The Walrein
Well-Known Member
Some violence, death.
Anyone who wishes to use this as the story their character explores for the Missing Mod Madness weekly challenge reward has my permission to do so.
This fic was partly inspired by The Teller's Team Rainbow Rocket entry in The Grunt Anthology.
The Defense of Rainbow Rocket HQ (A Story Without Mods In It)
War has changed. Interdimensional travel has brought together technologies and magic from dozens of different worlds, rendering traditional strategies and tactics obsolete. This must the dream of some theorizing armchair general, but for the Team Rainbow Rocket head of security – yours truly – it’s a nightmare. Of course, even discounting things like scarfs that let you walk through walls or spinning tops that can brainwash loyal grunts, the mansion our glorious leader has inexplicably chosen to become our new base isn’t exactly an impenetrable fortress. There are way too many entrances, excessively large and breakable windows, wooden walls and doors that can be smashed down by roughly fifty percent of all pokemon species, sloping roofs that make it difficult to emplace anti-air weaponry but are easy enough to land attackers on, and the whole thing is surrounded with gardens and shrubbery providing cover and concealment to intruders. And it’s my job to transform this place into a ‘castle’ that is ‘as impregnable a stronghold as the mightiest fortress in the indigo mountains’ , but which also ‘projects an aura of might and menace that strikes fear into the hearts of all who would oppose Team Rainbow Rocket’s rule over all dimensions’. Ugh.
Well, enough griping. We all have to play the hands we’re dealt. I stand in the foyer and survey it with a critical eye. Hmm… The first security consideration to make is the matter of preventing anyone from simply teleporting into our base, a feat any ten-year-old with an abra can accomplish. We don’t have the power supply to generate a disruptor field (yet), so I’ll have to make do with temporary measures. I’m thinking a Klefki maintaining a permanent fairy lock in every corner of every floor. Of course, I’ll need to prevent them from just getting distracted and floating away every time some idiot walks by with a jangling key ring on their belt, so maybe I could pair each of them with a magnemite to keep them stuck in place. Although, the magnetic field would also interfere with-
A grunt shoves open the front door and strides through, followed by a hulking conkeldurr balancing a wooden crate on their shoulder. “Hey boss, where should we put this box of multiple ordinance detonators? In the kitchen with all the other stuff that’s coming in, right?”
“First, I’m the head of security, not the head of logistics and supply, second, that should go in the munitions depot in the basement, and third, why on Multi-Earth are you letting that oaf of a pokemon carry a crate filled with dangerous explosives several feet off the ground on their shoulder! Protocol dictates all M.O.D. ordinance crates must be transported by at least two class-B telekinetics maintaining an inertial dampening field around the container at all times.”
Multiple ordinance detonators are extremely dangerous grenade-like devices, which use conventional explosives to launch so called ‘blast-seeds’ from dimension PM3 in every direction, like a man-portable cluster bomb. Upside: Blast seeds are known to damage all pokemon regardless of type. Downside: They explode very easily, to an extent that would make me question the sanity and competence of our weaponry research department if I hadn’t already made up my mind on that subject a long time ago. Nevertheless, I overcome my unease enough to step forward and examine the box more closely. “And furthermore, that crate looks improperly labeled.”
The grunt pouts. “Aww, but Petey here likes carrying heavy boxes! Isn’t that right, Petey?” The conkeldurr nods, and, to my horror, briefly takes a hand off the crate to give me a thumbs up. “See? He’s got it! And I labeled the box very clearly! It says ‘Warning: contains MODs’ on every side, so no one will try smashing it open with a crowbar like Jeff did that one time. …Man, I miss Jeff.”
“Look, just… get those away from me will, you?” I say, gesturing to the nearest exit.
“Sure thing, boss!” The grunt and his conkeldurr hustle away, and I’m once more able to turn my focus to matters of security. Where was I again… right, the klefkis. Hmm… Instead of magnemites, I could just use wobbuffets to keep them shadow-tagged down. Wobbuffets are naturally docile and content with standing around doing nothing for days on end, so there shouldn’t be any problems with them running off. Bonus: They could probably double as coat-hangers if they were wearing the right type of hat.
