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Morphic (R, possibly offensive to some)
- Thread starter Dragonfree
- Start date
The Great Butler
Hush, keep it down
I apologize for not keeping up, and I certainly regret it as this has really developed into a fine piece! The characterization, in particular, is very strong---kudos for the breakup scene and dialogue.
I'll try to keep up better next time.
I'll try to keep up better next time.
String Bean
genius at work
Oh man, this is awesome! It's like James Patterson's Maximum Ride (Genetics gone bad, evil scientists mix human and bird DNA, and create human-avian hybrids that can FLY!).
Anyways... I like how you have a variety of different pokemorphs (a fish, bug, bird, cat, ghost, fox, plant, and a...blob-thing).
If there is a PM list, I'd like to be on it. thanks!
Anyways... I like how you have a variety of different pokemorphs (a fish, bug, bird, cat, ghost, fox, plant, and a...blob-thing).
If there is a PM list, I'd like to be on it. thanks!
Psychic
Really and truly
String Bean...you scare me.
My friend just mentioned Maximum Ride to me before the summer, and it interested me so much that I had my mom send it to me while I was at camp. But silly her, she sent me School's Out- Forever instead of The Angel Experiment! But hopefully I'll be able to get Angel while I'm in the city, and then I will start having fun.
From what my irl friend Bailey told me, Maximum Ride is exactly like all the most common Pokémorph fics you'll see. Aka bunch of kids are captured by scientists, are genetically altered to contain the DNA of another creature and have cool special powers, live in an enclosed, secluded lab all their miserable lives only to escape later and constantly run from their creators.
Again, I've not yet read the book but the similarities are really...well, similar. I can't really pass judgement, but before you go comparing Morphic to Max Ride I'd suggest you go look up the traditional, clichéd Pokémorph fics.
Because Morphic is REALLY not one of them.
;; Update while I'm still in the city! Or at least send me the letters like I asked!
Oh, and do me a favour and find out how much it'd be to send a letter from Canada to Iceland. There's something I wanna send you.
~Psychic
My friend just mentioned Maximum Ride to me before the summer, and it interested me so much that I had my mom send it to me while I was at camp. But silly her, she sent me School's Out- Forever instead of The Angel Experiment! But hopefully I'll be able to get Angel while I'm in the city, and then I will start having fun.
From what my irl friend Bailey told me, Maximum Ride is exactly like all the most common Pokémorph fics you'll see. Aka bunch of kids are captured by scientists, are genetically altered to contain the DNA of another creature and have cool special powers, live in an enclosed, secluded lab all their miserable lives only to escape later and constantly run from their creators.
Again, I've not yet read the book but the similarities are really...well, similar. I can't really pass judgement, but before you go comparing Morphic to Max Ride I'd suggest you go look up the traditional, clichéd Pokémorph fics.
Because Morphic is REALLY not one of them.
;; Update while I'm still in the city! Or at least send me the letters like I asked!
Oh, and do me a favour and find out how much it'd be to send a letter from Canada to Iceland. There's something I wanna send you.
~Psychic
String Bean
genius at work
oh, sorry. I just thought that Morphic was cool and I was comparing it to another cool book, Maximum Ride.
Dragonfree
Just me
I've never read Maximum Ride (actually, I'd never heard of it), but I think the key difference here is that there scientists in Morphic aren't evil. They just make silly decisions.
Thanks for reading, anyway. Psychic, this was all I could find. I've also lost access to my e-mail so I don't have the mail you sent to me. ><;
Chapter 4
Author's Note: Remember that warning before the first chapter about how the fic is going to include sensitive subjects and may offend people? Yeah, that wasn't referring to that little abortion debate. It was referring to what you'll see in this chapter and later.
So again, I will emphasize that this fic is not trying to rant or preach about anything. All there is to it is characters with opinions. You have been warned.
-------
“We are gathered here today to discuss a desecration of life and of God’s Creation. We are here to discuss a most brutal violation of the laws handed down to us from the Holy Spirit when our ancestors fled to the Pokémon world. We are here to discuss abominations against nature and the natural hierarchy where humans rule over Pokémon. I am referring, of course, to the Pokémorphs.”
Isaac Daniels looked around the room. It was just the church cellar, mostly used for Sunday school, but religion was always steadily losing its popularity among the young and a few months ago they had canceled Sunday school and instead started to hold meetings for the few attending children in each other’s own homes, while the parents had weekly meetings here after having convinced the priest to lend them the room for the purpose. That, incidentally, was why no one had bothered to change all the light bulbs in the room that had gone out. There was only one that still worked and that one only barely: it flickered on and off every now and then, leaving the room in momentary darkness.
It was truly pathetic, he thought, for an institute of such former greatness as the church, that not only were all the influential bishops starting to preach liberalism, hypocrisy and loose interpretations of God’s word: the few true believers, when they needed to meet and discuss matters of true spiritual importance, had to do so in secrecy thanks to those appalling free speech-violating hate crime laws, and not only in secrecy, but in a dark, messy church cellar with nonfunctional lights.
“The Pokémorphs,” he repeated. “Humans, though created in His image, should not play God, but those propagators of science and evolution of course disregard this as fantasy. I need only cite the very fourteenth Commandment: ‘The creatures shall be the humble servants and the men shall be their kind masters: they are distinct by their nature.’ It tells us that the Pokémonly and the humanly are to be separate. And we are again warned in the Book of Visions, 21.5: ‘And there will be no more distinction between the men and the monsters: the Machoke shall pose as man and lie with the woman as the man.’ By creating the Pokémorphs, they have blurred the natural border between humans and Pokémon, and thus brought us one step closer to the looming apocalypse prophesized in the Book of Visions.”
He looked over the small group again as they nodded in agreement. “Ten years ago, a semi-religious movement chose to fight for the unborn Pokémorphs’ lives. They chose to do this because they valued the sacredness of life above the clear laws condemning the creation of those creatures. But this was based on a misunderstanding. It is, after all, the Lord’s creation and the miracle of natural conception that are things of sacredness; lives created by Man, as the Pokémorphs have, only violate His laws by their very existence. He must be frowning upon us now for having let them live and poison their surroundings for ten years, having let them go to school with our children…”
“One of them was in my daughter’s class,” a woman commented. “I had to have her moved to a different class. Apparently many other parents were doing the same, so they were having difficulties keeping the class together. It’s good to know there are still sensible parents around.”
