"Blackwell had at me himself before I was shipped off to Kalos." A munna is in his hands, her small body being pet. The way Chu-e talks, it's nothing- but the hollowness in his eyes rings otherwise. "He didn't just do physical torture." The munna bleats softly, sighs, and Chu-e lets her go and encourages her to float gently towards Cillian Quinn.

"Pollet also wouldn't teach me unless I experienced it myself. Think that sick fuck just wanted any excuse, though."

It's not one of those things he liked to think or talk about. Rocket had damaged their psyches in vastly different ways.

"Not like this, though." Already, a steady Hypnosis was being used, easy, lulling.

Gavin's lip curls at the mention of Blackwell.

"Course he did," is muttered, cold, not directed at Chu-e Choi. "That fucker."

His own Musharna receives none of the gentle petting; Gavin won't take his eyes off either Pokemon as he talks with his counterpart and a haze begins to spread through the room. It makes his skin prickle and chill.

"Worked under his son when I got shipped over from Kanto," he says of Pollet. "So I've been through it, too."

A quiet confession, solidarity between friends: "I hate this."

Not just experiencing it, because anyone would, but the very idea of it. Yet here he sits, the hypnosis making his head swim and his eyelids heavy. His mind screams at him to resist but lead settles in his blood, limbs weighted down.

"Yeah? I've heard he was a piece of work, too." He grimaces at the though. "... Guess you would have to be if you were Pollet's kid." And there are things Chu-e knows about that family that, in most, might inspire some sympathy. Yet, at this point, Calem is so warped he doesn't deserve it.

"I do, too." Agreed, easy. "But I think that's what makes us better."

Better by loosely defined words, better in that they wouldn't kill someone for no reason. Better that, while warped, there were still morals in them.

"I'll see you on the other side, okay?"

His own eyes droop, slightly, and dream mist floods the room, soft and pink.

"Still is. Got him working for me, now."

Though Calem Pollet still made his skin crawl as much as the haze that begins to swirl black under threat of his nightmares, there was a sick sense of satisfaction gained from the reversal of their roles.

He could torture Pollet if he wanted, put him through the same hell Gavin himself had endured. He hasn't. Not yet.

"Cheers."

Gavin blinks, and suddenly Chu-e Choi is standing over him. There's a vacancy in his eyes that's becoming too familiar.

He doesn't realize that this is a dream. When he attempts to draw upon his avatar powers, to shroud himself in the miasma that made him feel so safe, he finds that it doesn't work. His muscles won't work, he can't fight back.

Weak. Powerless.

Whatever conversation they were having is cut off.

Dreams merge into something else thanks to the mist.

A hand raises, that horrible black creeping crystal echoing loud, so loud.

It goes for the throat.

Chu-e screams, not the Other, but there isn't any sound, because he's trapped inside and forced to watch as it tries to maim his best friend.

Cillian Quinn

Dreams twist and tangle into a shared nightmare.

Gavin wants to run, to fight, to yell for help, but he can't do anything as crystal tendrils wind around his throat and penetrate and feed. He can only watch as onyx growth spreads across Chu-e Choi's skin like a rash, covering flesh and teeth and eyes.

He feels himself fading, eyes closing against his will.

And then in a violent shift, he awakes in another nightmare.

Pallet Town is barely recognizable for the burned shells of buildings and collapsed houses. He doesn't want to walk these streets, doesn't want to remember, but in the dream his feet carry him forward nonetheless.

But as he walks, the scene contorts under the memories of another.

A sharp gasp and Chu-e wakes up, groggy, but still asleep.

The tentacles are gone but he can still taste Cillian Quinn's blood on his tongue.

Pushing himself up, next to his friend, Chu-e follows. He'd not seen Pallet as it burned, only what came after. His focus had been elsewhere.

The smell of saltwater and iron mix with the smoke, the lapping of waves on a shore heard but not seen.

One difference between the Pallet that Had Been and the Pallet of Right Now was the husk of a mansion plopped in the middle of town. It didn't belong. Wasn't on fire.

It was so saturated with blood the building itself looked like it was bleeding, the smell of death and decay thick and oppressive.

Forward, forward he goes at Gavin's side.

Though unfamiliar, the mansion is folded into their shared nightmare and accepted as simply as if it had always been there. Dreams were funny like that. They had a way of making the extraordinary seem completely mundane.

It draws him in as if he's in a trance.

The air stinks of brine and blood.

Blood that squelches against his boots as Gavin enters the foreign shell.

Molded by his own memories, Chu-e Choi, too, would spot something amiss: a laboratory on the second floor, scientific jargon scrawled on a whiteboard that's been cracked in half. Dust and debris fail to completely obscure the bodies.

They're dead, yet their hollow eyes follow the two as they parse through the building. Accusing.

Chu-e's breathing picks up when they enter.

The bodies that little the floor are all smiling, staring up at them from the pile in the middle of the room. Not soldiers. Civilians. Children. Accusatory as their eyes follow, glassy and empty.

Flies buzz.

Chu-e sits on one of the seats in the lab, picks up dusty and empty beakers, pantomimes writing notes at what he finds.

Not him, but it's him, and he Chu-e understands it even as he doesn't.

He blinks, and a door in the wall, crying from the other side of it, wails of the broken. Not a fixture in the room, before, much like the mansion hadn't fit Pallet, something extra and terrible.

It swings open into darkness on it's own, calling Cillian Quinn.

"You're not afraid of the dark, are you?"

A mocking sneer from a disembodied voice that Chu-e Choi won't recognize, a thick Galarian accent colouring the words.

"Not like you helped at all," Gavin mutters to himself, shaking his head as he steps toward the open door.

Gavin doesn't want to cross the threshold into the gloom but the force of dreams compels just as effectively as his father once had, the door slamming shut behind them with a chilling finality.

Steps descend into blackness, familiar.

But when they reach the bottom, it's not the basement that Gavin expects.

It's something else, the product of someone else's nightmare.

'Cell' is a generous word for what it is. A florescent light buzzes, casting the room in harsh shades. Blood, piss, sweat, suffering- it aligns in the nose in a terrible way, as familiar as some might find the memory of mother's cooking. Nameless and faceless, they come for Cillian Quinn, and he won't be able to resist.

Dragging him to a stained and rusty metal table, not even hosed off from the last victim.

Strapped down as knives raise.

Chu-e is holding the knife, now, but he can feel the looming presence of something much larger and scarier at his back, not from his part of this, as if it might grasp him and throw him down and shatter him.

And Chu-e isn't piloting himself anymore. It's not like before, when he couldn't scream, his face contorts. Less at the action of lifting scalpel to meet flesh, but of being lost in a memory.

"Stop." Shaky. Not spoken to Gavin, just spoken, a mantra. "Stop. Stop. Prince. Stop."

Only his pokemon can't 'Dream Eater' the nightmare away here.