The wind blew with the scent of livestock, rich and earthy. It was a long way from sidewalks and city pavement-- here, the streets were only grass, the pasture cropped bare by grazing Miltank and Mareep. 

A vehicle was approaching Lulu's location. Slowly, but gradually. There was no sound of an engine, nor warning glow of headlights. The shape was square and blocky, silent but for the faintest hum of magnetic energy. It almost looked like a (strangely solid) golf cart until it grew close enough to make out its huge, bladed red nose.

The figure riding on top of the Probopass raised one hand in greeting, having made (for her) an unusually subtle entrance. "Any signs of one yet?" Chryssa asked in a stage whisper, drawing near to Lulu. She'd worn black for the stealth-based mission, though it seemed less like camouflage and more like she'd just come back from a funeral.

Chryssa was less than able walking on land, and especially not in difficult terrain crawling with tree roots and Diglett mounds. So she'd opted to make her approach on Probopass instead of teleporting in, concerned the flash of light would alert the Beheeyem of her presence. 

The only problem was the painfully, painfully slow speed.

"Beheeyem levitate, I believe," Chryssa said, not wasting time, "So I've brought a Pokemon with Gravity. If I can get close to it, I should be able to ground and trap it." She spoke casually about Probopass as if it was her own inherent powers and saw Arran's eyes roll upwards to look at her dubiously. "I'm Chryssa, by the way."

She smiled suddenly, meeting Lulu's gaze with bright, feverish intensity.

Her proposal had been accepted. Business conducted. The mission was underway. And consequently, Chryssa was struck with the sudden, fervent craving for more. No power struggle? No off-kilter exchange? Where was the spark? Where was the connection? She could have been any drone with a Probopass, but this was Chryssa. 

It had been just over a month since the explosion at the Church of Arceus. For weeks now she had been in and out of the hospital, suspended from "official" ranger duties until she made a full recovery. There was only one explanation for the tame entrance, introduction, and exchange: she was out of practice.

"So what's your weakness?" the girl asked casually, sliding off the side of her Pokemon. She hit the ground cane-first, the tip burying itself past tree roots and soft loam so the rest of her landed lightly. "I'm coming along, of course, I just don't want to be on board if my Probopass gets attacked directly. My weakness is physical ability, by the way, if that wasn't obvious." She was wearing a neck brace.

Again, Arran rolled his eyes disapprovingly at her, a low grumble escaping his mustache. The iron fillings twisted and rearranged themselves like a living, curly mass. <Probo....>

"You could lie, but as I'm sure you're aware, Elgyem and Beheeyem have a way of getting in your head. They'll know your weakness, even if you don't tell me." Chryssa's eyes glinted in the moonlight. Far away, over the field, the red lights continued to blink. There seemed to be three of them, moving in a triangle pattern. A trick, or a signal? 

She extended a small, delicate hand to the Gardevoir. 

"Still, wouldn't it be more interesting if you did?"

Gardevoir’s sudden rejection didn’t phase Chryssa— she just wiggled her fingers teasingly at the fairy-type instead. Being called weird had almost as little effect. “Am I really? You’re the one with no name or weaknesses,” the girl pointed out, still innocently composed. The woman had failed to respond to the most basic introduction and question, so her probing felt justified. “Don’t you have one? Really? Just make one up.”

Lie for her.

Entertain her. 

It didn’t matter what Lulu actually said. What was important was that she said something. ‘Cool’ people never wanted to admit they had anything wrong with them. It ruined the mysterious, ironclad veneer. As one of those undeniably cool people, Chryssa understood that fact implicitly. In some ways, she was lucky to have such an obvious physical problem on a surface level. It saved her the embarrassment of having her own facade cracked, and her true vulnerabilities exposed.

That didn’t stop her from trying to crack other people. Chryssa liked to level the playing field. And as someone who’d fought and trained a majority of psychic-types, she knew how quickly the tables could turn on a person with a vulnerable psyche. The right word. The right implication. A physical impairment was the least of their worries once they were dealing with a cornered Beheeyem.

“Gravity will pin Beheeyem down, but it won’t render it defenseless. Psychic-types can be quite resourceful,” Chryssa said, rephrasing her justification for the question. She rested her hand against her Probopass. Behind the mustached Pokemon, a sleeping Miltank began to levitate into the air. There was no psychic glow, no beam of energy, no blinking lights—it simply began to float into the sky.

Chryssa ignored the miracle of science completely. She was still fixated on Lulu’s weakness.  “...I’m just making sure you’re prepared. ” 

She was cool. Chryssa had to admire the mysterious woman's dedication to her mysterious woman image. Chryssa herself sometimes struggled to keep up a consistent persona-- she tended to drop in and out of character as naturally as breath, citing stage directions and commentary before returning to her role. 

None of it was real. Everything was a show. The only test was who the better actor was, and who had more to lose from falling off the stage.

The blur of Teleport smeared them across the landscape, and Chryssa felt fragrant grass take shape beneath her boots. The sky was dark, and there was no time to get her bearings. It was essential to catch Beheeyem by surprise. "Gravity," she said as soon as her tongue settled in her mouth, and the hum of Magnet Rise was offset by a heavy thud as the rock-type's body fisted deep into the ground. 

As if weighed down by invisible snow, the boughs of trees bent towards the earth and night insects plummeted, decorating the ground like a car windshield. The Miltank fell with a crunch of sudden angles, cruel corners bent from curves.