Isaac nodded. “That does not, however, justify their existence, and the Lord has given us some signs to emphasize this. Mia Kerringan the Scyther Pokémorph, in particular, has shown herself to be a creature of evil, as she has now twice attempted to attack innocent religious children at the school they go to when they tried to expose her to the Word of God. I believe our very own Monica Sellers is the mother of one of the children.” He nodded towards a plump woman with curly red hair.
“She threatened him with her blades…” she sobbed in response as the gathering looked quietly at her.
“The liberal media and the brainwashed public have already accepted the existence of the Pokémorphs. Already, large companies have offered Jean Ambrose the Vulpix Pokémorph the title role in the upcoming films based on the ‘Sarah Hooter’ books, which have already been established to be spreading Pokémon-superiority propaganda and messages of hate towards the righteous. Additionally, some of the scientists responsible for the experiments have expressed that they do not regret creating the Pokémorphs and shown enthusiasm towards the idea of future genetic experiments. First and foremost, it is David Ambrose, the leader of the original Pokémorph project.”
Isaac looked around the room. A couple of people shuddered at the mention of the name.
“You have all noticed him in the media. Atheist and staunch supporter of the scientific worldview. Some of the other scientists were religious as children but then lost their faith (and in fact a couple claim to be liberal believers), but he never believed. He has ridiculed people of faith in public on multiple occasions, is known to drink excessively at times although not as often as he used to, and is a good enough debater to have weaseled every single one of the Pokémorphs into our public schools. He has also proclaimed the manmade Pokémorph children to be superior to naturally conceived children and wants to legalize genetic experiments with human embryos. It is clear that his anger towards God has grown extremely violent, and he seems prepared to do just about anything to get his revenge on the creation. He is more dangerous than all the morphs, simply because he is an adult and can create more of them. Now that he has defended Mia Kerrigan the Scyther Pokémorph after her vicious attacks on the other children twice and managed to force the school to keep her, it has become clear that he must be stopped at all costs. The safety of our children, and of the future world, is at stake.”
A few of the men nodded in agreement, but Isaac noticed a woman looking doubtfully up at him.
“I hope you understand what kind of action I am suggesting we take here. Ladies, what remains is a discussion for the men. You may leave early today.”
There was a short silence as the women looked around at their husbands, but none objected. The sound of chairs scraping the floor echoed off the walls as they stood up to leave. Isaac even held the door open for them. He was a gentleman at heart.
There was no doubt in his mind that he was going to do the right thing, no fear of being caught and sent to prison. He wouldn’t have budged even if those darned liberals hadn’t gotten the death penalty abolished a couple of centuries ago. The Lord had visited him in his dream and told him to do it. It was his ultimate purpose in life.
David Ambrose had to die.
-------
Katherine Harrison dropped her pencil.
She hissed at her hand. Even now, when she had been practicing it for seven years, it was still happening at least around once a week at school.
She pushed her hand down on top of the pencil that was now lying on her desk and tried to get her flaplike fingers to grab hold of it properly. The rustling gave it away altogether too loudly, but the teacher had gotten so used to it that she only glanced briefly at Katherine, rolled her eyes quickly and continued talking. The other students briefly looked over at her. It was only because it was autumn. By Christmas, this year’s classmates would all be so used to it that the sound wouldn’t register in their brains anymore.
She finally managed to fish the pencil up with the petals of her blue rose and awkwardly positioned it so that she would be able to write with it before resuming taking down notes. Scritch scritch. Sometimes she really hated her mother and her coworkers. She wasn’t only a Roselia Pokémorph with fingers that were more like weak petal-like flaps she couldn’t do much with and attracted rather a lot of attention along with the large green thorns sticking out of her head: she also grew so fast that she had been forced to go through twelve years’ worth of schooling in only seven years. Just how difficult was it possible to make school for one’s potential daughter before her birth? And to boot, she was left-handed. That just really took the cake, although her mother had sworn many times that the left-handedness had not been intentional.
Well, it was not like it wasn’t technically the Stop Abortion Movement’s fault, anyway, in an ironic way, although out of her mother’s coworkers, only Dave had ever gotten tasteless enough to actually mention that in his defense. Theirs and Brian’s. Katherine snorted. Oh, yes, Dave. Of course everything is always everybody’s fault but yours. It’s not like the person who thought of doing illegal genetic experiments in the first place is to blame for anything at all. No way. He just provided the genius behind the first ever successful gene-splicing in complex species. No relation at all to the consequences.
Of course she had to admit she was sometimes grateful for Dave. He was the most enthusiastic fighter trying to allow the Pokémorphs to lead a semi-normal life of the bunch and he had managed to talk all of the morphs’ way into public schools despite their obvious difficulties, whether in the form of their physical and mental capabilities developing at supernatural speed, their hands being roses or their arms having blades on them. That, she had to admit, was definitely something. There was no way anybody but Dave could have convinced the schools to let Mia in and to keep her after she very nearly slashed her schoolmates to shreds. Twice. Hell, she was a Pokémorph herself and still wouldn’t hesitate to conclude that Mia had simply shown herself to be extremely dangerous to whoever came within a two-meter radius of her. Sometimes she seriously wondered if Dave was using hypnosis or something.
She realized she’d been letting her mind wander way too much; she had stopped taking down notes long ago and was now just staring emptily out the window that she had to be seated by for her thorns to photosynthesize. She had difficulty concentrating when she didn’t have sunlight shining on her.
She was pretty messed up and would have a very difficult life compared to everybody else, she had long ago realized. But really, she couldn’t do anything about it, and couldn’t help thinking she’d rather be there and have some difficulties picking up pencils than have been aborted as a fetus or even never have existed at all. And heck, even though most people at school must have gotten the impression that having roses for hands was hell, it only really got annoying when it came to holding and controlling small objects like pencils. At least she could move the petals with some force when she used them right. She was still practising to be able to play the violin, and was starting to see a little success.
At least, she thought to herself when she turned back to the teacher to continue taking down notes, she was not Gabriel.
-------
“Hey, uh…”
Gabriel turned around, looking at a little brown-haired kid he hadn’t seen before who seemed, from the looks of it, to be extremely nervous. A few other kids around his age were standing a short distance away, watching.
“Your… you know…” The kid pointed at Gabriel’s hair.
“Let me guess, it’s on fire?” Gabriel asked dully, blindly slapping the front of his spiky red hair with his hand as the kid nodded timidly. He tried his best to stroke his hair back so it wouldn’t get too close to the flames above his eyebrows again. Not that he expected it to be successful for any considerably stretch of time. He had, after all, been trying to keep his hair out of those flames for ten years now, and it always managed to get back into the fire after a while.
“Thanks,” he said to the kid and turned to leave.
