“Whispers in the Dark”

Chapter 7: Pieces of the Puzzle

By: Crichton55

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A/N: Sorry about the wait. Lot of crap going on lately and it doesn’t seem too keen on the idea of giving me a lot of writing time. All complications aside, I hope you enjoy this chapter. (Just a little heads-up, it might be awhile until the next chapter is up. It may not. I don’t know. I was a little hesitant to post this without the next one already written, but I guess I might as well post it now.)

Disclaimer: Ok, if in some wild and unattainable fantasy I DID own Pokemon, I would also own an entire fleet of Alienware laptops and several hundred 128GB flash drives, but I’m pretty sure that everyone knows by now that that’s not the case. Say it with me: I….do….not….own….Pokemon. Very good. Here, have a cookie.

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Misty opened her mouth to scream, but her surprise and disbelief was plugged by a hand that abruptly covered her mouth followed by the barely audible sound of Ash whispering in her ear. “Shhh. Misty, c’mon. Let’s get outta here.”

Her mind felt like it had completely shut down. Ash was dead. She had seen him die right in front of her, and now he was tugging her away from Giovanni and Mewtwo. She involuntarily hesitated for a fraction of a second, but Ash pulled her harder. Misty turned to run.

None of this made any sense to her at all. She was sure she was hallucinating, but Ash pulled her further, every few seconds glancing nervously over his shoulder. He stopped suddenly and faced Misty.

Ash kissed her with sudden force, but before Misty had time to react, he pulled away, plastering a look of nervousness mixed with relief onto his face. “We don't have a lot of time, Misty. We gotta find that machine, but it looks like we gotta do it alone. I don't think Mewtwo's too keen on helping us at this point,” said Ash rather quietly, looking over Misty's shoulder at Mewtwo, who hovered in midair about a hundred feet down the hall, looking down at a revived Giovanni.

Misty finally found her voice. “H-How are you-?” She didn't appear to be able to finish her sentence. Ash glanced back at her. “I dunno, but we'll answer that later,” he said. More questions seemed to explode into Misty's mind faster that she could find answers for them. She felt dizzy as the mental chaos and anarchy pumped through her brain. Ash pulled again and the two started to run once more.

Hurried footsteps seemed to have caught up with them, and for a split-second Misty feared another swarm of Rockets. She turned her head to see Brock running at her side, a look of horror plaguing his pale face. His breathing was slightly heavy.

Before Misty had much of a chance to respond to the sudden appearance of someone whom she had seen with her own eyes sustain a fatal gunshot wound, a large ball of crackling energy flew past their heads and collided with a series of doors fifty feet down the hall. An immense explosion rippled through the corridor Ash looked over his shoulder, but retracted it quickly with a look of horror, an action which Misty needed no explanation. Another purple ball of psychic energy steamrollered so close to Ash’s head that he missed death by mere millimeters.

All conscious thought that had been driven out of her mind, only to be replaced by a drunk-like state of shock, gushed back to her almost instantaneous. Misty’s brain seemed to have switched into auto-pilot as she grabbed the collar of a stumbling Ash and grasped the arm of Brock and began to sprint around the corner they had previously navigated. Turning left again on another hallway thirty feet away, she peered down the corridor, only to be greeted by what seemed like hundreds of closed doors, each as plain and unyielding as the next.

The trio continued to run, Giovanni and a brainwashed Mewtwo in hot pursuit. Ball after ball of psychic destruction flew past them, each one creating a blinding cloud of dust and fragments of wall that scratched at their faces. Ducking long enough to avoid a baseball-sized chunk of drywall, Misty tugged harder at the fabric in one hand and Brock’s sweaty arm in the other.

Yet another volley of dark energy was flung past them, and the trio heard Giovanni’s roaring voice. “NO! DON’T LET THEM GET IN THE CONTROL ROOM!” Something in his tone made Misty’s thoughts intensify. Control room, she thought as a door on their left burst apart.

The room was packed with machines and computers that either stacked thirty feet high, or lay disassembled in random piles of metal that dotted the tile floor. Large wires stretched across the floor, joining several computers with ten others in every combination imaginable before leading back to a large central unit that marked the center of the giant room. Ash, Misty, and Brock stood transfixed at the technology that surrounded them, their legs unable to take them any deeper into the huge room.

The center computer, which took up space equal to the size of three bathtubs, was the most intricate. The dense mass of countless wires and ribbon cables that snaked their way around the behemoth machine oddly resembled a gargantuan mass of artificial hair that had grown out of control. In some areas the tangled mess of electronic foliage was so thick that it was impossible to tell what was behind it.

