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Spat out into a realm of endless impossibilities as penalty for his insolence, Angelo aimlessly plunges into its stagnant current with an alarmed shout.

Only his outcry would reach no ears.

For his sole companion - the unwanted, Unown prize - ends up slipping through grasping, desperate fingers like a mirage teasing the damned. Free from obeying dimensional borders and honouring bets.

Lucky bastard.

Left alone within the darkness, sentenced to dangle listless without lifeline nor waypoints to guide him back into the world's embrace, Angelo drifts aimless.

As often unforgiving and restricting as it was, now that gravity is a constant that no longer exists, he'd find himself missing it.

And it's not the only thing lost.

There's no earth. No ocean. No sky.

No anything at all.

Not even time.

His trembling breath, denying his attempt at composure, is his only anything to calculate the passage.

Consciously, rough fingertips seek a braided band, smoothing over their unseen but memorised patterns of blue swirling hues.

And like the waves unintentionally weaved around his wrist, Angelo urges the tide within to soothe his accelerated heartbeat. His thumb stroking the element-weathered twine until clouds thin and part.

In this void, it's the strongest wayfinder he has.

Until eventually, Angelo begins to attempt piecing together a pictureless puzzle - and starts the count.

He loses count not long after his six thousandth breath and his ideas dry up soon after that. Inspiration lost amongst the nothingness that fills this pocket of void space.

Smuggling away what energy and hope he retains after what feels like days adrift on a barren sea, blue eyes slide shut - throwing himself into a world just as dark - to conserve what of him remains.

Angelo can't remember falling asleep, there was no differentials between realms here but awareness eventually rouses him. Stirred by the first and only star amongst the bleakest night.

In the end, maybe he's the one who is found.

This time, when Angelo reaches out for the Unown, it drifts his way without hesitation, the sensation of something real bumping against his fingers summoning a delirious, gravelled chuckle.

“Y'not friends with that shifty old asshole... Are you?” He asks the Unown that floats atop cupped palms, cradled like oasis water in the desert, its eye unblinking and as bright as a beacon amongst the gloom.

He'll take that as a no. But even if it was, it's arrival was a slither of chance he can't not take.

“If you could take me back…” Scratchy words drip slow from dry lips, hesitant, if only for the surprising amount of energy it consumes. The pilot's consciousness swirling the drain. “To my world… That would be…”





Within his desperate grasp, warm light pools, and Angelo instinctively tucks it close to his chest. It's illumination expanding, consuming.

Just before he's forced to close his eyes at the mercy of its radiance, slithers of blue steal one last look of the blackness that had devoured him for time unknown.

Whether or not his disorientated mind is playing tricks on him is something that Angelo, even much later on, is uncertain of. But he swears he sees the darkness shift, its mass swirling like thousands of spores caught on the breeze and he within the eye -

That or swarming, hungry beasts, pulling him and the clutched sun into pitch black depths. Swallowing sight, sound and eventually, consciousness.     

Around his cocoon of warm, dazzling white light, the world unbeknownst to him transforms anew.

And when blue eyes, hazy like he'd just been roused from a deep sleep, flutter open, Angelo beings to piece together familiarity in his disorientation.

He'd find 'his world'.

Beneath him is the softness of an old couch, his body sinking into its pillows. Through the blurriness, sunlight filters in through large wall-sized windows, bathing his aching body in warmth. And the salt scents, stubbornly infused into the fabric, tickle his nose into slowly, peacefully coming around...

Into bringing him home...

“Wake! Up!”

Still clutched in his arms, the Unown wiggles out of his grip and hides beneath the warmth of his jacket, just as the heavy sensation of a pillow collides into his face.

“Holy shi--” Startled, his eyes shoot open, arm instinctively swatting out. Only for the curse that spits off his tongue to suddenly take the form of another shape entirely. An automatic reflex, years honed. “--nx.”

Because before him, a girl has scuttled back to sit on the edge of the coffee table, out of range and clutching her weapon of choice with a cheeky display of teeth. 

