Lisa the Legend: Chapter 63 up!
Well, this might be the only time I don't give full, detailed replies to my readers. I need to be leaving the house for Melbourne in about 30 minutes and I haven't packed, cleaned the place or done anything I should've. Brian and Ada, I appreciated your comments and feedback heaps, as always (and I think I've spoken to you both already about the chapter, at any rate). I'm glad you both enjoyed the chapter and the style change. I'll take the stuff about foreshadowing on board: maybe some restraint is in order. "Less is more" and all that. Re: the lift, I had one do that to me in real life completely randomly a few weeks ago (it was level six of a multi-storey carpark) and I thought it would be very well used for dramatic tension in that moment. So that's the background for that. Thanks for the criticisms and compliments. And the identity of the Hispanic man will be revealed momentarily ...
Hoping to see some of the other readers around, I always love hearing responses and feedback from you guys, too, so please let me know how you're liking the continuation of the fic!
Without further ado, here's Chapter 63, which is what I spent this afternoon finishing instead of packing. I really enjoyed writing this chapter; as always, I hope that enjoyment translates to you guys, too.
Cheers!
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Chapter 63 – Submission.
A jet of ultramarine energy exploded from the tip of the Union agent’s stunner. Lisa reached for her belt, but her hand was not fast enough; she felt an overwhelming force strike her squarely in the chest. She was blasted off her feet; her backpack slammed into the wall behind Gavin’s bed, followed instantly by her head. An instant migraine cleaved her skull and Gavin’s camera dug into her chest as she landed, face-down, on the thin carpet by the bed, silver stars bursting to life before her eyes.
“STUNNED HER!” came Anthony’s triumphant yell.
Despite the splitting pain in her head, Lisa bit back the instinctive groan she wanted to release. Something had gone wrong: she was still conscious …
There was a sharp bang from one of the lower floors; spread-eagled on the ground, Lisa felt the ground tremble violently. The thought of her parents reared its head once more, her spine prickling with a rush of terror. It seemed they had walked right into a Union siege. Had they been prepared for battle? Or had they been taken completely by surprise?
“HELP ME LIFT HER!”
Anthony, the Union agent who, with Morty, had deceived Lisa and Gavin on Mt Fairfax, was right beside her now; one of his rough hands closed tightly, painfully, around her upper arm, while the other took hold of her right leg. He began to drag Lisa unceremoniously toward the door; her backpack, she forced herself to go limp.
A second pair of footsteps thundered down the corridor. An ocker, almost unassuming, male voice cried from the doorway: “Ha! Got ‘em both, Ant?”
Anthony’s deep snarl rumbled from somewhere too close to Lisa’s face for comfort. “Shut up and help me get her out of here before she comes to.”
The newcomer snorted derisively. “What, where you gonna take her?”
Lisa bit her tongue against the combined pain of the carpet burn on her face and the continued pressure of Gavin’s camera against her sternum, but forced herself to stay still. There were two Union agents in the room now, and she was unarmed. The fact that they thought she was unconscious was the only weapon in her arsenal.
“Just help me get her out of here,” Anthony spat again. Lisa was sure they were getting near the door.
Another loud bang sounded from below; a second later, there was a terrible, drawn out screech.
“What the hell was that?” demanded Anthony, stopping in his tracks. His grip on Lisa’s limbs loosened.
There was nothing else for it: Praying that Anthony had looked around at the other Union agent, Lisa plunged her hand down toward her belt, her hand closing at once on a cool pokéball. Opening her eyes, she rolled onto her back and ditched the ball at the floor, just as the Union agent at the doorway cried out, “OY!”
The explosion of radiance from the pokéball blinded Anthony as he spun round to face Lisa. She pulled herself up to a sitting position and garnered a brief glance of a tanned, stocky man standing at the door, levelling his own stunner at her.
“NO!” she screamed, throwing herself at the floor again; something white-hot grazed her hair a second before she hit the ground.
“GET HER!” roared Anthony wildly. It sounded like he was in excruciating pain, though Lisa, face down on the floor again, could not see why. In desperation, she tried to commando-crawl beneath Gavin’s bed, but she knew there was no chance she would make it before the Union agent at the door recharged his stunner and fired again …
“AAAAAAAAAAAARGH!”
