Pokemon Fusion Part 3: Dead Man Walking

  "Are we there yet?" Frieda said with a sigh. Their next destination was very promising, but also quite far away. Raja was carrying them on his back, at her request of course. "So faaaaaarrrrrrr......" Frieda had been acting like a child and Owen was starting to get annoyed. As she groaned her disapproval of the long trek onward, a man who looked like some sort of priest blocked the road. As Raja approached, he sniffed the man, who didn't even blink despite the close proximity. He merely raised a hand and bowed his head. He began chanting some sort of strange words and levitated slightly above the ground. He exuded a black aura and Raja backed away and growled at him. He clearly disliked the smell of this man. Before long, even the two humans could smell him. He smelled of rotting corpses. He slowly raised his head and they saw that his eye sockets were empty. His mouth hung open and a black smoke poured out of all the holes on his head. It enveloped him and soon dissipated, leaving nothing behind but the terrified looks on their faces.
  "W-what just happened?" Frieda looked positively petrified with fear. Her pupils had dilated and her breath came in rapid pants. She held her arms and shivered before letting out a deafening scream and running away in the opposite direction. "What madness has befallen her? And what sort of evil was that man we saw? They went searching for their friend, but didn't find her until the sun had already set. She was in a meadow, fused, and surrounded by flaming grass and several felled trees. She was still deathly afraid and now her fear had reached dangerous levels as her synchronization was extremely off. Whatever was happening, fusing was only making it worse..... The only reason Owen had found her was because she'd screamed again. But this time it had been more primal, more savage, as if a fear shared by every natural living creature had manifested before her very eyes.
  "Owen saw her Pokegear lying on the ground, clearly thrown in a fit of paranoia or the like. He picked it up and called Prof. Blaine. He detailed the encounter they'd had and her reactions and the more he said, the more grave Blaine's expression became. Finally, he spoke. "Oh dear, not this...anything but this.... The one thing both of them fear more than anything has practically walked up to them and laughed in their faces!" He grabbed his head in exasperation, at a loss as to what to do. Suddenly, he slammed his fist down on his desk. It he had not been able to control his blind fury at the last moment, he likely would have broken ever bone in his hand. Owen desperately asked what was happening to his friends. Issac was apparently just as involved in this as she was.
  "Those two, have met death once again. Her parents died when she was young, and Issac felt just as responsible as she did. Fusion can be wonderful for communicating with your pokemon as one mind and one soul, but it is a double-edged sword. It can also combine common fears into one that can possibly drive both of them insane. She herself has also once been beaten to the brink of death. By a man similar to the one you described. He apparently only ever spoke two words to her and it was as she was dying, motionless on the ground. He said to her 'Join us.' and ever since she has had both the incredible courage to face impossible odds, and a fear that could tear her psyche apart if it got bad enough. It traumatized her. Yes, because of it she has the drive to become one of the most powerful young people I have ever met, sheer willpower and raw emotion somehow able to bring out wisdom she never seemed to be capable of......but at what cost? That girl has been through a hellish training of her own design and become much better for it. But now that she's met that man again.... Wait a minute." He sudden;y seemed to become even more worried, preparing himself for what he might hear. "What did you say this man looked like, as in, besides his clothing?"
  Owen thought about it. "He had black hair and seemed a few years older than us sir. Does that mean anything?" Blaine nodded with a face of depressed hopelessness. "Yes, it is as I feared. That man is amassing an army of sorts. Or I guess you could call it a following. He has discovered a disturbing fact of Pokemon fusion that I hoped would never come to be realized by anyone else. Owen, that man you saw........is dead. A follower of what I assume is a cult started by that man that plagues Frieda's nightmares. The supposed leader's name is Gaston, he must have started a church with his unique fusion type as the central focus. On your journey, you are undoubtedly going to meet more of them. I must ask you and Frieda to do something that will possibly be the hardest thing for her to do: Recruit a member of that cult. We need a man on the inside or at least someone who knows their practices and such. You must find one who has had to die to realize their true potential for fusion....someone who has a Ghost-type fusion. The only one that requires the human to be dead before the partner ghost pokemon can fuse with the soul outside the body and then possess the body once again, now with the power to fuse at will without worrying about synchronization."
  All of this information was weighing down on Owen's mind. However, he had another pressing issue to deal with. Frieda had fainted, still fused somehow. "Professor, what more do we know about this all?" Blaine thought for a moment and told him of his findings when he looked into it a few years ago. "Well, apparently the souls, once fused outside the body, can never be defused. They become one being. Even though that means they must always be fused, they can still take on a regular human form aside from the fusion form. The pokemon's presence is not shown on the human since the whole process takes less time that it takes for the body of the human to start to decay. But recent new info you've collected has actually revealed another sort of possession-based fusion. It appears that demonic possession requires the souls to fuse individually, but the other type is divine possession. Like that girl and Articuno. when a human has devoted themselves body, mind, and soul to a being powerful enough to control those very aspects of the human, they can do so and fuse anytime while controlling them. In other words, Articuno didn't need to be there to fuse. But by fusing with it's physical body as well, Haley became the equivalent of a lesser goddess herself. You could say that the high-priestesses and such chosen followers count as demi-gods. Haley could have sprouted wings and flown of her oen free will with a very small fraction of Articuno's power. All she'd really need to do so if pray to her. We do have a few others who have met up with such individuals. Unfortunately, none that are able to be recruited."
  Frieda slowly woke up and immediately defused. Looking around, she seemed to be at a loss for words. "Did.....I do all this? There's only one thing that could make me and Issac lose control like that. I'm guessing the Professor told you all about my extreme fears of death and ghost-types, huh?" Owen simply nodded. And then he gave her the pokegear back. Blaine had to be the one to tell her what their new mission objective was. Contrary to their expectations, she was all for it. "Okay! If we can recruit someone, then perhaps it will help me face my fears and become even better. But I still think it would be a great idea to find a third recruit to help out. I met someone while on the mountaintop who helped me while you fought his daughter. Oops! I wasn't supposed...to tell...you that." Owen gave her a suspicious look. And then replied "Explain! What really happened up there?"