#rustboro

There was a rotting bridge over a choked lake, spongy under her feet. It deadened the sound of her footsteps, but held firm.

The drones moved on ahead, reaching the edge of the city. One waited for her there while the others spread out into the buildings.

“So what, you want a running commentary on this or just-” Aurora left the bridge and found an old overgrown path at her feet; paving slabs, cracked and worn down by the weather.

“Just whatever you think the drones might miss.” Winona again. Maxie was probably more focused on something else; this was probably not the highlight of his day, even if he was the reason they were here and she had eyes on her.

Aurora narrowed her eye and nodded. “Alright.”

There was a strange sort of pressure in the air, and it became stronger as she walked closer to the city. It raised the hairs on her arms, almost making her shiver.

“Well, I can definitely feel something. Must be that compulsion-whatsit you were telling us about. The Zombie Signal.” She snorted. “Finally, the apocalypse that films promised us.”

She passed an overgrown rusting sign that welcomed her to “Rustboro, the bedrock of learning”, and stopped at the first line of buildings.

They were ruinous lumps, jagged walls and caved in ceilings. Some of the windows still had shards of glass that glinted in the late afternoon sunlight.

“Don’t this just paint the prettiest of pictures?”

The trees were bowed and sickly under their own weight, strangled with ivy that was slowly but surely creeping over everything. The road was laddered with a patchwork of vines and cracks and weeds through all the potholes and splits caused by no one being around to fix them.

The place was silent. There were no people, there wasn’t any background chatter from fitful tech and rampaging hordes. It was beautiful.

There was water dripping through some of the buildings, from the last rainfall. A few puddles on ground before her, and the ground was damp. Maybe it had only just stopped raining before they arrived... which was a shame, she could’ve been in and out far quicker in the rain, and maybe she wouldn’t have had the drones following after her.

Shafts of sunlight through the still-grey clouds gleamed against the damp buildings, against shards of glass scattered across the ground. A limp banner flapped pathetically in the tiniest gust of breeze; it was threadbare and bleached almost white, but Aurora could just about make out the outlines of some words still there; “Cure your empathy and our scales”.

She shook her head. “Guessing they didn’t agree with Larousse here.”

“No,” Maxie said in her ear, and Aurora flinched. “There were riots and protest marches in the days leading up to it.”

“Fuck, could you... not.” *She shook her head. “That was-”

One of the drones swooped past, and she followed it with her eyes.

“How good are those cameras?” It reminded her of... of happier times.

Of training, of a community that had delighted in this stranger fuckery that they’d grown up in and with.

It reminded her of her sister, she realised, and bit back the pang of sorrow.

“They’re the best in the business,” Maxie said. “High definition, sensory tracking and data feedback.”

“Cool.” Aurora nodded and walked further down the street. “And - the recording, it’s saved? Like, I could access a copy after?” Ricochet had brought it back, too. Calling her Dawn like that, like nothing had changed and she was still... who she had been.

“I didn’t think you were interested in the research.” Maxie sounded mystified, even to someone who didn’t know him well.

“Oh, well-” Aurora shook her head and beckoned a camera closer. “I’m not, really, but...”

The drone came closer in, within arm’s reach.

“Make sure it gets my good side, that’s all.” If she had to be filmed for this, for posterity or whatever, then...

It swivelled, pointing its lens at her; she saw it refocus and tilted her head half away, tucking her hair back a little.

Aurora saluted; a peace sign by her right temple, the side the droid was on. “Hello again! It’s been a hot minute since one of my videos, hasn’t it?” She might as well have some fun with it.

“What are you-”

“That’s right, it’s Dawn of a New Hope back at it again!” She grinned, only slightly forced. “Today we’ve gone a bit further from home, and now we’re by Rustboro, in Hoenn.” She grabbed the droid and turned it to pan the camera over Rustboro. “No one’s been through here and survived, so – hey!” She released the drone as it zapped her with a small shock.

“Don’t touch the equipment,” Maxie said.

“Fine.” Aurora waved her fingers to cool them off. “I’ve been outfitted by Maxie – formerly of Team Magma – with new gear for a fact finding mission as I do the job I was born for.” She swept her hair back, showing the ear piece she was wearing. “He’s in my head. Just can’t get rid of him.”

“Get on with it,” he sighed.

“Alright.” Aurora rolled her eyes. “Let’s go.” She started walking. “Now, obviously Time Breaker isn’t with me today – in fact, shit went horribly wrong the last time we were together.” She turned her head to give the camera the merest flash of her scale-plated skull and pink eye. “So it’s really quite nice of Maxie to lend us the gear to make this a video for the ages.”