To complete the teleport protection package, there should probably also be at least two ralts or abra stationed in a central room regularly testing the defenses. …Probably ralts. They don’t fall asleep as often, and given the kind of emotional vibes in our HQ, they’ll have a very strong incentive to try to escape as often as possible.
Okay, next problem: Zoroarks. Any halfway competent security expert has to-
The front door creaks open again, and in comes someone – I have no idea who, due to the thick hood they’re wearing - dressed in a bright yellow hazmat suit and carrying a long metal case. “Excuse me, but would you happen to know where I can store these uranium fuel rods?” they say in a muffled voice. Lovely. Scenarios like this were becoming increasingly common due to Giovanni’s plan to add nuclear propulsion systems to this little man-made island.
“Identify yourself, please,” I say, while taking several steps backwards.
“Kari Vandermill. Engineering intern first-class. Don’t worry, the suit probably isn’t necessary, but better safe than sorry, right?”
“Uh-huh. Would you mind removing that hood and showing me your I.D. card?”
Kari – if that’s who she really is – sets down her case with a heavy thunk and pulls off her hood, then reaches into it to produce a sweaty piece of plastic with a picture of a slightly younger version of her on it. I scrutinize it closely.
“…this is an Aether Foundation I.D. card.”
“Whoops, haha, guess nothing gets past the head of security! Let me check my boots…” Wait, if she knows I’m the head of security and not logistics, then why is she bothering me about this? As I ponder this, Kari upturns her right boot and gives it a good shake, causing several more cards to come tumbling out. “Okay, pokemart employee card, credit card, credit card, eye insurance, voltorb owner’s insurance, Cerulean University I.D. card, weird foreign language credit card, personal injury attorney’s business card… hey, is this really necessary?”
“Yes! Need I remind you that we’re constant threat of infiltration by alternate universe versions of ourselves, Zoroarks, ditto impersonators, rival team members, meddling children, and other malicious actors. That’s why we’re all under standing orders to immediately detain any suspicious individual who can’t prove their identity. Or, in the case of entities obviously from a different dimension, like talking pokemon, to shoot them on sight.”
“Do those orders really apply to everyone here? No one gave me a gun during orientation,” Kari grumbles.
“Your I.D., please.”
“Alright, alright! Here’s my old Team Rocket I.D. That works, right?”
I sigh. “Just barely… Check it, Ryle.” With a burst of static, a rotom explodes out of my wristwatch and dives into the proferred I.D. card, turning its tasteful black and red color scheme to a garish orange and blue. A few seconds later, Ryle reverses the process and hops back into my watch, and paints a green checkmark on its screen.
“Against all odds, you’re good.”
“Great! So where can I put these fuel rods?”
“…I believe we’re currently storing all supplies for the nuclear propulsion project in the same room. It used to just be for neutron moderating materials, so the door is just labeled ‘moderator holding facility’. But make sure to put that hazmat suit back on before walking in there, as there’s bound to be great quantities of radioactive and otherwise toxic materials in that room. Woe betide anyone who enters there unprepared.”
“Okay, got it! Thanks,” she says, and departs.
Right, where was I… Zoroarks! And also zoruas, of course. How can I stop those sinister illusionists from infiltrating our base? The obvious answer is to just have a cofagrigus at every entrance and mandate handshakes with everyone who wants to get in, but that’s a little too unsubtle for my tastes. What if I disguised it a bit by having the cofragigus pass their mummy ability to an ambipom, and then the ambipom does the handshakes? We could just say there was a required ‘secret handshake’ to conceal what was really going on. Yes, genius! And next-
I turn around to the sound of yet another thought-interrupting grunt sliding down the handrail of the foyer’s main staircase. His feet slap against the floor, and he dashes up to me and waves a black pokeball in my face.
“Yo, what should I do with this?”
“Sliding down bannisters? Beginning sentences with ‘yo’? Is this Rainbow Rocket’s headquarters, or Team Skull’s?”
“Yeah, you got me, I’m ex-Team Skull. But I’m from one of the worlds where they’re super-awesome and mad evil, not like the lame-o’s in this dimension.”
