Chapter XX: The Second Side -Lich

...water...cold...moving...

Lich gasped for air as his head appeared above the water. Looking around, he saw the inverted-conical trees rush by him. He was being propelled along by the unconquerable current in the flooded river. He tried to fight it in vain, then tried to swim to shore but a sudden yell stopped him: Ark.
Looking downstream, he saw his younger brother's thick blond hair, a contrasting yellow beacon in the sea of grey and driving rain, disappear behind a rock. Lich started to swim with the current, pursuing Ark. He knew where the water led: A waterfall into a hole in the ground, its contents practically unreachable due to an overhang. If Ark went down there...
Lich was slammed against a rock, scraping a layer of skin off his left side. He winced, then continued his swim through the raging waters. The trees went by as if he was on a merry-go-round.
For a moment, Lich felt like he was falling about a metre and a half, and his head went under. As he surfaced, his brown hair plastering itself to his scalp, his location became clear: he just passed Letreh Undren, which translated into Yoshian, meant "Approach Falls"; the approach to the hole.
Ahead, Ark reached out and grabbed the end of a log, and as he looked at it, he saw it was wedged between a few rocks and went virtually clear to dry ground. Ark spun around, and his feet pointed downstream. Lich aimed himself towards the log -luckily for him, it was on his side of the river- and swam towards it. The log loomed closer as he approached, and soon enough, he reached for it with his arms and grabbed onto it, the shock of his arrival shaking throughout the log and dislodging Ark slightly from his grip. The current swept his legs underneath the log, which punctured and cut his skin in reply, causing Lich to yell in pain. Some of those scars he would have for the rest of his life.
He then started to haul himself up onto the log by forcing his left leg back as he turned, then lifting it out of the water and around the log. He lay and held his legs around the log, his black boots still in the water, as he looked ahead and saw Ark, clinging by both of his hands from the very end of the log, broken there possibly by crashing against a rock.
Lich slid forwards then everything seemed to slow down.
"Give me your hand, Ark!" he cried in Yoshian, bringing his hand forward, but not enough to reach his brother.
"No, Lich, I can help myself! I don't need yours!" he replied.
A sudden gush of water swept through, and Ark lost his grip. Lich saw his brother's head disappear under the water, and screamed, "Nooooooo!"...

..."Nooooooo!"
Lich woke and stared up at the starry sky, constellations unfamiliar mixed with those from Yamauchi and the Manaworld. He then turned to his side on the grass and wept for his brother's loss, like he always did after this recurring nightmare.
"Ark re garatan!" he cried, which means, "I'm sorry, Ark!"
Lich's body shook with each sob. Suddenly, a paw rested on his shoulder: Nessie. The Dragonite was perhaps his substitute brother, although he could never fill the gaping mould left by Ark Beluga Yoshi von Kippo, and Lich was definitely his master. He was sitting down beside Lich, and observed the orange Yoshi cry his heart out. He had been through this all too often before, and, although he never knew his own Dratini brothers and sisters, if he did have any, he felt Lich's pain, and took it upon himself to soothe his soul.
"There, there, Lich," he said, reassuringly, the PLT around Lich's neck translating and digitising the Dragonite's voice. "He will come back one day, you know that as well as I do. We can't control time, and fate decides what happens in it."
Lich had hope for the day he would see his brother again: in his shrine at his house, Undine, the Elemental of water and also the protector of waterways, and Gnome, the Elemental of earth thus protector of the underground, stood beside a candle always watched by Salamando, the Fire Elemental, so that it may not go out. He held this thought in his heart as he wept softer and softer until he fell asleep again, this time peacefully.

The new day dawned upon the mock world, and Lich woke up as soon as the first rays of the sun streamed across his face. Icydoom and Nessie were on either side of him, and they looked down at him as he stretched. After that, a stick of pink zinc cream appeared in his hand, and he applied it to the area behind his nose where yesterday's application had worn off, mainly by the salt water around Dinokan.
"Dinokan...Yamauchi...YoshiDude and Drakonis," Lich thought. He had three months in which to find his way back to Yamauchi, otherwise it would be assumed he was dead. With this thought in mind, he stood up and decided to start immediately by exploring the area for possible teleportation oppurtunities.
He hated the act of teleportation itself as he suffered from Heratu Syndrome, otherwise known as teleportation sickness. Upon arrival at his destination, he would be dazed and could possibly vomit. And the farther away he teleported, the greater the affects. Thus, he taught himself no teleportation magic, and this disadvantage was realised at a moment like now.
"Lich," Icydoom started, disrupting his train of thought, the PLT translating, "when you were exhausted, I tried to seek help. I found a robot guy, but he seemed to be in too much of a hurry for me to get him to help. So I opened Nessie, who sprinkled some Puipui juice on you."
Lich nodded in thanks, and he pointed at his Pokéballs, and looked at his two companions, who nodded, as their current business was finished. He held a light-blue one to Icydoom and an orange one to Nessie, and the two dematerialised into them. He then placed them back on his belt, and picked up the Boomerang from the ground beside him, and placed it in his its loop on his side. He then looked down the throughway towards what seemed to be a village, and nodded.
"Perhaps I can get help there," he said, as he set off at a brisk but leisurely pace towards it.

