Welcome to Gaia! ::

Darts had been right behind her, his eyes slowly rotating over to look at Ogerpon for the briefest of eternal seconds to try and communicate something to her before he ripped out of space into the Distortion World. Just like last time, he could feel Crystal over in her little bubble of the universe but unlike every other time previously the shock of jumping from slow motion to regular motion gave the hybrid a fright, stumbling out into the antimatter dimension with a short stutter step.

It was weird though, as he started rushing forward in sync with the Solgaleo hybrid in the other dimension. It was almost like he was standing shoulder to shoulder with her here, in this dimension. Like a thin membranous barrier were all that was separating them from one another in completely distinct parts of the universe. As his footsteps synced up with hers, his trained martial artist steps falling in line with her 'doing-her-best' gallop, their stances and beings overlapped one another in perfect coordination. Crystal's balled fists wrapping up dropped to her sides as Darts' spade-shaped golden spears wound back, both of them smashing through back into their normal reality in the same moment.

As they passed through, both of them would hear and feel within their very souls an enormous cacophony like glass breaking as spiderwebs of unadulterated destruction run from the point of impact both chose. The cracks run through the fabric of both dimensions and for a brief instant both hybrids would be visible to one another, a golden aura surrounding Crystal and a dark black one surrounding Darts as they both punched through back into reality, shards of eternity flying off in all directions as they reemerge into the Trick Room.

From the gambler's understanding they were only going to get one chance to be able to do anything and he had put his absolute everything into this punch, Outrage streaming through his body with as much draconic steroid as he dared to pump into his deltoids, chest, and triceps so it's little surprise that the path back in with his Shadow Force has such minimal resistance. What does surprise him is the absolute devastation he was leaving behind, and the appearance of Crystal. That was certainly new. Judging by her face this wasn't normal for Ultra Space trips but there wasn't enough time to worry about that right now, ironically enough.

Everyone in the gym would be unaware of the miniature bull-in-a-chinashop situation Crystal and Darts burst out of as from their perspective like in hyper-fast forward the Snagems would reemerge as a duo, brilliant golden and infinite blackness entwining as they both savagely attack the Dialga from essentially in the center of its mass as they emerge, routing straight through the time warp. There's another scream, this one sounding a lot more pained as both of them land direct impacts on the Pokemon's face and all of a sudden time would wriggle, shift, and then return to normal as the Trick Room shattered. All of the attacks the Snagems had thrown earlier all blast Dialga as one mass, a huge column of black and red fire the centerpiece as Leslie's Flash Cannon finally has the impact they were hoping for, pushing the Fiery Wrath and all of the rest into the Steel-type.

The inferno clears and even while Dialga was smoldering, big craters on either cheek from Crystal and Darts' fists as they had thrown everything they could at it, the Pokemon was clearly not even close to going down yet. And it was mad. It screams, a sound fit to make steel beams bend to its will as it charges up again, preparing another full-power Roar of Time with the intent to finish the job the original had not.

Cyrus stumbles, an inelegant motion for someone normally so composed as Monique's body weight and momentum return to pre-Trick Room values with no time distortion and he quickly raises the knife, bringing it down definitively but sloppily as he tries to finish the job before anything else could go wrong. Unfortunately for him Darts is just a little too quick on the draw, especially with all the Outrage coursing through his body, and the hybrid spins in one fluid motion after landing, shattering Cyrus' humerus with a crescent kick that splinters the Galactic leader's shoulder and sends him sprawling over by his enormous legend. The blade spins end over end and slams into the ground, quivering.

"Arceus DAMN you!" Cyrus spits, clutching his shoulder as he staggers to his feet, saliva running down his lips as he has lost all semblance of decorum, anger pouring off him as his eyes widen in madness, now beyond any reason. "Finish them all! Roar of Time!" He announces redundantly, intending on sending them all to meet their maker with one final burst of unimpeded chronomantic energy. The Dialga towering above him screams again, louder this time, as blue energy gathers in its open maw.

Boom………………………………………boom.

Monique’s heart raced, insofar as racing was something a living being could do in the face of a man whose Pokémon had just slowed the very flow of time to a crawl. Here she was, on the brink of certain doom, the final moments of a woman who was in all respects out of time.

Out of the time she came from. Her age was nominally negative—a fact that had sparked the first media speculation about her at the trial. She’d met her grandmother, pregnant with her mother. She’d seen things go down that she had devoted the last years of her life fervently seeking to prevent in another reality, a reality that was now being definitively tampered with.

Out of the normal rhythm of time. Every action seemed to play out as if in invisible molasses. Seemingly slowly, a knife, a blade of steel, rode its way to her throat on the wings of Cyrus’s hands, a cold reminder that what she was doing came with consequences. She’d seemed to cross everyone these days. They wanted to reduce her to a shadow, no matter how many Shadow Pokémon she’d purified. Though “they” seemed to have a lot to do with “him”: Cruxias.

