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the-third-shadow · 5 years

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Nightmares

This was not one of BKP-03's normal nightmares. That was clear enough by the fact that they had seen not one, but two figures they had never seen in their sleeping visions before. The first was obvious-- it was Misc, of course. He was tying something around their neck, and they could remember feeling unrealistically light, being able to breathe fresh air. They could actually move their jaw more than the sad few degrees of movement they got while with their mask on. For a moment it was lovely, and there was no pain, only a white scarf being tied around the place where there had once been the auxiliary collar from their mask.

Garbled voices. Was that what they sounded like without their voice echoing in their mask? They couldn't remember, it'd been so long since they had it on their maw. The sound was so far away, both in memory and the dream, but they almost made out a clip of a conversation. Somehow, it became apparent that this was not simply a dream, but a wish. This was what they wanted to be, wasn't it? Somewhere deep down, they wanted to be able to eat oran berries with their friend without having to have them fed through the nearly-invisible hole in their mask that let them breathe.

They could have it. You just have to break your mask.

[Click “Keep reading” to continue!]

But then everything disappeared. It wasn't the normal white, of course. It wasn't the place they refused to think too hard about. They were in absolute darkness, on stairs the color of that place's sterile lights. These ones felt as empty. They were at the top of them, and could see spears of the same empty light below glaring up at the platform they were on. But they were not alone.

Its form was not solid. It changed every moment, as if it wasn't meant to be observed, and the only thing Nia knew they could make out were four-- maybe six-- eyes on a horned head, with four more behind it in the shape of a ring. It was a familiar shape, but around something that couldn't have been a neck-- but certainly must have been a collar of some sorts. That's all anything like that could've been, unless it was a strange creature of the same sorts as Misc.

Everything felt fuzzy the way dreamless sleep felt, but there was something real to the way that the pink cracks spreading through their mask felt. Cold and warm, tangible yet elusive. The ringed creature did this with just a glance, and Nia knew immediately that the wavering thing was unfathomably powerful, holding back-- or perhaps being held back by something even more powerful than it.

It asked something, and Nia couldn't respond or quite hear it the right way, only being thrust from the bizarre rest to shriek in terror. They couldn't quiet down until their throat felt sore in their collar, and Misc was giving them a dazed look, his pupils not quite looking right as they wobbled against the darkness and his confusion. Nia loosened theirself up when they realized they'd dug their foreclaws a few inches into the soft stone ground and darted their gaze around.

It was too dark in here. They knew it wasn't the dream anymore, but it was too reminiscent of it. They pulled their claws free from the ground and stared at Misc, whose eyes were glowing with Psychic as he settled himself closer to Nia, opening a ring and letting some starlight into the dank cavern.

"Wh-- Jeez, Nia… I think you could get a good job as an alarm clock," he teased in a slurred whisper. There was tension around his eyes-- Nia had worried him, hadn't they? He pulled out a familiar blanket as he continued to speak, "You want to tell me what's wrong or you wanna ask me some questions to get your mind off of it?"

When Nia tried to respond, only a hoarse noise came out. Misc nodded sagely and set the weighted cover on Nia, tucking it in with Psychic to put pressure on Nia's body-- which was good, because the non-floating type of pressure that came with a good blanket (this one, specifically) felt safer than anything else in the world. He brought out a few berries and gave Nia a look that they took to mean meant he was probably asking if they wanted any, to which they shook their head the fraction they needed to for Misc to understand. They probably wouldn't have been able to eat right anyways after that mess of a dream.

"...It was Spear Pillar," they whispered after a moment, regaining their powers of speech. Their ears struggled against even the tinny, quiet sound of their voice when they spoke so quietly. It was too loud. They squeezed their eyes shut, trying to get rid of the ringing, but they had just screamed in their own ears, so it was going to be a while before they could think straight with the noise. "There was something. There was us, too. Nothing was right."

