Celebi Like Them (16)

It didn't take long to gather everyone together. Sickly Astrid and young Manny were both asleep, so not hard to carry into a clearing surrounded by false trees.

Quinn floated in the center of their makeshift circle, above Mythical Pokémon with expressions ranging from hope to skepticism. Aster lay curled against her mother, her breathing shallow but steadier than before. Manny slept peacefully in Sable's arms, oblivious to the tension surrounding them.

"Everyone ready?" Quinn asked, his voice steadier than he felt. "Once we start..."

"They've kept us prisoner long enough," Sable thought to them. "Time to go."

Cedrin fought his way into the air, or tried. His damaged wings couldn't get him all the way up, so Quinn took over, helping him into the air. "How did you do it last time?"

Vitari joined them in the air. Her heat was different now, burning hotter yet somehow less threatening than before. She must've wanted to hurt them. Now her heat protected them. "Say the word and I'll give you what I've got. Probably less than you're expecting. But if it tilts our odds a little, it's worth a shot."

Quinn closed his eyes, recalling his first trip through time. The music, the desperate surge of power before Team Plasma could start shooting. That had been four of them, and they'd barely made it. Now he needed to carry eight.

He relaxed his mind, trying to feel the flow of time around them. There was another direction of movement, somehow parallel yet unreachable by any conventional travel. Except for him. His thoughts slipped forward, and he saw.

He was straining in the center of the circle, focused on that melody that first transformed him, energy crackling around his small body. Chunks of nearby plastic plants ripped away and melted, or rapidly aged away to nothing. But no matter how hard he focused, his group didn't move. Alarms blared, and silver-vested Mew poured into the room from above. He heard Aria screaming as they took Aster away. Watched Sable fighting desperately until three guards pinned him to the floor.

He tried something different, and watched a different future. With Vitari and Cedrin together, Quinn managed to create a space-time distortion, a brief bubble of light that grew large enough to swallow them. Then the first Mew arrived, and it collapsed around them, transforming the hospital into a crater of molten rock. At least, he had the satisfaction of taking some of those awful guards with him.

Quinn gasped as he snapped back to the present, his tiny body trembling with the pain of an explosion that hadn't happened. He looked again, and again, and again. He sagged lower in the air with each new idea he tried, and each new failure.

"What's wrong?" Aria asked, concern in her melodic voice. "Is there anything we can do to help?"

"I'm looking forward at each option we try," Quinn admitted. "Looking for one that gets us out."

"We can do that?" Cedrin tilted his head sideways, antennae lifting off his sprout-like head. "I always thought I was just... imagining."

Vitari's tails twitched impatiently. "When exactly are we starting this magical time journey?" She floated closer, heat radiating from her small form. "You asked for my help. I'm ready to see if Celebi will explode from too much power."

Quinn shook his head, still confused by the vivid futures he'd glimpsed. "It's not that simple. It's not just voltage. No matter how much you share with us, we're... ungrounded." He took her hand, seized everything he could, and tried again. That time, he jumped forward alone, leaving the others to die. Closer, but not good enough.

Quinn stared at the fake plants around them, glittering in the false moonlight shining down from overhead. The plastic trees and cloth flowers made for convincing enough imitations in false daylight. But the night lights made the lie too obvious. They reflected, obvious for the toys they were.

"Wait!" His antennae perked up with excitement. "The last time I jumped through time, I was outside the collider. University had the grounds decorated with all kinds of plants. Trees, bushes, grass. When we jumped, I think all those plants... helped. Somehow." All the old legends said Celebi was the Voice of the Forest. Maybe there were more reasons than its typing for that.

He gestured at their surroundings. "When they first caught me, the Mew seemed afraid I would use my powers. Some of them knew what I could do. How could they ever hold Celebi who can travel through time, unless—"

"Our powers don't work!" Cedrin's wings sped up, his face lighting with sudden excitement. "There's nothing down here! Nothing in the temporal mechanics lab either. Maybe I'm not broken!"

Quinn floated closer to him, taking his hands and holding on tight. "You know how I said you were just going to watch?" At the Pokémon's nod, Quinn continued. "I was wrong. I need you to do what you did for Aster earlier—but more. Don't make one flower. Go completely nuts. Rip through the walls, tear up the ground, plant a redwood in this stupid hospital! Grow so much here that the whole prison falls apart!"

The smaller Celebi's initial excitement faded quickly. His antennae drooped. "I'm too weak. Growing just one flower was so hard, I thought I was gonna die. I don't think I can make enough to matter."

He was probably right. The Celebi was wilted and shriveled from his long time in the subterranean prison. But they did have a source of incredible energy nearby! Quinn turned toward Vitari. "Your mutation gives you power to share. So share it with Cedrin. Don't let him explode—but working together, help explode this prison. Help him grow instead of burn."

Vitari snorted, sending a little wisp of smoke up into the air. "If he blows up, it's your fault. I'm only doing this because you told me. You sure you can handle it, Cedrin?"

The Celebi faced her, expression hardening. "I wanna see the sun again."

She shrugged. "Guess we're committed. If I'm going to die down here, I might as well make a headache for the Admiralty in the process." A fierce grin spread across the bunny's face. "I never had the chance to see how far this mutation goes. Time to find out."

She extended both her tiny paws. "Just don't expect me to know how to do the time travel stuff."

Heat radiated from Vitari, washing over them in a sudden flood of white. It swept across Cedrin first, yet somehow didn't burn him. His expression hardened, both eyes swallowed with white light. The sickly Celebi gasped, his body straightening as energy coursed through him. His antennae perked up, his wings moved more vigorously, and the droop in his posture vanished.

"I can feel it!" he exclaimed, looking down. "What I should've. What it would be like to be up in the sun!"