“I certainly hope you’re not implying that Rainbow Rocket is ‘mad evil’ as well, as you term it. We may be pragmatic, but our ultimate mission is altruistic in nature: To bring peace and order to the multiverse through a process of pacification and unification of each dimension’s governing bodies.”
“Okay, but what about like, all those weird dudes we’re appointing as administrators, who want to flood the world or kill everyone or get rid of all emotion or whatever?”
I wasn’t entirely clear about Giovanni’s reasoning for teaming up with them myself, but I still felt a duty to defend his reasoning in the face of this disrespectful subordinate. “Those ‘weird dudes’ are valued allies who make important contributions to our team, but I assure you they have no influence in deciding our values or long-term mission.” At least, I really hope not.
“Whatever. Okay, so here’s the deets with this pokeball: You know how there was that big program to try to brainwash all those dragons using those totally sick mind-control tops from that dumb ‘pokemon ranger’ dimension? Yeah, it didn’t take with this one Latios here. Now it’s super-pissed and will attack anyone who releases it!”
“Why are you bringing this to me? Go find one of our many, many pokemon containment specialists and ask them about it. Just be sure to label the ball properly wherever you end up putting it.”
“’Kay, I’ll go tell them you said that.” The ex-skull turns and storms back up the stairs, then stops to shout down at you: “Hey, so for that label, would ‘Legendary Dragon: Free willed, do not release’ work?”
“That’s really not very descript-”
“Cool! I’m out!” The grunt’s footsteps fade into the distances.
Right… so, next security item: Ditto, smeargle, and any other pokemon that can use transform. They’re a bit tricky, since the only way to definitely detect a transformed pokemon is to try to transform into one and fail. Of course, the transformation process always has its imperfections, which can be exploited to-
“Hey, so you’re the head of security, right? I’m Paul, from accounting.” This voice is accompanied by a man wearing the standard Rainbow Rocket uniform, with the addition of a rainbow-colored tie to indicate his white-collar position.
…Hmm. I had decided to do my security planning in the foyer, so as to provide me with a view of the main entrance and its many vulnerabilities, but maybe that wasn’t such a good-
“So I’ve got this idea: I need to protect the records of all the bills we pay, so I was thinking I could store them in the same room with all those deadly booby-traps. I’d label the door “Bobs and bills”. The genius of it is that we know that ‘bobs’ stands for ‘booby traps’, but any intruder would think it just means ‘bobby pins’ or something!”
“…Please tell me this is something you came up with on your own, and not the result of the combined brainpower of our whole accounting department.”
“No, this is all me! Hey, just between you and me, the rest of the accounting department are a bunch of dim bulbs, know what I mean? Just look at this label-printer they gave me! The ‘S’ key is broken! They keep saying it can’t be replaced, but you’d think at some point they’d realize they can just budget the money for a new one, cause they’re, you know, accounting? Anyways, I’m glad you like my idea. I’m going to go implement it now,” Paul says.
As I’m about to tell him otherwise, my phone rings, and I’m forced to answer it while Paul scurries away. “Hello?”
“Yo, it’s that dude from a few minutes ago! So I’m writing the label for this pokeball, and I way messed up the spelling on both ‘legendary’ and ‘willed’. I crossed them out super-hard – I mean, they look more like decorative black rectangles of ink than words – but now there’s no room to write in the corrections! Bogus, am I right? And also, the colon between ‘dragon’ and ‘free’ looks kinda more like an accidental smudge than a colon.”
“Why are you bothering me with this insipid nonsense! Do I sound like I care?” I yell into my phone, and hang up.
Someone taps me on the shoulder. “Excuse me, are you done yelling? We’ve got a major problem,” a grunt says from beside me. I jump and whirl around.
“Don’t sneak up on me like that!” I spit.
“Geez, sorry!” she says, although she doesn’t look sorry. “Here’s the issue: there’s a lot of blood splattered all over the door to the post-modern psychic research department we’ve established in the basement, so the only words on it you can still make out are ‘psychic’, and the ‘mod’ part of ‘post-modern’.”
