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The sickness began in late winter.
In hindsight, it ought to have been clear what was happening. The patterns weren't subtle. We knew that war was raging; we knew that it was only because of our factories that we were given leave to carry on with our normal lives. We were thankful for the exemption, and we believed that, perhaps, we could endure until the end of it all, here in our valley. Though the world might crumble around us, as long as those we knew and loved could remain safe, we might remain content.
Foreman Lungern was the first. The overseer of the steel mill in the valley, he was known as a silent man who ran his operations with military precision. His workers respected and feared him in equal parts, and when he failed to report in early one morning, there came the suggestion that he had finally succumbed after years of self-inflicted overwork. Since middle age, he had been warned about the condition of his heart, but dismissive of these matters, he had continued to sleep less than five hours a night and never took proper meals.
The Electrike tracked him to a ditch close by the forest, eyes wide open and heart still beating at a steady pace. They thought he had suffered a stroke, at first. But the scans revealed no brain abnormalities, and it was soon decided that the ailment, if any existed, was likely to be psychosomatic in nature. The stress had finally caught up with him. He was only human, after all, and he had been at the job for decades; the man needed some well deserved rest and relaxation. With time, he might come to himself again.
We threw a retirement party for the Foreman, attended by every last one of his faithful workers. Everyone had a story to share about his gruff manner and the warm heart underneath it all. He had visited someone's dying mother. He had remembered someone's birthday when no one else had. He had bought Christmas presents for a newly widowed woman's children after her husband had unexpectedly passed due to an undiagnosed condition. He had caught a new employee, a boy barely in his late teens, crying in the bathroom stalls, and after learning he had to support his five siblings, had taken him under his wing. He had been a saint, a pillar of our community, a hero, and now, practically a martyr.
We wished him all the best, sent him home, and waited patiently for him to recover.
Spring came, heralded by the song of the seven-year Nincada, and the Foreman remained the same. Two and a half weeks after the initial onset of the ailment, he quietly passed away in the night, his weakened heart unable to support his motionless, speechless, meaningless life. We mourned him, but he was, after all, an aging man who had lived a difficult life. Though it was a tragedy that he had gone in such a manner, we agreed that it was probably for the best. He had finally attained the rest he long deserved.
It was somewhat more difficult to accept when twenty-six year old Randy Grisham was found four days after that up against a tree, eyes wide and unresponsive.
The condition was identical. Normal pulse, normal brain scans, normal resting brain activity. No significant damage to any part of the body apart from minor scratch marks all about that were attributed to the normal hazards of the job. Randy had been almost as well regarded as Foreman Lungern. We all knew him, we all liked him, and as a matter of course, he happened to be the boy who had supported five siblings from the time he was seventeen years old. He had grown into a most able young man in every way, smart as a whip, quick on his feet, and we agreed he was too good to stay in the valley. Either that, or poised to become the next Foreman.
I had been especially fond of him, being his younger brother by three years.
We took him home, we fed him porridge that dribbled down his chin, we changed his soiled linens. He had cared for us for nine years; we had hardly begun to repay our debt. But we remembered what had happened to Foreman Lungern, and as the days passed without reprieve from this nightmare, we began to despair.
Trent and Mattie Shaw, brother and sister and Randy's close friends, succumbed next. The victims the following week followed the same pattern, and soon enough, the rumors and whispers began to resound throughout the entire valley. They said that the condition was contagious, that the workers at the steel mill had been exposed to tainted metals, that one among us was deliberately poisoning all those competent enough to pose a threat to a desired promotion. None of it had any basis in reality, but all of it was terrifying and impossible to refute. No one could combat something that could not be identified.
In time, we settled on a name: the Hollows. Potions were worthless, bed rest even more so. They sat in chairs and stared at walls for hours, expressionless. They responded to no stimulus whatsoever. They would eat what was placed in their mouths, but seemed to be incapable of deriving any nutrition from it whatsoever. They did not know their names, they did not know their families - they didn't seem to know anything. For those who had seen their family members in perfect physical health only hours before reduced to such a state, the shock was enough to cause several illness in and of itself.
Randy died three weeks to the day after he was found against the tree. A full autopsy was ordered, and to the surprise and horror of us all, not only his heart, but every organ in his body was found to have deterioriated. Eaten and decayed.
I think, then, there must have been some who began to guess at the truth.