"Awfully vague, but…" He trailed off and looked at Nia, who was squinting at him with exhaustion. "It's weird that you're dreaming about Spear Pillar," Misc quietly returned.

He didn't press the issue, but Nia could tell by the way that he had shook just a hair at the declaration of the dream's location (which Nia wasn't even sure how they had known) that he had meant to say something likely akin to "That dream is ominous and is the worst possible thing you could have been having a nightmare about, Nia, we need to go." At least, that's how Nia chose to interpret Misc's trembling.

He was peeling one of those strange pink oran berries they'd seen him eat when he was particularly antsy. They smelled tantalizingly sweet, but Nia knew that they were in limited supply for Misc-- or that's what they assumed, since he hardly ate them-- so they didn't mention it. Thankfully, their bright color seemed to subtract from the darkness, though Nia knew they didn't glow, and it was Misc's Psychic making them do so.

"Can you tell me a story?" Nia chanced, crossing their claws and laying their masked head against the carapace-like legs attached to them. The poor posture made their beak and jaw hurt a bit more, but they needed something to alleviate the pressure near their bound crest, even if there was nothing stopping the band around the feathery ornamentation from remaining clamped down.

The words from their dream echoed for a moment and they had to squish them down along with their claws. The mask was not going, and no strange dream was telling them it was a good idea. No, most certainly no, absolutely not! They just had to figure out a way they could live without constantly needing help and then they could prove to whatever evil little voice had told them that in the dream that they were wrong and could go choke on an oran peel!!

"Oh, uh…" Misc blinked that rapid blink he did when Nia figured he was startled by something, but his smile bled through after a moment. It was a bit fainter than the normal ones, but enough to let Nia know that Misc was not, in fact, startled to death. Good. "That's certainly a new one. Anything in particular? I'm not really the best for storytelling, I'll have you know..."

"Friends. A story about friends."

"You are a paragon of specificity, Nia. May the Original One bless your soul," Misc said in a nasally, flat tone, rolling his eyes. His smile didn't leave for a moment. Still not dead, but definitely slightly annoyed at Nia for not knowing what they wanted more than that. "Okay, okay, um… Let's see what I can think of…"

He set his berries down and floated with a small bounce up to Nia's mask, mirroring the larger 'mon's posture with his arms as he laid on one of his rings. From what Nia could tell, it wasn't meant to be in a teasing manner. Probably playful, but it was hard to read some of Misc's more foreign gestures, especially as exhausted as they were.

"Once upon a time, there was a really scrawny Hoopa and a Pokemon unlike any other Pokemon in the world. One of them really liked naps, and one of them really liked stargazing-- except both of them actually did, now that I think about it. That's a terrible way of differentiating the two. Well, one day, the unique Pokemon-- we'll call them… uh… Mia, for now… Yeah."

Misc gave one of his funny grins, which got a hoarse noise from Nia. It was weak for a laugh, even by their standards, but it was still a laugh. It felt nice, even if it made the ringing worse and caused them to flinch a bit.

"Anyways, one day, Mia and the scrawny Hoopa-- who we'll call Nisc-- were stargazing and talking about all the pretty constellations in the Sinnoh sky, when these two big, bright streaks of light shot through the sky--"

"Misc, I remember this," Nia chided with another little laugh.

"No you don't, you're Nia, not Mia!" Misc put a hand to his chest as if he was offended. His bouncing hair combined with the fact that he still couldn't stuff his grin down was a dead giveaway that the emotion was completely falsified beneath glittery joy.

"You're getting the names wrong." They stretched their back legs out with a pop from some of their bones, and decided to mirror the gesture, letting their claws go so they could stretch them too. Misc floated out of the way of the chimera's attempt at reclaiming a bit of comfort. "You can't tell me a story I was a part of. Unless that's how it works?"

"Okay, okay, I quit. Like I said, I'm bad at storytelling." He gave the mon a soft pat on the back once they settled back down, comically sprawled out like a tired 'mon after a marathon. "A 'mon can only do so much, and that, my dear flower, is beyond even my expanse of expertise."

