“Just FYI, your illusion fell off as soon as you fell asleep,” says Richie.

“Huh.”

Richie’s driving today, which leaves me free to experiment with my new abilities. So far, I’ve only been able to spin up convincing illusions on 2D surfaces.

I have several pictures arrayed in front of me: printouts of photographs taken throughout my years of high school and college. Some show me at school events, others show me camping with my family (and occasionally Richie.) In each picture, I stand as straight as I can manage, hands and cane hidden behind my back.

Which is frustrating, because right now I’m trying to recreate my hands.

I can see why artists always complain about drawing them. I’m having a devil of the time crafting realistic illusions.

There’s a dull roaring behind us as a low-slung motorcycle speeds past us to our left. Then it seems to change its mind, brake light flashing as it slows down to match our speed.

On it is a small figure, wearing an fluttery white dress and a motorcycle helmet. I have to do a double take before realizing she’s not a human, but a Kirlia.

The Kirlia pulls out some sort of flyer, waving it just outside our window.

Richie and I trade confused glances.

“I don’t trust this,” he says.

“You don’t trust anyone,” I rebut.

Honestly, I’m a little weirded out too, but I proposed this road trip because I finally felt like getting out of my comfort zone. Retreating only a day in would be a waste.

“C’mon, roll down the window.”

Grumbling, he does.

The Kirlia carefully lines up with the window, then throws in the flyer.

With a purple flash, barely indistinguishable in the bright sunlight, She disappears, taking the dull roar of the motorcycle with her.

I grab the flyer and take a look.

“Blade Runner Pizza Delivery: Serving Chicago, Springfield, Davenport, Minneapolis, and other midwestern cities. Visit our website for full list of locations.”

“Pizza in 15 minutes or we pay you!”

~oOo~

“Hey Richie, have you noticed how we can just instantly tell the gender of anyone we’re looking at, even though nobody’s human anymore?”

“I had very carefully avoided noticing that, actually.”

~oOo~
Note: wrong tense here
Our last stop before Chicago is in a small town called Rochelle.

The highway exit could have been anywhere in the midwest; a gas station right next to a cornfield, with low-slung buildings all along the road.

The street was packed with semi trucks, but none were mobile. Instead, they lined the shoulder of the road. Some had been overturned, but by and large they seemed to be there on purpose.

A gaggle of people, perhaps two hundred, were congregated in a soybean field just outside the gas station. Richie flew over to see what was going on while I filled up the van.

I’d just finished up by the time he came back.

“So, what’s going on?”

“You notice the trucks we saw coming in?”

“No, I’m blind and brain damaged.”

“I’d always suspected.” Richie nodded sagely. “Anyways, the day of-- the day we turned into Pokémon, obviously lots of people were panicking, which lead to far fewer crashes than it should have, but more than enough to get the police department to pull people off the roads.”

“All the people over there--” he indicated towards the congregation by pointing his nose, a new habit he was picking up, “--are the truckers and motorists stranded two days ago. Or at least, the ones who couldn’t or wouldn’t drive, run, or fly back home. They’ve been teleporting or flying them back home, but it’s slow going.”

“Huh.”

As Richie gets in and turns the key, I screw up my courage and say, “We should see if any of them are going towards Chicago.”

“Really?” Richie asks, frowning. He hesitates for while before giving an answer, chewing it over. Then he shrugs. “Sure, Okay.”

We’re both silent for a little bit, staring each other down.

Meekly, I ask him. “Can you do it?”

“Oh for the love of--” He rolls his eyes. “Fine.”

He turns the van off, goes through the rigamarole of taking off his seat belt (which was very much not designed for someone with wings), leaves the van, and flies over.

I’m more than a little embarrassed to ask him to do that for me, but he’s always been the more outgoing of the two of us. Even before my accident.

He claimed he was just inherently a more sociable person. I suspected it was because he’d always had to seek validation from people he wasn’t related to.

Richie returns with a Gastrodon; a three foot tall blue and green sea slug. I could immediately understand why it had been stranded; there was no way it would be driving a truck anytime soon.