Someone snorted over the earpiece, but she didn’t think it was Maxie.

“Five cameras mean angles we could only dream of when it was just the two of us and a handheld camcorder, but we did the best we could. This is just the glow up we deserved.”

Her footsteps echoed amongst the buildings; she was alone. Couldn’t even hear anything but leaves rustling and the water.

“Are you sure there are things in here? Because currently this is a walk through the apocalypse we were all expecting. Not the one we all know and... maybe love is the wrong word. Are we still resigned to it? I mean it’s here, we can’t change that, but like damn if we could choose, am I right?” She waved a hand.

There was only one drone still beside her; the others had buzzed off who knows where.

“Maybe there are ghosts. Like – people ghosts. Dead ghosts. Not the pokemon kind that will probably try to kill me because they’re working for the dread lord Giratina.” She was rambling, she was aware, but whatever. It felt good to talk about something from her old life, without being questioned about it, without having to expand and actually be emotionally invested in it. “Hey, you think he’s like the dread pirate Roberts? Constantly changing faces when he gets bored, so he can retire and someone else can take over? That would be awkward.” She wrinkled her nose and laughed. “Picture; we get to the stronghold, and bust in all righteous like to avenge the world and everyone we’ve lost, only it’s not even Giratina anymore. It’s some... some bitchass Darkrai that's sitting there running the show now, pretending to have control over this whole mess.” She slowed down walking along the road. “This is kinda pretty, though.” She looked around again. “In a reclamation kinda way.”

The buildings were wearing down, tired by the weather and the plants that had grown wild from the sidewalks, from one people had left behind when they’d ran. A few trees were trying to grow, but they were shrunken and scraggly; this was a place of creeping vines and sickly bushes and weeds. Brightly coloured weed flowers, everywhere.

“Rin would’ve liked this,” Aurora said softly. “Not that they’d’ve been able to come in, but... they would’ve liked this.” She crouched to study a flower that had broken through the tarmac. “I think.”

Its stem was oddly bulbous, swollen like a dislocated joint, a bruised and inflamed muscle. The leaves were transparently thin and brown, and Aurora could see the veins pulsing weakly.

“Man, these plants are fucked.” She straightened up, brushing her hands down her loose trousers. “Gonna need some intense gardening here. Or maybe leave it to the wilds, I don’t know. I reckon we can cope without this town. What was it, like a uni and a gym?” She laughed and forced a grin. “Who needs those?”

The grass and weeds were muffling her footsteps as they got thicker, the ground becoming a green carpet the further in she walked.

“I am vibing with this place,” she remarked to the nearest drone. “This is the apocalypse aesthetic I always wanted. Humanity gone, the world left for those that survived and came after and – what the fuck is that?” She threw herself sideways, folding the distance between her and a wall, pressing her back into it and freezing.

The drones followed her and she waved a hand at them to be quiet, to get out of sight.

Something like a beedrill but banded oil-slick black and gold came around the corner, buzzing in a whine that set Aurora’s teeth on edge the nearer it got.

But she waited, watching it until it was gone from eyesight, if not hearing.

“Well,” she murmured. “They look friendly.”

“I did warn you,” Maxie said. “You’re inside their territory now.”

“I know. Nice of you to warn me it was coming.” Aurora got to her feet. “They’ll make this interesting, anyway.”

“It’s not meant to be interesting.”

“Isn’t it? Research? For you – and here I thought it was because it interested you what I could do-”

“Just - do what you went there to do,” Maxie said, sounding tired.

Aurora struggled back to standing, hand on the wall beside her. “Fine.”

There were fragile remains of a poster on the wall she’d been leaning against; the words were partially faded or missing, but there was enough to guess at.

“They really didn’t like Larousse, huh?” Aurora traced the letters.

Maxie didn’t reply.

“Alright, let’s get on with this.” Aurora tapped the wall. “I’ve got a ‘job’ to do, after all.” She air-quoted, rolling her eyes.

She walked back out onto the street, and looked around at the crumbling buildings.

“You know, having a prosthetic – or being amputated, missing a leg, whatever – is annoying right now. Don’t have the right one for climbing.” She started walking. “It’d be good to be up high in all this.”

“I’ve got the high view for you, boss,” Pink said.

“Oh, didn’t know you could join us.” Aurora blinked.

“Yeah, well-”

“Hold that thought.” Aurora lifted a finger, tilting her head. “What do we actually know about these bugs?”

Now that she knew what she was listening for, she could hear buzzing coming closer.

