Bella's not sure where she has wandered. She thought she was about to walk into a shop, but this appears to be an unattended bar. With none of the windows associated with the shop she thought she was entering. It could be an elaborate psychic assault of some kind, but it doesn't feel very... assault-y... and she was in the middle of a town and doesn't think any humans want to sic their 'mon on her. It's strange. She approaches the bar, looking around warily, hand hovering near her belt.
A pair of... people... walk in the same door that brought her.
One is wrapped in green leafy vines, in a roughly symmetrical pattern that just about barely conceals the parts of him that humans are expected to. He has more vines sprouting from his back, arranged in the shape of wings, with long feathery leaves. They move and stretch like real limbs. Tiny green tendrils twine through his hair.
The other has a similar height and general build, but a completely different peculiarity: he is wrapped in lightning. It crawls over his skin in tight crackling arcs and spreads out from his back and shoulders into wings shaped roughly like the vine man's, although the limitations of the medium mean that you can't really claim these ones have feathers.
"The things that move around besides humans where we're from are either animals or elementals, never both. Elementals resemble humans, with various halos - Fireflower looks a little bit like a horse with a Fire halo. Horses are a species of animal. Apart from Fire, Earth, and Lightning, the other single elements are Adamant, Air, Glass, Ice, Shadow, Shine, Stone, Water, and Wood."
"Are attack and capture the usual responses to Pokémon?"
"Well, you'll notice I didn't have Fireflower try to set you on fire right away, and I don't even want any more, I have six - if you don't have your 'mon attack a wild one that gets in your space, though, it'll basically kill you unless you're very lucky. People who don't have at least one 'mon of their own pretty much can't leave cities."
"Oh, I guess if you don't have Pokémon - they're good for keeping the wildlife off you but lots of people also battle them recreationally and to get them stronger so they're more effective at the wildlife thing. I enter tournaments sometimes to stay in good guild standing, I'm not great at it but I'm all right - mostly mine spar with each other or wild ones, though, I travel a lot."
"'Mon that you can't prove exist but that there are stories about, basically. Now and then you'll hear of a really bright Meowth or something picking up some human language, but it's - tabloid stuff, I'm not sure whether to buy it or not, Zag's quite bright and doesn't talk."
"We don't usually call 'mon and the things they do magic. Magic's a fantasy stories thing. But some 'mon powers are big and poorly understood enough that people call it that as a shorthand. Fireflower's just... firey, but, like, my Dusk has a psychic attack, that's more arguable."
"I'll take a, hmmm, an aspear slush for me and," she lets out a small dark 'mon with yellow markings, "Dusk likes aguav juice."
She gets two drinks.
Dusk laps up about half of his, and then is distracted by the elementals. He hops off his barstool and goes up to Earth, ears and nose and tail all twitching.
"You can pet him if you like, Dusk's friendly."
"Of mine, Fireflower's the least friendly, and you've seen her. They wouldn't all fit in here if it were crowded, but it's not." And she releases her Pidgeot, Sawsbuck, Mienshao, and Linoone. "Rachis, Branch, Juu, and Zag," she says, scooping up the latter into her lap. "Maybe don't try to pet Rachis. Zag'll have a sweet egg milk," she tells Bar. Zag seems very excited about the phrase 'sweet egg milk'.
Zag drinks his sweet egg milk. Dusk gets tired of being petted and finishes his juice. Branch looks around confusedly. Juu starts preening Rachis's feathers. Rachis seems to find Lightning intimidating, which Zag notices when he's done with his beverage and has slid out of his trainer's lap; he gets between the bird and the elementals and throws tiny little sparks of his own, chattering.
"Pidge," says the 'mon.
The girl interprets this as a yes and puts her back in her ball.
"Accidentally releasing elementals has tended to be very dangerous in the past, but I don't think that's nearly as unavoidable as most humans seem to believe. If they didn't bind us to amulets and force us to do magic for them, perhaps we'd be less inclined to act out destructively when unexpectedly given the opportunity."
"Which we're not even sure you can do, because you probably can't do magic," says Earth. "Stealing a bunch of amulets and bringing them here without breaking them would be a dubious improvement at best."