Lisa’s body surged with something hard, something beyond pain; her nerves had become strands of barbed wire, spiking her flesh from within. It was agony; it was hell: she was in darkness, languishing in her own mind … there could be no level of pain past this …
And then, at once, it was over; and Lisa was shaking, almost vibrating, on the carpet, a cold sweat running down her forehead, her arms too weak to even move.
Something small, metallic and cylindrical pressed into the back of her head.
“That was a taste of what you’re up against,” snarled the voice of the stocky Union agent. “Now stand up, or I’ll pull this trigger again.”
Lisa’s arms were like water.
“I can’t,” she quavered, eyes on the grey carpet. In the background, Anthony was shouting at his partner for assistance, but the second agent was not interested.
“Get up,” he repeated, prodding the tip of his stunner a little harder against Lisa’s skull. The casualness in his voice was dangerous.
Lisa tried again; her mind was still spinning, her arms still aching and unresponsive.
“It hurts too much …” she tried to say clearly, but her voice came as a whimper. “I can’t get up …”
She waited for a second current of pain to course through her, but it never came. There was a sudden flare of light from behind her and, to her complete surprise, a loud thump. Mustering all her strength, Lisa cocked her head to the left; beside her, collapsed on the ground, was the stocky Union agent, his eyes closed.
“OH NO YOU DON’T, BOY!” yelled Anthony, barely a metre away. He no longer sounded in agony, but there was something frightened in his register.
“YES I DO!” bellowed a teenage voice.
Lisa’s heart flooded with hope. This time Lisa actually heard Gavin grunt with the effort: another blast of intense light flared behind her, followed by a subdued swearword from Anthony and a dull thump.
Silence fell in the room, punctuated by the sounds of battle from the lower floors and carpark.
“Lisa …” Gavin was kneeling beside her, a sweaty hand against her jaw. “You okay?”
Lisa nodded painfully; she wasn’t sure how many times she had hit her head in the previous two minutes.
“Sit up … what did he do to you?”
“The Stunner … he had it set to something else. It was just …” An electric shiver, perhaps an aftershock, wriggled down her spine. “… pure pain.”
Gavin’s hands had moved down to her shoulders. “Come on, get up, we need to get the hell out of here.”
“I know.” With Gavin’s assistance, Lisa managed to pull herself off the ground, but no sooner had she regained a sitting position than her head spun with giddiness. She closed her eyes, trying to keep herself conscious.
“Leese – you right?” demanded Gavin, his voice urgent.
Lisa did her best not to slur her words. “I think I need some water …”
“Righto. Cup your hands, then,” said Gavin swiftly. Lisa obeyed without thinking.
“Fisky, get over here and give Lisa a drink,” said Gavin, in a louder, clearer voice. Lisa wondered what on earth he was doing until she realised that Fiskmire must have been the pokémon she set on Anthony earlier.
She felt Fiskmire’s heavy footsteps approach her before a cold liquid trickled into her cupped hands. She brought her hands to her mouth and gulped a cool mouthful down. She had never drunk water from a water-type pokémon before. It was purer than she expected: clean and sweet and with an almost earthy taste, like how she imagined water from mountain springs might taste. As she swallowed the final mouthful, she found that her dizziness had ebbed somewhat.
She opened her eyes. Fiskmire crouched before her, his beady eyes filled with concern. The fine blue fur on his back was ruffled and patchy: it looked like Anthony had scratched his back quite savagely.
“I’m alright, Fisky,” Lisa said softly. “Are you?”
Fiskmire shrugged his heavy, squared shoulders. Lisa reached out her arm to rub his head when, quite abruptly, Gavin cried, “My camera!”
Lisa tore her eyes from Fiskmire to find Gavin gaping at her chest, open-mouthed. She glanced down. Gavin’s black camera looked like it had been run over by a car: pieces of the camera shell had splintered off entirely; the place where the battery had once resided was now an empty hole; the flash had smashed into pieces and, most dramatically of all, the lens was no longer clear, but made opaque by hundreds of spidery cracks.