“There’s one high on your left,” Pink replied.

“Oh, I know, I can just about hear it.” Was this all the others could ever hear? With the earpiece in, she couldn’t flex her hearing. Couldn’t work out exactly where the thing was, how far away it was. Awkward. “Anything else?”

“Not much,” Maxie said, sounding faintly annoyed. “They don’t leave the zone, so no one’s ever captured one. Not so much as a corpse.”

“Alright.” Aurora started to grin, slowing her walk and unsheathing one of her sickles. “Can I have multiple angles on this? It’s gonna be sick as hell.”

“You realise that thing’s spotted you and it’s coming, right?” Pink asked. “No - Zlata, she’s on her own, there’s no weapons on those drones.”

“Oh, I know.” Aurora was still grinning. “I want a slow-mo replay of this in my copy, alright?”

“Replay - what?”

Aurora leapt, using her prosthetic for extra bounce, curving to the side and around; the bug came diving in for where she had been and missed.

Aurora slammed her sickle into its carapace and landed on her good leg, knocking the bug into the ground.

It had time for half a panicked warning buzz as Aurora dropped to her knee on top of its abdomen and broke its neck with her hands.

“Remind me on the way back and I’ll pick it up for you.” She reached for her sickle.

“That was unnecessarily showy,” Maxie said. “Don’t you have a gun?”

“And bring them all down on me at once? Haven’t you ever tried to do stealth mode?” Aurora shook her head. “For shame.” She frowned, tugging at her sickle, finding it hard to dislodge.

One harder tug got it out, but she overbalanced and sprawled sideways onto the cracked ground.

“Huh.” She lay there for a moment, until one of the drones came in closer. “I’m fine, I’m just-” She rolled over, and came face to face with the corpse. “Oh fuck-” She recoiled, folding the street at her back until she came up against a wall. “That was- nope. Nope. Nopity fucking nope.”

The drone dropped down into the space she’d just been occupying.

“Well,” Maxie said.

“That’s gross,” Pink said.

Aurora got back on her feet and walked gingerly back across to it. She poked at it with her prosthetic, rolling it over onto its back.

A mostly-human face stared sightlessly into the sky. The eyes were inky-black and split into hexagons, like oversized bug eyes. Its mouth was slack, teeth largely gone; the few that were left were horribly pointed and jagged. Down into the body of the beast, Aurora could see faded scraps of a shirt caught in the cracks of the carapace, and strips of scarred skin like the carapace had been welded forcibly onto it. The blood leaking out of it and collecting thick on the pavement was red, vivid and wrong looking.

“I guess that’s what happened to the ones left behind.” *Aurora shook herself and stepped away.

The drone lifted away.

“There’s nothing else near you,” Maxie said. “Keep moving.”

Aurora nodded and sheathed her sickle. “So that was- creepy. Probably not PG.” She flicked a glance at the camera. “Sorry, I’ve just put our age rating way up.”

“I’ll be sure to bear that in mind,” Maxie replied.

Aurora grinned. “Maybe edit that part out of my copy or something. I mean leave the sweet moves – gosh I hope you got the angles right on that – but uh. Keep the horrific mess out of sight of our viewers.”

Maxie grunted.

“Is that an acknowledgement? I’m gonna assume you’re going to do that for me.” Aurora smiled sweetly at the nearest drone. “Thanks, you’re a gem.”

As she walked on – past the trainer’s mart, the pokecentre, what looked like a school – the bugs came more frequently, as if alerted to the death of one of them.

Aurora slipped inside the school to hide from a group of four, and crept through one of the classrooms, just under the line of the windows. “I don’t really want to call more of them down right now,” she whispered. “Because that’s not how we stealth, and you know. Gotta save everything for the boss battle, right?”

The chairs were clattered over the floor, dust and glass and torn pages from books littered amongst them. But the tables had barely moved.

On the whiteboard at the end of the room, a lesson was half written out. Aurora squinted at the board, deciphering the worn text. A lesson on type advantages and disadvantages, the last sentence cut off in the middle of a word.

“Shit,” she whispered.

Standing, she found the marker dropped on the ground by the teacher’s desk. A cup was sitting there, moss growing out of the mould in it, one solitary flower bobbing in the faint breeze coming in through the empty windows.

She tossed the marker lightly in her hand and studied the board. The words already written there weren’t going to come off easily; they had been there too long.

Aurora rolled the board up to find a blank space and uncapped the pen, testing it against a corner of it by writing ‘UwU’.

Then, across the centre of the board, she wrote ‘No mourners. No funerals.’ before stepping back.