From there, the situation escalated rapidly. Each week, a dozen new cases. By mid-spring, there wasn't a single family in the valley who wasn't caring for one of the catatonic or the swiftly dying. A state of emergency was announced, and for the first time in anyone's memory, the steel mill was closed. No one was allowed inside save for the experts in the hazmat suits who would carefully comb every inch of the building in the following weeks and would find absolutely nothing of concern.
The tension in the valley reached a fever pitch. Nobody left their homes, nobody approached anyone else, and nobody dared to so much as speak to another human. For all we knew, it was a memetic mutation communicated by sound, it was a mental disorder created by psychic broadcasts, it was a scattering of fungal spores that silently infested the body and turned it into a hollow shell. The possibilities were endless. The valley had fallen completely under the spell of the Hollows. In a way, the ones who contracted the disease were the luckier - for them, at least, the interminable wait was over.
On the first day of summer, the silence was broken.
From the forest to the north, a wail resounded over the entire valley - every one of us, afterwards, swore we had heard the ghastly, despairing cry.
Melanie Newton and her young teenaged son, Jared, had chosen to leave the house that day. She had worked in the steel mill, but it had been six weeks since she had stepped foot inside. They needed to pick up groceries from the store, a task complicated by the discovery that the car had broken down.
It wasn't far. She decided to walk and asked him to help. They set out in gas masks and homemade hazmat suits, carrying empty baskets they knew had been thoroughly cleaned and sterilized. Around 2:00 in the afternoon, they closed the door behind them with the intention of returning home within the hour. Melanie's husband, Teddy, was already a victim of the Hollows, and he was rapidly deteriorating, even under their constant care.
The sight of Nincada crawling along the ground was far from unusual. Every seven years, they infested the Valley and instilled disgust in those suffering from entomophobia, though they did relatively little harm. They sang for their mates, had relations, and peacefully died. From time to time, some of the children would choose to keep one as a pet, and these would live much longer, bonding with a human as they had.
They were not alarmed when they saw an unusually large number of the Nincada seeming to follow along beside them as they walked.
They became alarmed when they were set upon and dragged into the outskirts of the forest nearby.
He said, afterwards, that it was more terrifying than any of us could ever imagine. Thousands of Nincada, clicking their mandibles as if communicating, coating the ground such that it was impossible to step without crushing one, a congregation of insects as large as small dogs with a malevolent, alien air. Hundreds of Ninjask, wings vibrating at speeds too high to follow, the hum of the vibrations serving as a constant background to the chirping and singing of the Nincada.
But the true horror... What he had identified to be the threat the moment he had spotted them, hanging in the air like marionettes...
Shedinja. The Husk Pokémon.
Who would have believed it? Who would ever have believed the ridiculous stories of children? It was impossible. Absurd.
Peering into the crack on its back is said to steal one's spirit.
They pressed her head to the floor and manipulated it into place with strangely delicate movements. She screamed, struggled, cried out for her son to help her - no, don't help, run while they were preoccupied. She bit at their legs and thrashed, but against the numbers, the outcome was inevitable.
They turned her head upwards, excruciatingly slowly.
Her eyes met.
He screamed, then, the sound that echoed up and down the valley. And as children, perhaps, may believe the ridiculous stories of children, he thrust out a Cleanse Tag he had traded ten Great Balls and a Qualot Berry for on the playground and screamed once more as the Nincada rushed him, trying to tear it from his hands before he could strike the Shedinja with the charm.
They didn't succeed. It shuddered, shriveled, and cracked open, an empty, hollow husk animated by some force we can only begin to guess at.
Jared Newton survived.
The rush to obtain Cleanse Tags swept through the valley, as did a sudden surge of hope. The Hollows had lost their mystery. The cause was clear. They could be defeated. Ghost Pokémon were not invincible.
But they didn't need to be.
Just as quickly as the news spread, so, too, did open war. The insects descended on the houses of the valley; the Nincada chewed at the boards and the tiling, and the Ninjask slammed into the windows over and over again, their motions nearly invisible until the window simply shattered. The Shedinja hovered, motionless around the house in groups of six or seven, patiently waiting for their victims to be brought before them.
Jared had taken his attackers by surprise. Pieces of paper could offer only so much protection. With their knowledge of this new weapon, it was a simple matter for them to devise new tactics. And we... we had no new tactics. All we could do was cover every square inch of our valley with our talismans and pray that it would have to be enough.