"We're friends?" Nia suddenly asked,craning their neck as much as they could to look at Misc. Somehow it hadn't occurred to them that perhaps Misc was not helping them for some sort of unspoken obligation.

"Of course, you silly Pokemon."

#pokeask #pokemon #type:null #hoopa #nia #misc #plot #not an ask #art #writing #hybrid

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maximum-rewrite · 7 years

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Chapter 2

You thought this was just a better-written version of Patterson's books, right? Whoops. You were wrong. No, this story exists to tell you what really happened. Hold on to your seatbelts, friends. We're expecting some turbulence.

Okay, that’s it. I am sick of writing that garbage. It is too sappy and idyllic. Too human.

‘But Max,’ you might say, ‘I read the published version of this, and it all goes downhill pretty soon here.’

Look, I read Patterson’s version of this too. I know what happens in the books. And let me tell you a thing: compared to reality, those novels look like Candyland.

We thought he would be a good person to tell our story because he’s such a prolific and well-known author. People eat his writing up. So we told him the basic premise of our story, sketched it out for him as much as we could (obviously we didn’t want Itex to kill him for knowing too much), and advised him to take a little bit of creative liberty for the sake of plausible deniability or whatever. Then we skedaddled and let him take it the rest of the way.

Well, he screwed it up. Badly enough that I’ve decided to take this into my own hands.

I’m not a writer, so don’t get too crazy about the technicalities here. This does not exist to entertain you or let you escape to some nice gentle bunny world. I just… I need this. We need this.

As long as this book exists, there is proof that we did too.

My dreams usually aren’t dreams, they’re memories. My brain does not want to create new stuff; all it can do is relive past experiences. Which honestly sucks a lot, since my past isn’t something I’m particularly interested in seeing every single night, but that is the way it is: reliving over and over.

Except this one. I know this one could never happen in real life.

It’s the same dream that is in the book. I’m running, running, running, but not to provide data or to increase my stamina. In the dream, I run because I am trying to escape. Then the Erasers corner me, and they seem like they actually want to kill me. Not kill me in a murderous-instincts-bred-into-them way, but actual orders to get rid of me. And then I’m flying away, and they can’t catch me.

Yeah, that’s a real laugh. It gets even funnier in a sick way if you psychoanalyze it (which, by the way, Patterson tried to do before I told him where to stick it).

I’ve only been able to come up with that one fictional dream since Jeb died.

Jeb is the one who got us out of the School and brought us here. ‘Here’ being an estate hidden away in the Rockies. Here we learned to fly and to fight. Everything we know about history and society and logic and practical skills, Jeb taught us. He took us away from the testing and labs and exhaustion and pain, and then he taught us how to be self-sufficient. He freed us.

And then, two years before the start of all this bru-ha-ha, he disappeared. When he did not come back, we assumed he died. We didn’t grieve. We simply moved on, not wasting our time and energy on something we could not gain from. Just like he taught us.

Everything was more or less dandy at this point, which is where you guys enter. That’s where Patterson started, that’s where I’m starting, because that’s when everything fell apart.

Fang and I woke up at dawn to go sparring. We did it every morning, bringing one of the others along with us once each week to train them. Once every cycle, however, there was a day when it was just the two of us.

Daybreak struck early in the summer, and we lived on the east side of a mountain, so the sun already hovered on the horizon when we reached our practice clearing. I took a deep breath of the clean air as I stretched backward and heard the soft sounds of Fang doing the same. For half a second I let myself slip into a reverie, wondering why I could hear mating calls so late in the year. The male had to be awfully—

Wham. Reverie, broken by a feathery clubbing. Man, wings hurt. There was a lot of muscle in those puppies. I staggered forward a step, wrapping my brain around what happened. Fang, wings extended, just met my glare calmly. Actually, he looked kind of annoyed.

