pokemon scrambling for purchase on nothing.

Garo's psychic grasp brought them all together, and after making sure everyone was accounted for, Doug finally looked around himself.

Space. And lots of grey stuff.

Several heavy gulps of air later confirmed that no, he had not been dumped into the vacuum beyond the atmosphere, though the streams of glowing light sweeping like currents should probably have been his first clue.

Wide eyed and slack jawed, the youth stared at the void while at a complete loss.

Everything that had happened up until now had been new and shocking, but it had at least taken him to... places. Some familiar, some new, but recognizably places that belonged to Earth, if slightly warped at times.

He couldn't even begin to guess at where the heck he was now.

"Jeese James, I'm a long way from the farm now." He said as he swept a hand over his hair, his straw hat floating off it. "Huh? Oi!"

The youth flapped his arms ineffectively, trying to swim after it, realizing there was nothing to push or pull against a bit too late.

"Fudge! Garo, get that hat!" The youth began to order when he saw the accessory getting far too close to the unknown streams for comfort.

Garo's psychic grasp came over the hat just as its rim touched the flow.

Earlier, gazing into the grey streams, had simply given him generic or incomprehensible sights. Cataclysm or history, neither much called to the youth. Now?

Human history and apocalypse were washed away in ink blots of white... before the image a single woman sitting in a rocking chair began to form.

Around her, the porch of a wooden home with fields of wheat stretching before her appeared in blotches of desaturated colour.

With a small smile on her lips and her hands at her lap, she carefully weaved thick straws together into the shape of a hat.

John stared at the image for what felt like forever, his mouth parted open and his body limp.

His chest rose, slowly at first, then faster and faster until he lurched, his hands coming over his mouth as a sob wracked his throat, his shoulders trembling as droplets of tears floated out of his eyes.

He didn't want to see this. He had struggled hit hardest to not even think about such things for months, years.

He did not want it. But he needed it.

His eyes snapped open once again, the youth unable to stop himself from staring as hard as he could at what he knew he would never be again.

This was likely the last he would ever see of her; even if he could not stop crying, he would regret it if he looked away, he knew.

It was burnt into his heart and mind, and in the process it undid one of the many shackles the youth had bound himself with.

And then the stream was shattered apart as a thunderous roar boomed in the distance.

His pokemon crowded around him as a blast parted through several streams beyond the one, barely skirting around the destruction's radius while sobs still rocked his chest.

Whatever peace of mind he had managed to attain through all this, was almost shattered when he caught sight of the looming shadow of the lord of the realm.

That is to say, he almost pissed himself when he got a good look at it.

"God?" He asked, wide eyed, because what the heck else could this thing be? He wasn't an Arceus faithful, he didn't know what Dialga or Palkia or whatever looked like, but this couldn't just be a pokemon.

"Uh..." He said, wide eyed.

What did you say to a God after... invading its realm? Tripping into its realm? Was this its realm? Or was it here just to fetch him?

No, that was definitely giving himself too much credit. It was here to deal with someone dumb enough to end up in the 8th dimension while going to the bathroom.

He slowly peered towards his hat, which had, miraculously might I add, survived the Roar of Time by virtue of mostly being out of the way.

As if realizing this, Garo yanked it back, Doug catching it.

He stared at the handywork of his mother for a second, before looking back at the God.

He was sure there was no reason for him to be here, but... he did not lament getting caught up in it. He thought he might have just learned something.

The past couldn't be changed, but it could be remembered, learned from and accepted. Perhaps it should be let go of as well.

But he wasn't quite ready to do anything with this newfound understanding, but...

"Uh. I was on my way to the bathroom." He said honestly as he stared up at the God's gleaming maw, not needing to be a genius to know what was coming. "... I know it wasn't intentional, but... Thanks for the ride."

Despite almost pissing himself earlier, he couldn't help but reembrace the earlier sense of inner peace.

He tried smiling at the god, holding out his hat as a gift.

"Say. Wanna Join the Unofficial Bugcatchers Club?"

He liked to think he was blasted to the present specifically for that.

It wasn't strictly a no.