“So that’s why that first Stunner beam didn’t knock me out,” Lisa said slowly. “Anthony shot the camera instead …”
Gavin did not look comforted by this fact: indeed, his face was even more pale than it had been; he looked devastated.
“Give it to me,” he said shortly, slinging his backpack onto the ground.
Lisa didn’t even think to question the seriousness in his tone: she unfurled the camera strap from around her neck and, cradling it in both her hands so as to keep it from falling apart, passed it to Gavin. He placed it gently in the smallest pocket of his rucksack, his face still pallid.
The continued screams and blasts of battle below tugged at Lisa’s ears again.
“Right – we have to move,” she said abruptly. For a minute or so after Gavin defeated Anthony there had been a lull in the room, a deceptive sense of safety born from the relative quiet, but Lisa knew there was no time for resting on their laurels: more agents could arrive on the third floor in a matter of seconds.
She scanned the floor for Fiskmire’s pokéball and found it lying in the spray of sawdust from the erstwhile door.
“That was good work, Fisky,” she said, as if they had just defeated a wild Raticate in the bush. She threw a glance at the motionless form of Anthony: his black pants were almost shredded by Fiskmire’s teeth, and it looked like Fiskmire’s claws had drawn deep scratches on the Mediterranean-looking agent’s arms. “Return.”
A surprised expression stole over Fiskmire’s chubby features as the scarlet light washed over him; it seemed he had been expected more opponents.
“But Fiskmire didn’t knock Anthony or this other guy out, did he Gavin?” Lisa continued, double-checking that she had all her pokéballs on her belt after being thrown across the room.
Gavin zipped his bag up solemnly.
“No. I did. My powers …” he murmured, not looking up. “It was scary, because I actually knew what I was doing this time. I wanted them KOed, I tried to make it happen … and it did. Two big things of purple lights – took ‘em both out straight away …”
Lisa let her gaze wander from Anthony’s body to the form of the stocky Union agent. A surge of curiosity flooded her sense of urgency.
“What do you think they came here for?” she asked, feigning nescience. She knew, of course: her father’s words from a month ago had been on constant loop in her head since she first comprehended that Redwood Hospital was under attack by the Union:
“The only way anyone can take the fragment of key hidden within the Sepulchre of Suicune is to have you enter it, Lisa, as you are the guardian of Suicune. That’s why the Union tracked you down so vehemently over the past four months, Lisa; that’s why you’ve been the object of their attacks so many times. Once they possessed you, they could effectively force you into the Sepulchre of Suicune, once they found it, and lo and behold, they’d be a step closer to having all the keys and finally having access to the secret in the shrine of the legendaries.”
Gavin stood up and slung his rucksack onto his back. “You, of course,” he said simply. “Somehow they got wind that your Mum and Dad were taking you to the safe house today and decided to attack.”
Lisa’s blood ran cold at the mention of their names.
“Do you think they’re okay?” she said in a rush.
Gavin scratched his shaved head for a second. “Probably,” he said, finally, and Lisa was strangely comforted that he hadn’t just given her a thoughtless, “I’m sure they’re fine.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Well,” Gavin said seriously. “From the sounds of it … and the looks of it …” He glanced through the window, and Lisa followed suit: a dozen or so figures were running around amid flashes of vibrant light from Stunners, jets of lurid flamethrowers and clouds of Poison Gas attacks. “… it’s not just your Mum and Dad fighting the Union. That’s a big battle. They must have brought some of the Guard with them just in case something like this happened.”
Lisa’s heart lifted, then plummetted: so how many Guard members were going to be injured, maybe killed, because of her? How many innocent bystanders? Emma’s corpsed flashed through her mind’s eye again …
“Lisa, this isn’t the time to be thinking this over,” said Gavin sharply, correctly reading the pensive silence that had crept over her. “Come on, I’ll teleport us out of here – we need to go meet the other patients, and my pokémon.” He focused his eyesight on the wooded area on the banks of the Acacia River, still visible over the plumes of smoke issuing from the battlefield below.