Ash looked up at a large pillar that stood close to the hairy computer. Seemingly thousands of wires and cables wound their way to the bottom of the column, which rose to the ceiling. He did not know what it was for, but he knew instinctively that it had something to do with what was controlling Mewtwo.

Next to the center console stood a tall man with thick, dark-rimmed glasses. His head was adorned with a thick metal helmet with what looked to be a wig of small but numerous red and blue wires that flowed down to the floor and back up into the machine. The Rocket, who was dressed in a black uniform that sported a large red “R”, looked over his spectacles at Ash, Misty, and Brock with an evil smirk plastered across his face.

“Impressive, ain’t it?” boomed a voice behind them. Wheeling around, the trainers found themselves ten feet away from Giovanni and Mewtwo, who hovered at his side, eyes glowing blood red. “Ten years, fifteen robbed banks, thirteen million dollars, and enough electricity to power three planets. How did I do it? Let’s just say there are some people worth doing anything for.” His voice remained hard and sinister, yet there was a small, almost undetectable tone of sadness in his speech that began to involuntarily turn the gears in Misty’s brain.

Wait, she thought. This doesn’t feel right. He sounded like Ash isn’t the only one he’s after. Why would he build all this and send Jessie, James, and Meowth after us just to kill Ash? There are plenty more trainers out there that are better than him. Misty’s thoughts blazed across her mind, searching for an answer.

The scene changed. She was on the floor, the cloudlike body of Ash billowing in her arms. She knew that this wasn’t reality, that she was still standing in the control room. Misty didn’t know what exactly this familiar world was. She tried to grasp Ash’s rippling, lifeless hand, but her hand passed right through it, slowly coming to the realization that this world was her memories.

She looked up to see Giovanni’s Italian shoes stop in front of her, the wispy ghost of the man’s legs seeming to flow as if caught by a small breeze. Misty saw the patch that decorated one of the shoes. She recognized the small Pokeball and the initials that decorated the top half. D.C. What could it mean?

The shoes disappeared, the cloudy panorama dissolving into what looked like a formless mass of vapor, which reformed into the white landscape of a room she had ventured into only once. Pictures of Ash and his mother dotted a tall dresser next to a nicely made bed. Her gaze drifted from the dresser to the sheets to the rest of the room. Misty saw that Delia Ketchum’s bedroom was as elegantly cared for as her garden. The curtains, though they did not move, gave the illusion that they were flowing as though they had been pushed by a small breeze. The walls, though void of wallpaper, were plagued by an array of photos similar to those that sat dormant upon the dresser.

Misty had never been in this room before this moment, nor had she ever been in it since, yet the memory had been too strong to forget. Everything seemed so…perfect. She turned her attention back to the photos on the dresser.

Glancing over each one, she saw the various time periods of Ash’s life. Some photos depicted him as a small toddler zooming around in a hard plastic tricycle, while others showed him at a mixture of points during his Pokemon journey. Misty mentally giggled to herself, noting one picture showing Ash with his arm around her shoulder and sporting a very cheesy and very goofy grin. Cute, she thought to herself.

She turned to leave, but something stuffed slightly behind the photos caught her eye. Knowing that any attempt to push them aside would be fruitless, she adjusted her angle and examined a small patch, scarcely larger than a postage stamp. The item design was fairly simple, as it showed little more than an Earth Badge that stood behind another set of initials. G.R.

Shrugging it off, Misty began to walk away, but the sight of another patch half buried underneath the first one seized her attention once more. Though this one appeared to be a little more intact than the one it lay under and the one she knew to exist on the side of Giovanni’s shoe, it didn’t take long for her to recognize it; the initials that sat on an image of a PokeBall warranted no further curiosity. D.C.

The thought exploded through her mind with the force of a bomb. No, she thought. It couldn’t be. It didn’t fit. None of the facts seemed to suggest it, yet she couldn’t help but feel it was right. It was like she had just been granted the last piece to a large jigsaw puzzle but didn’t want to believe it was the right piece.

Reality flooded her vision once more. The sounds of the countless machines buzzed relentlessly in her ears. Her thoughts were out of control, ravaging her brain like wildfire. Misty leaned over to Ash and whispered in his ear. “Ash, Is ‘Ketchum’ your mother’s maiden name?”

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A/N: Sorry for posting late again. A trip to Florida and college starting up isn’t doing me many favors. I hope you’re enjoying the turn of events here. I hope to finish the next chapter sooner than the others, I don’t want to end the chapter in a cliffhanger so large, but I think I have to. PLEASE!! REVIEW!! I want your opinion, not the opinion of random people who don’t care.