"Block it, Arran," Chryssa ordered, finally orienting herself in their new surroundings as Lulu's Pokemon shot a Shadow Ball at the grounded alien. "Keep it from moving around." 

Was she tempting fate?

A cornered animal will always fight back.

Arran's Mini-Noses detached from his sides and the three beaked projectiles formed a tight, rotating circle. They zoomed towards the Beheeyem like a lasso, imprisoning it in a hoop of spinning stones.

Wouldn't it be more interesting if you did?

The Beheeyem's glowing eyes pulsed frantically, then slowed. It raised its hands as if to surrender, exposing the three diodes set in each palm.

Three colors, blinking in rapid succession.

Green. Yellow. Red. Red. Yellow. Green.

From one hand, green light bathed Lulu like a searching spotlight. 

From the other, red hues shone on Chryssa, washing her in blood-colored light.

There was nothing so sophisticated, so intricate, in Chryssa’s mind compared with the scientist’s. Nothing about her psyche had been tampered with (unless you counted years of religious conditioning from the Church of Arceus.) There was little to dissect intellectually— but as for emotions... well, those simple chemicals were as easy to change as flicking a switch. Love to hate. Joy to fury.

Red to green, green to yellow, yellow back to red.

As Lulu suffered the undressings of psychic fingers, the Beheeyem found in Chryssa what it had been looking for.

Fear.

The first rush as the Beheeyem pulled was dizzying, as paralyzing as the first drop of a roller coaster. Chryssa’s body stiffened as if plunged into freezing water, each muscle tensing hard enough to crumple cans where she floated above the ground.

But that wasn’t it. Not all of it, anyway. Chryssa’s heartbeat seemed to slow as she sorted past the shock to find the first wave ebbing, narrowing. It wasn’t just fear— this was something darker, something deeper. Something familiar.

When she was at her most alone and her thoughts turned to ticking timers, Chryssa knew this beast.

This was dread.

“Something’s coming,” she managed to find her voice and say clearly, still rigid from the dread that the psychic Pokémon continued to pull from her innermost thoughts. Her tongue felt fat and sluggish in her mouth, a frightened animal caged in a prison of gritted teeth. “I don’t know what... but I think it’s trying to warn us.”

What would frighten a Beheeyem? What could be so terrible that an extraterrestrial (if those theories were true) would come to Earth and turn to robbing cattle?

The lights blinked frenetically as the psychic-type spelled out the answer, a desperate warning in a language neither of them could read.

Suspended in red light, Chryssa could only continue to dread what happened next. When they failed to understand, the Beheeyem would drop them— and they would fall to the ground like so many bags of broken bones. With her capacity for higher thought suspended as surely as her body, one instinct overrode the rest. 

I have to live.

“Arran, let it go— send your mini-noses up here to get us,” Chryssa managed, speaking through jaws that felt welded shut with tension. “Now!” The circle of spinning projectiles broke, two of the mini-noses soaring up towards the pair of women in the sky like life preservers in the ocean of night. Chryssa seized the closest one just as the light faded and the Psychic attack dropped, gravity resuming its normal downward course.

They were free—but so was Beheeyem.

Floating above it all, Chryssa felt the sense of doom drain from her body, leaving her exhausted. After weeks spent in the hospital, the feeling was almost as familiar—and infectious—as the fear.  

Her dangling legs found solid support as her Probopass blasted up to meet her, bladed red nose spiraling like a compass needle. She settled on his head, still clinging with one arm to the Mini-Nose like a lone water wing in the sea of night.

Below, a tapestry of Teleport decorated the dark grasses. Psychic power flared again and again, brilliant, as Lulu Flint pursued the streak of blinking diodes like a comet chasing traffic lights..

Red. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Red. Yellow. Yellow. Green. 

The girl leaned forward, suddenly incredulous. Her eyes widened. Was it just her, or was it actually—

“Hold still, Arran. My, my, isn’t that something...”

---

The alfalfa was cool and dewy beneath her bare feet when the girl finally landed, the grass tickling her ankles. She’d lost her boots midair. “That’s mission complete,” Chryssa said, resting one hand on the rock-type for support as she made her way over to the winded (and triumphant!) woman. “I have something I’d like to show you before we leave, though. I thought you ought to see it.”

The girl held up her cell phone, on which she’d taken a time lapse photo from above. Like a living drone, she and Probopass had gotten a clear view of the pasture from a bird’s eye perspective. 

“Enhance,” Chryssa said, zooming in like a normal person could generally do on their smartphone. “Enhance... enhance... there!” 

Even in its desperate flight, the Beheeyem had been calculated. It had painted a portrait with its path, criss-crossing the field to form a starlit globe, its surface streaked with greens and golds. 

But then there was another shape— something strange and angular, asymmetric, an anomaly in an otherwise perfect crop circle. Something red as raw meat, scribbled through with jagged scarlet veins.

Perhaps this, at last, was what Beheeyem had been trying to show the livestock it had levitated. A view no one else could see. A message no one else could read. 

A picture—one only a camera could capture. 

“I don’t know what this means,” Chryssa said, her eyes bright. Her fingers curled around the screen and the mosaic preserved there, pixel-by-pixel, transcribed in light. “But I hope you do.”

Feeling lightheaded from the night’s excitement, Chryssa let out her breath, then pocketed her phone with a sudden, infectious smile.

“Let’s meet again, Ms. Mystery. Don’t leave me hanging next time. I’m still waiting for your weakness.”