"Yeah. I'm sorry. I'm not sure how much you'd like it in my world anyway, somebody might throw a Pokéball at you and wild 'mon would probably attack you and just like you don't know if I can do magic I don't know if you can train 'mon, the ability to do that varies even in my world among humans."
That depends entirely on how often you get doors. This varies considerably person to person and most people don't receive them on demand.
"Rrg."
Yes, if those people can be communicated with while the door is held.
"Then that would affect your confidence, probably. But if you're just waiting here I guess it depends on bar traffic."
Yes, the door in front of and to the left of you leads to a lawn with a forest and lake adjoining and mountains surrounding.
"Innnnteresting. But people who don't want to sleep outside or on the couch basically can't stay here?"
They can take work shifts, which entitle them to rooms and in some cases stipends.
"Ooh."
"Who qualifies for those?"
Most people, including all three of you, qualify for janitorial work, although they will not receive their compensation if they don't actually perform it. Security requires the ability to subdue a significant fraction of possibly irascible patrons if they begin fighting; whoever or whatever arranges the doors ensures that the personnel on-duty and that fraction rather than other populations coexist reliably.
"Can I see, like, a pamphlet on Security? - Do I qualify? With the 'mon?"
You could legitimately accept a Security job. A pamphlet!
The girl finishes scanning the pamphlet, and then says that she'd like to sign on for a Security job, and the bar gives her room 013 and a beeper tells her where to find the relevant office when her beeper announces her shift is about to start. Apparently that time is not right now.
Earth glances at Lightning, who contributes, "Lightning doesn't really heal, but as long as somebody isn't too dead for Shine, I can keep them alive no matter what's wrong with them. At least until I run out of power. It takes a lot."
"And Ice can freeze someone to preserve them indefinitely in whatever state they're in, which takes less power than maintaining them with Lightning and doesn't need to be maintained once it's done, but in about one of a hundred cases the unfreezing kills them."
"Elementals can be healed most easily using their own element, and some things aren't applicable to us because we can't die and our bodies aren't always very much like human bodies. Shine works on all of us, but I couldn't do much for an injured Stone or Air. I think healing humans isn't very different from healing animals, except that depending on the animal, an Earth or Water might need to know different things to help them."
"Yeah - see, when 'mon are in their balls they're sort of simplified in ways I don't actually understand and there's machines that can make repairs to them pretty easily and then they're all better, no waiting time or blowing your money on Potions and stuff, so every town bigger than like three houses together in the woods has a Pokémon center."
The conversation peters out. The girl loiters in the bar long enough for all of her 'mon except the skittish Rachis to receive their free drinks, and for her to receive a grilled sandwich, and then, muttering about how she hopes the Security job helps her find the place again sooner rather than later, lets herself out.
Where they find sitting at the bar and having an animated conversation therewith - yet another one. This one's prepubescent and dressed differently and is asking if the doors can be summoned "- maybe with academic magic? Or since it's doors wood magic, I think there's wood magic."
She is clearly less interested in the possibility that somebody is a plant than the possibility that somebody is lightningy.
"Eeeee! - it's when I put my magic up and it's like I'm, well, the sky, being the clouds and the air and the sunshine and everything. It's best during big storms. I'm supposed to only do it in a magic circle so I don't leak magic everywhere and not go more than a few miles away from my body, though."
Stormy eventually needs to be put down - one of the annoying things she needs to do for the part of her which is not the sky is eat, and she can't even get a meal from Bar because she doesn't have any spending money on her. She gathers up the napkins she collected from Bar with explanations before the elementals spotted her, and lets herself out, wistful.
After some traffic which includes no mysterious duplicates of Maurabel, the crowd thins out again, and here is another mysterious duplicate. This one is about the same age as the one with the Pokémon, but skinnier and redheaded and paler, and in yet another stylistically unrelated sort of clothing. She seems pretty bewildered.
"Okay. I didn't think you were entirely a plant, but it seemed politer to ask than to check any other way I could think of. I'm a plant," she volunteers, "I don't tell people that at home but this is sufficiently bizarre that I don't think it can possibly hurt anything."
Hello. Can I interest you in a beverage? First drink is free.
"Not right now, maybe later... there are people who look like me?"
Several.
"Why?"
In the case of the ones Earth met, they're your 'alts', or alternate universe versions of yourself.
