FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

The Magikarp was having the worst day ever.

He had started off the morning trying to find a bite to eat, but anything that seemed even remotely like food all turned out to be the metallic baits used in a fishing pole. Just when he thought he was going to get a nice mouthful of food, he got yanked out of the water and tossed to flop helplessly around on the ground instead. To add insult to injury, the fisherman just mumbled about useless Magikarp and threw him back... and then kept right on fishing. It wasn't the Magikarp's fault that the shiny bait looked so much like food.

Finally, he had given up searching for food near the surface and had risked descending into the depths of the lake... but the guardian Dragonair in the lake hadn't liked that and had chased him back to the surface. And to top that indignity off, the Dragonair had snapped up a berry from the surface before descending back into the dark depths.

Eventually the fisherman had left, and he had thought it safe to keep searching for food... but some boys showed up shortly after. It wasn't long before they were making fun of him - 'look at that stupid face!', 'it's so dumb, I bet it doesn't know any moves!'. Which was totally unfair because he did know moves - Splash and Tackle. He had proved it by jumping out of the water and high into the air... but it had just made the boys laugh. Which had made him angrier, so he had done it again. Which had just made them laugh even more.

Then one of them had bet another they could hit him with a rock.

He hadn't liked that at all. They had missed him for the most part, but one of them got lucky and had managed to hit him in the side right as he hit the top of his leap. He had fumed in anger and decided to hit _them_with his tackle. He had circled around so he had pointed towards them, charged forward, and shot out of the lake...

...and had been slammed off course by a Cherubi that had appeared out of nowhere.

He flopped on the ground in indignant rage, fuming and shouting random threats that only made the boys laugh louder. Something weird happened in the air around him and he saw the Cherubi change color, and he was vaguely aware of his own scales shifting to a golden color out of the corner of his eyes, but he didn't care about that. He tried to flop towards the water, tried to get back to it and prepare for a new charge...

A rock hit him in the face and he snapped.

The world washed away in a sudden haze of white, and a roaring sound filled his ears. He felt a stretching sensation running through his body, felt his body becoming impossibly long...

The haze cleared and he stared down at the kids that had been terrorizing him. One of them had been about to throw another rock, but now the human was staring back at him with an expression the Magikarp had never before seen.

Fear.

The roaring sound continued to fill his ears... and it was only then that he realized he was making it. The terrible shout was coming from his mouth, was forming into the words of anger and promised violence he had been spewing earlier.

The now-oddly colored Cherubi moved first, screaming in terror and hopping off towards the trees around the lake. The boys dropped their rocks and ran after her, screaming even louder.

The red Gyrados roared again, this time in delight as well as anger, and began chasing after them.

Best.

Day.

EVER!

I watched Clara walk towards the mountain. Opal walked on her left, moving just as quickly, as they scouted a path through the time-shredded landscape.

Sara walked behind them, but even though they were still very, very far away, I could tell it was just the three of them. The rest of Sara's team must have been safe in their Pokeballs - there was no reason to have them out and risk getting stranded in one of the rifts in time.

Good. That was a good sign.

I ducked back into the tunnel and made my way carefully towards the cavern where I knew the final confrontation would take place. It had been a royal headache to move everybody here from Uxie's valley - especially after Phoenix had flaked and risked everything to go and have some silly match with the younger version of Constella, the utter nitwit - but I had eventually managed it even without his help. Now the crystals that protected each of my time-stretched friends rested in the walls around the cavern Dialga had arrived in, unnoticed even by him. I still wasn't sure what had happened to him to cause his attack in the first place - I had a few ideas, based off some things I had seen go wrong with time in the thousands of years I waited, but they were still just ideas - but I _had_known that something had driven off the Froslass that protected this place for a reason, so I had found her and brought her back. Maybe she would be useful in the fight somehow; it was her home that had been invaded. And even if not, I knew she would be useful after.

At some point in the thousands of years of waiting, I witnessed an event where time itself was threatened. It's a story much too long to tell, but it ended with a Pokemon from the broken future erasing themself to prevent it... and upon seeing the pain of the friends that Pokemon had made at its loss, Dialga had restored the Pokemon back to life. It took me a while to understand exactly how, but Uxie and I finally pieced it all together - while that Pokemon's body had been doomed to fade away, Dialga had managed to catch the _spirit_of the Pokemon and had woven a new body for it to live in.

That was my plan. Fix things so that _nobody_got sent back this time... then, with the help of the ghost type, rescue the spirits of my friends from their doomed bodies. I had learned that ghosts could do that, too, though most had used it for less... positive outcomes.