She didn’t know Cyrus. Or Team Galactic. Or Dialga. Sinnoh was not a place for a shadowbitch. What she did know was that this beast and its handler, who at first seemed like an answered prayer, were an unquestioned curse. Too unfeeling, too cold, too unfamiliar. So un-Alolan.

She Who Floods the World… I have tried to be a blessing…

She thought of Aopuaʻa, her first new Pokémon in this reality, a species dependent on something the Dome had taken away from her time. Lua Pele, the tempestuous Camerupt. Lolo, the Porygon rescued from the depths of The Under. Pahi, the Scyther, now a Kleavor—another Pokémon out of time. The Galarian Zigzagoon Sub now had. It took commitment to purify a Shadow Pokémon. Let alone five of them.

She thought of the other Pokémon she had met along the way. Two came from the past: Hālena, from Hisuian Pichu to Alolan Raichu, and Kia, the Wyrdeer. Two came from other realities: her own Kalama and Aniani the Primarina—her mirror, once upon a time. And there was Alcremie and Toxicroak and Orthworm and Crawdaunt and Audino and Honchkrow and Malamar and Poltchageist, the Tauros she’d caught…

She Who Floods the World… If not me, protect this world with someone else…

It was hard to cry at one-sixteenth speed. But her body was trying vigorously in its final, agonizing, artificially drawn-out moments. Synapses were firing faster than the local rules of physics permitted them to be acted on. Ducts carrying liquid—

A blur of gold and black shatters, breaking the speed of light. A massive blast connects, the beast pained. Rooooooar. ROOOOOOOOAR! Time jerked forward, the heart beating at normal speed. Cyrus caught off guard as the blade came up and— Cyrus suddenly is kicked, the blade flying from his hand. She heard his curse and Sub’s yell reach her ears at the same time. His panicked instructions came as a relief. The weight of Moltres’s Fiery Wrath off her brain, she rushed to touch Claydol, hug Claydol, get out of this hellish scene.

As she was teleported, all she could feel for a split second was her racing heart.

Boom…boom.

Before I could finally comprehend the inevitable in, the feeling of dead to rights, everything started to move as it should once again. I nearly fell over again from the sudden jarring of time reverting, everything was trying to catch up and align back up with how time was supposed to. I looked back up, staring at the Dialga caught off guard by the likes of Crystal’s and Darts’s actions. Freth, Orderly, and Doc managed to get over towards me. “Blizzard! You okay!?”

“I’ll…I’ll manage…” I said to her. Considering that I was barely standing after Dialga’s attack, she heavily doubted it. The lot of us would look up, hearing Cyrus losing all composure, a rather uncharacteristic notion of someone I knew to be a rather stoic, emotionless man. I almost questioned just then if that mushroom guy also got a hold of Cyrus somehow, but I quickly realized that as soon as he gave his new command to the Dialga, this fight was over. He was ending it. “That fool, he’s going to try to kill everyone here, with him, himself if he has to.”

Sub’s command roared out, commanding everyone to bail out by any means necessary. “Freth, I believe we need that Alakazam, now.” Doc Owl said. Freth would take out her Alakazam, I would do the same bringing out Telia from their respective Pokeballs.

As soon as Reno would get the disabling of the transmitter on its way, I looked over to Lucario and Sol. “Sol, Lucario, hang on!” I said to him. “Telia, get us out of here! I don’t care where! Far away from here!”

“Book it, Alakazam. Doc, Orderly, stay close!” Freth said. Once the transmitter was down and the groups were hastily set, we would teleport out of there, next to no hesitation out of our Pokémon. We would have to assess the damage when we were on safer ground.

Clare followed Aile’s lead, rushing after the woman with the Fenrall baby in their arms to keep her safe. This was so far beyond their understanding, it was hard to say if they actually knew how bad this was. They were startled into a moment of pause as a flash of light erupted from within Libelle’s swaddling and a moonlight-colored mass emerged from within to form Lykas’ uniquely-colored Psychic-type, Mykel, who proceeded to rush into the ruined gym-turned-courtroom, having sensed his master and his mate in mortal danger moments ago.

