The piercing whine that emanates from the rift gets the attention of just about everyone in Hisui, when it starts around sunset.
It’s followed by a gradual thump-thump-thump, like a heartbeat from the sky, growing louder and more rapid as time passes—and then the entire sky flashes with splinters, and shudders, and the rift cr-CRACKs like thin ice. Ripples of impossible colors echo out from it as it widens and shifts—
And then something long and metallic comes sailing out of it. Like a spear thrown by Sinnoh Itself, it soars beautifully over the Temple, before gravity works out what’s going on and it suddenly does a nosedive back towards the mountain. The initial meeting between it and the ground is accompanied by a horrible, ear-grating SHRIEK, as the stone and metal bitterly fight each other for supremacy, but its inertia is gaining strong now, and it simply leaves its sheared pieces behind. It ricochets its way down the steeper parts of the slope, and then enough of its underbelly has been lost that the tiny wheels speckling its sides can actually function, and then it starts picking up even more speed with a teeth-rattling ka-CHUNK-ka-CHUNK-ka-CHUNK, falling inevitably down towards the plaza and the ravine beyond.
In an act of divine mercy, it skips over the plaza without demolishing it. Its back segment gets lodged on a slight uphill before the ravine, and the front segment completes its weak arc and falls back towards the rock, CRASH-CLANGing into it. For a moment, it seems like it’ll come to rest there. The mountain is filled only with the sound of various sheets of metal screeching and wailing their way down to join the main body, while it pauses to contemplate its path so far.
Then, almost simultaneously, the front half dislodges from the first and completes its nosedive to the bottom of the ravine, and the back half explodes.
This, the train decides, has made its point.
---
“Good. Go—just—one more.”
That’s the voice that greets Lewis as he inches his way cautiously towards the wreck. From this angle, so far, all he can see is gnarled metal jutting up and away from the crash site, the nose buried in the hard dirt and some segments slightly smoking. But that’s distinctly a human voice—and one that’s short and taut with pain, at that.
He’s hyperaware of the other half of the metal wreck, teetering on the cliff just above, but it didn’t seem like it was about to follow the front half down, and Ingo had had a point, earlier, that if it did come down, he was the least likely to get hurt from it. So he forges ahead.
Something dark blue and twisty—a Pokémon, he thinks—wriggles its way back up the side of the wreck and disappears back into it, just as it comes into view. Below that, sitting on the ground is a man wearing a coat that was probably clean and white, at one point, before the dirt and smoke and—is that blood—got to it. Other than that, the coat is… oddly familiar? His head is lolled forwards, and in his lap is a set of Pokéballs. But they’re nothing like the ones that Vivi uses—these seem distinctly unnatural in make, with flat whites and bright reds and the tiniest bits of metal controlling the mechanisms.
If Lewis is being honest, a part of him was fractionally hoping to see Kingsmen here, if only because that would have been very convenient. He’d find him having dragged himself out of the wreck of his hubristic destruction, and get to gloat a lot before picking him up and threading him on one of those spikes of metal. It’s a tantalizing vision. But this person is decidedly not Arthur.
“Hello?” he calls tentatively, and the stranger picks his head up, and okay, now he’s just confused. Because that can’t be Ingo, either—but for a moment, he was fooled. He adds, thoughtlessly, “…who are you?”
“…Emmet,” he says, and seems like he’d like to add more to that statement, but also like one-word answers are about as much as he can manage at the moment.
His breath is coming in tiny shallow gasps, punctured at irregular intervals by small hitches. One of his arms is joining the Pokéballs in his lap, too obscured by whitish fabric to get a clear view of, and the other one is pressed against the back of his neck which is definitely concerning. His legs are a haphazard jumble, and one of them looks like it’s twisted wrong.
Not that any of this is shocking, if he just crawled out of that wreck.
Emmet squints at him, and says hesitantly, “who… what…?" sounding just as puzzled as he feels—and it’s then that Lewis realizes he’s completely forgotten about his human guise. He pauses to count his blessings that this stranger didn’t freak out as soon as he saw him.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he says in a hurry, crouching down and trying to decide whether it’s worth it to put his face on.
He blinks, and then says, “Okay?” which adds another point to the confusing-Ingo-double column: that was more or less Ingo’s reaction the first time, too. Although significantly more lucid-seeming.
“I’m here to help,” he continues, “we need to…” and then he hesitates. What do they need to do? He’s not a warden; the extent of his experience is stumbling across lost travelers that are too frost-numbed to run away from him.
They can’t stay here, that’s for sure. It’s not safe, and it’s just going to get colder the more the sun sets. But he’s not exactly confident in his ability to move him without hurting him more, either. Maybe if he helps him walk…? He can’t just do nothing—he wavers, acutely aware that he’s wasting precious time.
Finally, he settles on, “We need to get to Warden Ingo.”
This does not provoke the reaction he’d been expecting—Emmet suddenly gets much more conscious, and starts, saying, “You know Ingo?” and stands upright—
—which proves to be too much, because as soon as he puts any weight on the broken leg, he topples over into the dirt again, this time actually unconscious.
Lewis is kneeling to make sure he isn’t dead, when there’s a flash of dark blue in the corner of his vision, and an angry Pokémon noise, and then he gets a Thunderbolt right to the face.