Her honey-brown eyes focus squarely on him rather than soaking up the new surroundings, like she'd been aboard the Sotally Tober a thousand times already - as if it's an everyday, unremarkable view.

Funny, when Amara Vestri herself is no longer an everyday presence for him.



“Morning, Snorlax face!” She says with a lively, unconcerned lift to her voice. “Mamma said not to wake you up after last night but um, I was bored of waiting... It is nearly lunch time y'know!”

Gingerly, Angelo swings his legs over the side of the couch, ignoring the sting on his nose and the parched dryness of his throat as he sits. Even the Unown that had slipped into his jacket interior is forgotten, insignificant when faced with the visage of his younger sister, who should be walking Alto Mare's canal fringed streets.

“Ammy? When... When did you get here...?” His voice comes out scratchy, like his throat had been scraped away with sandpaper. His sister presses her lips together tight, containing laughter.

“Oh boy, you do sound like Whisky.” She sniffs dramatically. “Smell like him, too. Is that what adults mean by 'feelin' it in the mornin'?”

Short on patience, Angelo leans forward, arms on his knees and lets out an equally dramatic sigh. Amara squeaks and lifts the pillow in front of her face like a shield, giggling.

“Gross! Stop! Stop! We got here this morning to help clear up! Like we said, remember? I wish we'd just stayed over last night though, I like sleepovers with you an' Sky an' Dorado but papà said no... Lame. I wanted pancakes, Sky always--”

A scarred hand reaches out as she quickly chatters, fingertips resting atop a head of short, unruly chocolate hair. She's really there, Angelo concludes in wonderment, although he gives Amara's fluffy locks a rough ruffle for good measure.

Definitely here, given how she throws the pillow at him. It hits his chest softly and the hidden Unown squirms. Angelo tosses it out of reach, into the corner of the couch.

“Alright, Chatotbox. Y'know that's not what I meant, I meant when did you get to Hoenn?”

“Ummm...” With a tilt of her head, Amara swings her legs back and forth in thought, soles of her old trainers scuffing the living room floorboards. “Like... Uh. Ages ago? Mamma got that fancy shmancy new job here, remember?”

“What? Here here?”

His brow knits together in a little frown, confusion flickering in his expression, unable to hold it back when confronted with such an impossible sounding - but certainly not unwanted - idea.

“Hoenn's not exactly the... best place for you all. Mamma knows this.”

His mother had never made the wisest of choices, Angelo was not ignorant to that, but to move the family here... They did have the news back in Alto Mare, for one.

“Huh? That's dumb. It's not like it's not safe. Apart from that one time, when Dorado stole that tourist's picnic at the beach because.. snrk... because..” Her snort of mirth is cut short, Angelo interrupting his younger sister as the concern and questions flare, finger reaching out to poke her shoulder.

“Not exactly what I was getting at, dork. More like there's those distortions here? And Team Rocket?”

Scrunching her nose in annoyance, the girl sighs like her brother's questions are the most ridiculous in the world and promptly decides the most appropriate answer is to roll backwards off the coffee table.

“You're a weirdo,” Amara concludes, running out of the Sotally Tober apartment with heavy stomps. Leaving the front door - and Angelo's confusion, his curiosity - wide open in her impatience.

Outside the world is bright and jubilee hangs in the air as infectiously uplifting as the brine on the breeze. Chatter and laughter lingering with jovial familiarity between those aboard the Sotally Tober deck, even as remnants of a lively night is swept away.

Angelo blinks as the sunlight hits him, squinting as his eyes get used to the difference between this world and the last.

Yet he can't look away fully, even as his vision stings and blurs.

Amara runs ahead of him, shoes squeaking on the polished wood as she stomps towards two boys of a similar age. Picking up a discarded mop, she, Ricci and Renz begin their mop race after a 'three, two, one'. Renz running out on two, followed by a chorus of screeches of 'cheater!' 

He catches the back of Lucia and Paolo, his step-father, walking down the gangplank and onto the docks, plates of leftovers in their hands wrapped up in film.