“And… um…”
“What? My hands dripping again?” Gabriel sighed as he turned his head.
“Yeah.”
He looked down at his left hand, which was dripping warm orangeish goo onto the ground.
“Oh. Sorry. It happens.” He hurriedly smeared the slime up his arm with his other hand and then looked at the kid and the group that was still goggling at him. “Let me guess, just finished your first day of school here?”
The kid nodded, still looking at him with wide, terrified eyes.
“Well, I suggest you get used to it,” Gabriel told him and prepared to leave again.
“So are you the… the…”
“Yes, I’m the Slugma Pokémorph,” Gabriel replied with a sigh. “Please try not to make me angry at any point in the future, because if my body temperature gets any higher than it is, I happen to have a very uncomfortably high risk of major organ failure.”
The kid ran for it. Gabriel smiled grimly after him.
“My life sucks,” he sighed as he headed towards his home.
Thanks for reading, anyway. Psychic, this was all I could find. I've also lost access to my e-mail so I don't have the mail you sent to me. ><;
Chapter 4
Author's Note: Remember that warning before the first chapter about how the fic is going to include sensitive subjects and may offend people? Yeah, that wasn't referring to that little abortion debate. It was referring to what you'll see in this chapter and later.
So again, I will emphasize that this fic is not trying to rant or preach about anything. All there is to it is characters with opinions. You have been warned.
-------
“We are gathered here today to discuss a desecration of life and of God’s Creation. We are here to discuss a most brutal violation of the laws handed down to us from the Holy Spirit when our ancestors fled to the Pokémon world. We are here to discuss abominations against nature and the natural hierarchy where humans rule over Pokémon. I am referring, of course, to the Pokémorphs.”
Isaac Daniels looked around the room. It was just the church cellar, mostly used for Sunday school, but religion was always steadily losing its popularity among the young and a few months ago they had canceled Sunday school and instead started to hold meetings for the few attending children in each other’s own homes, while the parents had weekly meetings here after having convinced the priest to lend them the room for the purpose. That, incidentally, was why no one had bothered to change all the light bulbs in the room that had gone out. There was only one that still worked and that one only barely: it flickered on and off every now and then, leaving the room in momentary darkness.
It was truly pathetic, he thought, for an institute of such former greatness as the church, that not only were all the influential bishops starting to preach liberalism, hypocrisy and loose interpretations of God’s word: the few true believers, when they needed to meet and discuss matters of true spiritual importance, had to do so in secrecy thanks to those appalling free speech-violating hate crime laws, and not only in secrecy, but in a dark, messy church cellar with nonfunctional lights.
“The Pokémorphs,” he repeated. “Humans, though created in His image, should not play God, but those propagators of science and evolution of course disregard this as fantasy. I need only cite the very fourteenth Commandment: ‘The creatures shall be the humble servants and the men shall be their kind masters: they are distinct by their nature.’ It tells us that the Pokémonly and the humanly are to be separate. And we are again warned in the Book of Visions, 21.5: ‘And there will be no more distinction between the men and the monsters: the Machoke shall pose as man and lie with the woman as the man.’ By creating the Pokémorphs, they have blurred the natural border between humans and Pokémon, and thus brought us one step closer to the looming apocalypse prophesized in the Book of Visions.”
He looked over the small group again as they nodded in agreement. “Ten years ago, a semi-religious movement chose to fight for the unborn Pokémorphs’ lives. They chose to do this because they valued the sacredness of life above the clear laws condemning the creation of those creatures. But this was based on a misunderstanding. It is, after all, the Lord’s creation and the miracle of natural conception that are things of sacredness; lives created by Man, as the Pokémorphs have, only violate His laws by their very existence. He must be frowning upon us now for having let them live and poison their surroundings for ten years, having let them go to school with our children…”
“One of them was in my daughter’s class,” a woman commented. “I had to have her moved to a different class. Apparently many other parents were doing the same, so they were having difficulties keeping the class together. It’s good to know there are still sensible parents around.”
Isaac nodded. “That does not, however, justify their existence, and the Lord has given us some signs to emphasize this. Mia Kerringan the Scyther Pokémorph, in particular, has shown herself to be a creature of evil, as she has now twice attempted to attack innocent religious children at the school they go to when they tried to expose her to the Word of God. I believe our very own Monica Sellers is the mother of one of the children.” He nodded towards a plump woman with curly red hair.
“She threatened him with her blades…” she sobbed in response as the gathering looked quietly at her.
“The liberal media and the brainwashed public have already accepted the existence of the Pokémorphs. Already, large companies have offered Jean Ambrose the Vulpix Pokémorph the title role in the upcoming films based on the ‘Sarah Hooter’ books, which have already been established to be spreading Pokémon-superiority propaganda and messages of hate towards the righteous. Additionally, some of the scientists responsible for the experiments have expressed that they do not regret creating the Pokémorphs and shown enthusiasm towards the idea of future genetic experiments. First and foremost, it is David Ambrose, the leader of the original Pokémorph project.”
Isaac looked around the room. A couple of people shuddered at the mention of the name.
“You have all noticed him in the media. Atheist and staunch supporter of the scientific worldview. Some of the other scientists were religious as children but then lost their faith (and in fact a couple claim to be liberal believers), but he never believed. He has ridiculed people of faith in public on multiple occasions, is known to drink excessively at times although not as often as he used to, and is a good enough debater to have weaseled every single one of the Pokémorphs into our public schools. He has also proclaimed the manmade Pokémorph children to be superior to naturally conceived children and wants to legalize genetic experiments with human embryos. It is clear that his anger towards God has grown extremely violent, and he seems prepared to do just about anything to get his revenge on the creation. He is more dangerous than all the morphs, simply because he is an adult and can create more of them. Now that he has defended Mia Kerrigan the Scyther Pokémorph after her vicious attacks on the other children twice and managed to force the school to keep her, it has become clear that he must be stopped at all costs. The safety of our children, and of the future world, is at stake.”
A few of the men nodded in agreement, but Isaac noticed a woman looking doubtfully up at him.
“I hope you understand what kind of action I am suggesting we take here. Ladies, what remains is a discussion for the men. You may leave early today.”
There was a short silence as the women looked around at their husbands, but none objected. The sound of chairs scraping the floor echoed off the walls as they stood up to leave. Isaac even held the door open for them. He was a gentleman at heart.
There was no doubt in his mind that he was going to do the right thing, no fear of being caught and sent to prison. He wouldn’t have budged even if those darned liberals hadn’t gotten the death penalty abolished a couple of centuries ago. The Lord had visited him in his dream and told him to do it. It was his ultimate purpose in life.