“Hey Max, that isn’t why we’re out here.” I wished I had justification to retort. But I didn’t. He was right. But then he kept going. “If you slack off, soon I’ll be better than you.”

I dropped my knees into a crouch and opened my wings, spreading my feathers out to their full span. “Oh yeah? Really think you can get one over on the one and only, first and greatest?” Fang just smirked.

“Depends.”

“On?”

“Whether you’ve gotten better in the last week.”

He didn’t give me a single second to switch gears before launching himself at me. I ducked to dodge the fist flying at me and found his knee waiting for my jaw down below. Stars popped in my vision. A beat of my wings propelled me away from him, but the moment my feet touched the grass again I was throwing my weight back toward Fang. I pummeled into his abdomen with my head and we both went down. I tucked my wings back and rolled away before he could grab me.

Fang shifted onto his side facing me, his eyes narrowed. Just like he’d done to me before, I met his glare with a cocky smile.

“Who’s the best again?” I crowed.

Lightning fast, his handful of dirt whipped out at me, throwing debris in my eyes. Before I could react he was all over me, trying to wrestle me down. I put up a fight and clipped his ear and cheek with my fist, but size won out. For now. When my vision finally cleared he was on top of me, pinning my chest and wing with his knees and my throat with an elbow. He was also smirking like he'd won. Cocky bastard.

I popped one of my eyebrows, skeptical of his supposed victory. He had me underneath him, but Fang himself wasn’t very stable, and he’d left my arms free.

His forehead twitched an instant before I moved. I mustered all my strength to jerk my wing and chest, destabilizing him enough to shove him off. I followed him over and grabbed at his body while he was winded, wrangling him into a hold he would have a hard time escaping unless he broke something.

Even though the tussle left me breathing heavy, I had to gloat after all the smack he talked before. “Better luck next time, buddy. They didn’t improve this model until Nudge.” He grunted his assent.

With that urge delightfully satisfied, I finally let him go. We both stood and dusted ourselves off, picking pine needles from each other’s feathers.

Oh!, I almost forgot. I gotta clear up some misconceptions you might have from the books about our physiology.

One of Patterson’s creative liberties was to portray us as very normal. I don’t mind – it makes us more marketable or relatable or whatever. If I’m telling you the honest story though, with no holds barred for the shitty stuff, then I’m also not going to sugarcoat us.

Short version: we ain’t human, friends.

Slicing, dicing, and recombining genomes to make a chimera doesn’t really work. You end up with a monstrosity halfway between both species and usually in a lot of pain for as long as you keep it alive. It is definitely not possible to make something that is totally human except for wings. The Flock was built from the ground up. Our genomes are completely customized to have the best of everything, but the scientists weren’t that concerned with appearances as long as we worked. Unless we try to blend in on purpose, it is pretty obvious that we aren’t standard kids.

You’ll get a better sense of what I mean as we go along. The biggest thing to know is the wings.

They’re big, somewhere in the vicinity of three times our height in length. Each of us was designed to look like a certain bird – I’m a golden eagle, Fang is a raven, Iggy’s some sort of seabird, etc. etc. Our wing shapes and feathering look like our bird-y cousins’.

We maintain our feathers like hair. If we don’t, it can be difficult to fly or just plain uncomfortable. We preen each other a good amount to reach those annoying middle-of-the-back spots. It’s kind of intimate. I guess if every person had wings it would be considered something romantic or sexy, but for us it’s useful and necessary.

So Fang and I wrapped up our training with our feathers preened, cleaned, and fluffy. We chatted while we walked back home for breakfast.

“Hopefully Iggy actually took some initiative this time and made breakfast without us telling him to,” Fang muttered, his voice dry. I couldn’t help but agree.

“Yeah, no kidding. I was thinking, I want to see if we can brush up on flight as a group today. We haven’t been out in a while.”