And crouched by a bucket, Nico watches the soapy water fill from a tap, the youngest of his siblings quiet and transfixed in his task.

All of his family were here, mingling amongst the ship crew as if it were your everyday Sunday.

“Aha! He rises! Someone looks like they had a good night.”

Jewellery tinkling and heels clicking in a tune that's engraved in his brain, Anna Vestri rounds the corner. His mother is as fashionably dressed as ever, long dark hair pulled back into a high ponytail.

Just like he remembered. Aside from the fact she's wielding a trash bag in bright, rubber gloved hands.

Her smile is equally as blinding and carefree when she tip-tip-taps up to see him.

“Mamma. Uh. Hey.” The pilot looks dumbstruck at her. Perhaps he's still slow from the Unown dimension or from the bizarre nature of it all? “What are you guys doing here?”

“Cleaning. Are you that hungover?” Her mascara-heightened eyelashes flutter, before her smile stretches into a shape that often graces Angelo's lips. “Maybe I should be the one heading out tomorrow. I feel ab-so-lute-ly fine!”

With about the strength of a Butterfree wing, her dainty fingers fall to slap playfully against his shoulder. And Angelo feels a smile pull at the corner of his mouth, questions and confusion melting at her energy.

“You sure? You sound drunk.”

As frustrating as she could be - despite the lingering bitterness he harbours deep down for his teenage years -  he'd missed her.

“Oh, shush. But ah, I'm so jealous, Angioletto! You're going to get to see so many amazing things.”

There's a clatter and a thud, water splashing, as tiny feet trip over themselves. Nico unable to hold up his heavy burden as he attempts to carry the bucket of water to his mop-wielding siblings.

Picking himself up, he wails and runs towards them with arms outstretched, bumped nose pink and dripping with snot.

It's like a hardwired reaction. Angelo crouches in preparation to pull one of his younger siblings into an embrace of comfort. 

“Whoopsie! Come here, darling! Let me see.”

His mother smiles, sincere and airy as she scoops up the sniffling child that falls into her arms, even as his grubby face buries into the crook of her neck.

Angelo blinks, caught off guard and left hovering.

Anna unaware of the gravity of her words, just as her eldest son was unaware of the weight hearing them would manifest within his chest.

“It's okay, Angie. I got him! I don't need any help.”

---

The party, it turns out, had been one of goodbye.

His.

South-west of Hoenn an archipelago had been discovered, a collection of islands appearing in an expanse of blue previously desolate as far as the eye could see.

He'd discovered it.

Tomorrow morning, he and a research team were heading out to the unnamed collection of islands. The first footprints on its earth would be his, the first documentation of its topography would be by his hand.

A whole new world of secrets waiting for him.

Apparently, he won't be back for six months, at best.

---

“Not nervous are you, Angel?”

It's quiet up in the crow's nest and yet he doesn't notice Skyler joining him until an arm snakes around his waist, fingers peeking just under the edge of his shirt in a familiar call of attention.

Blue eyes that had been focused on the bay, on the large research vessel that has his plane tied onto its deck, are pulled her way.

“Hm? Nah. Guess it hasn't sunk in yet.” He'd only learned about it a few hours ago, after all. “I'm sure it will hit once we're on the water.”

Angelo turns his back on the endless horizon awaiting him, leaning against the railings (which no longer squeak) with a casual shrug.

Only to be met with bewilderment on her face, Skyler's arm falling back to her side.

“That would've been a sight, but this one's all yours, remember?”

“You're not coming with me?”

The idea of being apart from her for six months has Angelo's brow pinching, even more so when she looks up at him without a flicker of apprehension on her features.

Her smiled acceptance is unnerving.

Angelo covers it up with a joke, lips curled in a weak shield. “Sure... I'll see you in a few weeks then, when you finish eating your parents out of house an' home.”

“You saying my food is bad, Vestri? Didn't hear you complaining last night.” She retorts, defiant laugh on her lips, teeth sharp and absent of offense. “I don't need you to look after me, y'know.”