---

Spiderweb-like fissures grow over the expanse of night sky, snuffing out stars and leaving a trail of inky darkness in their wake. Throat dry with the smoke from nearby fires, Skyler can't help the relief that floods her when reality shatters once more, shards of distant constellations crashing onto the ground and leaving her with the echoes of distant, panicked screams...

Nothing could've prepared the captain for what came after.

The incomprehensible immensity of the cosmos yawns open before her, stretching into infinity in shifting nebulae and winks of impossible visions, rushing dizzily past her. Blink. Crumbling buildings lying forgotten in the grasp of a strange forest. Blink. Seaside chatter as fishermen reunite in the morning. A head of blond hair and Anders - bright with laughter. Whole. Alive. Blink. A moonless night and the ocean stretched past the horizon, beckoning in the distant roar of a ferocious ocean storm. Blink. Space folds in on itself, an infinite loop like a serpent eating its own tail.

Quicksilver flashes before her eyes, tightly-wound streams of time filling the void with the alluring taste of possibility. Skyler's fingers twitch of their volition, her companion's words easily drowned out by the crescendo of her pounding heart. Because there's a terrible hunger that peeks out from silver eyes, sweeping over the strings of reality in much the same way as it does the distant horizon. Chasing after an impossibility with all the determination of the famished and the desperate.

Is this all?

It blinds the captain to everything else. And while the ROAR echoes in her very bones, a wordless demand that bends time itself to the will of the legendary, Skyler's hubris demands she clenches her teeth against its call, snarling her futile rebellion in a flash of teeth. If IT wanted to pull her back, IT would find her waiting with bared teeth and violence in the pull of her mouth.

Her fate was her own. She would make it so.

In the end, however, it's Laurence Anderson and Articuno that take her away from the the ruins of her own poor decisions. Wings awash in glittering ice spread out before her, the sailor finds herself scooped up along with Lars. Calloused hands immediately grip hard onto frigid feathers, bracing herself for the sharp turns and twists, the legendary weaving a path between the floating rivers of time that seek to bring them back.

"Lars, we really need to talk!"

And that's the last of Skyler Dross's words as she feels herself disappear, leaving behind the echo of a singular whisper that has no weight in the grand scheme of things.

And she still was in her pyjamas.

Laurence Anderson @hoennhistoria

She falls one last time. Instead of the jolt awake against the hard, dirt ground, Lex finds herself suspended in space and time. There is an emptiness that surrounds her. The feeling is not too different than what she has experienced in her own timeline. It’s a hopeless, complete, dark emptiness. It consumes her. And in this moment she is completely alone, suffocating in a darkness she feels like she created herself.

But she isn’t alone. A deep, primitive roar reverberates the air around her and penetrates to her very core. It’s alarming, taking her breath away as her eyes grew wide in a mixture of panic and surprise. The steel-plated legendary hung in the emptiness in front of her. Her amber eyes fixed into Dialga’s.

Could it sense the fear? The regret? The emptiness inside her? Did it recognize that her emptiness reflected its own in this place?

Something triggered the beast to nearly explode, a ROAR OF TIME shooting from it’s very being. The beams of time rushed past Lex. She could feel the power, the heat of each. She caught a glimpse of one of her timelines. It was a moment of time in a life she barely recognized, before it all went to shit and before she left Killian. Her hand reached towards him. She fought as hard as she could against the pull of her own timeline. And for a moment, the love that ignited her soul had her winning. That was, until the beast took note. That wasn’t her timeline.

In an anger sparked by her defiance, Dialga ripped her away from the memory. It was painful to her very core. She was so close, “NO!” Lex screamed in agony tears breaking through to stream down her face. With a forceful push, she spun towards the appropriate timeline.

”No, no, no,” this time she was begging, pleading with the deity, “Not this one“, in this timeline she was lost and alone, filled to the brim with regret and self-hatred, and was constantly terrorized by fear.

She had no choice, and the thief was consumed by the beam, transporting her back to hell.

tl;dr: Lex tried to escape through another timeline where she sees Killian but Dialga forcefully rips her away and sends her back to her correct timeline.