“Wha- what do you mean ‘blood splattered’? Where did the blood come from?”
“Oh yeah, whenever anyone touches the door to ‘mod psychic’ as we’re all calling it now, a giant anvil falls from the ceiling and crushes you to death instantly. No idea why. It’s just something that keeps happening. Actually, maybe I should have mentioned that bit first…”
“A more important question: What makes you think I’m the person to deal with this?”
“I was told that- well, nevermind. You know, you seem really stressed out. Maybe you should go ask the head of logistics and supply what his secret is! That guy never seems busy!”
A suspicion forms. “Maybe I will…” I mutter, and storm off to the break room. As I approach its entrance, I hear the deep voice of the head of logistics and supply coming from within, and halt.
“…so then this guy comes up to me, this real big guy wearing a purple robe. He says he’s this ‘King Biruritchi’ of ‘Team Great Rocket’, and he wants to know where they’re holding try-outs for the new admins. So I say ‘Buddy, you know you’ve gotta have a legendary pokemon if you want to be an admin, right? Archie has Kyogre, Cyrus has Dialga, whadda you got?’ And he says ‘A legendary pokemon? Are you kidding me? I’ve got scads of legendary pokemon!’ And so I say, ‘Alright, let’s see them, bub!’ So then he pulls out this – I kid you not – card binder, and starts showing me all these pokemon cards of the legendaries he has! And you can tell he’s real proud of it too – he’s bragging about how he has both a normal and a holofoil version of each one, and he’s pulling out all these ‘grading certificates’ showing how perfect and rectangular the cards are and so forth. I stop him right there and say we’re looking for real legendary pokemon, and he goes – he goes – oh man, he goes – ‘You’re keeping real divine pokemon imprisoned here? But that’s unethical!”
I can hear the laughter of at least two people coming from inside the break room, but the loudest of it is almost definitely from the head of logistics himself. Then it dies down and I can hear someone else speaking up:
“Wow, that’s really wild. Where do you get the time to deal with all these guys? Aren’t you really busy, being the head of logistics and supply and all?” It’s a familiar voice, but I’m not sure whose it is.
“Naw! See, all of us department heads know a little secret: Almost any question we get asked – whether it’s where to put explosives, or what to do with a disobedient pokemon – can be reframed as a ‘security question’, you know? So whenever I get some annoying request I don’t want to deal with, I just tell ‘em to go bother the head of security about it!”
“Aha!” I exclaim as I burst into the break room. “So you’re the reason why everyone keeps interrupting me with their insipid problems! I am literally going to strangle-”
BLAM! BLAM, BLAM!
I look down and notice three bullet holes in my chest and lower abdomen, and collapse to the floor. It’s only now that I notice the other person in the room, the person the head of logistics was talking to: It’s me! An exact duplicate of myself (sans bullet wounds), holding a revolver pointed in my direction.
“Finally. I was wondering when you’d show up,” the other me says as I struggle to staunch my bleeding.
“Stop him! He’s obviously a ditto… or a zoroark… help…”
“No. I’m one-hundred-percent real. You, on the other hand, are an extremely pesky alternate universe version of me who slipped into this dimension by mistake. Luckily, I came up with a clever plan to crowd-source hunting you down, by redirecting everyone to bring their complaints to you,” my doppleganger says.
“Yeah, the convolutedness of the idea was how I knew this guy’s the genuine article,” the head of logistics says, clapping my clone on the back.
I open my mouth to protest, but my throat feels too dry to speak. Words fail me. Everything fails me. I’m so cold…
I feel myself dying… how am I still conscious, still thinking? Am I becoming a ghost? I must be…
My memories are fading. I was… I was angry at someone, wasn’t I? A remembrance rises to the forefront of my mind: A… crate? Someone asking about… mods?
Yes, yes that’s it! I may have been struck down, but as a ghost I will continue my mission of defending these headquarters in the name of the great Team Rainbow Rocket, and I will take my violent, ghostly revenge on absolutely anyone asking about mods of any sort around here! Bwahahaha, yes!
THE END
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And I'm glad it did because this was freaking hilarious.