It’s nude except for a backpack, possibly filled with personal effects.

“I’m mighty glad you folks were here to help me out; I was pretty far back in the line,” the Gastrodon says. “Anyway’s, th’ name’s Cedar.”

“I’m Richie.”

I mutter my own name sotto voce. Cedar doesn’t ask me to repeat myself, which I’m grateful for.

Cedar nestles down on the pile of stuff we’d fit in the back of the van. We’re briefly stumped by how to belt Cedar in, but then Cedar reveals its mastery of the Sticky Hold ability and we leave it alone.

About fifteen minutes into our ride, my curiosity is too overwhelming to leave alone, so I break the awkward silence the van had previously fallen into.

“Hey Cedar, I’m really sorry if this comes across as rude or insensitive, but--”

“It’s the hermaphroditism, isn’t it?” Cedar says this casually, not seeming to take any offense.

“Hermaphroditism?”

“Yup.” I see Cedar nod in the mirror of my sun visor. I contort to look backwards; this line of questioning was going to get personal enough it felt rude not to look it in the face. “Slugs are hermaphrodites,” it adds, just as nonchalant as before.

“And are you-- uh, OK with that?”

“Yep. More than OK, actually. I miss m’ human body, but this’s an improvement, any way I look at it.”

“Huh.”

“Y’know, I’m not sure if this is related, but I’ve been feeling something sort of similar.” I turn to look at Richie, who’s still thankfully focused on the road. “Like, I don’t think I’d have chosen to turn into a pokemon of my own volition, but if I have to be a Pokémon, a Noivern isn't such a bad one to be. Flying is pretty neat.”

“Yeah, I totally get that, actually” I say. “Zoroark is part of a really small pool of Pokémon I’d have been OK with turning into.”

This breaks the ice, and we’re soon comparing our experiences since the mass transformation.

“Oh! I know! Show him the video; the one I took yesterday when I was roleplaying being a kite!”

I do. My own, tinny voice comes out of the laptop, muffled by the wind.

“Feeding line!”

I hadn’t seen the video before, and it’s fascinating to watch it from Richie’s perspective. It’s a little like watching the takeoff of a jetliner, but instead of doing it through the lens of a fixed, static porthole, Richie turns and maneuvers freely as the corn fields blur into each other and become solid rows of green, neatly arranged.

Cedar oohs and aahs at the appropriate moment, and is generally very appreciative. It’s gratifying.

When we get to the part where Richie spots the cop car, Cedar belts out an uninhibited belly laugh. I can barely remember the panic I’d felt at the time; even though only a day has passed, the event already seems to take on the aura of nostalgia.

“Boy, it sure does sound like you’ve been on an adventure already. Where did you guys say was your destination?”

“New York,” we reply in tandem. “We’re hunting for a legendary,” I add.

“Which one?”

“Whichever,” responds Richie. “We’re not picky.”

“Well, good luck! I’d love some answers m’self.”

We talk some more about we’re we’ve been and were we’re going.

Later, Cedar relates one of its own stories.

“See, this guy’s just utterly hysterical. We’re all trying to calm him down, ‘cuz, y’know, we get it-- shit’s crazy. Even after a good night’s sleep, shit’s crazy. We all emphasized. Empathized? Empathized.”

“And let me just emphasize again, he’s big. There was actually another guy, same species, also waiting for a teleport. They’re both loch-ness-monster lookin’ fellas, they both had this trailer-bed wide shell on their backs, but the guy I’m talkin’ about is at least twice as round as the other one. Eighteen doughnuts stuffed into a twelve donut box, if you catch my drift.”

“So we’re all utterly at a loss for how to calm him down. Completely out of ideas. And then I get the bright idea to just ask him why he’s so hysterical. See, we’d all just assumed he was angry at being turned into-- y’know-- the loch ness monster, but it turns out, that wasn’t exactly the problem.”

“The entire reason the guy’s so distraught is, get this, because he thinks the missus will go absolutely nuclear on him when she finds out how much weight he’s gained.”

I laugh, and so does Richie.