"Huh. Are they plants?"
The ones who visited recently were not, no. I cannot guarantee that you are the only plant out of all of your alts anywhere ever.
Ordinary forms of althood, yes. More exotic forms of parallelism exist but are not at play in what I've observed here.
"I don't have a personal name. You can just call me Earth," he says with a slight shrug. "In my world, humans can capture elementals and force us to do magic for them. There are entire industries built on the practice. Maurabel is one of the few humans around who sees something wrong with it. I don't think I'd consider her unusually nice if it weren't for the contrast."
"Planets? That's a new one. Earth is a type of elemental from my world. Lightning is another." He points at the couch; Lightning sits up and waves. "And in much the same way that I'm not a planet, I'm going to assume you're not a mythical creature speculated to be a wild misinterpretation of early encounters with elementals."
"Nah, there's also angels and fairies. And parlor tricks. And summoning. Angels change stuff, fairies move stuff, parlor tricks are stupid and tiny, and summoning moves demons, angels, and fairies from where we spend most of our time to the mortal world so they can get us to do stuff for them."
"I'm not sure I could describe the familiarity. Our local version's attitude towards elementals is very unusual at home, much less so here. But the other alts we met here have tended to share it, and share it in a... certain way. As for 'duplicate how', I'm not sure I understand the question and I probably couldn't answer it if I did. I've only been here for part of a day."
Alternate universe versions of you. Can I interest you in a beverage? First one's free.
"I've... got that covered, but thanks."
I am not limited to beverages you are likely to ever hear about in your home universe.
"...That changes things. Let's get something snazzy and exotic."
Something snazzy, exotic, and pink appears. With an umbrella. The demon sips it. "Okay, that's awesome, thank you."
"Breaking elemental amulets usually leads to the newly freed elemental doing a lot of destructive magic to anyone and anything nearby and then running away. I believe that's because no one breaks them on purpose and breaking them by accident tends to happen during stressful moments. But it's a discouraging statistic if you're a human who wants to free some elementals."
"And we can't test that here under relatively safe conditions because Lightning and I are still bound to our amulets and can't harm anyone. I suppose you could go find Maurabel and talk to her about cooperating somehow on a large-scale elemental theft... I don't know where she is at the moment, though, besides not at school. And you would stand out very obviously at home, with the wings. People would probably try to classify you as a new hybrid elemental. Someone might even try to capture you, and I have no idea what would happen then."
"No, the other ones of comparable apparent age were taller and didn't have wings," says Earth. "Although one of them was some kind of plant creature visually indistinguishable from an ordinary human. Hello," he adds in the newcomer's direction. "This is a weird magic place called Milliways and that is an alternate universe version of you and we're discussing how to rescue some people in my world from magically enforced servitude."
"If you want to, and we need the information for some reason, I won't stop you, although then you probably want to avoid being in a room with me and anybody who can get my name or otherwise vassalize me. Uh, how do we know that me and him and this other person and so on are the same... personality or whatever?"
"There are two ways for my kind of magical servitude to happen - learning somebody's real name, or feeding them. The feeding thing is mostly a problem between fairies and mortals - I can go foraging and not worry if somebody has some long lost claim to a tree I pick nuts from or something as long as I'm not actually stealing - but I wouldn't take food from a strange sort of person without being sure."
"In my world, there are elementals and humans. Elementals have wings and halos, like my vines or his sparks, and are very magically powerful in our own element; magic-using humans have affinities for multiple elements, but can do much less with them than we can. Magic-using humans can also create amulets that bind elementals to obey whoever last touched them. Elementals can't interfere directly at all with our own or others' amulets. Humans consider it unsafe to let any elementals go free, and we're very valuable and useful for doing magic with, so they capture any of us that they find. My friend and I are part of a university collection, and we've been trying to find someone who seems like they might be able to steal and break all the amulets in the collection. But I don't know if it's possible to break an amulet without using my world's magic to do it."
"If you stole all the amulets and brought the elementals here and explained everything to them first, that might not be much of a problem. Humans think we're unavoidably destructive, but I don't. I would avoid surprising busy elementals with sudden freedom, particularly if they're upset or traumatized, which we frequently are, but I think we have the chance to do a much better job than that."