Angelo can scarcely feel the knuckles clipping playfully against his bicep in a punch that'll surely leave a bruise.

His eyes search for a lie amongst the glitter of moonstone, only to find unapologetic wildness reflected on the surface, as ever.

It's not about something as trivial as cooking. There's something deeper, something he can't yet place, that has the smile deflate.

At his silence, Skyler's brow pinches, as if sensing that something was wrong. Yet he finds there is no comfort in the hand that is placed to his cheek, an answer to the weird dissatisfaction in his gut not waiting for him in a narrowed glint of silver.

“Angel. Hey.”

Within the clear, blue sky, a peal of thunder echoes.

Like a school of Wishiwashi swimming through depths too dense to dive, bulbous, glowing eyes swarm together in the endless expanse of darkness. Pulsing, surging into shapes and forming words perhaps far too convoluted for man to decipher.

As one.

Together, they'd worked on their latest piece. Crafting a world suited to the tastes of their newest realm visitor. From sculpting every grain of golden sand to tailoring even the signature scent of Lilycove on the fair weathered breeze and echoing the right pitches of each loved one's voice. Plucked from one angelo vestri 's memories.

Truly, the Unown were artists of their realm.

Their motive?

Maybe they wished to simply to make his passing more peaceful, as his body aimlessly drifts through their space? Perhaps to test and flex their psychic abilities? None will know.

And yet, their guest does not seem... Satisfied.

They murmur to one another, hums crackling like white noise on a dead channel, in their confusion.

On paper, they'd provided everything they thought - what he thought - was desired.

They'd presented him an opportunity to venture forth into lands unexplored. To be the discoverer of worlds unpenned and free of footprints.

His family was well. Thriving. Their presence in Lilycove effortlessly fitting into the landscape, allowing him to be reassured that their lives - and some of them - had changed for the better. For him to just be with them again.

Then they'd seamlessly woven together the two parts. Gifting him the freedom to venture unbound, unchained. Unneeded.

Yet the human heart is a complex thing, it seems. Even to them, all knowing and powerful, beyond man's understanding.

Within the Unown dimension the hum turns frantic, rejection less of a sting and more like magnetic poles, repelling their grip on the carefully constructed realm.

Space rips apart with the ferocity of thunder.

Their creations begin to crumble.

And through the chaos of the storm they desperately try to hold together, an unknown entity breaks in through the cracks.

They cannot stop it.

angelo vestri does not wish for this world any more.

So this world, could no longer be...

So did I…

Blood beads interlace with the rain, drip-drip-drop, on the wooden planks of the dock, groaning beneath the stagger of his uneven legs.

In the distance, footsteps thud like a war drum, slow and promising. Closer and closer. While his strained breath fills the space between the gaps.

Concluding with a pained cry of thunder, the universe tears apart to make way for silence to then sit heavy and murky, life stagnant.

A symphony to the horizons' end.

Everything Angelo had seen in this world is but crystal dust between his fingertips now. Evaporated, drifting up into the fractured sky, his beloved and family, everything he cared about, splintered like statues made of glass.

(Even though he knew they weren't real, he'd felt something within him crack right along with them.)

Gone. Until there was nothing left except this long plank he'd been made to walk and the dark waves below. Bottomless and hungry.

When Angelo had imagined being on the edge of the world, he hadn't been chased down to it.

And yet he meets his pursuer with a bearing of teeth, less threatening as it was inviting the hunter to try his luck at making sure he stayed down - one more time.

There was something deeply satisfying about denying death's silent call.

“And here I thought I was in good shape… Now you're just out to embarrass me.”

Every breath burns his lungs, every expel of his voice croaked from the exertion of evading and defending himself from wicked blows. But Angelo would be Angelo, taunting is his nature, even to the relentless assassin that had backed him into a corner.

“Have to tell me your secret. Sure the wife would appreciate it.” He sniffs, wiping away a bloodied nose on the back of his hand.

While the friendly Unown-V had done a good job at keeping the assassin's Unown-S at bay, that hadn't stopped the brawl upon the disintegrating Sotally Tober bow. Nor the stray Hidden Power that had carved a path against his thigh when he'd managed to slip away...

