A baroquely dressed skeleton of a woman sat alone in an antique wooden chair with a face full of regret and determination. She brushed away a strand of the bleached-white, once-golden hair that was bound back in a violet silk thread fishnet veil, and leaned over a table draped with black cloth with two silver candlesticks cemented down with elephantine feet of ebony wax. Candle nubs flickered and writhed as her bony hands gently warmed the ends of two fresh sticks and conjoined them like a gardener transplanting cuttings from a healthy orchard to save a dying tree.
She breathed in and retched in time with the grandfather clock on the wall as she repeatedly filled her lungs, fighting to keep life giving air in long enough for her to continue the labor of life. A string of blood danced down her lip as her heaving chest came to rest, and closed her eyes as she reached down into her lap. The sound of roughly shuffled cards mingled with the wheezing and shuddering of her home, like an old barn in a hurricane, standing in defiance of the inevitable.
She laid the tarot out in a simple spread and inhaled wisps of the Gracidea incense burning on the moonlit window. It always cleared her mind; thank the threads of divinity it was something she could still smell after all the years of destruction wrought upon her senses by the miracle cures of man.
“Past,” she said, voice creaking like an old door.
A portrait painting of a scientist reaching for something precious on the floor, A shattered, heart shaped flask covered in a pink and yellow liquid pooled around his feet is to his left. His glasses are to his right, shattered and coated in red and black ichor. The hem and sleeves of his lab coat have started to catch fire. Everything in the lab is unhinged and arranged in comedic, precariously balanced stacks. Is he leaping for safety, or is he falling into the mess he's made on the floor?
The name on the card is written at the bottom. ‘The Magician.’ The card is reversed.
“Present.”
A picture of men and women crawling from black holes in the earth and ruined buildings on a desolate landscape, wearing the tattered remains of once luxurious garments. All around, they reach upwards in desperation. The eye of Arceus glows like the sun in the sky, but is hidden behind poisonous, mustard colored clouds. All around, the clawed hands of monstrous looking soldiers in bright red uniforms reach for the survivors, carrying stern, authoritarian gazes forged into ugly, tusked faces. What is it that they reach for? Is it viciousness, or fatherly discipline locked within those wisened Kantonian eyes?
The card reads, ‘Judgement.” It is reversed.
She breathed out a long held breath and she shuddered as the final card was due to be drawn.
“Future.”
As the old woman slid the final card from the top of the weathered deck, her hands shuddered and shook again as she entered a coughing fit, instinctually bringing her hand to her mouth. The card fell to the table, landing in the third space of the spread.
A tower, tall and proud, forged from marble blocks atop a gorgeous snowy peak. The base of the tower is built sturdy, but in the mountain are dark cracks in the stone, sprouting mad steel electrical infrastructure up and around, tangling the tower up in live sparking wires. At the top of the tower, a quadrupedal figure, too blackened and smudged to make out for sure, is struck down with a massive bolt of lighting coming from the crown shaped ring of stormclouds overhead. Humans leap from windows and balconies on the left; one of them, a black haired beauty gowned in a red dress with a performer’s baton and a blindfold over her eyes, leaps headlong as if diving into a deep pool. To the right, Pokemon of uncountable variety leap for safety from the burning precipice; one of them, a Raichu with a rich mane of corn colored hair, fiercely guards an egg in her clutches as she falls.
This card is, ‘The Tower.’ Not inverted, not upright, but sideways, spotted with globules of black, phlegmish blood.
For a moment, a tiny, silly moment, she reached for a new card, but then she mused to herself as she wiped the blood from her mouth and nodded with a sense of absolution settling in her guts. The old woman closed her eyes, blew out the candles, and rang an intricately crafted silver bell at the table as she burst into another coughing fit.