"We were just coming back into the building where the university elementals are kept when we're not in use. If I hold the door and someone walks out and goes around front, and deals with the amulet-minder somehow, they could take all the amulets right off their hooks. You might want a bag to put them in so nobody sees you carrying off a double armload of amulets before you get back here."
"The shift could have changed while we were out, and I'm not sure I remember who it was... either of us," with a gesture to Lightning, "would probably recognize who it was, but we might not know them by name, just by sight. You could chat with them a bit and find out that way, I guess. It would probably have to be you, wings off and tail hidden, because if Promise walks around the university with those wings she'll be mistaken for a new kind of Earth hybrid and there'll be a frenzy to capture her."
"If you happened to acquire my magically enforced servitude I have the strong expectation that you wouldn't do anything with it whatsoever - and I'm already volunteering at least one presently-unknown human from my world for the same thing, if we go through with this plan. So if it's worth knowing whether or not you can name elementals, we might as well find it out."
"That's heartening for everyone else's sake, anyway. And now I can tell you people's elements without worrying that they might object. Hmm. So - one of me or Lightning opens and holds the door; whichever one is holding it, the other one goes around to see if the current amulet-minder is someone we know; if so, we tell their name to Promise, who commands them not to interfere while a de-winged and perhaps re-clothed Revelation heads out to grab all the amulets and stuff them in a bag. If not, the same thing but Revelation does a first run to chat with the amulet-minder and try to learn their name. And then we bring the amulet-minder here, and have all the elementals come through the door as quickly as possible while hoping no one notices and gets suspicious, and explain what's going on, and get everyone outside, and have the amulet-minder break all the amulets. Is that enough of a plan to be going on with?"
"Should I get the tail too or not bother? It's bound to be more easily hidden."
"Yeah, I'll wear a long coat. Name some long style of coat that makes sense in your world and I can copy it. And some kind of shirt. Let's leave me the tail, I - actually, see if you can remove the tail if I don't let you. It has the same nerve thing but I was letting you with the wings, there's a loophole in my indestructibility for deliberate body modification."
"...Flaw in plan," Earth agrees. "All right. The translation issue means you probably can't ask the amulet-minder for their name without involving Promise, which would be troublesome. But one of us," he gestures between himself and Lightning, "can still go look and see whether or not you would have needed to, and then if you would have we can try thinking of something more complicated. In a pinch you could pretend you're very foreign and that Promise is your recently captured, I don't know, Earth/Shine hybrid? What would they call one of those - Leaf, probably, if they looked like you. And have her translate. Elementals speak all the languages that exist when we coaelsce; it wouldn't be that odd. And you could make a fake amulet without much trouble, I imagine. It'd be a complicated story but it wouldn't have to hold up for longer than it took to find out the amulet-minder's name."
In the room where Kisonde was until a moment ago, there is a large rack of hooks with amulets hanging from them on chains. Earth moves past it to duck his head into the room beyond.
"We're all being stolen to be taken away and freed. I absolutely trust the people doing it. Does anyone want to stay behind?"
No one wants to stay behind. No one seriously doubts him about it. They know this Earth; he's been here a while.
"All right. Turn down your halos and follow us. Is anyone out flying right now?" He scans the crowd. "Ice twenty-eight - who knows where Ice twenty-eight is?"
A Shine stands up. "I'll go track her down."
"Everyone else, follow me. Fold your wings and turn down your halos so we're not too eye-catching. Luckily we don't have to go far - just out the front door and around to the side. I'll explain the rest when we get there."
A parade of elementals troops around the corner of the building and back in by the other door, a journey of no more than twenty steps. Except that when they get there, it isn't the elemental barracks again; it's some kind of bar or something. They are confused. Earth directs them out to the lake area. Just as the last few are making their way out of the barracks, Ice and Shine land and follow the rest.
Kisonde is really alarmed.
Lightning closes the door.
"Check all the amulets first to make sure we've got everybody," he says. "It'd be kiiind of a mess if we had somebody's amulet but they were out flying when we broke it."
"I did that, but we can double-check," says Earth. "Revelation, would you mind bringing the bag out to the yard and reading off all the tags and then bringing it back here?"
Kisonde is so fucking alarmed.
