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Tower of Mastery

Breath caught in Zack's chest. Ska was dead. He knew already, he was the one who left Ska behind. But now the act was final. Zack closed his eyes, and pinched his brow.

'After our fight,' Zack started, recalling Ska spiked with chunks of metal. He searched for the right words, found them hard as he grappled with borrowed grief. 'The whole ship started to go down. I couldn't save him, Sal.'

His arm ached, whole again but less. 'I'm glad you guys made it out. What a ******** mess.'

Tower of Mastery

After growing accustomed to Kalos's unique sense of flair, Zack found the soldiers' uniforms were striking only in that they were beige. Maybe the region was starting to rub off on him. They were polite enough, but Zack was still on edge from the assault; his hand instinctively twitched for a pokéball at their tone. Luckily, his belt was empty, and Serene grabbed his arm before he could make any more poor decisions. The Kirlia stared at the two soldiers, probing their thoughts but coming up empty. Zack frowned. Some kind of psychic blockers?

'Hold on, I might have left it on the airship that just blew up,' he said, dropping his backpack to the floor and reaching through the gaping hole in its side while keeping a careful eye on the two soldiers. 'Here.'

Zack presented his Trainer ID. The picture was a couple years old, and showed him right after he left the academy, long haired, grinning, and flipping off the camera. So the Kalosian military were already taking over. Gurkinn feared that Lord Nostrad would use any excuse to seize the vault of Mega Stones for his own use, and those fears were apparently realised. They broke their backs stopping one act of piracy and enabled another.

'Can you see that okay, Domehead?'

Helena was very careful when she reached into her bag, digging a hand into it while keeping an eye on the soldier. This way it wouldn't open up enough to let anyone see the loot she'd taken from the pirates - including some of Ska's cards.

The teen was weary after the day she had, not including the injuries she'd sustained on the airship, which were prevalent across her body. The bite wound from the bat - which had stopped bleeding but one could see it in the red stains of blood that surrounded the puncture wounds in her clothes, sticking the material to her skin. The blood on her face from hitting her head complete with a coagulating scab on the side of her head. Then various cuts and bruises all over.

"Satisfied?"

Tower of Mastery

This was just Kalos all over. One minute you're off a crashed flying pirate ship and talking to a pair of masked, rapid response soldiers, and the next one of them has melted into the crazy lady you met on a balcony. It hadn't even been an hour since Zack saw Pachi last, though it felt much longer. At least a year. Maybe a year and a month or so. He was tired and sore and, the moment she produced the cookie facsimiles, starving.

'Yeah, no thanks,' he said, noting that Pachi's eye colour had gone from pink to something similar to Salieri's gold. No normal people could change their eyes like that. She was either some form of aura user or wore contacts. 'I'm cutting back on foods that have "mystery" in them. I won't even touch secret sauce.'

Zack racked his brain while he spoke, trying to recall all he could about his encounter with this woman. She didn't seem to be a threat, and even helped against Ska, but she also had trippy psychic powers and a transforming gun. And that Chandelure. Those soldiers hadn't gone far, yet they hadn't noticed anything strange about this situation. Some kind of perception powers? He'd have to consult the notebook.

'By the way,' he said, using his special smile. The one where he smiled your way while preparing to punch your jaw off if you tried anything. 'She's the second sniper.'

Tower Of Mastery

The gears moving Sal's train of thought were visible in her expression, shifting from not knowing what Zack was talking about, to slowly remembering and then stepping back while mouthing 'Ohhh!' and not making a sound. She pointed at Pachi. "What. Are. You doing here?"

The watery skin on Reynard's spine began to bubble and boil as she arched back like a cat, hissing like a rising kettle.

Pachi was offended more by the refusal of the cookies than the rebel child's combative stance. She vaporized the cookies from existence when it was clear no one wanted them. "Knocking over a Pirate King." She flicked the air in front of her. "Boop. Like a domino. I always wanted to see a king fall. And you wanted it too. There's a saying..."

She closed her eyes, trying to recall what it was she wanted to say. "No, no. Ssshhh, that's not it." Salieri felt as though Pachi's Chandelure necklace was staring at her.

"The enemy of my enemy!" Pachi spouted with aplomb. "Is my friend. Makes us friends. It's like I saved you from drowning." The last bit was directed at Sal.
"The hell-" Sal felt her voice rise, then stepped forward and lowered her volume so the soldiers wouldn't take notice. "What did you even do? You fought the Skarada pirates?"
"Shot the King and saved your friend. Hit an engine thing, no more backup engine. Put holes through the bottom, capsized the ship. Took some stuff." Pachi tallied a list on her fingers. "Now we're even, Salieri."

