Crossing of the Paths

Book 2: Darkness & Light - Chunk 2

The Crossing of the Paths
Second Edition
By MMM/AJ
Part II: Darkness & Light

A/N: Well uh, howdy there readers! I bet you didn't expect me to show back up again so soon with yet another fresh chunk for you already! Truth be told I didn't expect to either, but man my muse has just been on an insane TEAR this month! I had a nice break from work for the 4th of July and ever since then I've just been ON FIRE pumping out tens of thousands of words on this and all my other projects! I'm insanely proud of it, especially since this chunk is even a nice beefy 18K words too!

Fair warning to you folks though, there are still some emotionally weighty bits here. Even though Mewtwo has now fully embarked on his brand new Terminian adventure, there's still no shortage of some dark stuff. So once again I have appended a Content Warning onto the end of this chunk. Please do read it if you're sensitive. But otherwise, dive right in and enjoy! Heaven knows I certainly enjoyed it! There's a character that shows up in this chunk that was singularly fun to write and I'm willing to bet you'll enjoy reading him as much as I enjoyed writing him!

Chapter 2 - A Terrible Fate

Mewtwo wasn't sure what to make of the strange, dimly lit wooden passages he now found himself wandering through. His path seemed perfectly linear since there was only ever one exit to each room and hall he found, but their contents became increasingly bizarre the further he progressed. At first it was only subtly bizarre, starting with a clearly enclosed room filled with the stumps of massive trees. Those who paid attention would realize that there was no room for for such huge trees due to the low wooden ceiling. Then came a room mostly filled with a massive yawning pit rather than a floor. Mewtwo simply flew across this pit with his telekinetic levitation, but he felt very tempted to fly down there and see how far it went. The uncanny and supernatural nature of this place made him think twice though and he forged ahead instead. What came next really threw him for a loop; here was a long, straight, square hallway that had been twisted like a candy cane so that the floor and ceiling swapped places. This was visually disorienting enough on its own, but the real kicker came when Mewtwo tried to walk down this hallway. Gravity itself seemed to change direction as he walked, so that "down" was always pointed toward the floor, even as the floor rotated up onto the ceiling, ultimately causing Mewtwo to walk upside-down. He could feel his stomach churn with nausea and he stopped in his tracks in order to try to process what was happening.

"What in Arceus's name is even going on here?" He mumbled to himself.

A thought struck Mewtwo as he tried to fight back the urge to empty his stomach. Shadetalon had warned him that the space between dimensions was a place where the laws of physics no longer applied, and something like this gravity-distorting hallway anomaly would be right at home in a place like that. Even though there was no storm of rainbow-colored superheated plasma in here, it wasn't too much of a stretch from the strange self-accelerating void full of multicolored symbols that he'd just fallen through earlier. But Mew had taught him that this place was supposed to be a near-total vacuum and right now he was breathing just fine without an air bubble. He might have lingered a little longer while ruminating about this if he wasn't then jarred back into reality by the sudden gritty sound of stone grinding against stone not too far ahead of him. A set of sliding stone doors was gradually closing at the end of the hallway about a dozen feet in front of him.

Mewtwo made a snap decision to keep moving forward rather than turning back. He knew that the tunnels behind him only led back to the dead end where he had arrived and his instincts were telling him the void would never let him fly back up to the Lost Woods where he'd started. He teleported to the end of the hallway in order to reach the door in time, but nearly fell flat on his head from the shift in gravity along the way. With just a few seconds to spare he darted through the door before the gap grew too narrow for him to fit through.