Thousands of years of preparation and waiting were suddenly rushing towards a conclusion. I snuck into place in the cave and hoped for the billionteenth time that I had done enough...

The scene played out much the same way it had originally. Sara had brought her team out when they entered the tunnels, and they eventually arrived in the cave. Their light flickered around the cavern and would have exposed us... but I had hidden us by simply stretching time in the area around us. Instead of lighting up the entire cavern like it had before, there were six dark spots around the cavern where it simply took too long for the light from the younger Sinori and Opal to reach anything. Nobody noticed - or if they did, they probably just dismissed it as other broken areas of time - and instead focused on Dialga, much as had happened before.

But this time, when Dialga reached to pull them all back in time... this time, I _stopped_him.

I used the physical presence of my friends as symbols. The sun. The moon. The morning dawn, the noon heat, the starry night sky. The lingering twilight in between the night and the day. All of them still, unmoving, remaining right where they were. I set my will against Dialga's, I set my experience with manipulating time against his... and I won.

Time flowed normally onwards.

But that wasn't enough, either.

Things were about to change - a lot of things were going to happen suddenly, and they would change the history that led to my own past. It wasn't enough to simply keep time flowing. It wasn't enough to even slow it down. I had to stop it completely, stop even a second from passing - or else we would all be erased when the next second came. I had learned that from a Grovyle that had come from a future where time had been stopped. He and others from his branch had been able to change as much as they wanted, with no worry of being erased... well. At least not until time began flowing again.

I calmed myself as best as I could, and focused... and coughed out nine brilliantly burning wisps, willing them to take up position around the cavern. They cast the strange not-light outwards, competing with the light from the younger Umbreon and Vulpix... and I severed time entirely at the ring formed by those wisps.

I had made sure Sara was caught outside the ring, back at the exit from the tunnel. She didn't move at all, not even a blink of an eye or a breath. Everything that happened inside my ring would be resolved before the next beat of her heart. Before her next thought. She wouldn't even be aware of it - she would simply have seen my wisps rising into position... and then she would see whatever came next.

Nothing that happened here could affect her. Dialga couldn't harm her.

My wisps now shown with their normal blue fire. Inside the ring everything was normal, but I could already feel a strain. Time hated what I had done. It fought against me, tugging at my will, trying to rejoin the outside world and flow normally again. It would be a fight to drag out every moment from now on, and to keep this little pocket of time from joining with the rest of reality. I wouldn't be able to help fight Dialga.

Well.

Not anymore than I already had.

I glanced at the younger team of healthy, strong Pokemon. My friends. Healthy. Strong. They would be able to defeat Dialga this time, I was sure of it.

But there was no such thing as overkill when you were dealing with a Pokemon as powerful as Dialga. I took another breath. Opal was still beyond my reach - I still hadn't managed to bring him back into the normal flow of time - but I reached for the rest of my friends, and freed the older forms of Phoenix, Constella, Clara, and Sonata to join the fight against the now-furious legendary.

I stared in horror at the results of the battle. I knew Dialga would be strong, but...

Every one of my friends lay defeated on the floor of the cavern. The younger versions, and the versions I had brought the long way with me. The younger version of myself had been knocked out of the fight almost from the very beginning, and the rest hadn't lasted much longer.

Dialga looked from the defeated Pokemon and focused on me. I could still feel him trying to move time. The Pokemon was impossibly battered - there was no way it should still be standing, but it was. Its armor had been dented and even melted in some places, its legs and chest bore deep gashes, some of the plates above its tail had simply been ripped away. There was no way it should still be conscious after the beating my friends had given it... but it was. It was still standing, as if by sheer will alone, and it was still fighting to rip time from me. Somehow it wasn't able to win, which still surprised me - I had learned a lot about manipulating time, but against Dialga himself? But it didn't matter. I wouldn't be able to fight him and stop him, and once he defeated me... then there would be nothing to stop him from pulling us all back in time.

I hadn't made anything better.

I had just made things worse.

Now we were all doomed, about to be hurtled back in time once more, young and old...

Dialga glared at me through horribly mangled armor and reared back upwards, preparing to slam into the ground and defeat me too...

I didn't understand. Had I screwed something up? Had I made Dialga stronger somehow? It didn't make sense... Opal had managed to defeat Dialga all on his own. He had been alive and waiting this whole time, so that meant he had to have defeated the legendary Pokemon somehow. And it had just been him. Why hadn't the rest of us been able to...?

No... No, it couldn't end like this...