Spine chilling mirages rushed across the back wall. Then, as the clock struck midnight, a disheveled young lady with glowing purple eyes lurched out from a shadow-swallowed corner of the room. She had her face done up with immaculate works of makeup, eerily contrasted by the long, inky waterfalls of matted black hair that spilled onto the floorboards. Pocked with shade underlined eyes, cheeks sunken like a macabre doll, her porcelain skin curled into a manic grin. "No need for that, Madame, I've been here all along. Curious card stack..." She cackled, raising a palm to her mouth that was covered with the sleeves of her loose-fit cloak.
The ancient, shaking woman wheezed like an ocarina emptied out after being dropped in the ocean. "Something, somewhere, can actually draw you away from terrorizing the Galarian Countryside?"
The girl’s throat rattled with laughter again and she clicked her long black polished fingernails together in response. "I'll be cutting hapless fools forever, madame; be it breathing or with my bones as blades..."
"So be it then, as you know, I have need of you. A task I’m sure you won’t balk at. The only favor I ask is you not cackle like a demon as you get on about this nasty business," she reached into the sleeve of her black silken dress for a thin, silvery stiletto with an onyx gemstone forged at the base of the hilt. “I like to keep things professional.”
The young lady smiled, her cheeks practically folding in on themselves as her glistening white teeth bared in a way that made grown men want to peel away their own skin. "I've wanted to sink a blade between those old ribs of yours for soooo many moons. No hate, Madame. You've taught me so much, after all."
The elder’s eyebrows raised as her thin wrinkled skin warped into her own frightening, mercurial smile. "Why's that then, young Tanya?"
Tanya chuckled and tossed a Pokeball to her mentor, an ugly gunmetal colored thing thing with a menacing coded lock where controls would normally be. It was pasted with a black and white label reading, ‘Removal of this seal is a capital offense!’
"Because I've always wondered if a silver blade could somehow cut the steel heart of Agatha Oak,” she said, wringing her hands cutely as she blushed.
Agatha dialed in the unlock code and twisted the knob on the Incarceration Ball, and immediately it sounded off an ear piercing alarm. Red light coalesced into the form of a very confused looking Gengar at the center of the room, who then panicked as his eyes darted around the loud, unfamiliar environment.
Agatha's steel reinforced laceup boots stomped the device with way more power than a decrepit old woman had any right mustering, cracking the floorboards with the force, and left the Pokeball shattered in a million silent pieces.
Tanya giggled, and when Agatha's sunken craters for eye sockets shot at her she collected herself. "Making things interesting to the very end. Such an inspiration," she said as her hands gently caressed the handle of the thin silver spike of a blade in her hands.
Agatha stood, resting her wrists on her cane as Gengar gawked at the shattered Pokeball. "Gengar, you know your brother succumbed to the madness. Early, very early. He tried to kill me. Will you do the same?"
"Naaaahhhh.... Aggie..." the Gengar smirked, finally collecting himself after having his world totally rocked and then rolled back into place. "Aggie Aggie Aggie, ya know I'd kill ya in a heartbeat." He floated up to her and laughed a ghostly echo. "If only ya asked real nice..."
Agatha stomped her cane down and shook her head. "Unnecessary, Miss Tanya has the honors. However, young Gengar… pay attention.”
Tanya muttered ancient, horrible words as she breathed into her palms and ghostly energy began to coalesce around the blade with lazy, purple fire.
“I know you. I’ve seen the way you openly doubt yourself, shrugging with indifference each and every moment you were on my team. You've told every league official that ever asked that you're a fool, a wastrel, a second rate belt filler; second in every conceivable way to your brother's haunt."
She glared down at him. "But you've never told me that, have you.”
Gengar grinned and rubbed his paws together. "Could never lie to you, Aggie. Bad for my health."
She nodded and leaned over to him, running her fossilized fingers through the ghostly fluff on his head. For the first time in his life she had touched him not as a unrelenting trainer, but as a friend. It was shocking to behold. "My most talented Pokemon. My unused secret weapon; a sword, left rusting in the sheath. Bad times are ahead. Mankind and Monkind are at war, and I fear both will lose in the end… Your brother fell to this war, but you will not. I know you will not."