They worked quickly. Hundreds lost in the first week alone, carried from their houses in the night, beset upon by insects bursting through the barricades, or even accidentally glancing out the window in the exact wrong angle. And then... only then. We realized what it all meant, at last.
Every single person who had succumbed to the Hollows had been a worker in the steel mill at the time that Foreman Lungern was first discovered. And we knew... We knew that despite our hopes, we had never, could never avoid being a part of the war between human and Pokémon. We created the guns, the tanks, the ships, the subs. With the loss of our valley, the blow to the human efforts would be immense.
In less than five months, they had destroyed us so completely that it would be decades before the steel mill could ever enter production again.
We had lost. There was nothing to do but accept death graciously.
For me... it is only a matter of time, now. The chirping and buzzing are intolerable. I can see their forms through the curtains, pressed up against the windows; I can hear the sound of millions of legs pattering all over the roof.
As far as I am aware, I am one of the last surviving employees of the Rustboro Steel Group in the Valley of Steel. I had never intended it to be a permanent position, only to do my duty during the war - novel writing, admittedly, couldn't be of much use to anyone. The pay wasn't much to speak of, either.
It is very unfair.
But then... I suppose they aren't very discriminative of such things as motives. Anyone who bears the taint of the steel mill must go. War is, after all, inherently impersonal. I can only hope that when I am gone, they shall leave our valley at last, and for seven years, at least, the valley can recover from this ordeal. I don't think they'll be in any hurry to revitalize production - by that time, the war will have long been concluded, in any case. No one has any doubts as to who shall have been the victor.
I am almost finished here. When I put the last word to paper, I will open a window.
...This will be the only piece of work I shall ever have the chance to produce in its entirety.
What do you think? It isn't bad for an amateur, right? It was always my dream to have something published, one day. Perhaps this will be good enough.
My name is Tanner Grisham, I am twenty three years old, four months, and seven days, and when I am gone, I hope very much you won't call this something awful like 'Shadow of the Shedinja'.
...
I suppose I am forestalling the inevitable.
Goodbye, then. Goodbye. Please don't forget me. Please don't leave me. I don't want it to be this way. Not like Randy. Not like that. If I had a poison, I would take it now before they come for me.
Oh! I wish there were more time.
This isn't fair......
It isn't fair................
In hindsight, it ought to have been clear what was happening. The patterns weren't subtle. We knew that war was raging; we knew that it was only because of our factories that we were given leave to carry on with our normal lives. We were thankful for the exemption, and we believed that, perhaps, we could endure until the end of it all, here in our valley. Though the world might crumble around us, as long as those we knew and loved could remain safe, we might remain content.
Foreman Lungern was the first. The overseer of the steel mill in the valley, he was known as a silent man who ran his operations with military precision. His workers respected and feared him in equal parts, and when he failed to report in early one morning, there came the suggestion that he had finally succumbed after years of self-inflicted overwork. Since middle age, he had been warned about the condition of his heart, but dismissive of these matters, he had continued to sleep less than five hours a night and never took proper meals.
The Electrike tracked him to a ditch close by the forest, eyes wide open and heart still beating at a steady pace. They thought he had suffered a stroke, at first. But the scans revealed no brain abnormalities, and it was soon decided that the ailment, if any existed, was likely to be psychosomatic in nature. The stress had finally caught up with him. He was only human, after all, and he had been at the job for decades; the man needed some well deserved rest and relaxation. With time, he might come to himself again.
We threw a retirement party for the Foreman, attended by every last one of his faithful workers. Everyone had a story to share about his gruff manner and the warm heart underneath it all. He had visited someone's dying mother. He had remembered someone's birthday when no one else had. He had bought Christmas presents for a newly widowed woman's children after her husband had unexpectedly passed due to an undiagnosed condition. He had caught a new employee, a boy barely in his late teens, crying in the bathroom stalls, and after learning he had to support his five siblings, had taken him under his wing. He had been a saint, a pillar of our community, a hero, and now, practically a martyr.
We wished him all the best, sent him home, and waited patiently for him to recover.
Spring came, heralded by the song of the seven-year Nincada, and the Foreman remained the same. Two and a half weeks after the initial onset of the ailment, he quietly passed away in the night, his weakened heart unable to support his motionless, speechless, meaningless life. We mourned him, but he was, after all, an aging man who had lived a difficult life. Though it was a tragedy that he had gone in such a manner, we agreed that it was probably for the best. He had finally attained the rest he long deserved.