I reached out towards Opal. I felt his presence, felt the glacially slow passage of time around him, and I followed it all the way back to the Celebi that had originally slowed the passage of time down for him. I had done that countless times, and countless times I had been rejected, passed over to be able to bring Opal back into the normal flow of time in favor of somebody else, somebody else the Celebi had decided to connect with and pass Opal off to instead...

This time I didn't ask. I couldn't afford being rejected again, couldn't afford Opal waiting any longer. There wasn't much 'longer' left for Opal to wait for, not if we didn't stop Dialga. I poured all the energy I had into it and ripped Opal from the Celebi, something I hadn't known was even possible before that very second. I had the briefest of impressions of an old Celebi yelping in sudden surprise...

...and the Umbreon rushed free of the wall in a shatter of broken crystal in the split second of the Dialga's descent, slamming into the massive Pokemon and sending him into the wall of the cavern.

The legendary Pokemon glared at the blue-ringed Opal with a look of confusion... then hate. "WHY WON'T YOU JUST DIE!"

The Umbreon just shook his head. "Stop it, Gengar!"

Gengar...?

"Let Dialga go!" Opal - my Opal - glanced around, and I saw confusion in his expression as he looked around the cavern. He saw the exhausted forms of his friends, both young and old, healthy and hurt. He seemed most confused by the young Sonata - the now-evolved Cherrim always took me a moment to get used to, too - and by me... but I saw him decide to push that away for the moment and instead look back at Dialga. "Release him, now!"

Dialga's eyes began glowing in anger. "NO!"

The air began to shimmer around Opal, and the blue light seemed to ripple around him. His eyes widened and seemed to glow with it. I recognized the move - Mean Look - but there was more to it this time. Opal wasn't just using his own Dark energy; he was adding something else to it. The same energy I had used to manipulate time radiated from him, too. "Let. Him. Go!"

Dialga roared in anger and agony. " NO!!!" It writhed in place, as if trying to get up, but it was chaotic. The legendary Pokemon's limbs twitched randomly, kicking out or seizing up mid-motion.

Opal jumped backwards to avoid a swipe of the angry claws and landed closer towards me. He fixed the Dialga with that same powerful gaze once more. Power flowed out of him and surrounded the legendary... and in its glow I saw something else. A huge shadow grew up the wall, a dark purple shading with red, angry eyes. "LET! HIM! GO!!"

A horrible scream ripped through me, something more terrible than just sound itself and which shook me deep inside... and the Dialga collapsed to the ground, unconscious from the many attacks it had withstood.

A furious Gengar stood on the ground between Opal and the Dialga. Darkness surrounded it, a strange blob on the ground that was more stain than shadow. The light from my wisps were swallowed up by it, as if the creature was simply devouring the light and allowing nothing to escape. It glared at all of us at once, fury clear in its eyes, and glared at Opal most of all.

"You! Again with you! You keep ruining everything, do you have any idea-"

"Oh not this again!" The Umbreon looked disgusted and rolled his eyes. "It was bad enough I had to listen to you the first time! I get it, you couldn't handle it when I beat you as a Haunter way back when after I first evolved, and you got stronger and chased down a Pokemon to possess that could erase your defeat from history." The Umbreon's rings pulsed and he focused back on the shadowy Gengar. "I've got news for you - you weren't the only one that got stronger. You've lost to me twice now, and you're about to lose a third time, too. You aren't going to touch any of my friends. Ever again."

The Gengar hissed in anger... and part of it simply dissolved away. The hazy purple that had covered the ground was simply gone, allowing the light of my wisps to flow through again. An instant later Opal yelped, and I saw purple flames surrounding him. A Curse attack - the fight suddenly had a time limit. If Opal couldn't defeat him soon...

Wait.

Dialga was unconscious now. Why was I still hanging back? There wasn't any danger from it anymore.

I entered the fight with a torrent of fire sent right at the Gengar's face. The ghost's eyes widened and it brought its hands up, and my fire impacted harmlessly on a shadowy shell inches from the Gengar's face. A Protect move. Opal rushed forward and ducked underneath the shell, then slashed through the ghost with rings blazing with blue light. The Ghost screeched in pain, and an afterimage of blue light seemed to burn inside it... but it stayed standing.

Darkness began to coalesce in its hand, forming a ball of shadows. The Gengar glanced between the Umbreon and myself, deciding which of us to hurl the attack towards...

...and another Shadow Ball attack slammed into it from behind, ripping through the ghost and tearing at it. The Froslass who had before then stayed hidden floated forward, already preparing a second attack.

The Gengar's attack floundered, the gathering shadows dispersing. Pain and rage were strong in its hateful eyes... but pain was winning. I took another strong inhale, knowing the ghost couldn't have much left in him, and exhaled a blast of intense fire.