There’s laugher in Cedar’s voice too, as he continues. “Now, fair enough, he’s probably put on a few pounds. Turnin’ into a dinosaur’ll do that to ya. But man, considerin’ how much she’d have had to feed him to turn him into such a lardball in the first place, it’s probably a safe bet the missus prob’ly liked a bit of meat on his bones. A little bit more wouldn’t be any more distractin’ than having four flippers and twice the number of horns.”

~oOo~

We eventually drop off Cedar in Platteville, a village a while away from Chicago proper. He’d made Richie promise to start uploading the videos he’s taken as a sort of informal documentary of our travels, so we mooch off his home wifi to get a youtube channel started.

We meet Cedar’s partner, an Azumarill. To the joint surprise of me and Richie, the rotund aquatic rabbit is golden, instead of blue. She explains that she was melanistic before the event.

Cedar tells us to show her the same video we’d shown him. The third time through, I notice something interesting in the background-- someone’s flying, far to the south. Their figure is barely visible, an indistinct red-orange blob. It streaks across the screen in the matter of seconds. A Charizard? No, Charizards didn’t fly that fast. Maybe it was a single-engine plane, a crop duster or small transport.

We stay for about an hour. When we leave, it’s with bellies full of warm food, and hearts full of warm thank-yous.

~oOo~

We’re apprehensive, entering Chicago proper. There’d been nothing in the news about the city, but all that meant was that other places had fared worse, and melted down more dramatically. Des Moines came to mind, unbidden.

Despite our concerns, however, things seemed to be stable. Friends met on the sidewalks to talk, flying types pirouetted in the sky, trying out their wings, and teenagers, often recognizable as second-evolutions, showed off their new powers to each other.

We sit impatiently in our van, bored out of our skulls.

Miles ahead of us, a Tyranitar and Metagross, enormous, bulky figures, clear out abandoned cars from the highway. They’d been at it for a while, and will be at it for a while longer.

Start a multi-chapter plot
Blade Runner Pizza Kirlia should be called in when they need a teleporter
Kirlia’s character arc involves maturing, and her becoming a Gardevoir
Characters should get into a conflict intentionally to help someone else, instead of being pulled into it inadvertently.

~oOo~

Away from his family, the man can finally let his mask drop. He sprawls, exhausted, over a beat-up old office chair.

He examines his claws, sheathing and unsheathing them experimentally.

He still hasn’t felt the need to use them, for which he counts himself blessed. But neither is he sure that he could, if it came down to it. A mixed blessing.

Talking about mixed blessings, he still had to compose a voicemail for his son.

He pulls out a sheet of paper. It’s as blank as his mind isn’t. He wants to pour out his soul to his son, asking him to come back and help out. He wants to say something angry and ill-considered about how his son is abandoning his family when he needs it most.

But love overrides stress and misplaced spite. At the top of the page, he writes, “Hey son! How’s it going?”

A good start.

He wants to ask how the leg’s holding up. It still seems too good to be true. When the physical therapy and surgery they’d been able to afford had only been “good enough,” he’d wanted to curse and break things, for failing as a father.

“Things are pretty hectic back here, but probably not as hectic as some of the places you’re driving through.”

He frowns; he’s inadvertently smudged some of the graphite. He pulls out another paper and rewrites everything.

Not that anyone will ever see this transcript except for himself and maybe his wife. It was a meditative thing; he likes everything perfectly in order before he sends a voicemail. If he didn’t care, he’d just call. Texting was right out, of course-- too impersonal.

“Most of the small businesses around here are back open, and the supermarkets and gas stations are getting staffed by the national guard when the workers don’t show up. I’ve held off going to work for today, but I'll be back im by Wednesday at the latest.”

“It’s funny-- it’s only been a week, and things are already going back to normal.”

Not, that was wrong. It was the kind of thing he said to reassure his family, but he didn’t believe it. How could things be normal, ever again? Earth and its peoples were a plaything for a higher power, and he was no longer so sure that that higher power was God. (Plus, he was covered in fur and could set his breath on fire just by thinking about it, but was was an irrelevant detail in comparison.)

Ultimately, he left the line in.