David Ambrose had to die.
-------
Katherine Harrison dropped her pencil.
She hissed at her hand. Even now, when she had been practicing it for seven years, it was still happening at least around once a week at school.
She pushed her hand down on top of the pencil that was now lying on her desk and tried to get her flaplike fingers to grab hold of it properly. The rustling gave it away altogether too loudly, but the teacher had gotten so used to it that she only glanced briefly at Katherine, rolled her eyes quickly and continued talking. The other students briefly looked over at her. It was only because it was autumn. By Christmas, this year’s classmates would all be so used to it that the sound wouldn’t register in their brains anymore.
She finally managed to fish the pencil up with the petals of her blue rose and awkwardly positioned it so that she would be able to write with it before resuming taking down notes. Scritch scritch. Sometimes she really hated her mother and her coworkers. She wasn’t only a Roselia Pokémorph with fingers that were more like weak petal-like flaps she couldn’t do much with and attracted rather a lot of attention along with the large green thorns sticking out of her head: she also grew so fast that she had been forced to go through twelve years’ worth of schooling in only seven years. Just how difficult was it possible to make school for one’s potential daughter before her birth? And to boot, she was left-handed. That just really took the cake, although her mother had sworn many times that the left-handedness had not been intentional.
Well, it was not like it wasn’t technically the Stop Abortion Movement’s fault, anyway, in an ironic way, although out of her mother’s coworkers, only Dave had ever gotten tasteless enough to actually mention that in his defense. Theirs and Brian’s. Katherine snorted. Oh, yes, Dave. Of course everything is always everybody’s fault but yours. It’s not like the person who thought of doing illegal genetic experiments in the first place is to blame for anything at all. No way. He just provided the genius behind the first ever successful gene-splicing in complex species. No relation at all to the consequences.
Of course she had to admit she was sometimes grateful for Dave. He was the most enthusiastic fighter trying to allow the Pokémorphs to lead a semi-normal life of the bunch and he had managed to talk all of the morphs’ way into public schools despite their obvious difficulties, whether in the form of their physical and mental capabilities developing at supernatural speed, their hands being roses or their arms having blades on them. That, she had to admit, was definitely something. There was no way anybody but Dave could have convinced the schools to let Mia in and to keep her after she very nearly slashed her schoolmates to shreds. Twice. Hell, she was a Pokémorph herself and still wouldn’t hesitate to conclude that Mia had simply shown herself to be extremely dangerous to whoever came within a two-meter radius of her. Sometimes she seriously wondered if Dave was using hypnosis or something.
She realized she’d been letting her mind wander way too much; she had stopped taking down notes long ago and was now just staring emptily out the window that she had to be seated by for her thorns to photosynthesize. She had difficulty concentrating when she didn’t have sunlight shining on her.
She was pretty messed up and would have a very difficult life compared to everybody else, she had long ago realized. But really, she couldn’t do anything about it, and couldn’t help thinking she’d rather be there and have some difficulties picking up pencils than have been aborted as a fetus or even never have existed at all. And heck, even though most people at school must have gotten the impression that having roses for hands was hell, it only really got annoying when it came to holding and controlling small objects like pencils. At least she could move the petals with some force when she used them right. She was still practising to be able to play the violin, and was starting to see a little success.
At least, she thought to herself when she turned back to the teacher to continue taking down notes, she was not Gabriel.
-------
“Hey, uh…”
Gabriel turned around, looking at a little brown-haired kid he hadn’t seen before who seemed, from the looks of it, to be extremely nervous. A few other kids around his age were standing a short distance away, watching.
“Your… you know…” The kid pointed at Gabriel’s hair.
“Let me guess, it’s on fire?” Gabriel asked dully, blindly slapping the front of his spiky red hair with his hand as the kid nodded timidly. He tried his best to stroke his hair back so it wouldn’t get too close to the flames above his eyebrows again. Not that he expected it to be successful for any considerably stretch of time. He had, after all, been trying to keep his hair out of those flames for ten years now, and it always managed to get back into the fire after a while.
“Thanks,” he said to the kid and turned to leave.
“And… um…”
“What? My hands dripping again?” Gabriel sighed as he turned his head.
“Yeah.”
He looked down at his left hand, which was dripping warm orangeish goo onto the ground.
“Oh. Sorry. It happens.” He hurriedly smeared the slime up his arm with his other hand and then looked at the kid and the group that was still goggling at him. “Let me guess, just finished your first day of school here?”
The kid nodded, still looking at him with wide, terrified eyes.
“Well, I suggest you get used to it,” Gabriel told him and prepared to leave again.
“So are you the… the…”
“Yes, I’m the Slugma Pokémorph,” Gabriel replied with a sigh. “Please try not to make me angry at any point in the future, because if my body temperature gets any higher than it is, I happen to have a very uncomfortably high risk of major organ failure.”
The kid ran for it. Gabriel smiled grimly after him.
“My life sucks,” he sighed as he headed towards his home.
Last edited:
You know, after reading that, I've come to the conclusion that I will never combine human and slugma for any character of any story I write or daydream. It just seems cruel. Although I must say you handled him very well. His life truly does suck. Yeah, I'm out of words to say, so I'll shut up now.
The Great Butler
Hush, keep it down
Wow, that was pretty intense. I give you credit, Dragonfree, for being willing to tackle tough topics in your work. It certainly pushes this fic to another level.
Sike Saner
Peace to the Mountain
That Isaac Daniels sounds like major trouble… o_o; But I’m not surprised that there would be people who would feel that way about the Pokémorphs for the reasons that Isaac and those who agree with him do. It just seems like that particular sentiment really would arise if human/nonhuman hybrids (especially intelligent ones, because people’d feel even more threatened by such) were ever made.
Speaking of believability, I really like the inclusion of complications in life that are particular to the nature of the morphs’ hybrid forms, such as the difficulty that Katherine has in using her rose-hands and Gabriel’s problem of his hair constantly igniting (someone needs to tell him that bald is beautiful XP).
And, speaking of Gabriel, I already love that character. Not only is the idea of a Slugma Pokémorph still seriously cool, but Gabriel’s also got an instantly memorable personality. I look very much forward to any more opportunities to read about that guy that may lie ahead. ^^
Oh, and out of random curiosity, what are the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth commandments, and are there more than fourteen in the context of this story?
Favorite excerpt:
It’s things like that that just make me find that character very easy to like.
Speaking of believability, I really like the inclusion of complications in life that are particular to the nature of the morphs’ hybrid forms, such as the difficulty that Katherine has in using her rose-hands and Gabriel’s problem of his hair constantly igniting (someone needs to tell him that bald is beautiful XP).
