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Coumarine Pokémon Center

The Cofagrigus hiding out from Durendal stuck out like a sore thumb. Well, it would to any human. Dune wasn’t sure how vending machines worked. All he knew was that they spit out food. The coffin shaped one had all of its food hidden inside, which wasn’t at all appetizing, so he kept moving.

It was only when that vending got up and crawled away on the ceiling that Dune knew what was wrong. Once again Durendal was in hot Pursuit, bolting right after the fleeing foe.

He dashed right out the window behind Cofagrigus, using his swift speed to catch up, and activated his Magnet Rise to hover next to the building. Now the enemy was still in his sights. There was no escape. Before Cofagrigus could reach the roof of the Pokémon Center, Durendal would try to charge his shoulder into the coffin with a full power Pursuit attack.

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Salieri felt the Pokémon Center, and all her other surroundings, melt away into blackness as her memories, her being, became overlaid with Zack’s. As she experienced his memories from his point of view, Zack would have the same experience with hers as they warped and twisted into shape.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Salieri fell to her knees on the desert sand, gagging and coaxing at her throat with both hands. Her insides felt aflame, breathing became hard. Normal side effects, so far.

“You have to actually eat it,” said her teacher. Huge, he was as tall as a Seviper was long, dressed in shabby clothing with scraggly white hair.
“I know,” Sal gutterly growled, desperate not to vomit. It took everything she had.

The Berries would raise the stats of Pokémon, but only when they were on their last legs. Humans weren’t meant to eat them, but the few that could manage it would be raised to their peak. A developing adolescent like Salieri would become stronger and more durable than most grown men while she trained thanks to this.

“It’s not a promise of power. It’s an exchange,” her teacher warned her yet again, now leafing through a book. “Lifeforce. That’s the price. You can still stop.”
“AZ…” she asked, crying “How many…years…?”
AZ did the math. “Train and eat these for three years…and you’ll lose ten.”

Sal punched the sand and forced the noxious Berries down her gullet. “Worth it.”

The world spun upside down, a full rotation before it swirled and settled into her apartment. There she was, a schoolkid getting scolded by her father. “Was it worth it?” asked Arnaud.
“They started it,” Sal said, nursing a black eye.
“That’s not what I asked.”
“…they called me a hobo, cause my shirt has holes in the back. They-they kept pointing, and laughing.” She was on the verge of tears.

Arnaud sighed and squatted, now level with his tiny daughter. “You need to learn to pick your battles, kid. You don’t want to fight forever, do you?”

Salieri, the one whose memories were merging with Zack’s, watched her life swirl around into an empty space where all she could see were bright shards of memories, hers and Zack’s. As she fell, or floated, she caught glimpses of her past.

She saw her father being lifted into the air by purple ghostly flames, a soul burning Curse getting branded into his forehead. She saw Moze sinking into a depression, sipping on a Potion while a party at Gotengo whizzed right by. She saw herself as a child, with Moze and Arnaud at a beach playing in the sand.

Now she stood on sand again, but the ocean disappeared, and the sand turned into the Kalos Badlands. Salieri watched another version of herself run out of a crevasse alongside her Lucario, holding a Gible in her arms. The other Sal pressed her back to a stone wall, hiding from a horde of Gabites closing in on them. Her Lucario charged an Aura Sphere in between her palms, reluctant to fight.

Time skipped. The Gabites were gone, fleeing away. “…you should be more careful,” said the man who saved her, the man she’d later come to know only as AZ.
“How did your Pokémon learn to fight like that?”
AZ was already walking away. “Over many years…through a lot of pain…”
“…can you show me?” she pleaded. “Please?”
AZ didn’t answer.

The scene changed again, and so did the sand, shifting into the deserts of Orre. Salieri moved out of the way of her own memory, watching the other Salieri scramble up a shifting line of boulders that turned out to be an Onix. The Onix bucked Sal, the one in the memory, right off. That Sal tucked and extended her feet into a dropkick onto a weakened Mightyena below her, knocking the Dark type out.