---
Ingo picks his way slowly towards the upper half of the wrecked cars, watching carefully for any sign of a second explosion.
He’s not even sure why it exploded the first time, if he’s being honest. He feels like that shouldn’t have happened, like it’s somehow an inaccurate fiction and he should be vaguely offended. But then, from what he can see through the remains of the door that’s been ripped apart, the insides of this car are loaded down with twisting, smoking metal that looks to him like a recent addition, and that could have feasibly ignited and blown, maybe. Depending on what it is.
The metal car is draped over the rocks, accordian-folded up from the force required to halt its motion. The low sun illuminates the jagged edges of the metal in almost blinding shades of gold. If the lower car was steaming or coughing dust, this one is really smoking, a signal-flare plume rising up from the shredded door into the sky. There might be fire flickering inside, even—it’s a little too far away to tell.
There’s a Porygon flitting around the wreck, seeming not sure exactly what to do. Curious to see one just out and about, but he remembers Miss Vivian’s theory—that they’re native to the world beyond the rift, and venture through out of curiosity. Perhaps this one got caught up in the no-brakes crash and carried along?
His gaze wanders from the Porygon and down closer to the cliffside, and suddenly he’s moving much more quickly.
It—isn’t a dead body. It’s moving. It’s—a young man? With a shock of fluffy, almost spiky hair that’s only a shade darker than the Guild merchant’s. He cannot be Hisuian, from his clothes, which are neon colors to match his hair. And, more alarmingly, there are several spikes of shrapnel jutting out of his back and shoulder.
He pushes himself up on one hand, and gets his knees under him into a sitting position, and just as Ingo is closing the distance, he notices his approach. He blinks and raises one hand to wave, an action which makes him sway slightly.
“Hey, boss. I- I didn’t mean to do th-that,” he says, pointing at the wreck, as if that were anywhere near the top of Ingo’s list of questions.
And clearly suggests he’s not fully recovered from the explosion, so Ingo decides to go with simple and direct. “You’re injured. Can you stand-?”
“It’s j-just, I didn’t think we’d come out vertical," he continues, as if Ingo hadn’t tried to speak at all."Which, in hindsight, that’s st-stupid, but it was just, the entrance was made on the- on the ground and I assumed th-that would conserve, but no, it snapped to the extant portal and- and- oh, fuck, that could have been so much worse, if it didn’t s-snap-“ he runs a hand through his hair, wild eyes suddenly darting towards the sky. “-but, anyway, my point is, I was too f-focused on the, the initial breach, and the s-second one was supposed to be easy, but the rift was in the fucking sky and. And, I didn’t mean to. To wreck it. It was s-s-supposed to go way better.” The last part is said with surprising fervor, like it’s very important to him that he understand it.
He’s also turned to face Ingo more fully as he talked, revealing his other shoulder to him, and between the white fabric soaked through with blood and the fact that the sleeve is empty–
Ingo smothers a gasp, because that isn’t helpful at the moment. Instead he kneels, and says very seriously, “your arm-”
But he only looks down, almost indifferent. “Oh, that? Th-that’s old news. Happened ages ago. Don’t worry about it.” He waves a hand through the empty space, as if to emphasize it. “Uh, appreciate the concern, th-th-though. Look, don’t worry, I’m only a- a li- little bit st-stabbed. Barely even hurts.” He shrugs, and then winces.
“That is in no way less worrying.” Ingo shakes his head, trying to re-right his own train of thought. “We are conducting you to a safe station for maintenance immediately. This is not negotiable.”
“Ugh, f-f-fine, don’t say th-thanks or anything. Can I at least- gloat a little bit f-first, though?”
“You can walk and gloat at the same time,” Ingo decides to say, instead of attempting to make sense of any of the many absurd things he’s said so far. Is this how the other wardens feel talking to him? He reaches down and offers a hand, and carefully lifts him up. For the big game he talked about being only a little bit stabbed, he still has to take a lot of his weight.
As they start stumbling away from the wreck—the Porygon chirps and flickers after them—the stranger starts to laugh. Unsteady, with his head dropped towards the ground, but slowly building, until finally he chokes out, “I’m so fucking good at my job.”
“Language,” Ingo says automatically, and then, deciding it would be better to make sure he stays talking and therefore conscious, adds, “I’m gathering that you… somehow caused… that wreck?”
“Fuck yeah I did!” He laughs again. “I punched a hole in sp-space! And time! Couldn’t’a picked a better fuck-you to those assholes if I tr-tried! I made it! I win!” He whoops triumphantly, except he runs out of air halfway through and it trails off. After a few shaky breaths to recover, he continues, “Can’t- can’t believe I’m here. I mean, s-s-seriously. Kingsmen name, every s-s-single journal, soon as we get back–“
Ingo’s steps falter, and it takes a very conscious effort not to stop entirely.
“Is that…” he asks hesitantly, “your name? Kingsmen?”
His head raises to squint at him. “Uh, yeah? Arthur.”
Now Ingo actually does stop, and stare at him. His thoughts are stalled, filled with the ranting memories of a Zoroark with an exceptionally focused hatred, and a gentle nature that entirely belied it, and a thousand vitriolic stories of the man who sentenced him to a bloody death…
Arthur Kingsmen, murderer of Lewis Pepper, apparent breaker of Sinnoh’s sacred space, blinks fuzzily at him.