He noticed, as he walked, that the scenery was mysteriously similar to both Kippo and South Yoshi Island, his two homes. Palm trees stood beside inverted-conical trees. As he observed them, out of the bushes sprang a Rabite. It was a technically a yellow rabbit with pink ears, but they attacked people through spin jumping and, as their name suggested, biting.
"A Rabite...here?" he said, then noted he had said the first words of the Mana Knight Randi as he walked through the Potos Forest after pulling the Mana Sword from its stone in the river. The Rabite looked at him, then turned and bounced back into the bushes, which was very unusual behaviour. Normally they were far more kamikaze.
"Mana fluctuations..." he mused as he walked towards the village.
As he arrived in it, he found it mysteriously deserted. There was a platform where something should have been standing, and beside it, a strange creature seemed to bark at him. Lich observed it from the other side of what would be the marketplace, and recognised it to be a Zergling, from the descriptions Markior had told him.
"Zerglings mixing with Rabites? What is going on here?" he asked the air, and got no reply.
He decided to keep away from it as he walked around the village, in casw it may attack. It appeared to be sleeping, but it may only be crocodile's tears.
"And where there's Zerglings, there can be..." his mind kept reminding him as he investigated. Satisfied that there was nothing of interest around the village, he kept walked out through the other exit, and found a forest cut down, apparently quickly by some obvious mechanical means. The cuts suggested that a sweep from a buzzsaw on a pole felled the trees. Lich grew nervous in case the being may attack him, and his hand wrapped itself around the Boomerang for self-reassurance and comfort.
"Rabites, Zerglings, killing machines with blades...sounds like it's a game for someone with a sick mind," he thought as he walked through the fallen forest.

Lich stopped in his tracks suddenly. He felt a Mana fluctuation, a powerful one, eminating from beneath his feet. It was shaped like a crater on the Mana field, and whatever lay inside would be inpenetratable by either magical or psionic means: it was a Wall.
"Clever, but not clever enough, Havering," Lich muttered as he looked at his feet. "I want to get home as soon as possible, I'm sure he knows, so he hides a teleport underground and Walls it for greater protection."
Smiling, he opened up his brown Pokéball, and Quake, his Dugtrio, materialised into the ground in front of him. Three brown heads with a pink nose and two raisin eyes each stared up at him.
"Quake, I need you to dig down."
The largest head nodded, and suddenly all three heads disappeared underground. A sudden, gruff groan wafted up the hole that appeared. The Dugtrio reappeared a few seconds later and said, "Metal, really hard. I can't cut through."
Lich nodded and returned the Dugtrio to its home around his belt. He then looked down the hole and decided that it was a reasonably easy, yet slightly tight fitting hole, much to his liking to climb down. He sat down and started to slide down it.
His head blotted out the sun, so he commanded "Light" in Pandoran, and instantly the Boomerang filled the hole with an uncanny blue-white glow, eminating from his side.
The light shined on the metal beneath him. He tapped it with his foot, and decided that it was no thicker than the length of his thumb. He then held the Boomerang in one hand, one point towards the metal then commanded, "Laser on."
Instantly, a blue-white, narrow shaft of light hit and started to cut through the metal. Lich moved his arm in a circular motion and soon he stood in a circle of cut metal. He commanded "Laser off", then, knowing that only a millimetre held the metal in place, he jumped onto it, and the plate clattered into the room below.
He had no idea what lay below, and just hearing chilled him to the bone. Screams, explosions, obvious metal clanging in battle, and was that...Protoss and babbling Yoshian?
He held on to the walls beside him through pressure alone a moment more, before jumping into the room. He looked up and saw the cause of the hideous noises: He was standing in a macabre and grotesque picture theatre with only one chair, occupied.
He looked at the images. Was that his own...head, blood dripping from where the neck once was, being fed to a Mutalisk? Lich turned away from them, and heard the sounds of the Mutalisk eating. He covered his ears, and tried to think of pleasant and happy things, but soon, his stomach turned, and his last meal presented itself to the world once more. Lich shook, then weakly moved backwards towards the images to see who occupied the chair.

"Markior?!"

The god of the mind sat riveted and unmoving, staring, unblinking, at the images. Lich quickly let one hand go and waved it infront of his face, but no reaction was gained from him, and replaced it.
"Hypnotised by them," he thought. "And I think only Havering would do that! How dare he! How dare he!"
He turned and saw the images, then, in pure rage, reached for the Boomerang, and threw it, full force, into what seemed to be a green Yoshi, back stretched over an altar, being sacrificed. The Boomerang lit the whole room with a blue-white glow as it arced through the screen. The energy from the Boomerang hitting the images caused them to suddenly blank out, but Lich only realised that after a second. The time the Boomerang took to return to his hand, however, was one ten-thousandth of that.
Lich looked at the now black area where the images had been playing, then sighed, calming his anger down. He then walked over and stood before Markior on the chair.
As he watched, the Markior's pupiless eyes started to flicker. He was blinking again. Lich sighed in relief as he saw his friend return from hypnosis.
"En Taro Adun, Markior," he said, in Markior's native tongue.
He expected Markior to reply likewise, but what came next shocked him more than the images which were playing. Markior's smoky body seemed to dwindle in its activity, and by one of his eyes, there was a grey spot, which then ran down his cheek.
"Let's get out of here," he muttered.