It was somewhat more difficult to accept when twenty-six year old Randy Grisham was found four days after that up against a tree, eyes wide and unresponsive.
The condition was identical. Normal pulse, normal brain scans, normal resting brain activity. No significant damage to any part of the body apart from minor scratch marks all about that were attributed to the normal hazards of the job. Randy had been almost as well regarded as Foreman Lungern. We all knew him, we all liked him, and as a matter of course, he happened to be the boy who had supported five siblings from the time he was seventeen years old. He had grown into a most able young man in every way, smart as a whip, quick on his feet, and we agreed he was too good to stay in the valley. Either that, or poised to become the next Foreman.
I had been especially fond of him, being his younger brother by three years.
We took him home, we fed him porridge that dribbled down his chin, we changed his soiled linens. He had cared for us for nine years; we had hardly begun to repay our debt. But we remembered what had happened to Foreman Lungern, and as the days passed without reprieve from this nightmare, we began to despair.
Trent and Mattie Shaw, brother and sister and Randy's close friends, succumbed next. The victims the following week followed the same pattern, and soon enough, the rumors and whispers began to resound throughout the entire valley. They said that the condition was contagious, that the workers at the steel mill had been exposed to tainted metals, that one among us was deliberately poisoning all those competent enough to pose a threat to a desired promotion. None of it had any basis in reality, but all of it was terrifying and impossible to refute. No one could combat something that could not be identified.
In time, we settled on a name: the Hollows. Potions were worthless, bed rest even more so. They sat in chairs and stared at walls for hours, expressionless. They responded to no stimulus whatsoever. They would eat what was placed in their mouths, but seemed to be incapable of deriving any nutrition from it whatsoever. They did not know their names, they did not know their families - they didn't seem to know anything. For those who had seen their family members in perfect physical health only hours before reduced to such a state, the shock was enough to cause several illness in and of itself.
Randy died three weeks to the day after he was found against the tree. A full autopsy was ordered, and to the surprise and horror of us all, not only his heart, but every organ in his body was found to have deterioriated. Eaten and decayed.
I think, then, there must have been some who began to guess at the truth.
From there, the situation escalated rapidly. Each week, a dozen new cases. By mid-spring, there wasn't a single family in the valley who wasn't caring for one of the catatonic or the swiftly dying. A state of emergency was announced, and for the first time in anyone's memory, the steel mill was closed. No one was allowed inside save for the experts in the hazmat suits who would carefully comb every inch of the building in the following weeks and would find absolutely nothing of concern.
The tension in the valley reached a fever pitch. Nobody left their homes, nobody approached anyone else, and nobody dared to so much as speak to another human. For all we knew, it was a memetic mutation communicated by sound, it was a mental disorder created by psychic broadcasts, it was a scattering of fungal spores that silently infested the body and turned it into a hollow shell. The possibilities were endless. The valley had fallen completely under the spell of the Hollows. In a way, the ones who contracted the disease were the luckier - for them, at least, the interminable wait was over.
On the first day of summer, the silence was broken.
From the forest to the north, a wail resounded over the entire valley - every one of us, afterwards, swore we had heard the ghastly, despairing cry.
Melanie Newton and her young teenaged son, Jared, had chosen to leave the house that day. She had worked in the steel mill, but it had been six weeks since she had stepped foot inside. They needed to pick up groceries from the store, a task complicated by the discovery that the car had broken down.
It wasn't far. She decided to walk and asked him to help. They set out in gas masks and homemade hazmat suits, carrying empty baskets they knew had been thoroughly cleaned and sterilized. Around 2:00 in the afternoon, they closed the door behind them with the intention of returning home within the hour. Melanie's husband, Teddy, was already a victim of the Hollows, and he was rapidly deteriorating, even under their constant care.
The sight of Nincada crawling along the ground was far from unusual. Every seven years, they infested the Valley and instilled disgust in those suffering from entomophobia, though they did relatively little harm. They sang for their mates, had relations, and peacefully died. From time to time, some of the children would choose to keep one as a pet, and these would live much longer, bonding with a human as they had.
They were not alarmed when they saw an unusually large number of the Nincada seeming to follow along beside them as they walked.
They became alarmed when they were set upon and dragged into the outskirts of the forest nearby.