A red droplet of Fire vents its substance into a wisp of smoke; a gleaming metallic drop of Adamant cracks apart into glittering shards that dissolve immediately; a pearlescent Glass does something similar; Water melts and turns to vapor, Ice shatters and does the same, Shine goes out in a burst of light, Shadow in a burst of dark, and on and on. The empty amulet chains pile up on the floor.
Finally, the last amulet turns to dust.
"What the fuck are you doing," says Kisonde.
Who has just finished saying: "Yeah, I noticed. I noticed that part. That is definitely something I noticed. I was more asking how, and why, and why me, and in general what the fuck."
Revelation comes in. "There is the question of now what. Does Milliways have a wild elemental population for keeps or are they going to somebody's world, not necessarily their own? Is Kisonde in large amounts of administrative trouble that we should attempt to deflect as a courtesy?"
"Mine's nice, but the balance of power and civilization and so on is pretty thoroughly reliant on the fact that there are only demons in it, and I don't know how to get anybody from here to the places where demons are not the sole species, since elementals - not to mention Kisonde - probably aren't summonable."
"Yeah, I mean, what's the transportation barrier here?" says Shine. "I'm sure we could convince a Shadow to shadewalk some people from A to B if B sounded like a nice place to hang out and contained any shadows to shadewalk to."
"Normally the only ways between subworlds involve dying or getting summoned, depending on the direction," says Revelation. "But if you want me to hold the door while you try shadewalking from here to - I'm not actually sure where the best place to put you would be. There's options. What do you look for in a habitat?"
"Yeah, I don't think ours can do that, and even if they theoretically could they won't know how. Okay, lay of the land: I live in Hell. It's a vacuum when it's, well, in its theorized starting state, but it is full of demons, all of whom can make whatever we want to spruce up the place. There is also Heaven, full of cloud fluff and angels who turn the cloud fluff into whatever their little hearts desire. There is Fairyland, which has plants and animals and water features and so on all by itself, which is convenient for the fairies who are only telekinetic. There is Limbo, which is extremely boring - dirt, air, night/day cycle, infinite flatness, dead humans with no magic powers except indestructibility also shared by the aforementioned, and some extremely random material possessions these humans spawn when they die ranging from 'an ocean that doesn't even have any fish in it' through 'a house' to 'their favorite dog'. And there is the mortal world, which has live humans in it, but not everywhere. They only live on two planets and a moon and some space stations. There are other planets to be had if you like them uninhabitable."
"I think I want to know where you plan to go and what the plan is if you like it and set up shop. I feel kind of responsible for my selection of worlds. Oh, also, Earth should try taking off my tail again without being let as a test on how dangerous you are to the ostensibly indestructible while un-amuleted."
"Good and proper immortal, but if someone tried to take my wings off permission wouldn't have anything to do with it. I don't love it. I'd miss sorcery, though, and it doesn't work anywhere else, I've been trying lightmotes to make sure that the rule holds here. I might be able to do something at home eventually..."
"The idea is I hold the door for you, and you see if you can go from someplace in my house in Hell to someplace nice and uninhabited in Fairyland. I can make you a map and suggest that you go, oh, one billion miles north of its northmost point, if that would help specificity-wise."
"Unfortunately I have never been to Fairyland, and I can only conjure up things that I'm designing myself or copying from elsewhere. I could get you a field guide to Fairyland trees, maybe, but the wildlife is probably not totally consistent a billion miles away from the inhabited area."
It's a big map on a very small scale. There are some countries and big cities marked legibly (though none of the words are in any language Shadow knows) and many more you'd need a magnifying glass to see. There are seas and big lakes and mountain ranges (the mountains look like they are just as inhabited as everything else) and forests. The map is about six feet square.
"I think I still don't know how much a billion miles is," Shadow says after a moment. "But... let's see... if you shone a bright light from that mountain at the north end of the map, it would take a little more than an hour to reach the south end of the map, and a little more than six to reach the place I found. So I guess I'm more than a billion miles away."
"I think I heard somewhere that the estimated global population of captured elementals was a hundred million," says Earth. "Some of those are going to be hard to reach by shadow walking, but not all of them."
"I can barely scry," says Earth. "Unless the thing you want to find happens to be a plant. I definitely can't do fast transport like Shadow can."