It met a beam of ice from the Froslass, and both attacks were drowned by a sudden pulse of darkness coming from Opal. The Dark Pulse, Ice Beam and Fire Blast attacks all hammered the Gengar...

...and when the brilliant light of the attacks finally faded, the Gengar was gone.

Opal sagged to the ground in relief. "Finally... now stay gone for good this time, why don't you."

The Froslass floated slowly forward, into the spot the Gengar had just been in. Ice began to form on the ground around her, swirling into the air... and then hardened into a purple frozen lump. She plucked it from the air and stared at it... and then it vanished just as quickly as it had appeared. "Don't worry. He won't be able to hurt anyone else ever again."

It took a few minutes, but we got everybody back up. Opal was quiet, and I could tell he was confused... but I think time had affected him just as much as it had me. He seemed to know there wasn't time to ask them.

Once everybody was back up, I went back to focusing on the wisps. Five of them had collapsed in the fighting, and only four of them were left to hold back the flow of time. And... things had been changed. The events that had led to my existence had been undone. Once time began flowing again...

I put those thoughts away and began focusing on the remaining wisps, steadying them. My friends would need every second I could get them.

The Froslass floated between the two groups - the friends I had brought with me, and their younger forms. She explained the situation to them, how half of them were about to be erased... but that she could merge their spirits together, so long as they understood each other well enough. So long as their spirits resonated as one.

It was the younger Opal that asked the obvious question. "How do we do that?"

"Tell your stories. Tell them what made you, you. What life was like. Important moments." The Froslass glance over the group with a hopeful smile. "Why not start with your names?"

The Froslass felt a growing dread as she listened to the Ninetales. It was slow, but she gradually noticed the little things adding up - the look in Sinori's eyes when she talked about rest, or how the hopeful longing to be back with her friends at the start of her story had given way to a weary need to simply see things through, even that almost-outburst when the Froslass had explained she couldn't save the Ninetales if the Vulpix's spirit wasn't in a similar mindset... but mostly it was in the careful, repeated explanation of the nature of messing with time.

That didn't make sense - Sinori had known she was running out of time, so why waste it on those explanations? Why repeat them more than once? It wouldn't really help her younger self understand her any better, and... what would it actually accomplish? If her spirit merged with the younger version of herself, then they would have all of her memories. There would be no need for any of the explanations; the Sinori that walked out of the cavern would know everything that each Sinori who had walked in knew.

Sinori had warned the Froslass beforehand of possible dangers. After the moment ended and their physical forms were erased, all the energy that had been trapped in Sinori's tails - the energy that Dialga had used to drag them all back in time in the first place - would be released. The Ninetales' tails would no longer hold it safely in place inside her. It would become chaotic and possibly even dangerous, with the potential to drag them all forward or backwards in time once again... but just like before, instead of doing anything harmful, they would be drawn into the six tails of the young Vulpix that was even now listening with a sense of growing worry on her own expression.

That would mean the younger version of Sinori would have access to the same abilities the older version of her had, and the same dangers that came with them. Sinori had explained all that to the Froslass while they had waited, before the final confrontation with Dialga. But she would also have the knowledge of how to safely handle that power... wouldn't she?

The older Ninetales didn't seem to be acting as if she would be there to help her younger self control the power. She was being meticulous and wasting precious time to be sure the Vulpix understood the ins and outs of time, instead of working to make sure she survived the moment and escaped like the rest of her friends.

The Froslass looked at the other five Pokemon. The ghost had succeeded with each of them - the empty, broken bodies left from Sinori's original time lay abandoned on the cavern floor, while the healthy forms from the new time breathed softly in slow sleep and brimmed with extra energy, the spirit and memories of the two 'branches' merged back together into one creature. It hadn't exactly been easy, but she had done it. And she could tell that the Ninetales and Vulix were beginning to resonate with each other; the two fragmented spirits were bridging past the long divide of time, and were growing closer to reconnecting. The Froslass should be able to do it one last time, even if Sinori was much, much older than the others had been. That would make Sinori's spirit 'heavy', and more difficult to carry out of the physical body, since there would simply be so much of it... but she was sure she could do it. After that the spirit would recognize itself and its own body, and seek to return to it, joining with her younger self as it did.

Why was Sinori worried? Was there something the ghost had overlooked? Some problem she had missed... something Sinori herself might not even have been allowed to bring up?

And why did she keep thinking back to that strange look in Sinori's eyes, when she had told the Ninetales she had to? Why did that seem so important? What was it the Ninetales had been just half a heartbeat away from blurting out, and why did she feel like the fox Pokemon had found some sneaky way to say it anyways?