Even if there were somewhere that Angelo could run, now, he couldn't.

Expression falling grim, he watches as death comes for him in the form of a man with silver hair, his scythe an all-seeing eye. Hauntingly silent.

It glitters in the what remains of the light, a prism of colour catching rain and crystal dust, as the Unown-S gathers energy. Ready for the execution.

Two rays of Hidden Power collide. The dark water of space drags at the creaking wooden support beams of the dock. Two endlessly hungry entities, nipping at his heels.

“'m not fucking dying here!” He shields his face from the explosion, ears ringing.

Shards of residual power, glittering like stars, graze against his skin as he plunges through the edge of the crumbling world. The last remnants of the reality in which the Unown had crafted for him now but dust, entangled in his hair and adrift to space.

His heart is pounding too loudly, adrenaline making his blood burn too furiously, for him to know if he's screaming or not when he rips through world's end.

Angelo finding himself plunged once again into darkness.

But not nothingness. Unown-V trails after him this time, falling beside him, like a loyal constant.

Movement flickers in the corner of his eye, even though the wind stings and rips past him fast enough to bring tears, the pilot's gaze is drawn.

Drawn to witness the collision of worlds, playing out before him as the Unown's power begins to recollect itself from his broken world, shooting across the expanse of darkness like an arrow. The lights trailing through the sky revealing moments within dimensions that were not his own.

Of copied faces, mirroring some of the ones he'd left behind, back in his Hoenn.

Martín del Mar and a girl he did not know, staring at moon that hangs too low over their heads. Hauntingly so.

He sees Eris Halla , crying and tugging at a chained Luxray, bloodied on the ground. Her soundless, desperate wails pulling at Angelo's chest.

An exchange of gifts, embraced solemn goodbyes, shared between Alexei Ivanov and a blue-haired man in a boarded-up room. As if it were the last.

And skyler dross .

Bloodied and ever fierce Skyler. Its like the venom is breaking down every nerve ending of his, too. Nihilegos' tentacles ensnaring, consuming.

His fingers reach, drawn her way with raw instinctual desperation but the window flickers shut a beat later and he's no closer. No help.

She's fine, he thinks to himself - convinces himself - like a repeated prayer in the back of his head, bloodied knuckles clenched. She's back at home with Dorado and Sammy and the others. That's... not my Sky.

The need to see her safe, asleep and tangled in bedsheets with drool on her pillow like he'd left her, is a hook sunk deep into his flesh.

But first, he needed to get out of here...

For the Sharpedo were coming to pick off those lost within the deep.



It arrives on the tail end of an explosion, sound suddenly existing within this realm as something bright breaks away from the accumulation of scattered Unown power. Tearing through space like a shooting star...

One. Followed by another smaller spark, then another and another.

As the first makes a sudden bank in the endless sky, redirected sharply from its plummet, Angelo notes the calculated intent of the object as it swerves. Its course set, beyond avoiding the smaller fragments that give chase.

That it carves a path through the empty plane. Honed in on him.

White. Aquamarine. Blinding fast.

It's on Angelo before he can finish saying it's name.



Feathers are gripped in his hands, grazed knuckles stinging from the ferocity of the squeeze, on the lifeline that had come for him.

“Latios...?”

A Latios with an alternate downy hue, peers over towards his new rider, red eyes filled with pain and recognition. Until they're swallowed up by light...

Images flick within Angelo's mind one after another, rapid but each one telling a story.

Through Latios's view, he sees a Hoenn blanketed, in what at first he thinks is snow but quickly realises with a twist in his gut, is ash.

Lilycove's coastline is no longer where it should be, dark rock replacing glittering blue with lava long cooled, bleak and void and like an endless shadow.

Then, in a blink, he's watching a version of himself. Caked in dust as the dry sun angrily beats down, walking towards the toppled carcass of a long-beached ship. No waves in sight.

