.:is this what you do with eternity?:. {Arceus characters}

By now Lully had been drawn towards Primus as well. What a pokemon--he was enormous!--and yet something was powerful enough to beat him up this badly.

"Poor thing, you must really be hurting."

Primuse grunted. "Yeah. You could say that."

Primus shifted his massive black and white head to look up at Artemis. His crest and other body adornments were a steely grey; they made up the other component to his colouration, which was utterly colourless.

"Who are you?"

This was an interesting find. All three of these pokemon were of rare and powerful type; he didn't know what the hell Artemis was, but she looked like some relation of Suicune, Entei, Raikou...those species. How had they gotten here?

Lully looked up. The portal was still lying open, though it was gradually shrinking. If she could just have a look. My parents might be there. He said he came from Silvestra's stronghold, isn't that what they were all talking about before they got captured?

She bunched up her hindquarters and took a leap upwards into it. She was just going to look.

"Primus," said the darkly Dialga as the portal closed up.

He glanced up there. "I think your babies just got into some trouble."

It had happened too quickly. He would've stopped them if he'd been able to get up. But he hadn't.

***

Lully found herself...back on the seed-pokemon-rich world where she had been living with her parents and Anggun temporarily. This was Anggun and her father's home world. "Mommy? Daddy?" she called.

"I didn't close it," growled Primus. "You might notice I'm a little..busted up right now. It closed itself."

***

"Eonia!" Lully bounded over to her adoptive sister. "So glad you're here. I don't see anyone..." She sighed. "Was hoping...."

"Don't worry, sweetie," said Primus as he gradually began the stages of getting to his feet with a lot of bulk and little strength. "I'm not sticking around any longer than I got to. Gotta find out what the fuck happened to my gang then get that bitch up at the Nexus sorted out." He growled. "She's going to pay."

***

Lully had noticed the lack of portal light where there had been before. She sighed. "I'm sorry. This is all my fault."

"Yeah," said Primus, "a world called Calamora. Small, warm planet with about a million kinds of tiny little grass seed pokemon that can gang up and poison you--really, you don't want to get lost in those jungles. We were chasing after where Silvestra had sent one of her little hordes out to catch a couple of arceus on her list. When we got there, well, the arceus were already captured and there were way more pokemon there than we thought...And they'd been waiting for us."

***

"Uh...I don't know, Eonia," said Lully, "but last time I was here, well, we were here...This is where we were before. And I think ...we aren't alone." They were indeed loosely surrounded by several small grass and spore like pokemon.

"I don't think--she's probably back at the...other place. Hydria's home," said Lully. She watched the creatures rustle in the leaves and grass. She slowly turned in a circle. They were all around them.

***

"No kidding." The Dialga snorted. "I'll see if I can get us back." But he was not the sort of pokemon who could open up a portal to just anywhere. He was better at time portals than space ones, and that wound you up in all sorts of confusion. He had to stay in the same reality. A portal began to open...

"Me either. What if we run?" said Lully. "Really fast?" She was just thinking that they looked to be too many to succeed against with brute force. But they didn't look like they'd be very fast.

***

The Dialga flashed through the portal, and glanced behind him to see if Artemis was coming. All he knew right now was that it was not the same place he'd come out of. But it looked similar.

"No! Just to run--I can run really fast." Lully was an equine pokemon, after all--technically speaking, that was the general shape of her body. Long, strong legs with both speed and endurance. "Can you fly fast enough?"

***

Primus arrived on a sunlit mountaintop, red sandstone cliffs jutting dramatically up from a lush jungle landscape further down. "This is it--this is Calamora. Just don't know where."

The only reason Lully had not yet made a run for it was that she didn't want to bolt and leave Eonia here. As soon as Eonia agreed, the young arceus took off at a gallop over the grass, dashing literally as fast as she could. She made a long leap over the nearest grass pokemon, and didn't look back after landing. She just ran.

***

An arceus was approaching. And it was no juvenile one. This was an adult, of fairly 'standard' appearance, although standard was an increasingly useless word to use for an arceus's appearance: it seemed that each one was unique and they varied quite a bit. The widespread belief in many worlds and regions that there was only one of them certainly came from the fact that Arceus, a spacefaring and often space-dwelling creature, lived very widely spread out--in a universe and multiverse scale. The belief that they had created the universe might be quite truthful--their actions out in the 'final frontier' did indeed heavily influence and often shape the birth of new universes.

This one was a young white stallion and he landed facing Artemis and Primus. "You missed them," he said, "but together, maybe we can continue working to track them and get them back. It all leads to one place, ultimately--the Nexus planet."