She tucked the pen into her back pocket and scrambled out of the window.

“What was that in aid of?” Maxie asked.

“It’s not like anyone remembers who was here, right? There were kids in that class,” Aurora replied, walking away from the building. “And now they aren’t.”

She paused and looked around. This street is not the one she’d started on; these are all houses, overgrown sickly gardens.

“This way,” Maxie said, and the drone flew ahead of her.

Aurora jogged to keep up with it, and it led her back around onto a main street, between two houses and opposite an old building that looked like it had been the gym. It was rough rock – or it had been, before the intervening years had smoothed it out, taken the harshness away from it and let twisted plants grow as they willed.

“On your left,” Pink warned.

A bug hovered in front of it, in the middle of the street.

“I see it.” Aurora unclipped one of her sickles and ran towards it.

It heard her coming and turned, wings buzzing against its back, and charged back at her.

Aurora held up her free arm to deflect its snapping jaws – they latched around her leather gauntlet – and she twisted it sideways, smashing her sickle into its neck. “They all turned out like this?”

It dropped to the ground, yanking her sickle out of her hand.

“Guess it’s thematic.” Aurora winced at its face – bug eyes too big for its skin, the skull twisted out of shape – and pulled her sickle free.

“Another-”

She turned and threw her sickle before Pink could finish warning her, and it lodged in the carapace of one diving down from the roof.

The bug lurched and she ran to meet it, pulling her other sickle out.

She spun on her foot as she leapt the last distance, bringing her sickle down into its head, smashing it into the pavement.

“If I had been made to turn into a creepy frankenstein bug, I simply would not have. Rip to these other people, but I’m different,” Aurora said, yanking her sickle free of its carapace. She had to hold it down with her other hand to make sure they disengaged properly.

This one only had one eye – the other was missing, a gaping hole in its head – slowly splitting into its composite lenses. They didn’t get any less creepy, but... maybe she was getting used to them. Or at least – getting better at moving on. They had vaguely human faces. The distortion turned people into monsters, that was what it did.

That’s all these were now.

There was bloody gunk on her hand; she wiped it down the side of her trousers, wrinkling her nose in disgust.

“You quite literally are,” Maxie said, one of the drones swooping down to circle Aurora, scanning her from head to toe. “With your abilities, whatever exudes the mind control can’t affect you. Even if you had been here when it first started, you wouldn’t have-”

Aurora sighed, rolling her eyes even as she fought to conceal a grin. “That’s not what I meant, but fine. Thanks.”

The hairs on her arms were rising; the pervasive tugging feeling had been getting slowly stronger but now, in the street in front of the gym, it was stronger than ever.

Aurora turned to see a tall building rising above the others. “The portal’s by that, isn’t it?”

It was diagonal from the gym, across the main road that ran through Rustboro, and behind another street of flats.

“I have one of the drones on it,” Maxie said. “That’s where you need to go.”

Aurora nodded. “Where are the other three?”

“One’s got a track on the body you’re bringing back, the other two are running grids.”

“Cool.” Aurora crossed the street and shouldered her way passed a door hanging awkward in its frame.

The stairwell was empty, clear of even the debris of lives lived in this block of flats. No bikes, no toys. It was... strange.

Aurora climbed up to the top and broke through the maintenance door and onto the roof.

There was something... odd on the wind. A kind of groaning, maybe?

Aurora walked across the roof towards the site of the portal, and found herself overlooking a square filled with bodies. “That’s...”

The portal was just beyond them, surrounded by them like a carpet.

Aurora squinted at them. “Finally.”

“You did take your time getting in this far,” Maxie said, agreeing.

“No, I mean – Zombies? In our apocalypse? More likely than you think,” Aurora said, peering down at them.

The closer the bodies were to the portal, the more bug-like defender they were. Then they rose up, sped off into the city, and the huddled masses shuffled a step closer, like they had to be beside it to fully change.

And there was a low-level moaning coming from it all, rising up into the air. Constant groaning.

“Nice.”

The sun was setting, out to her left, and the clouds had drawn in. The square – it was fenced in, the ruin of the tall building towering above it on the far side to Aurora, the sea creeping close on the left and a thin, buckled fence on the right – had the bare struts of street lamps around it, but they were broken.

The sea was burnt red and slapping sickly at the line of grass that was all that stood between it and the city. Probably just the sun turning it that colour. It gleamed against the buildings as well, turning everything into dramatic shadows and orange hues.