The Onix pounced at her, and was knocked out of the air by an Aura Sphere. Both Salieris looked up a sand dune and saw the Lucario skidding down, out of breath. “Getting tuckered out, Rosario?” asked the Sal in the memory, also out of breath.
“I just…gotta…take a break,” Rosario said with a wave of her paw, collapsing on her back with her tongue lolling to the side. Salieri grinned, and decided to fall back. She fell straight through the sand and back into the world of memories, falling

into a bowl of soup, face first after one of the pirates tripped her. The mess hall erupted with snickering as the offender taunted her with a mocking Kalosian accent. Salieri blinked back her stinging tears. “It’s mind boggling that there’s a Kalosian stupid enough to come to Orre.” He leaned into her face. “Nobody wants you here. You don’t belong on this ship-“

Skarada came up to the pirate, grabbed him by his hair, and brought his face into the captain’s knee. Nose broken, the pirate fell to the floor crying in pain. Ska didn’t break is stride as he jumped onto a table and addressed his silenced underlings.

“The next of you mongrels that questions the rights of who I choose to have on MY ship gets laid out. Savvy?”

His crew nodded, gave him guilty ‘Aye’s and went back to eating. Ska helped Salieri to her feet. She was too embarrassed to say anything. “You wanna know what your problem is, kid?”

“Her heart is too big.”

AZ spoke quietly over the campfire. Night had descended on the desert. Salieri paced around the fire, unseen by her memories, and saw Rosario sleeping on her side. “Too big for what?” asked the younger Sal through a mouthful of canned beans.
“For her. It’s dangerous. Someday, it’ll kill her.”

Salieri covered her mouth to snuffle a sob that snuck up on her as her memory just snorted at the comment. “Has anyone ever told you you’re morbid?”
“I don’t talk to many people,” AZ said flatly.

The desert winds changed into a salty ocean breeze that filled Salieri’s nose. She spun around and saw Gateon Port, and the ship that had brought her from Kalos.

“Did you take my mates out yourself, kid?”

Ska, with both eyes open, walked right around the observing Salieri over to the memory, who stood between the groaning bodies of four pirates. The Sal in the memory was caked in her own blood, barely able to see through a bruised eye. “Yeah. You wanna fight too?”

That got a good laugh out of Ska. When it was over he wiped a tear from his eye. “Priceless. You’re glowing with moxie, kid. Come find me if you ever feel like joining my crew.”
Sal laughed right back, even more condescendingly. “Why would I ever do that?”

“Because you want to get stronger, don’t you?”

Moze asked her the question, loud enough so she could hear it from the top of the Prism Tower’s swirling winds.
“Everyone’s gonna be around for summer break.” Young Sal pouted. “I don’t wanna miss that.”
“That’s the time we have to train. Nobody wins the league without training.”
Salieri sighed. “If this is gonna be our life now, then maybe we shouldn’t challenge the league….”

Salieri fell back into the void, spotting clips of memory again. She saw herself wrestling with Moze on the floor of Gotengo, trying to keep a Potion bottle out of his hands. She saw Rosario collapsing next to a volcano, blood coming from her mouth. She saw herself on her ninth birthday, being gifted a Riolu that would become her very first Pokémon.

“I don’t want to see this.” Salieri closed her eyes and curled into a fetal position. “Stop, I don’t want to see this.”

Now she was in Orre’s desert again. Salieri watched AZ drag her younger self kicking and screaming out of a tent. Younger Sal was crying. “You can’t do this!” she screamed at whoever was in the tent. “You said you’d never leave me! You promised!”
“This isn’t helping anyone,” AZ told her sadly, but the memory of Sal wouldn’t listen. Instead she chomped on AZ’s arm, trying to get away. AZ didn’t flinch.
“You can’t give in! YOU CAN’T GIVE IN!”

Now Salieri was lying on her back, not in the sand, but in a bed. Her clothes were on a chair next to it. She reached out to her side, for the boy she thought was sleeping next to her. He was already gone.

“Oh Sal.” Mia held her hand as they got coffee together in the smallest of Lumiose’s cafes. “I’m so sorry.”
Sal just nodded. “He said that last night too, before we…you know…”
“No, he saw you were vulnerable, and you were drunk, and he used you.” Mia’s flat face turned down into a tiny scowl. “I can invent something that will force him to crap himself, whenever you want. Brown note.”
Salieri almost laughed, but instead she just whimpered, embarrassed. “I feel betrayed.”

“TRAITOR!”

Erin, with her one arm, held Salieri by the neck over the edge of the Fishbone’s burning deck. The airship was still over the sand ocean below. Salieri saw Ska on the ground near the licking flames, clutching where his eye used to be. She looked down at her hand, and saw she was holding her own cut off arm.
“Can’t hurt…those people…” Sal choked out the words as Erin squeezed.
“I told him we shouldn’t let a Kalosian on our ship,” Erin said coldly. “My baby was sentimental, you took that and ripped out his eye with it.”