He said, afterwards, that it was more terrifying than any of us could ever imagine. Thousands of Nincada, clicking their mandibles as if communicating, coating the ground such that it was impossible to step without crushing one, a congregation of insects as large as small dogs with a malevolent, alien air. Hundreds of Ninjask, wings vibrating at speeds too high to follow, the hum of the vibrations serving as a constant background to the chirping and singing of the Nincada.
But the true horror... What he had identified to be the threat the moment he had spotted them, hanging in the air like marionettes...
Shedinja. The Husk Pokémon.
Who would have believed it? Who would ever have believed the ridiculous stories of children? It was impossible. Absurd.
Peering into the crack on its back is said to steal one's spirit.
They pressed her head to the floor and manipulated it into place with strangely delicate movements. She screamed, struggled, cried out for her son to help her - no, don't help, run while they were preoccupied. She bit at their legs and thrashed, but against the numbers, the outcome was inevitable.
They turned her head upwards, excruciatingly slowly.
Her eyes met.
He screamed, then, the sound that echoed up and down the valley. And as children, perhaps, may believe the ridiculous stories of children, he thrust out a Cleanse Tag he had traded ten Great Balls and a Qualot Berry for on the playground and screamed once more as the Nincada rushed him, trying to tear it from his hands before he could strike the Shedinja with the charm.
They didn't succeed. It shuddered, shriveled, and cracked open, an empty, hollow husk animated by some force we can only begin to guess at.
Jared Newton survived.
The rush to obtain Cleanse Tags swept through the valley, as did a sudden surge of hope. The Hollows had lost their mystery. The cause was clear. They could be defeated. Ghost Pokémon were not invincible.
But they didn't need to be.
Just as quickly as the news spread, so, too, did open war. The insects descended on the houses of the valley; the Nincada chewed at the boards and the tiling, and the Ninjask slammed into the windows over and over again, their motions nearly invisible until the window simply shattered. The Shedinja hovered, motionless around the house in groups of six or seven, patiently waiting for their victims to be brought before them.
Jared had taken his attackers by surprise. Pieces of paper could offer only so much protection. With their knowledge of this new weapon, it was a simple matter for them to devise new tactics. And we... we had no new tactics. All we could do was cover every square inch of our valley with our talismans and pray that it would have to be enough.
They worked quickly. Hundreds lost in the first week alone, carried from their houses in the night, beset upon by insects bursting through the barricades, or even accidentally glancing out the window in the exact wrong angle. And then... only then. We realized what it all meant, at last.
Every single person who had succumbed to the Hollows had been a worker in the steel mill at the time that Foreman Lungern was first discovered. And we knew... We knew that despite our hopes, we had never, could never avoid being a part of the war between human and Pokémon. We created the guns, the tanks, the ships, the subs. With the loss of our valley, the blow to the human efforts would be immense.
In less than five months, they had destroyed us so completely that it would be decades before the steel mill could ever enter production again.
We had lost. There was nothing to do but accept death graciously.
For me... it is only a matter of time, now. The chirping and buzzing are intolerable. I can see their forms through the curtains, pressed up against the windows; I can hear the sound of millions of legs pattering all over the roof.
As far as I am aware, I am one of the last surviving employees of the Rustboro Steel Group in the Valley of Steel. I had never intended it to be a permanent position, only to do my duty during the war - novel writing, admittedly, couldn't be of much use to anyone. The pay wasn't much to speak of, either.
It is very unfair.
But then... I suppose they aren't very discriminative of such things as motives. Anyone who bears the taint of the steel mill must go. War is, after all, inherently impersonal. I can only hope that when I am gone, they shall leave our valley at last, and for seven years, at least, the valley can recover from this ordeal. I don't think they'll be in any hurry to revitalize production - by that time, the war will have long been concluded, in any case. No one has any doubts as to who shall have been the victor.
I am almost finished here. When I put the last word to paper, I will open a window.
...This will be the only piece of work I shall ever have the chance to produce in its entirety.
What do you think? It isn't bad for an amateur, right? It was always my dream to have something published, one day. Perhaps this will be good enough.
My name is Tanner Grisham, I am twenty three years old, four months, and seven days, and when I am gone, I hope very much you won't call this something awful like 'Shadow of the Shedinja'.
...
I suppose I am forestalling the inevitable.
Goodbye, then. Goodbye. Please don't forget me. Please don't leave me. I don't want it to be this way. Not like Randy. Not like that. If I had a poison, I would take it now before they come for me.
Oh! I wish there were more time.
This isn't fair......
It isn't fair................