And, speaking of Gabriel, I already love that character.
Not only is the idea of a Slugma Pokémorph still seriously cool, but Gabriel’s also got an instantly memorable personality. I look very much forward to any more opportunities to read about that guy that may lie ahead. ^^Oh, and out of random curiosity, what are the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth commandments, and are there more than fourteen in the context of this story?
Favorite excerpt:
It’s things like that that just make me find that character very easy to like.
Dragonfree
Just me
Thanks for reviewing, everybody. (Try to be more constructive in the future, though, vareki.)
Sike Saner: Heh, I never bothered making up the other Commandments. xP But the idea was that there were fifteen. I may make them up at some point, but I don't think I'll need it for now.
You'll see a lot more Gabriel in the future, but unfortunately not in chapter five, which as a matter of fact is ready now. I seriously love this chapter. Mostly because of the character it focuses on. Hehe.
Chapter 5
Mia Kerrigan sat on a bench at the edge of the school grounds. For most kids, free periods were their favourite time of the school day. And so had they been for her the first couple of years.
Then her scythes had started to grow, and the other kids had grown deathly afraid of her, something she could not really relate to personally but could, in a limited sense, understand.
On its own that was perhaps not too bad, since she had never been a particularly social person and initially it had been very satisfying to see all the gawking eyes averted as soon as she glanced in their general direction. The bad part was that it wasn’t until they became afraid of her that the Nutjobs had begun to feel some sense of martyrdom (an idea which they, for some reason she could not quite grasp either, seemed to feel oddly attracted to) in trying to explain to her why she was a vile creature of Hell.
And that was why she felt her glossy yellow insect wings begin to twitch that day when she realized that the Nutjobs were approaching her.
The boy she had attacked the last time was absent from the group, and she felt a hint of dark pride in herself. The oldest of them, a sixteen-year-old girl with square-rimmed glasses and long brown hair tied into a ponytail, was still there, however, and this year she had gathered a few new followers.
Mia said nothing as they came within a few feet of the bench.
“Still here?” the girl asked with contempt in her voice. Mia noticed a small blond-haired boy with large blue eyes standing in the group and looking at her with an expression almost of pity.
“Frank left because of you, you know,” the girl went on. “He didn’t want to come back. His mom put him into a different school. I hope you’re happy.”
Mia looked at the little boy, who looked back at her. He bit his lip, but didn’t show any other sign of being afraid.
She liked him.
“He was my friend.”
The little boy blinked his large blue eyes slowly, surveying her, his expression still a strange blend of interest and sad pity.
“What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you ever answer when people talk to you?”
Mia’s eyes darted up at her and her head slowly followed. She could see the muscles under the skin in the girl’s exposed neck tensing in anger, her posture stiffening slightly. The little boy glanced up at her and then back at Mia.
“You can talk!” the girl shouted. Her fingers curled into fists, her knuckles whitened. “Say something!”
“What?” Mia replied, her attention now focusing on the sinews in the girl’s neck shifting as she swallowed.
“I know you aren’t one of God’s creations,” the girl replied with a slight jerk of her head, her voice shaking slightly. Her ponytail swished around behind her for a second but quickly came to a stop. “But if you turn to him, he will accept you like any of his children. You can be good and you will be forgiven. How you were created doesn’t matter. Everybody is the same before God. I don’t know why you do the… things you do. Maybe you… you’ve got demons inside of you or… something.”
The way the girl’s gaze shifted as she said the last sentence betrayed undeniable scepticism. She didn’t really believe there were any demons. Mia could tell. That girl was confused and bitter, and had never gotten to Mia much, not even last year when she had been a lot more violent and actually punched her or the times when she had screamed about the eternal fires of Hell. It was the boy that bothered her more, that boy who wasn’t like the other cronies. The way he looked at her, sad, pitying.
“There is no God,” Mia just replied, watching both the girl and the boy. The girl flinched at the words, as if she had just been stung. The boy closed his eyes for a moment, ever-so-slightly shaking his head, knowingly, like it was Mia who was the one with the empty faith in imaginary friends in the sky. Something about it irritated her. Why was she to be pitied? She liked that boy. He wasn’t supposed to irritate her.
“Leave me alone,” she said, looking straight at him. He looked back at her and then stepped slowly forward. Mia’s arms automatically twitched into a defensive position, ready to slash, despite the wooden sheath bound around her forearms that covered her small blades from wrist to elbow and rendered them harmless. The boy didn’t blink. His eyes looked straight at hers, searched them, flicking now and then to the bony horns sticking out of her green hair and the sheathed blades on her arms.
“Get away from me,” she growled, her arm twitching. She would have hit him, except that she still liked him and didn’t want to.
“I feel sorry for you,” he told her, unblinking. Mia saw the brown-haired girl jerk her head down toward the boy, her bitter expression blending with surprise.
The boy took another step.
Mia jerked her arm towards him, but another girl from the group with the same blond hair and slightly smaller blue eyes, most likely his sister, pulled him back and jumped in front of him so that the sheath covering Mia’s scythe hit the side of her arm instead. There wasn’t much force in the blow and the girl wasn’t hurt, but she gave Mia just the expression that she had found most typical of the Nutjobs in her time dealing with them.
“Listen, you freak,” she said as she threw Mia’s arm away, standing so close to her that Mia could smell the blood rushing to her face, “I know you can’t hurt anyone with that on your scythes, but we’re going to get you out of this school, no matter what. You contaminate it with evil. You should be locked up somewhere away from real people where you can’t hurt them, and…”
Without thinking, Mia bared her teeth and snarled, a reaction that to her felt more natural than she knew it ought to. The girl recoiled slightly, clenching her jaws. “You can’t hurt us,” she repeated under her breath, more to herself than to Mia. “You can’t hurt us. They put that on your arms so you couldn’t.”
Mia knew it was a bad idea, but she growled, jerked her left hand up to the leather straps tying the sheath to her right hand and began to tear wildly at them. The Nutjobs took only a fraction of a second to realize what she was doing and immediately turned around to speed up to the school building. The blond-haired girl had to practically drag her brother with them.
She ripped the sheath fully off and felt the cool air around her exposed scythe. It felt good. The blade itched for something to cut, but the Nutjobs were already gone.
She looked around, straight into the eyes of the teacher currently on watch who was standing by the wall a few meters away, his face pale and sweaty as he picked up his cellphone and dialled what she knew to be Dave’s number.