Sal was at a loss for words. Exhaustion seeped into every part of her while blood seeped out the injuries. Her mind was already throbbing, working overtime to process the last fifteen minutes of her life. Pachi's eccentricities weren't helping. She needed to keep it simple. 'What do you want?"

"Fiiiiiinally, a real question. But it's not your turn anymore. My turn." Pachi smiled and addressed the group, standing tall with her arms folded. "What do you want?"

"I'd like to know how many other enemies we have in common," Helena said.

"That and a decent meal."

Shalour City

Sunset came late in the summer, but was only a couple of hours away. Its passing in the sky briefly cast a shadow on the porch Juliet and Benedict stood on.

Juliet focused on the mental image of a familiar door, across the street from the Lumiose General building. "The nobility has been...lackluster in the past, myself included. I'm simply trying to make up for it."

She stuck the key into the door they came through. Before she turned the knob, she paused, staring ahead at the door's window. Threads and notes regarding what she knew about Benedict connected in her head. "It's no coincidence that I keep finding you at these incidents," she said without looking back at him. "You know something about the darkness lurking in Kalos, don't you?"

Her voice was its usual tone of airy and calm as her other hand rested comfortably on the hilt of the sword sheathed at her side.

Tower Of Mastery

Pachi nodded at Zack and Helena's requests, soaking them in for maybe a few seconds too long. A little annoyed, she groaned. "That's kind of cheating, but ok."

She ushered them to close the conversation circle, further blocking them from the cadre of soldiers fifty feet away who paid them no mind. "I come from a long line of Lorekeepers-"
"From where?" Sal chimed in impatiently.
"Somewhere you may never know."

Pachi put on a voice akin to one used to set the mood for campfire stories. She put her hands together and pulled them apart, unfurling a scroll that hadn't been there before. On the scroll was a stick figure of a tiny Pachi, animated to move slightly alongside a group of adults with similar outfits.

Salieri made a mental note that they also shared her race. It dawned on her that Pachi was the first person she had ever met who looked like her and Moze before. If this crazy woman's tale was to be believed, it could shine a light on where she might have come from, a question that hadn't interested her in nearly a decade.

"We are meant to track human history, and carry on the will of our ancestors. Their spirits live on in their dreams, their dreams live on in me. I keep their lore within my heart. I am many, I am one." Pachi closed and unfurled the scroll again. Now the picture of her younger self was hugging a Musharna as the circle of stick figure adults chanted with their arms raised around her. Pink mist trailed from the Musharna's port into Kid Pachi's eyes, ears and mouth.

"I studied and I learned and I saw the stagnation. Humanity advances and remains still at the same time. It confuses me." An audible tinge of frustration lined that statement. "They do not move past their mistakes. They do not learn."

Once again, she changed the image on the scroll. It depicted stick figures of humans and their Pokémon, being led by medieval rulers to fight a war. The stick figures hacked and tore each other apart in ways that disturbed even Salieri.

Then their outfits and weapons changed, updating to a modern era. But the scene repeated the same way. Only this time, they were no longer stick figures. The art on the scroll had become so detailed that it almost looked like a documentary, found footage of soldiers being vaporized and cut in half and choked by gas. Pachi closed the scroll and it disappeared in a puff just as Sal considered saying she had seen enough.

"Do you like your country?" Pachi asked Salieri. Sal said nothing, and in the silence the look on her face spoke for her. Pachi smiled gently. "I don't either. I'm here for a reset."

The Lorekeeper perked up, breaking the mood she had been setting. "Ok, so, tell me who your enemies are and I'll tell you what we have in common. Aaaaand..." She put her hands together, parted them vertically, and a sandwich floated between her palms. Pachi rose her eyebrows up and down at Helena. "Ta-da."

Sal gave the Redgraves a quick glance, trying to read their reaction. Reynard's was more telling. The Vaporeon's eyes had been narrowed at Pachi the whole time. Animal instinct. She still didn't trust this womanchild, and neither did Salieri. However, Sal's animosity had wavered. "How do we know we can trust you?"

Pachi looked at her like that was the stupidest question anyone had ever asked. "...I'm not you, so how would I know?"