Salieri saw the busted poison gas cannon to her other side. It couldn’t be launched now. No one knew it, but she saved those people in the outpost far below. “Worth…it…”
“Hmm. We’ll see about that, mate.” Erin dangled Sal’s limp body over the edge a bit further. “Consider this a walk off the plank.”

Erin dropped Salieri off the ship. She fell back into the void.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The memories were starting to fade and change as Salieri appeared in Zack’s memories, and Zack appeared in Salieri’s. It was her who escaped from the volcano, wasn’t it? And Zack was on the pirate ship?

No, no. That wasn’t true. Salieri looked down at her hands. Her hands. She flipped around in the void of shattered memories and saw Zack floating around as well.

“HEY!” she screamed over the constant din of recollection. “Zack! You know which ones are yours, right?” Out the corner of her eye, she saw Zack, Kelly and Robin camping with each other. She blocked the vision with her hand before she fell into it. “These aren’t my memories, stay out of my head!”

Salieri saw herself almost fall into an old party at Gotengo, but she did her best to flail away, swimming through nothing. Was this in her head? Of course it was, this couldn’t be real. It didn’t add up.

She knew who she was, when she concentrated very hard. She was the one who had to beat the nobles at their own game, to save Arnaud, to save Moze. To save her country. Just a girl with an agenda. Not Helena’s keeper, not the boy who lost his friends and his Pokémon. That was Zack. They were separate.

“Keep yourself together! ZACK!”

The scenery may have been an illusion created by Serene's mind in conjunction with Zack and Salieri, but the damage done to the Pokémon Center was quite real. The floor's tiled were cracked and pounded down into craters, tables were in smithereens, a hole was in the ceiling leading to the next level of the building.

Before Cofagrigus' spear hand could reach Serene, his grip stopped short. A tiny metal foot had stepped onto the arm, preventing it from stretching any further. Durendal kept his stance firm and grabbed Cofagrigus' pinned arm with his hands. His Inner Focus was bound into submission. What was left was a sense of urgency, the need to save his trainer. Anyway that he could.

Serene had done almost all the work. More than enough. But Salieri and Zack's fates were still intertwined. Durendal followed his trainer's commands to the letter: 'Don't knock it out. We need it conscious.'

[Undo it,] Durendal told Cofagrigus. As Assurance, he brought down one hand in a swift chop to cut off the Ghost's arm.

If it came off, he'd allow the pain to register for a moment before once again telling Cofagrigus to [Undo it]. There were three more arms to work with.

Durendal watched Salieri and Zack's held hands suddenly separate with no pomp or circumstance. If they woke up now, would they be themselves again? Undiluted Salieri and Zack? He didn't know for sure, but physically they were their own people again. To seal the deal, Dune zipped over to Cofagrigus, a beige mummified blur, and would knock out the coffin with a swift Pursuit elbow to the head.

And if that happened, he'd turn to Serene, who he hadn't expected much out of until now. She mustered up far more power than he realized she had. He felt the need to explain why he was so late. [I got lost at the vending machines,] he shrugged, immediately regretting explaining himself.

Salieri didn't stir awake. She bolted, her senses becoming her own again. The bolting came with a sharp pain and she looked down at the gash on her stomach. She looked at Zack -he was Zack again, not half or any other percent of her, thank Arceus- and saw he was just as stabbed as her. "Merde," she said, almost surprised to hear her own voice come out of her mouth. "Merde."

She stretched her arm, the one that had been clamped to Zack's for hours. It felt like she had slept on it funny, and now it was pins and needles getting it to wake up. When it worked, she released Oberon. The Cleffa looked around at the destruction of the cafeteria. She had never seen the inner workings of a building on Earth before It was fascinating.

"Heal Pulse," Salieri groaned, laying herself back again and pointing to Zack's stomach. Her stomach throbbed with sharp pain, but she knew she'd still be okay if Oberon patched her up second. The Cleffa nodded and bounced onto Zack's shoulder, landing with a squeak and washing him over with a wave of pink Aura from her hands. Soon, Zack would come to.

Salieri stared at the ceiling. Originally, she thought that after separating the bond they would simply part ways and maybe not speak to each other the rest of the day. A mundane ending. Instead, all she could think about was watching her best friend get left behind in the volcano, resigning him to doom because she couldn't act fast enough. Kelly would never feel the same about her after that. He'd never be the same at all.

She knew for sure that memory was Zack's. But like the rest of them, she experienced it first hand. It stuck with her.

When Zack woke up, and when Oberon moved on to fixing Salieri's wounds, she would quietly ask, "Are you yourself again?"