She took a deep breath and closed her eyes to calm down, shaking her head to clear it, but it was already too late.
-------
“Mr. Ambrose, surely you can understand that this is unacceptable.”
“I don’t see why this is any worse than what happened before.”
The principal’s office was not very big, and the crammed bookshelves that always threatened to collapse and the deathly still, heavy, red curtains in front of the firmly shut windows gave it a distinctly claustrophobic atmosphere that had made her despise the room the moment she had first set foot into it. She was sitting on one of the chairs in the corner with her bare, clawed feet up on the other, examining the blades that poked out through her skin just below her wrists while the men talked it over. She heard the principal sigh.
“Mr. Ambrose, this is the third time this has happened. The first time you assured us it was a one-time occurrence and would never happen again. The second, you told us that for safety we could put on that sheath which would protect any students from potential unconscious outbursts. But now this, too, has proven futile. We have multiple eyewitnesses who will readily swear that she simply took the sheaths off and all that saved her fellow students was that while she was doing so they had time to flee. Surely you cannot expect us to keep her at this school even after this. It is clearly only a matter of time before she murders someone. Frankly I’m afraid of her.” He lowered his voice, apparently having deluded himself into thinking her hearing wasn’t that much better than an ordinary human being’s. “I wouldn’t dare take her into this office if you weren’t here too, to be honest. The teachers are afraid of teaching her classes. More than one student has come in and expressed great concern or even wish to leave the school.” Not that it mattered that she heard it. She had noticed all of that already.
She poked the sharp corner of the scythe right at the elbow where it was widest, just before it sharply turned back into her arm and rejoined the bone. A trickle of crimson blood from her fingertip travelled down the blade and started to glide off her elbow. She wiped it carefully off with the finger it had come from and licked it off from there. She’d always enjoyed the heavy, metallic taste of it.
“You’re not getting it,” Dave’s irritated voice replied. “They provoked her. Nobody in their right mind would provoke a half-Scyther. It’s their own damned fault, if you ask me.”
“All the more reason not to allow half-Scyther into this school, don’t you think?”
“She has a right to education.”
“Of course she does, but if she can’t function among other students, her education may have to be carried out in her private home where she can be kept under control.”
A fly buzzed close to her and landed on the wall. Mia’s eyes automatically followed it as it crawled upwards in vain hopes of finding open air. She raised her arm slowly.
WHAM.
Dave and the principal jerked their heads around in surprise, abruptly ceasing their conversation. She pulled the short blade out of the wall it had sunk slightly into, letting the two halves of the fly fall down on either side of the resulting crack as a subconscious smile flickered across her face.
It took only a moment for her mind to snap back into human manners, her eyes flicking back to the crack and then to the elderly man in the blue suit standing pale-faced behind the desk. “I didn’t like it,” she just said.
Dave looked at her for an awkward second and then turned quickly back to the principal. “Eh.”
“We are not going to have her at this school anymore, Mr. Ambrose,” Mr. Rogers said, watching Mia. He had always been a man who had contained his fear relatively well. He may have been gripping the edge of the desk so tightly that his knuckles whitened, and a bead of sweat was trickling down the side of his forehead, perhaps or perhaps not just because the room was awfully hot for at least her liking, but his voice remained steady and his expression determined. “Please leave. This decision is final. She cannot function at a public school, and you know it as well as I do, Mr. Ambrose.”
Dave licked his lips nervously for a second, his gaze travelling a few times from her to the principal and back to her.
“Let’s just go,” he finally said, offering his hand to Mia. She had always liked it, the way he offered his hand. He did it sincerely and fearlessly, the muscles in his fingers occasionally twitching in protest but his mind inevitably successful in forcing them under control and maintaining the gesture. There was something intrinsically trustworthy in it, more so than in most other people, whose revulsion at the idea of touching her was generally far more obvious. She took his hand and stood up, letting him lead her out of the office and slam the door stubbornly at their backs.
Oh, yes, she liked Dave.
They walked out of the school building to his shiny white car and he walked over to the driver’s seat while she silently opened the door on the passenger side and got in.
“Watch the seat, Mia, watch the seat…” Dave muttered as he closed the door on his side.
She looked on either side of her elbows, where the sharp points at the end of her scythes had created a pattern of small holes and tears in the leather through the years, making sure the blades didn’t touch it as she buckled the seat belt.
Dave started the engine and drove off the sidewalk where he had carelessly parked the car. He sighed, looking briefly at her with his blue eyes.
“It was the Nutjobs again,” she said.
Dave snorted. “It’s always them, isn’t it? ****ing assholes, constantly shoving their religion down people’s throats. I’ve known too many people like that in my life. Complete retards, all of them.”
Mia nodded dully.
“So what was their latest theory about your origins? Have they done demonic possession yet?”
She didn’t answer. He looked at her again.
“There was a boy,” she said. “I liked him.”
Dave raised his eyebrows. “What, did he think you were just a lesser imp and not Satan himself?”
She shook her head absent-mindedly. Dave was peering through the windshield as he turned round a corner and didn’t notice.
“Don’t listen to them. I’ve told you, they’re batshit insane. You’d get more sense out of Babelfishing a Kadabra on crack. Just don’t even try.”
She didn’t understand them. Religious faith just didn’t make any sense. She couldn’t feel angry at them, like Dave did. Just baffled at their existence. Why they would want to believe in something they had no evidence for. It was just something she couldn’t wrap her head around.
“Goddamn kids,” Dave swore under his breath as a group of children scattered from the street in front of them.
“I don’t get it,” she muttered.
“What?”
“Religion.”
“That’s because unlike those nutsos you’ve got some sense in your head.”
“My parents believe in God too.”
Dave pretended not to have heard her for a few seconds. She watched a fly sit down on the back of his neck. If she slashed at it she could accidentally cut his head off. Haha. Oops.
But she liked him, so she didn’t actually do it. And even if she hadn’t liked him, there would have been complications. Too obvious who did it. No good Pokémorph sympathizers left to defend her in court. Somebody would point out her mental age of sixteen and say she was responsible for her actions. Everybody else would agree because they wanted to get rid of her. ‘That fly was getting on my nerves’ had never worked well for her. Jail. Tiny cell with stale air. Nothing decent to eat. It just wouldn’t pay.
He turned back to her. The fly took off and instead settled on the car window on his side. “Well, at least your parents don’t take it so damned seriously.”
She nodded and looked out the window.
“Hey, uh, want a hotdog?”
She shrugged.
“Great,” Dave replied and turned round the next corner.