The younger Vulpix glanced towards the Froslass... and she saw a sad understanding in that Sinori's eyes. The Froslass looked away from the Ninetales and focused entirely on the Vulpix. Had she figured out what was bothering her older self? She would be more likely to understand the older vulpine, especially as their spirits began to resonate...

"You don't really want to survive past this moment, do you?" The Vulpix's words were quiet, and held a deep, heavy sympathy... and seemed to be directed just as much at the Froslass as they were meant for the Ninetales.

The Froslass looked back at the Ninetales in shock. It suddenly all made sense. The story Sinori had picked - of one of her friends so devoted to something that she no longer cared if it cost her life, no longer felt her own life would be that horrible of a loss in comparison. It had been a hint about her own emotional state. That had been what that strange expression meant right before she had started the story, where she had wanted to say something but had stopped short of it. Just like Clara had said in the story about the wish. The question Sinori had stopped herself just short of asking: "So?"

The Ninetales was silent... then she slowly nodded. "I'm so tired..." She glanced towards her sleeping friends. "I told them I would try... but... I got the idea from Clara. Maybe I had it before then, but she made me really think it through. Don't just survive until it was safe again, fix it all instead. As long as everything is fixed... as long as they're safe... as long as you are safe... it... doesn't matter after that."

She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to. Her younger self understood. And the Froslass did, too.

The two fox Pokemon looked towards the ghost, neither of them speaking. She nodded back to both of them. She would still try... but... if the older Sinori didn't actually want to survive anymore... there was very little she could do.

She reached out to find the spirit hidden within the Ninetales... and gasped in shock as she fully comprehended the heavy weight of it. The Ninetales was ancient, yes, but it was more than just that. All the years of loneliness. All the desperation. All the sadness. Even a strange sense of guilt that had eaten away at the fox Pokemon. Sinori's spirit was heavy with all of it, had gone too long without another caring spirit to help carry their weight, had been too long without another simply telling her things would be okay, or that what she was doing mattered. She had been utterly crushed beneath the terrible, unceasing weight.

The final wisp flickered again... then faded. The nine wisps of light gave one final flash, and then they were gone. The instant had passed, and time had resumed. The moment that Sinori had stretched finally finished... and now it was a new moment. There was no more time. The Froslass braced herself emotionally and connected with the Ninetales, becoming aware of her thoughts as she did.

The thoughts were of... singing?

The form of Dialga vanished, teleported away and gone as simply as if it had never been there. Strange empty lights began to rise from the empty body of the Flygon... then it was gone, leaving only the sleeping form that had been beside it.

Can't slow down, can't hold back....

The Froslass tried to grasp the entirety of the crushed Ninetales' spirit. It was too heavy and jagged, and it burned, and she lost her grip on it. Blobs of emptiness rose from the green body of the Espeon... and in a flash of light it vanished too. The Froslass tried once more and managed to get hold of the ancient that time, managed to contain every painful part of it in her ethereal grip. The sheer emotional weight of the timeworn essence drove the ghost to the ground, pulling downwards on the Froslass's own form just as surely as the force of gravity would to any corporeal being. The ghost struggled to reach out to the younger Vulpix, tried to find her spirit too, so she could join the two together....

Though you know I wish I could...

The empty lights began to rise from the other bodies too, but the Froslass ignored them. She had to find the Vulpix, had to connect the forlorn Ninetales to a younger body that could survive... why was it so hard? She had felt them resonating, the spirit should be calling out to its own familiar self... there! She felt the Vulpix's spirit, vibrant and alive, a stunning contrast to the utterly defeated and hopeless spirit of the Ninetales... but... just as ancient? Just as massive, just as filled with history, somehow...

Ain't no rest for the wicked...

But the two were nothing alike. The ancient Ninetales and the inexplicably equally ancient Vulpix watched the Froslass as the realization of failure sunk in. They were just too different. They had begun to resonate, but... the Ninetales was too far gone. Too lost in an endless void of despair born of thousands and thousands of years of loneliness. The happy spirit of the Vulpix simply couldn't understand all that pain and despair, and would not accept it as part of herself. "I can't... there's... you're still too different..."

Empty lights began to drift upwards from the Ninetales' fur. "It's okay. You did enough." The Ninetales glanced towards the sleeping forms of her friends, taking in one last sight of them... and then her eyes lowered, closing in time with the song in her thoughts.

Till we close our eyes fo-

The cave brightened in an intense flash of sudden light... and when it faded, the Ninetales was gone.