“Well.” Aurora stood on the roof, and wished for some sort of breeze. She might not have been wearing anything that would flap aesthetically enough, but it could at least lift her hair for her.

She tied her hair back, quickly braiding it close to her skull and out of the way, making a disgusted face as she realised she’d just smeared the bloody gunk through it from her hands.

There was one drone beside her, hovering just out of reach beyond her shoulder. The other four were tracing the square, because the bug-guardian-whatevers didn’t take any notice of them.

The portal itself reached to the second floor of the building behind it, and seemed to be rooted into the ground somehow.

“If you’re quite ready?” Maxie asked.

“Alright.” Aurora unclipped her gun and flicked the safety off.

There were guardian-bugs flitting back and forth over the groaning mass, like they were checking on their status. A lot of them.

“What d’you reckon. Six bullets, I can take out... at least six of them from here, then I’m betting maybe ten more?”

“This isn’t about your kill count,” Pink said.

“What happened to this being a stealth mission?”

“It’s the boss battle. They’re never stealthy.” Aurora rolled her eyes, sighted, and shot.

She was on the move before the bullet hit – the bug falling into the mess of zombie corpses below it, the other bugs turning to react – and shot again from a different spot of the roof, then again and again and again until her bullets ran out.

Aurora grinned and clipped her gun back into its holster. She was standing at the edge of the building, the sea a matter of five feet away from her. Nothing.

It lapped at the land, steady and persistently chipping away at it.

The bugs were massing towards her.

She unclipped both her sickles, took a step back, and launched herself forward into a two-step leap out over the square.

The sea surged up. The sunlight refracted through it as it spread and thinned, reaching upwards far beyond where the waves could normally reach.

Aurora smashed through one bug and lashed out at another as it got close, spraying its gunky blood everywhere as she yanked her sickle back.

The water cut through one on her left and caught her fall, hardening to crystalline wings on her struts.

She straightened out and swooped a circle about the square, doubling back into the mass of bugs following her and wreaking a terrible sort of massacre before they could retaliate.

Aurora was grinning as their blood spattered across her face, her gauntlets, her arms. She brought her legs up and kicked her prosthetic back into one as it came up under her, the crunch of its carapace hugely satisfying.

She was doing something, finally, something useful, something more than waiting. And oh, it felt good.

The groaning was thinning out, more of the bugs rising to attack and defend.

Aurora trimmed her wings, dropped, and sped for the portal.

Bugs crashed into each other behind her; they could be fast, but they gave up mobility for speed. What a trade-off.

“Look out-!” Someone – was that Zlata? - yelled over her earpiece, and Aurora glanced down to see one of the zombies – not quite a bug, not yet – reach up and grab her leg.

She was jerked to a halt even as it stumbled forward after her, and dropped to the ground.

Her wings shattered against the ground and her armour swept across her body as she was swarmed and pulled under.

She headbutted one in front of her and wrenched one hand free, still holding tight to her sickle, and slashed it about, cutting them back to pieces.

Her sickles transmuted to chakrams and she brought her free hand across and down against the other, still trapped, and a shockwave rang out.

The zombies swarming her were knocked back in a clear radius about her.

Aurora got back to her feet, shaky, fully armoured. “Well.”

The portal was at her back.

“Less showboating, boss,” Pink said, almost sounding bored. “There’s a job, remember?”

“I remember.” Aurora jumped, threw one of her chakrams out to spin around the portal, and landed on it when it came back around to her side.

She leapt from it to the building behind it, landing on a first floor window ledge. Turning, she eyed the portal and flipped her remaining chakram in her hand. She was farther from the water now; she wouldn’t be getting her wings back. She was still below the height of the portal, but-

Aurora leapt again and landed on her chakram as it swung around again, higher, and sprang off it, raising her chakram above her head.

The other dropped back down – she heard it clatter onto the ground – and as the one in her hands caught on the tip of the portal, she swung herself back and flipped up to stand on the top of it.

“All those gymnast lessons really paying off now.” She paced around the chakram as it grew wider, flexing her fingers as the armour around them grew into sharp points, like needles.

“Remember kids,” she said, stretching up on her toes, “Don’t do this at home.” Then she dropped down and stabbed her fingers into the air on either side of the portal, forcing it closed.

Her momentum pulled her downwards, the portal stitching shut under her fingers as she flicked them in and out like she was sewing.

The chakram remaining above her expanded again and lowered over her and the portal, up and down and keeping its guardians back until she hit the ground.

Turning, she yanked one hand free and picked up the chakram lying on the ground, ready to defend herself.

But the portal was closed and the bugs had dropped. The zombies had quietened.