-------
Howard Kerrigan was doing the dishes when he got the feeling that Lucy was standing behind him. She had a wonderful knack for being quiet and sneaking up on people, but she hadn’t yet tamed her abilities enough to stop a faint psychic signal from pushing gently at those she approached, alerting them of her presence.
He turned around, glanced at her and smiled. “Something bothering you?”
She looked up at him with wide, innocent eyes.
“Daddy, am I an abomination?”
He turned around and stared at her, pushing away the trace of hypnotic power in her eyes. “What? No. Who told you that?”
She pointed at the window above the kitchen sink. “There’s a guy with a sign outside in front of the door.”
Howard looked back at the window, and indeed, there was a man standing on the sidewalk outside the front door holding a sign that said simply ‘VISIONS 21.5’.
He ripped off his rubber gloves and ran to the front door. “Hey!” he shouted heatedly as he opened it, running towards the man. “Don’t you dare stand here giving my daughter ideas! Get away from my house right now!”
The protestor looked at him. It was a young man with pale skin and dark hair that would have been handsome if not for the icy coldness in his light blue eyes. Howard fleetingly recognized him as one of the scariest fundamentalists from church, somebody Daniels. He shivered.
“Get away from my house,” he repeated sternly. “You are not welcome here.”
“Realize what you have done and repent,” Daniels said in a quiet, cold voice. “The Pokémorphs are abominations before the Lord. He will make you pay for their creation, sooner or later. You will regret that He ever let you be born.”
“Get off my property now.”
A crazy glint appeared in the man’s piercing eyes. “He has already chosen His instruments. Those of true faith have received their calling. You will be punished.”
“I told you to leave.”
A smile flickered across Daniels’ features. “The rabbit who refuses to hear of the fox,” he said, “will regret it only when she wanders into his lair.”
Howard returned his icy stare for a second. He felt cold.
“Very well, Howard,” Daniels said quietly. “I see you cannot be persuaded.”
“Not by you. Go away.”
Daniels opened his mouth, but then flicked his eyes to the side. Howard looked to see Dave’s white car pull into their driveway. Both doors opened, and Dave and Mia stepped out. Mia glanced dully at Daniels while Dave pointed at the door to indicate that they needed to talk inside.
“Excuse me,” Howard said coldly to Daniels and walked to the door to meet them.
He took a last glance over his shoulder as he turned the key. Daniels looked at Dave with the creepiest grin Howard had ever seen, and then turned slowly around to walk down the street, still holding the daunting sign above his head.
Sike Saner: Heh, I never bothered making up the other Commandments. xP But the idea was that there were fifteen. I may make them up at some point, but I don't think I'll need it for now.
You'll see a lot more Gabriel in the future, but unfortunately not in chapter five, which as a matter of fact is ready now. I seriously love this chapter. Mostly because of the character it focuses on. Hehe.
Chapter 5
Mia Kerrigan sat on a bench at the edge of the school grounds. For most kids, free periods were their favourite time of the school day. And so had they been for her the first couple of years.
Then her scythes had started to grow, and the other kids had grown deathly afraid of her, something she could not really relate to personally but could, in a limited sense, understand.
On its own that was perhaps not too bad, since she had never been a particularly social person and initially it had been very satisfying to see all the gawking eyes averted as soon as she glanced in their general direction. The bad part was that it wasn’t until they became afraid of her that the Nutjobs had begun to feel some sense of martyrdom (an idea which they, for some reason she could not quite grasp either, seemed to feel oddly attracted to) in trying to explain to her why she was a vile creature of Hell.
And that was why she felt her glossy yellow insect wings begin to twitch that day when she realized that the Nutjobs were approaching her.
The boy she had attacked the last time was absent from the group, and she felt a hint of dark pride in herself. The oldest of them, a sixteen-year-old girl with square-rimmed glasses and long brown hair tied into a ponytail, was still there, however, and this year she had gathered a few new followers.
Mia said nothing as they came within a few feet of the bench.
“Still here?” the girl asked with contempt in her voice. Mia noticed a small blond-haired boy with large blue eyes standing in the group and looking at her with an expression almost of pity.
“Frank left because of you, you know,” the girl went on. “He didn’t want to come back. His mom put him into a different school. I hope you’re happy.”
Mia looked at the little boy, who looked back at her. He bit his lip, but didn’t show any other sign of being afraid.
She liked him.
“He was my friend.”
The little boy blinked his large blue eyes slowly, surveying her, his expression still a strange blend of interest and sad pity.
“What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you ever answer when people talk to you?”
Mia’s eyes darted up at her and her head slowly followed. She could see the muscles under the skin in the girl’s exposed neck tensing in anger, her posture stiffening slightly. The little boy glanced up at her and then back at Mia.
“You can talk!” the girl shouted. Her fingers curled into fists, her knuckles whitened. “Say something!”
“What?” Mia replied, her attention now focusing on the sinews in the girl’s neck shifting as she swallowed.
“I know you aren’t one of God’s creations,” the girl replied with a slight jerk of her head, her voice shaking slightly. Her ponytail swished around behind her for a second but quickly came to a stop. “But if you turn to him, he will accept you like any of his children. You can be good and you will be forgiven. How you were created doesn’t matter. Everybody is the same before God. I don’t know why you do the… things you do. Maybe you… you’ve got demons inside of you or… something.”
The way the girl’s gaze shifted as she said the last sentence betrayed undeniable scepticism. She didn’t really believe there were any demons. Mia could tell. That girl was confused and bitter, and had never gotten to Mia much, not even last year when she had been a lot more violent and actually punched her or the times when she had screamed about the eternal fires of Hell. It was the boy that bothered her more, that boy who wasn’t like the other cronies. The way he looked at her, sad, pitying.
“There is no God,” Mia just replied, watching both the girl and the boy. The girl flinched at the words, as if she had just been stung. The boy closed his eyes for a moment, ever-so-slightly shaking his head, knowingly, like it was Mia who was the one with the empty faith in imaginary friends in the sky. Something about it irritated her. Why was she to be pitied? She liked that boy. He wasn’t supposed to irritate her.
“Leave me alone,” she said, looking straight at him. He looked back at her and then stepped slowly forward. Mia’s arms automatically twitched into a defensive position, ready to slash, despite the wooden sheath bound around her forearms that covered her small blades from wrist to elbow and rendered them harmless. The boy didn’t blink. His eyes looked straight at hers, searched them, flicking now and then to the bony horns sticking out of her green hair and the sheathed blades on her arms.
“Get away from me,” she growled, her arm twitching. She would have hit him, except that she still liked him and didn’t want to.