Lisa took his sweaty palm; their fingers locked together tightly.
“Ready? Here we go,” said Gavin confidently.
Lisa closed her eyes. Gavin’s hand squeezed hers tighter still. A second passed, then another. Her feet were still firmly on the ground.
“Gavin?”
She opened her eyes, disenchanted: they were still surrounded by the wreckage of Gavin’s hospital room. It looked like the stocky Union agent sprawled beneath the bed was beginning to stir.
“Sorry, I was trying,” muttered Gavin breathlessly. “I think I needed to wait a bit longer to recharge my energy stores or something like that.”
“Well, recharge faster!” cried Lisa: the Union agent was shaking his head from side to side as if he had water in his ears.
“Okay, I think I’m ready!” cried Gavin, equally urgent. “Hold on, here goes!”
Lisa closed her eyes once more, readying herself for the queasy whirlwind of teleportation. She gripped Gavin’s right hand tighter, tighter, until, suddenly, her hand closed on nothing but thin air.
“Gavin – what the -?”
Her eyes flew open in fear. There was nobody standing beside her. She was stranded, still, in the hospital room.
“NO!” She couldn’t stop herself: how could this have happened – how could she be left behind?
The stocky Union agent pushed his hands against the carpet, lifting him off the ground.
“You won’t get out of here, girl!”
He got to his knees and, with a menacing glare toward Lisa, reached for his Stunner, still splayed on the floor beside him.
Lisa’s feet were carrying her before she had even thought about what she was doing: she leapt over Anthony’s body, glided over the mess of sawdust and darted smartly through the remains of the door. Reaching the corridor, she glanced left and right, hesitating for one infinitesimal moment before throwing her weight left and sprinting. The lift and stairs might have been dangerous, but they were a known escape route. She had no way of knowing whether or not there was a flight of stairs to her right – and if there weren’t, she would be cornered in an instant.
She ran on, past the nurses’ station, barely metres from the lift now. The Union agent bellowed at her from a long way behind, but she knew her headstart would make all the difference. Shuddering at the thought of what was in the lift, Lisa grabbed the silver handle of the stairwell beside the lift and, steeling herself, pulled it open wide.
“LEAVE ME ALONE!” screeched a female voice.
Lisa ducked in the nick of time as a bolt of blue light soared past her head and into the corridor. It took her a second to realise that neither the curse nor the jet of energy from the Stunner had been directed at her: Barely a foot in front of her, a blonde woman was clinging to the yellow handrail in an effort to stay on her feet, her back to Lisa; a black-clothed man stood on the landing, wielding an oversized stunner, the form of a steel-blue Machoke slumped at his feet.
Sure that the Union agent had not yet spied her behind the frame of the blonde woman, Lisa plunged her hand into the pocket of her jeans. The cool, rubbery surface of the Buzzball was as welcome and reliable as ever, and as Lisa extracted it, she felt herself transported back to the chaos of Mt Fairfax. She was back in war mode.
“ELECTRIFY!”
As she screamed the command, Lisa held the red orb over the shoulder of the blonde woman. A spear of white-hot electricity crackled through the air, splitting into two forks of energy: one struck a small ‘Mind Your Step’ sign on the wall, showering them all with orange sparks; the second fork of electricity found the man’s stunner. There was a loud fizz of electricity and an unexpected burst of smoke from the stunner; then the man’s body gave a wild jerk and he collapsed to the concrete with an unpleasant whack!
Lisa spun round in terror suddenly: she had forgotten the Union agent behind her. Her mouth fell open slightly as she spied his silent form sprawled on the floor ten metres down the corridor; his stunner had landed by the nurses’ station.
“That’s some skill, Lisa!”
Lisa glanced back into the stairwell. The blonde woman stood a short way behind her, a shaky grin on her pale face. Lisa felt a rush of joy: she recognised the woman from the makeshift ward at the Fairfax Inn. She was a Guard member.