Salieri only met Zack's look for a few seconds. It was a few seconds too long, because she looked away in a hurry. She knew what it meant. They both did. She felt the same.

"You said he's a *****, right?" Salieri asked, getting out her Pokégear. "Supposed to be in jail? This one's easy." She dialed the police, which was a number she never thought she'd dial herself. Sal cleared her throat when they picked up the call.

"Hello? Oh my god, I need help," Sal quivered, putting on her best impression of a horrified teenage girl. "I-I'm in the Coumarine Pokémon Center, and this man came up to me and touched me, and I said no but he-he wouldn't stop and he said he'd kill me, so...yes, molested. Oh god, I'm so scared, He tried to hurt me, and I fought him back and oh god there's blood everywhere, I don't know what to do. Help me, please!...okay, okay, thank you. God bless you, thank you."

She hung up the phone and exhaled sharply, dropping the facade in an instant. "Yeah, he might not see daylight ever again." The whole Pokémon Center's first floor was empty after the people evacuated outside. They'd be coming back in soon. There wasn't much time to lose if she wanted to interrogate Mr. Bonding.

"Can you watch the door?" Salieri creaked to her feet, stitched up by Oberon but still hot with pain. "I need to vet this guy while we still can. Oberon, heal his face enough so he can talk. No more."

"You still have plenty of things for Durendal to cut off," Salieri spat over Bonding's body. "Isn't that right, Dune?"

Her Pawniard was over near Zack, trying to use a pair of scissors he found in someone's abandoned bag to cut the mummy wraps off his body. When he cut into them, they just came back like a second skin. And then the scissors became wrapped in bandages too.

Princess Atomicka tapped at Salieri's leg, an attempt to get her to move out of the way. If this was Glacknor, she would have dissolved this man's body with a quasar ray by now, and then kept his disembodied soul matter on display in the public trophy room. But this was not Glacknor, she had no quasar ray, and that meant she had to get creative with her tortures. Atomicka rubbed her hands together and stuck her tongue out to the side. [Klaatu gurara n'kar.]

She placed a hand over Bonding's face, and the pink Aura of healing that had just gone into his body would resurface again. Atomicka pulled it off like it was a plastic wrap, and the farther away it got from Bonding's face, the more his damage came back. She let go, and it snapped back into his body, healing him slightly once more.

"That was..." Salieri gave her Cleffa a look, surprised that such a tiny baby alien had such capabilities. What else could she do that she hadn't revealed yet? "...just as I planned. Dune will lop parts of you off, and Oberon will keep you together until you tell me what I want to know.

Sirens sounded down the street. The cops were responding quickly. Salieri knelt down, slowly as to not stress her stomach wound. "Nicolette Nostrad, her liason, the other Darkhorse Hunters. Tell me what you know about them."

As the SWAT team ran in, Salieri and her Pokémon came out the side door. She wore more of Bonding's blood on her shirt and a disappointed scowl on her face. "He doesn't know anything," Sal huffed. She returned Durendal to his Pokéball and kept Oberon close to her chest with both arms. Oberon had blood on her face too, but she didn't seem to care as she took on Serene's old thousand yard stare with a plush toy smile.

An officer approached Salieri, and she started sniffling up crocodile tears as best as she could. "He's in there, oh my god there's blood everywhere!" Sal cried hysterically, tugging on the officer's arm. He nodded and went inside.

She snapped back to her normal self. There would be questions soon, unless they left. "Let's get out of here." Before they left, she tacked on one last thing. "When we have to explain ourselves, let's leave out the part with the, uh, thing."

Shalour City - The Tower of Mastery

Having never seen the Tower or its surrounding town before, Salieri looked around with some level of awe. The whole place looked like it didn't belong in this time period anymore, yet people were here speaking right out of the modern day. She'd seen pictures in school but it was different being there in person. It was impressive that this place was still operational as training grounds, not just as a tourist attraction.

"Gurkinn," Salieri repeated, still looking up at the Tower. "Sounds like a yogurt."

"Handouts?" Salieri knew that her clothes were torn up and that neither of them were looking good, but she thoroughly detested that this man could be pitying her. Still, it was best that she didn't explode right now. They came for help, after all.

"Salieri Soledad. And I don't need your men's comfort wear catalog rejects, thanks. Just take us to your leader."

Oberon just stared unblinkingly at Seelie with her fixed smile. A bead of Bonding's blood trickled down her face near the corner of her mouth. Her tongue snapped out and she licked it up.