"I can scry like nothing else, but I can't go somewhere near-instantly by magic once I find it," says Shine. "I think only Shadow has something like the shadow places... everyone else has to pass through the physical space in between where they're starting and where they're going somehow or other."
"Unless we get together a big group of free Airs and Air hybrids, and have them swoop down out of the sky with Promise and grab amulets," says Earth. "Enough of them together and it'll be hard for anyone to get caught; and if it's Air, well, Air is the best at flying and the second-best at scrying. It's the closest we could get to shadow walking without a Shadow. It'll make it less obvious that we're using shadow walking some of the time if most of the time we ostentatiously don't."
"But not people trying to walk through the door while you're holding it," murmurs Shadow.
"If somebody turns me invisible I can guard the door. The most nonviolent method is probably drugging anyone who investigates, nice and gentle, night-night, and then shoving them out of the building again. But I can't see invisible things, so if invisible people start poking around..."
"Okay then. We're in good shape at least to start out, I think, although I'd like to have at least a few elementals besides the one holding the door sharing guard duty with me at any given time in case something I can't or wouldn't know how to notice starts happening."
"This is Dust," she announces. "Air/Stone hybrid. She can do all the invisibility things."
"I can go collect volunteers," says Earth. "Should I? Or do you think me and Dust and Shine will be enough to keep you company while Shadow and Promise go rescue that Fire?"
While Promise is mid-fade, Shadow touches her hand. "I have to be touching you to shadow-walk you," he murmurs.
"You are now invisible in air," says Dust. "I'm very good, so smoke and mist and airborne dust will go right through you without a problem, but if someone dumps liquids or solids on you or throws you in a pond you'll make a visible you-shaped space in it."
"Humans find the shadow places really weird," he says. "You might not see anything, but if you do, you can close your eyes if it bothers you."
Then he takes her hand and steps from shadow into darkness. There is a sensation of movement. Time passes. Not a lot of it, but some.
They emerge again beside the open door.
Shadow pulls Fire and Promise through into Milliways.
"There you are," says Dust.
Earth closes the door.
Shadow and Promise fade back into visibility.
Fire hugs Shadow hard enough to lift him right off the ground.
Kisonde nervously holds out her hand to Promise for the amulet.
She does.
The floor starts to smoke under Fire's feet.
"Pull in your halo," says Shadow, giggling. Fire looks down and snorts. The flames wreathing his skin subside until some parts of him are actually visible through them, and the floor ceases to be imperiled.
"I'm a demon. Demons can make stuff, and that includes my wings and tail. And we're indestructible. Earlier Earth detached my wings to see if that counted as hurting me and then tried my tail to see if he could do it without me letting him; it seems like I'm still normal amounts of indestructible relative to elemental stuff."
"In the interests of not letting Promise hear her name by accident, Revelation could go along," says Earth. "It would leave the door unprotected but hopefully not for very long."
"If you see weird things and you don't like it, close your eyes," Shadow advises before he steps into the shadow places and takes Revelation with him.
Then he looks for someone who matches the provided description.
"Well, we could go there and do things that involved at least ten minutes' worth of holding the door, but here is fine. Note explains the alternate universe selves thing, has a quick rundown of me and Promise's features including a warning about her name, repeats the explanation I got about the bar's mechanisms, and says me and a Shadow will be along to pick her up and answer more detailed questions soon, does she want to consult on slash contribute to our exciting projects."
"Okay, the reason you are pulled down towards the planet instead of floating away, and in fact the reason why planets are spherical, is a force called gravity. Black holes have so much stuff in such a small place that they have stupidly large amounts of gravity and they squish anything they catch. Even light."
"Specifically Promise made Kisonde do it, because Kisonde's a human and can do your kinda magic, whereas I can only do demon magic and Promise can only do her fairy things plus sorcery that doesn't work outside her world. And the elementals said they wouldn't hurt Kisonde and in fact did not. You can do the rest of 'em if you want."
And when the batch has all gone, Cam closes the door again. "Where are we hitting first? Also, I want to issue everybody involved nice long-distance walkie-talkies and find out if those work while we're shadow-walking." He tucks one behind his ear and hands one to Promise and offers Shadow one.