He's just jumping from the stanchion, tilted towards the barren ground, with a full backpack in tow when an explosion sees the boat submit onto its side with a harrowing final groan.

His vision shakes as Latios lunges forward towards the falling figure. A battle commencing, brief moments of bloodshed, before sight of this version of himself is lost in a storm of sand.

It skips forward until Latios had broken from the world, fleeing Unown pursuers and assassins. Alone.

Until they'd caught sight of one another.

Reunited. But not each other's. 

Later, on a voyage to islands far beyond the Lilycove coastline with Latias, the pilot would come to learn this to be Sight Sharing. Images of what had been.

“C'mon.” He rasps, slowly reaching forward to press a hand to the Latios's neck. Careful in his comfort and wonderment, ignoring the way his fingers shake from what he had seen. “We're getting out of this hellhole.”

Unown-V slips back into his jacket, and then they're off in a blur of speed through the Unown Dimension.

A thousand eyes seeming to give chase.

And against those odds, luck is not in their favour.

Behind them, a surge of Unown are after their blood, swarming from seemingly a million different worlds with a collective mission in mind.

Despite Angelo's guidance, navigating the best he can through the void with no waypoints, there seems to be no way to escape...

There's only so far - for so long - he and Latios can fly.

“Keep going.” Angelo doesn't know whether it's an attempt to reassure the Eon pokemon or himself at this point, perhaps a bit of both, as it falls from dried lips. “We can make it.”

We need to go faster.

Within his pocket something shifts, warmth spreading suddenly like a hand had been pressed to his heart. Angelo reaches into the depths, his searching fingertips brushing against the Unown-V that had taken refuge and something smooth. Spherical.

Using what little power it had left, his stubborn stowaway blesses Angelo with one last wish and now, it sleeps.

When he pulls his hand back from his jacket, a Mega Stone sits within the pilots palm, blue and grey and pulsing with energy. Only the Latiosite doesn't feel quite right, fragile and flimsy, it's lustre dim in comparison to the gems Angelo is already in possession with. 

Yet the light, the power, that surrounds him and Latios when its squeezed within his bloodied palm, feels real enough to spark hope...



He'd wished to fly faster, so faster they flew.

On the back of the larger, metamorphized Latios, they burst forward through the dimension with a sudden acceleration of speed. Angelo having to press himself closer to Latios's body and cling until his knuckles pale as they slice through space, lest the force pull him from the Eon pokemon's back.

It's like they're moving so fast they teleport, that blink of a star on the horizon becoming larger and larger, until the tear in the darkness reveals a scene through it.

Granite Cave awaits. His Hoenn.

Angelo's lips part to encourage Latios, to give him that one last push to guide him into safety’s embrace, when a flash of white appears in his peripherals. Cold seeping into his bones.

“On your six! Mov--”

An explosion slams against their side, a collaboration of Hidden Power materialising from the dark to pulverise into both Latios and Angelo.

Did I miss them? He thinks, thoughts a rapid blur in his head as they fall through space with shared yells in hurt and horror.

Within his palm the Latiosite, already unstable in its forgery, splinters and cracks...



An explosion of rejected energy rips Latios from his empowered state and Angelo's fingertips from his feathers. Tearing them apart in fire and residual Unown power.

And shooting only one of them towards the open maw of the door, Granite Cave's image spinning nauseatingly in the turbulence of his downfall...

“Latios!” His fingers reach, dread strangling his throat into a painful croak, as the assassin’s Unown swarm him like a dark cloud.

The Eon pokemon's uncertain fate is the last thing Angelo sees when the portal seals shut behind him, and his body collides against cold stone.

Rapid, strained breathing is the only thing he hears, even when his Dragapult that had been left behind swoops to Phantom Force them away.

Even the restless wiggling of the Unown-V in his pocket is a numb sensation. Everything blank, blurred out so he can move forward, until his stumbling feet hit the Sotally Tober.

And where the creaks of the floorboards beneath his feet, the drip-drip-drop of blood, echoing hauntingly within empty rooms, chips away at what little resilience Angelo feebly clings onto.