The distant sound of police sirens blared from outside the clacking shutters of the window as the storm outside turned to a torrent.
"A.... Aggie.... ‘It's’ not happening, is it?"
She shook her head. "No, something worse. Something unpredictable. Something unknown is coming, and I will not be here to see it through." She sighed, tiredly, and the little color in her skin had started to fade as she was overwhelmed with nervous laughter at the predicament. "Even the best laid plans fall face-first at the feet of the enemy."
"Aaagie... Agatha..." The gengar shook his head. "What’cha need me to do, toots?"
She pursed her lips and nearly fell asleep, groaned in pain, and then smacked her cane down as she started to wobble and her eyes started fluttering shut. Then she chewed on the thought for a moment. "I need you to make sure everything is ok. I want you to see our vision through to its conclusion." She pointed to the cards on the table and Gengar floated over them, gazing at the spread, committing them to memory. "In short, you need to put your thumb down on the scale. For as long as is required… Can I trust a savage, soul thirsty monster like you with the fate of everyone and everything?"
"Ya shouldn't." He laughed in his own way, giant teeth bared like ivory mirrors. "But ain’t nobody tell’n queen bitch of the Indigo Plateau otherwise, so I gots no choice, Madame."
She gazed down at the shattered Pokeball and smiled. "Right. Of course. How silly of me."
Gengar watched Tanya licking her lips behind Agatha, and a nervous look came over him. "Aggie, I know you said no goodbyes, but… Can I ask ya one last question?"
She glanced back at Tanya, who impatiently danced on her tippy toes with anticipation, then back to Gengar. "Just one."
He made a smile; a deviant, visceral smile. "What's ya biggest regret?"
She frowned, closed her eyes, and chewed on this one too. With her eyes still closed she looked back and gestured at Tanya with a nod. "That I never could have a daughter."
Tanya, like a starving beast leaping out of the bushes, slammed into the old woman's torso, both hands wrapped around the handle as she drove the spike right through her spine, past the bone, and straight towards her heart. The stiletto stopped and Tanya grunted in frustration as she twisted the blade, shoving it through the rest of the way.
"Guess I should have known It’d need two strokes," Tanya whispered to herself behind a crooked smile. She released the blade, palms greased with her mentor’s blood, and the once black stone at the hilt pulsed with purple light.
Agatha choked, and blood gushed down her chin as she tried to speak; mortally injured, but still standing straight as a general before their men. Then, as her iron constitution failed her at the knees, she clutched at her heart and fell to the ground. The brittle old bones of her legs had finally buckled in, leaving her in a loose, bony mess on the floor.
Decades of tears ran from her eyes like a broken faucet, a jailbreak from the emotional prison she’d locked herself in too.
Gengar flew to the ground and waddled up to Agatha on the floor, like a little paperboy approaching his boss for the last time as he left for greener pastures.
"What would’ja a’ve named 'er, Aggie?"
Agatha's eyes opened and shut. Again, and again, and again; slowly losing purchase on her mortal strand with each gentle blink. "Samuel.... loved the name.... Lydia."
The stone in the blade audibly clinked like a lock shackling together a web of chains, and then slowly thrummed like a glowing, amethyst heart.
The doors at the front of the estate thundered with the pounding of angry men. "IPD, OPEN UP!" they could hear, muffled through the boards two floors down.
Tanya plucked the stone out of the hilt like the last grape on a wilting vine, then placed it into Gengar's palm. She pet him on the head and giggled, like a schoolgirl that had just touched the hand of the most popular boy in school. "Let them blame me…" she began, looking around at the right proper occult horror story that had unfolded. A prosecution's wet dream, she thought, marveling at her handywork. "It's got my claws aaallllll over it."
She crawled back into the shadows, gazed longingly at Gengar, and, like a swamp creature pushing itself past putrid matts of scum, sunk back into the comfort of the darkness, never to be seen again. "Better go, you got a lotta work to do, handsome."