Cedrin descended to the floor, placing his small hands against the fake grass. The little Celebi closed his eyes in concentration.

A tiny green shoot emerged from beneath Cedrin's palm, then another and another. The synthetic flooring cracked as real grass pushed through, spreading outward in an expanding circle of vibrant green. Huge sheets of false grass came up, tossed aside by larger bushes and shrubs. Vines crept up plastic trees, weighing them to the floor. Real ones grew up all around them, filling the clearing.

"Arceus, he's doing it—" Aria whispered, clutching Aster closer as roots cracked through the floor beneath them. Saplings erupted through the tiles, stretching upward at impossible speed. Flowers bloomed in vivid bursts of color—not just Gracidea, their scents filling the sterile air with perfume.

Sable laughed energetically, watching a real trunk smash into the ceiling and send the tiles of the sky-screen crashing down nearby. "The kitten has teeth!"

Walls began to crack as roots forced their way through. The fake scenery screens flickered and died as vines wrapped around them, pulling them from their mountings. Water pipes burst, creating streams that flowed across the newly formed forest floor.

Then the alarms began.

Harsh red lights pulsed through the growing foliage as a klaxon wailed. A harsh, mechanical voice shouted about containment failure.

"They're coming," Sable warned, soothing the baby Pokémon in his arms. "Soon they'll flood this place with gas. Maybe lethal, maybe not. After that, marines."

"You said you could take us forward in time!" Vitari hissed, her body heat rising. "Now's your chance."

Quinn's heart hammered. Through his telepathic senses, he felt the Mew guards rushing toward them, their minds focused with cold determination. Not containment—it was execution.

"I don't know if I can—"

Vitari cut him off, grabbing his arm with her tiny paw. "Here!"

A surge of energy flooded into his body. It felt like every energy drink he'd ever tasted, every drop of excitement and possibility and movement all concentrated into one moment. A raw current of possibility, making his antennae crackle with static. Though they were incredibly rare Pokémon, even Quinn knew the stories about them: they could not lose a battle once they joined it. Their allies would always triumph.

Without meaning to, his perception shot forward. Time unspooled before him, an equation solving itself in his mind.

He saw the door burst open. Mew in silver vests pouring in, faces set in grim purpose. No words, no warnings—just the silent lifting of metallic devices. Gas hissed into the room.

Cedrin fell first, his newly grown plants withering around him. The small Celebi collapsed face-down, twitching once before going still, the glow in his wings extinguished forever. Aria screamed, clutching Aster to her chest. Sable fought the longest, shadows rippling around him until three guards pinned him down with strange crystal devices that dissolved the gaseous essence of his body.

Quinn tried to flee, only to be caught in a net of psychic energy that ripped him to tiny pieces.

"No!" he gasped, wrenching his consciousness back to the present. The door hadn't opened yet. But if he couldn't make his powers work a second time, all these innocent Pokémon would die.

The mathematics of his research, the equations he'd spent years solving—they hadn't been about tachyons at all. They'd been about this. He didn't have to "feel" how his powers worked, or intuit them in some mystical training montage. He had already studied.

"Everyone together!" Quinn shouted, extending his arms. "As close together as you can!"

On the ceiling above, the door to the visitor's center started retracting. Pokémon outlines waited within, weapons raised.

"I trained for this before I knew it existed," he whispered. Then something else: music. He had heard it twice now, once deep inside a particle collider, and once when he made another desperate jump away from danger. Only this time, he knew what it meant.

The living forest Cedrin had created pulsed with light, flowing into Quinn like electricity through a superconductor. He expanded the equation, encompassing a bubble of space just large enough to for the seven frightened Pokémon surrounding him.

Silver-clad guards burst through the opening, spraying their deadly gas into the containment hospital.

They were too late.

The world around them dissolved into tangled spirals of light. Unlike Quinn's first journey through time, this one wasn't chaotic and desperate. With Vitari's power surging through him, he navigated the currents of time with precision, translating his years of study into instinct.

Through this kaleidoscopic expanse, massive shapes moved. Ancient beings of incomprehensible power, existing beyond the constraints of linear time. Quinn sensed their awareness turning toward the small group of travelers—curious, perhaps concerned.

One immense presence dominated all others. A vast, majestic entity that seemed wrapped in the threads of possibility, each one entangled in its alien body. Midnight blue and gleaming silver, with eyes that contained the birth and death of universes.

Dialga.

The temporal deity didn't speak. It didn't need to. Its attention halted their forward momentum, suspending them in the timeless void.

Images flooded Quinn's mind. A barren landscape. Crumbling buildings. Ash drifting through lifeless air. The entire world, scorched beyond recognition. No life of any kind remained, just endless, desolate emptiness.

The vision faded, leaving him trembling in the void.

How could he speak to this being, demand an explanation? If he drew its eyes too sharply, would it wipe them away? It must be so easy for this being, so much larger as to be incomprehensible to him...

But no, Dialga was already gone, leaving no trace that it had ever been there. None of the others reacted, or even seemed to be aware of what happened. Except one.

"We can't go back to your time," Cedrin thought, pained and halting. "We caused that. We have to change it."

The tiny Celebi was right. Quinn focused, looking back into the flow of linear time. Instead of casting his attention far ahead, he focused on the future.

"Hold on!"

Reality crashed back around them. Quinn landed, his wings sagging and his breathing heavy. He felt dried, dead plants, and a stone floor beneath them.

"Where are we?" Aria whispered.

"When," Cedrin corrected. "Dunno. A few centuries? Maybe a little more."

Quinn couldn't answer. His mind still reeled from Dialga's warning. Between the jump forward and contact with such an incredible mind, his thoughts began to drift. "Someone find... Avery—"

Merciful unconsciousness took him.