Sunlight breaks through sepia-tinted cloud cover, grain festering over the vignette like lost media. Silhouettes surrounding the young girl continue their verbal lashings, while the shadows of migrating flocks cast over the still, sterile landscape.
'...why are you so weird? No wonder nobody likes you...'
An amalgam of past memories, it would appear, though the Littleroot here is far from familiar. May's small frame stumbles when rising to meet her hecklers at eye level. Trembling, pools of sapphire glare daggers through tears, but the taunts of those obscured figures closing in and around her are ceaseless.
'...she can't really talk to pokemon, can she?'
'...thinking she has a chance to become champion?! Please!'
Bottom lip bitten while her balled fist pulls back, it lunges forward split seconds later. But before she can make contact, the shrouded visage of the target disintegrates against bruised knuckles, a swirling haze billowing from where the shade's throat should've been.
The inky mist spewing from the writhing shadow puppet trails up through May's nostrils; panicked, she clutches at her chest, lungs quickly filling with miasma. Legs buckle and drop, May sinking to the feet of her faceless tormentors - before they, each after the other, combust into tar black smoke and flame.
Their demonic voices would then slip into her psyche, unrelenting even when formless.
'...she's a fake!'
'...she's a fraud!'
'...she won't ever amount to anything.'
In mere moments, the nightmarish Littleroot decays into shadow and ruin, a dark wash of energy flooding over a land that's become increasingly uncanny. Rippling skies replace their faded blues with deep indigos and violets, hanging in the air with storm clouds a sense of malevolent dread.
Left alone in the darkness of a decomposing world, the weight of May's body vanishes in an instant. She soon shrieks in agony, looking down only to see her limbs beginning to deteriorate into ash and soot, rotting to her bone and then into dust.
Through the phantom pains and her cries for help, those same voices refuse to relinquish her - before long, the little girl fades into the nothing.
'...nobody's gonna miss you when you're gone, and you know its true.'
Blood continues running through trembling fingers. Dawn's grasp upon the brunette's skin brings about the once-familiar sensation of touch, though that sensation is soon nullified back into nothingness. Numbness cocoons May's body and soul, the Distortion World reducing a woman who'd conquered titans and terrorists into little more than a rag doll.
She, steeped in an inescapable gloom, reels in and out to that which transpires before her lifeless eyes. Lucidity awakens May but for a moment, however, when the goddess of this dimension first descends upon Vega.
Giratina, sinister as she is divine, unleashes a deafening battle cry, one that reverberates against the very underbelly of her purgatory. Layered choruses of the damned accompany the phantasmic renegade's call, shadows unfurling like sentient ribbons across her gargantuan figure. Against the thunderous quake of the floating platform, the dragon goddess barrels towards Vega at speeds that betray her behemothic size.
Yet, despite yearning to call out in warning, May's voice remains caged in her throat. Soon, it'll dissipate into the void that has laid roots deep in her core - one that roars like a violent maelstrom, swallowing everything that once was in place of an unfathomable madness.
Filled lungs continue to heave up copious amounts of blood, though even these spontaneous fits appear incorporeal - almost as if the blood that coats her palms and clothing belongs to someone else entirely. Painlessly, these could very well be hallucinations conjured by her fragile, fearful mind; after all, it was fear itself that had consumed every other perceivable emotion she'd once harbored.
Her concept of "self" had now been spliced into something completely unrecognizable and, as predicted, her inner voice fades back into the darkest recesses of her deepest horrors.
The smallest shard that remains of her consciousness wishes so badly to turn to Dawn, to call out to her, to feel that anchor of her touch once more - though, it has become quite evident that this distorted world would prefer she watch her pokemon fight until a bitter, gruesome, inevitable end.
A wicked fate they are all likely to suffer, hope fleeting.
Vega shields themself with flattened limbs the instant Giratina's taloned assault lands its thundering force. The cataclysmic blow smashes right through their celestial barrier; glittering cosmic light trails the deoxys' descent, as they are hurdled into the floating landmass below. The impact leaves a crater around the fallen star, gales of shadow continuing to bombard the alien in the attack's aftermath.
It is not long before the interloper can be seen ominously rising from the freshly-created crevice, core blinking in a variety of perplexing colors. Having shouldered the attack as well as they possibly could've under these dire circumstances, Vega is able to confirm now what they had already believed to be abundantly clear: that absolutely no amount of power summoned would result in their victory here, not while in this realm.
Buying time - until the two women below can reclaim ownership of their consciousnesses, in order to devise an escape from this hell - is the only sound option.
But this decision to stall means not a moment can go by without considerable action. So without missing a beat, the deoxys maneuvers through the swathes of darkness that continue to lash at them from all angles, while simultaneously surveying the massive body of their ghostly opponent.
What Giratina evidently possesses in strength, she seems to lack in momentum. And so it is within that next precise window - as Giratina re-animates her surrounding shadows for another, undoubtably fatal, strike - that Vega quickly resonates with one of the meteorites that orbit their abdomen. Metamorphosing in a dazzling instant, their crown extends into a long spike while flattened tentacles combine to form two spindly, whip-like arms.
Shadow Claw soon issues forth, shades of purple smog and shadow blasting across the platform below; though when it goes to land, there is no target where Vega was once lingering. Instead, the blur of Vega's figure weaves away through the murky shadows that snake voraciously towards them, the streamlining of their body elevating their speed to new, frightful levels.
Though her powers are limitless here, and though this could all prove futile in the end, Giratina doesn't yet realize exactly what it is that she's up against - leaving a slight advantage for Vega, however short-lived it may become.
Virtually invisible at such high speeds, the alien interloper wastes no time in detecting for any potential weaknesses along the phantom dragon's body. From black eye sockets peer studied pupils, scanning along each limb, each appendage, for something, anything.
Perhaps by a stroke of luck much needed, the closer Vega draws to the goddess of this realm, the more noticeable the scarring along her many protruding spikes becomes. Thick gashes, seared into her figure in a fashion most malicious.
It'll come with increased risk to act from such a close range, though Vega cannot continue to outspeed the beastly apparition without delivering an attack of their own; they must at least attempt to level the playing field, to the best of the abilities they have in their arsenal.
Its then that their dizzying dance across inky skies comes to an immediate halt, the deoxys positioning themself where they presume a blind spot to be - their target, now up-close and in focus. Particles begin manipulating around Vega's tendrils moments before their entire body emits a brilliant glow, an aurora of crystalline blues and whites glittering in stark contrast to the world warping around the opposing forces.
The frigid molecules multiply expeditiously, rapidly condensing to a fine point that gathers before the alien's blinking core, growing larger and larger with all the force Vega is able to siphon from within. Ice Beam's light is blinding but glorious to behold once unleashed, detonating with ear-piercing ferocity towards a gnarled scar along the goddess's upper left shoulder.
As the blast sears through the surrounding shroud of darkness like a light of hope, diamond dust cascades magnificently in its wake - and May's oceanic eyes, once empty, show signs of regaining their lost luster.