“Sure, sounds like a good idea. I know Angel still isn’t very good at—” He broke off mid-sentence, suddenly falling dead silent and stopping in his tracks. I paused too and reached a hand out to tweak his forehead.

“Still in there?”

“Shh!” he hissed. The look in his eyes seemed pretty serious, so I shut up and listened for whatever Fang was hearing.

My heart dropped into my stomach at the quiet thrum of helicopter blades growing louder as it approached. Helicopters never came up here – that’s why it was a good place for us to be. The noise echoed off the mountains surrounding us so much that I couldn’t tell where it was coming from, and then suddenly it was in our field of vision just across the valley.

“Did you see what type it was?” Fang asked. I nodded. Our eyes met and without saying a word we agreed on what had to happen. Flying through the trees was too risky and above them too visible, so both of us took off running toward the house.

When we busted through the door, the rest of our flock was already sitting down at the table. Our arrival triggered four identically confused faces.

“… Max?”

“Were you guys seriously that excited for breakfast?” Nudge asked.

It smelled like pancakes. I mentally cursed the stupid helicopter for ruining an excellent morning.

“We need to get out of here,” Fang explained. Again we were met with confused looks.

“Get out of here?”

I finished swearing just in time to offer one sharp word: “Helicopter.”

That elicited some new reactions, ranging somewhere between fear and confusion. Iggy was more on the frustrated end of the spectrum. “You’re sure it’s not someone who got lost?” I shook my head.

“It was an unmarked transport chopper. This isn’t just some weekend rental that went off the map.” Whoever manned or sent this thing knew what they were doing. They almost definitely were not here for fun, and there was only one un-fun thing that could be considered business around these parts: Us.

“These guys are here for a reason. We can’t just hunker down until they go away. We need to be smart. Leave your stuff. Iggy, get rid of breakfast evidence – we’re getting out of here.”

Jeb told us we could never be caught. Anyone who found the Flock wouldn’t even think twice about sticking us in cages at a zoo or a laboratory.

He was the one and only human who hadn’t seen us as lab rats or spectacles to ogle. He was the only one I would ever trust not to abuse us. Whoever was in that helicopter was no exception to Jeb’s rule and my personal rule – never trust someone outside the Flock.

Each of us perched ourselves in the branches of a tree nearby the house, like so many panthers watching silently from the canopy. Fang made our house look disused while I checked that everyone was secure. I left Angel and Gazzy together in spot, and found Iggy last.

“You’re in charge while Fang and I go check things out, got it?”

“No way!” he protested, leaning toward me with a scowl. “I’m coming with you guys.”

“You are not.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Iggy,” I sighed. “Dude, you can’t do reconnaissance very well if you’re blind.”

A kind of pained, kind of pissed look crossed his face. He wasn’t born blind – somebody jacked up an experiment on his eyes, and he lost vision permanently. The scientists wouldn’t have let that kind of imperfection survive if we’d stayed. Iggy had been slated for elimination before Jeb busted us out.

“You’ll be able to hear someone coming better than the others. You are the best early warning system there is, and we will need that if they manage to find us. Capiche?”

He was still scowling, but he nodded. Fang came out of the house then, and I glided down from the treetops to meet him.

“Ready?” He nodded.

Jeb paired each of us up and trained those pairs together. Fang and I were partners in that training. With no speaking or motion signals between us, we could fly in perfect synchronization. We did that now, skimming the tops of the trees together. Each of us silently scanned the ground on our side as we flew toward where we thought the chopper would be. For a while, neither of us saw anything other than the trees. I saw a rabbit.

Then a little trill from Fang made me look over at his side. At first I thought he was pointing out the glint of metal through the trees – the helicopter itself. When he banked and I followed, though, I saw what he really signaled for, and my whole body felt cold.

Winding through the trees was half a dozen men carrying various equipment. But not just any men. Not just normal men. Everything about them was predatory, feral. These were not people.

They were Erasers.

#Read It Now #Maximum Ride #Maximum Rewrite

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