Unable to stop the Pokemon before he was lost to the chaos and unwilling to take a baby back into it all, they kept going, following Aile to the warp pad and managing to slip away just before the Trick Room came down.

~~~ ~~~

As Odd focused on channeling his energies into his partners and their energies through him to keep this symphony playing properly, Cadenza found purchase and ripped a piece of Dialga’s very soul free. Dragging that fragment of soul into themself, the Shedinja suddenly found their mind subjected to infinity and nothingness all at once. As all of cosmic history and a seemingly infinite future full of countless branching possibilities stretched their comprehension beyond its limits, they felt aeons pass in what couldn’t have been more than a tenth of a second. Before their mind could completely snap from it all, the infinity of time itself reasserted its dominance over even masters of the soul and ripped itself free of the Shedinja’s control in the form of another Roar of Time.

Either unable or unwilling to predict this potential outcome, Odd failed to control the situation entirely and as Cadenza was practically torn apart(thankfully only in a metaphorical sense) by the sudden chronomantic explosion, the new ring of draconic energy that erupted knocked out all four of his Pokemon and blasted him several feet away from where he had started. When Reno came to the rescue, he’d find it easy enough to recall Odd’s Pokemon and carry the Channeler away, considering he’d been knocked unconscious by the free airfare as well.

It would take a long while to figure out exactly how bad things were after this but that applied to all of Snagem at this particular moment and Odd would have to wait until he was conscious again to find out what he missed.

~~~ ~~~

Lykas had attempted to return to the battle at hand, only to find that by the time he made it a few steps, Cyrus had already issued his command to Dialga for the Trick Room. As reality warped around the gym, the hybrid felt his body suddenly disobey. No matter how had he pushed to rush, he found himself moving at less than a crawl. Even paralyzed Slugma moved faster that he felt he was in that moment. He couldn’t even move his eyes to look around but what he could observe in front of him and through his peripheral vision, everyone was being affected more or less the same. Except for Cyrus. As the hybrid’s lungs began to burn, unable to even breath at normal speed while Cyrus moved as if he were in fast-forward, the hybrid realized how screwed they were if someone couldn’t break this trap. It was bad enough that Odd had blown himself and his team up trying to do something here but the hybrid couldn’t react to that. He couldn’t act to aid in the fight. He couldn’t run now. All he could do was stand here, unable to will his body to move faster as Sub’s Galarian Moltres hovered overhead and wilted even the most strong-willed of fighters. Soon enough, those dark flames would turn that wilting into burning and even further, it would turn that burn to a scorch. Strong as his will was, he knew even he would find his spirit burned to nothingness if he were exposed for too long.

Then Cyrus approached Sub and gave his spiel about being trapped, whatever that was about. The important part was the end, however. He intended to let Sub live and watch his teammates suffer? Then the man approached Monique, drawing an ordinary pocket knife as the Zoroark hybrid was unable to flee, trapped within this same temporal bubble as Lykas. The hybrid wanted to scream. To swing. To fire an attack. To do something! But nothing came. His energy responded as slowly as his body, leaving him unable to form a counterattack in Monique’s defense.

And then, suddenly and without warning, two flashes as Darts and Crystal ripped themselves free of spacetime and re-entered it almost before they had left, slamming into Dialga with their own cosmic energies pouring out. Those cosmic energies, while not opposite, ran parallel to Dialga’s and together, they seemed to be enough to break the Temporal Pokemon’s control over local spacetime. The result? A shattered Trick Room. They’d only been inside it for a few seconds but it had felt like hours and as those hours of stasis came to a sudden halt, Lykas felt it before he heard it: his own voice. “Monique!” He cried out, stumbling over his feet and crashing to the floor in the process as his body scrambled the various signals it had been sent all at once. It took the hybrid a moment or two to recover and, by then, Sub was calling for complete evacuation. The hybrid hadn’t seen Mykel with those who’d been brought to the trial, assuming the Pokemon had been left behind since he usually carried Mykel’s Moon Ball with him even when the Gardevoir was left out back at HQ in most cases and kept it carefully tucked away on those rare occasions he didn’t. He had actually left it behind when the team went out after Team Dim Sun that first day, when everything first went to Hell and assumed either the ball hadn’t been found or it had been confiscated without SWIPE realizing it belonged to a free Pokemon in the building beforehand.

”Boss!” Lykas was shocked by the mental voice he hadn’t heard in weeks as Mykel called out to him, rushing over. The Gardevoir grabbed him, pulling him along with psychic assistance as he found Reno with Odd just as he Teleported away. Locking on to that residual psychic energy, the mint-and-lavender Gardevoir followed the Psychic Channeler to his destination, Teleporting Lykas after them.

~~~ ~~~

Back in Viridian Forest, Wren was casually analyzing some samples of the forest’s soil he had gathered while waiting for updates when Reno arrived in a panicked rush to gather up those left behind. Gathering his chemistry materials into his arms, he didn’t even bother packing it away before rushing to leave with the Snagem’s second-in-command without question. Reno didn’t typically lose his cool and if it was bad enough to have the redhead in this kind of disarray, they needed to move faster than immediately if at all possible.