“Christina,” she boomed, holding out a large, rough-skinned hand. Lisa took it weakly. Christina’s eyes scanned her briefly. “God, I’m glad you’re alright,” she said eventually, and it came with a heavy sigh. “I was fighting two of them at once, and I couldn’t keep track of everything – that bastard got past me on the second floor landing,” she added a little abashedly, jerking her head toward the unconscious form of the stocky Union agent. “But it looks like you took care of him anyway.”
Lisa shook her head gently. “I didn’t. I think that shot from the stunner that was meant for you hit him – I still had the door open …”
Christina placed a hand on Lisa’s right shoulder; Lisa was surprised that, for such a strong, well-built woman, she was shaking violently. “You did good with that jerk in the stairwell, at any rate,” she said seriously, poking her thumb behind her; the black-clothed man was still slumped beside the unconscious Machoke on the landing. “Your parents told me about this thing. What’s it called again?”
Lisa lifted the Buzzball up to show Christina, but she didn’t relinquish her hold on it.
“It’s called a Buzzball. It’s saved me and Gavin from strife more than once …” she explained.
Christina suddenly glanced around the corridor wildly. “That’s right! Gavin! Where is he?”
Lisa verged on explaining about the botched teleportation, but the thought that Christina might not know about Gavin’s powers bubbled in the back of her mind. “He was lucky, he got away in time, but I couldn’t – this guy got to me –” she said briefly.
“So Gavin is safe. Good. And again, I’m sorry I let this tool get past me, but once they took out my Machoke, they had an advantage,” she explained. Letting the door to the stairwell close behind her, Christina strode toward the unconscious Union agent, her gait heavy; she was quite solidly built. “Well, we won’t be letting him get away too easily.”
As Lisa watched, her heart rate slowing from the previous moment of conflict, Christina released an Ivysaur from a rather grubby red-and-white pokéball.
“Cuff him, Ally,” Christina commanded.
Ally the Ivysaur gave a menacing growl. With unexpected fluidity, two serpentine vines unfurled from the back of Ivysaur’s dark green bulb, twisting around the wrists of the Union agent and binding them tightly together. Ally gave a second growl and the vine whips broke off, leaving two long lengths of vine hanging from the man’s cuffed wrists.
“There’s another one, Anthony, in Room Seven,” Lisa chipped in.
“Ally, get to it! Room Seven, cuff him!” boomed Christina.
“Saur,” mumbled Ally, scampering down the corridor in the direction Lisa pointed.
Lisa waited for Christina to turn in her direction before she finally exploded.
“So, what’s going on? Are Mum and Dad okay? Did the whole Guard come here? Are the Union –”
“I’ll explain what I can, Lisa,” said Christina, in a level voice. “Your mum and dad drove here today, as planned, to pick you up. Two cars of back-up Guard members were to follow, in case the Union managed to get wind of what was happening.”
“And they did –” Lisa interjected uselessly.
“Things went wrong the moment your parents stepped out of the car,” continued Christina, as though she had not been interrupted. “Union agents – dressed in civilian clothes – launched an attack on them. Your parents seemed ready to defend themselves; I think maybe some of their pokémon were released before they exited the vehicle. In any case, they weren’t hit by the Union’s stunners – some kind of Reflect or Light Screen, maybe.”
Lisa’s heart rose slightly.
“That’s when we stepped in. There were six of us acting as back up. I lost track of everyone straight away: the Union had back-up too, of course. There were attacks and jets of light and even bullets flying everywhere – then someone set one of the cars on fire – it was hard to see anything for a minute there.”
“So it started in the carpark.”
“Right. I’m not sure who went into the building first, us or them. Might have been them. One jerk tried to pistol whip my sister Lauren – she’s in the Guard, too – so I shoved him then, when he didn’t fall over, I jumped on his back. I thought my weight would destabilise him – guess he was stronger than I thought. We ran through a heap of smoke … next thing I knew, we were in the reception area.”
“So much for the Army Reserve guarding all the hospitals in Johto,” said Lisa derisively.
Christina’s eyes grew dark. “That’s the scariest part about this,” she said slowly. “I saw them – saw them with my own eyes – the moment the fighting broke out. All six soldiers abandoned their posts at the doors. Ran inside.”
“WHAT?” cried Lisa.
Christina nodded soberly. “I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it myself. Either the Union agents have infiltrated the military somehow, or … well, I don’t know if there is an ‘or’. I think the reserve troops were sent into the hospital to clear out anyone who might get in the way of the Union. You know, get rid of the nurses and doctors and any other staff, make it easy to get to the patients – to get to you, Lisa.”
This was strangely not the biggest worry on Lisa’s mind. “But if those troops were acting on Union orders – then the other soldiers, the other hospitals – everywhere in Johto –”
“I know,” Christina bit her lip. “But we can’t afford to think of that now, or we’ll go crazy, absolutely crazy.” There was a light scampering of feet: Ally had returned from Gavin’s room sporting a proud grin. “Well done, Ally. Here,” Christina dug a hand into the pocket of her stonewashed jeans and threw a small, brown pellet at Ally, who chomped it up at once.
Lisa shot a questioning look at Christina. “So – what do we do now?”
Christina placed a hand on the silver door handle of the stairwell and opened it; at once, the sounds of battle below became more audible.
“The most important thing is that the Union don’t get their hands on you,” she said firmly. “Not only would we lose you, which would be terrible enough, but the Union would then practically have free access to the Sepulchre of Suicune. Return, Machoke,” she added swiftly, holding out a Great Ball; the bulky form of Machoke dissolved in a blast of translucent red.
“So – I wait here?”
Christina hesitated, her foot on the first step.
“I think that’s the best move we can make. I’ll clear the stairwell, and then you can follow at a safe distance. Hopefully everyone’s still out in the carpark – the reception area should be relatively clear by now.”
With a curt nod to Lisa and a sharp call to Ally to follow, Christina trudged heavily down the first flight of stairs, taking care to step hard on the unconscious Union agent’s back. Lisa hung back at the very top, one hand on the yellow metal handrail, the other firmly clasping the Buzzball. Christina’s footsteps echoed as she disappeared from sight. Lisa tried to listen for signs of nearby battle: certainly, there was audible chaos in the carpark, but it sounded markedly quieter in the hospital building now.
After two minutes, Christina called, “Alright, Lisa, it’s safe all the way. Come down to the landing right before the ground floor.”
Lisa scurried down the stairs two at a time: somehow the thought of the stocky Union agent waking up and attacking her from behind was scarier than the thought of full-on battle. Along the way, she stepped over three Union agents, their hands all bound by Ally’s vines, as well as two unconscious Arbok and a motionless Magmar.
Christina was crouching by the door, Ally at her heels.
“It sounds silent out there, Lisa,” she said confidently. “I’m going to go out and scope things out. When and if – AND ONLY IF – I give you the all-clear, you follow me closely, alright?”
“Okay, Christina,” replied Lisa, grasping the Buzzball and retreating a few steps.
Christina winked boldly at her before apparently steeling herself, and pushing the door wide open.
Lisa saw it happen: the flash of metal, the explosion of blue light. The burst of razor leaves scorched by a roar of vermilion flames. Christina’s scream.
“NO!” Lisa roared. Not again, it couldn’t be – they’d been so close – it had been silent in the reception area!
She froze for just one second, then tried to run away without turning around; her heel caught the concrete step behind her and, with a sickening realisation following her all the way, Lisa fell up the stairs, the Buzzball spinning from her grip as her hand collided with the railing. Her backpack cushioned her fall, but it was a hollow win:
Two men and a Charmeleon stood in the open doorway, exultant. Lisa could see an open, fiery mouth, a Stunner and a sleek black pistol all aimed directly at her. Despair flooded her veins. There was no escape.
“Fight’s over, bitch,” said the taller of the Union agents. “Joseph Sterling’s gonna be very happy with us.”
Lisa gaped at the pistol in his hand, cocked and ready.
But instead the shorter agent, the one with his stunner pointed at Lisa’s heart, pulled his trigger. And there was no mistaking it this time: no camera, no luck, no defence; Lisa saw the cobalt beam, felt the energy surge through her, heard the Union agent’s triumphant exclamation chase her into blackness:
“Gotcha!”
Originally Posted by mr_pikachu
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