“I feel sorry for you,” he told her, unblinking. Mia saw the brown-haired girl jerk her head down toward the boy, her bitter expression blending with surprise.
The boy took another step.
Mia jerked her arm towards him, but another girl from the group with the same blond hair and slightly smaller blue eyes, most likely his sister, pulled him back and jumped in front of him so that the sheath covering Mia’s scythe hit the side of her arm instead. There wasn’t much force in the blow and the girl wasn’t hurt, but she gave Mia just the expression that she had found most typical of the Nutjobs in her time dealing with them.
“Listen, you freak,” she said as she threw Mia’s arm away, standing so close to her that Mia could smell the blood rushing to her face, “I know you can’t hurt anyone with that on your scythes, but we’re going to get you out of this school, no matter what. You contaminate it with evil. You should be locked up somewhere away from real people where you can’t hurt them, and…”
Without thinking, Mia bared her teeth and snarled, a reaction that to her felt more natural than she knew it ought to. The girl recoiled slightly, clenching her jaws. “You can’t hurt us,” she repeated under her breath, more to herself than to Mia. “You can’t hurt us. They put that on your arms so you couldn’t.”
Mia knew it was a bad idea, but she growled, jerked her left hand up to the leather straps tying the sheath to her right hand and began to tear wildly at them. The Nutjobs took only a fraction of a second to realize what she was doing and immediately turned around to speed up to the school building. The blond-haired girl had to practically drag her brother with them.
She ripped the sheath fully off and felt the cool air around her exposed scythe. It felt good. The blade itched for something to cut, but the Nutjobs were already gone.
She looked around, straight into the eyes of the teacher currently on watch who was standing by the wall a few meters away, his face pale and sweaty as he picked up his cellphone and dialled what she knew to be Dave’s number.
She took a deep breath and closed her eyes to calm down, shaking her head to clear it, but it was already too late.
-------
“Mr. Ambrose, surely you can understand that this is unacceptable.”
“I don’t see why this is any worse than what happened before.”
The principal’s office was not very big, and the crammed bookshelves that always threatened to collapse and the deathly still, heavy, red curtains in front of the firmly shut windows gave it a distinctly claustrophobic atmosphere that had made her despise the room the moment she had first set foot into it. She was sitting on one of the chairs in the corner with her bare, clawed feet up on the other, examining the blades that poked out through her skin just below her wrists while the men talked it over. She heard the principal sigh.
“Mr. Ambrose, this is the third time this has happened. The first time you assured us it was a one-time occurrence and would never happen again. The second, you told us that for safety we could put on that sheath which would protect any students from potential unconscious outbursts. But now this, too, has proven futile. We have multiple eyewitnesses who will readily swear that she simply took the sheaths off and all that saved her fellow students was that while she was doing so they had time to flee. Surely you cannot expect us to keep her at this school even after this. It is clearly only a matter of time before she murders someone. Frankly I’m afraid of her.” He lowered his voice, apparently having deluded himself into thinking her hearing wasn’t that much better than an ordinary human being’s. “I wouldn’t dare take her into this office if you weren’t here too, to be honest. The teachers are afraid of teaching her classes. More than one student has come in and expressed great concern or even wish to leave the school.” Not that it mattered that she heard it. She had noticed all of that already.
She poked the sharp corner of the scythe right at the elbow where it was widest, just before it sharply turned back into her arm and rejoined the bone. A trickle of crimson blood from her fingertip travelled down the blade and started to glide off her elbow. She wiped it carefully off with the finger it had come from and licked it off from there. She’d always enjoyed the heavy, metallic taste of it.
“You’re not getting it,” Dave’s irritated voice replied. “They provoked her. Nobody in their right mind would provoke a half-Scyther. It’s their own damned fault, if you ask me.”
“All the more reason not to allow half-Scyther into this school, don’t you think?”
“She has a right to education.”
“Of course she does, but if she can’t function among other students, her education may have to be carried out in her private home where she can be kept under control.”
A fly buzzed close to her and landed on the wall. Mia’s eyes automatically followed it as it crawled upwards in vain hopes of finding open air. She raised her arm slowly.
WHAM.
Dave and the principal jerked their heads around in surprise, abruptly ceasing their conversation. She pulled the short blade out of the wall it had sunk slightly into, letting the two halves of the fly fall down on either side of the resulting crack as a subconscious smile flickered across her face.
It took only a moment for her mind to snap back into human manners, her eyes flicking back to the crack and then to the elderly man in the blue suit standing pale-faced behind the desk. “I didn’t like it,” she just said.
Dave looked at her for an awkward second and then turned quickly back to the principal. “Eh.”
“We are not going to have her at this school anymore, Mr. Ambrose,” Mr. Rogers said, watching Mia. He had always been a man who had contained his fear relatively well. He may have been gripping the edge of the desk so tightly that his knuckles whitened, and a bead of sweat was trickling down the side of his forehead, perhaps or perhaps not just because the room was awfully hot for at least her liking, but his voice remained steady and his expression determined. “Please leave. This decision is final. She cannot function at a public school, and you know it as well as I do, Mr. Ambrose.”
Dave licked his lips nervously for a second, his gaze travelling a few times from her to the principal and back to her.
“Let’s just go,” he finally said, offering his hand to Mia. She had always liked it, the way he offered his hand. He did it sincerely and fearlessly, the muscles in his fingers occasionally twitching in protest but his mind inevitably successful in forcing them under control and maintaining the gesture. There was something intrinsically trustworthy in it, more so than in most other people, whose revulsion at the idea of touching her was generally far more obvious. She took his hand and stood up, letting him lead her out of the office and slam the door stubbornly at their backs.
Oh, yes, she liked Dave.
They walked out of the school building to his shiny white car and he walked over to the driver’s seat while she silently opened the door on the passenger side and got in.
“Watch the seat, Mia, watch the seat…” Dave muttered as he closed the door on his side.
She looked on either side of her elbows, where the sharp points at the end of her scythes had created a pattern of small holes and tears in the leather through the years, making sure the blades didn’t touch it as she buckled the seat belt.
Dave started the engine and drove off the sidewalk where he had carelessly parked the car. He sighed, looking briefly at her with his blue eyes.
“It was the Nutjobs again,” she said.
Dave snorted. “It’s always them, isn’t it? ****ing assholes, constantly shoving their religion down people’s throats. I’ve known too many people like that in my life. Complete retards, all of them.”
Mia nodded dully.
“So what was their latest theory about your origins? Have they done demonic possession yet?”
She didn’t answer. He looked at her again.
“There was a boy,” she said. “I liked him.”
Dave raised his eyebrows. “What, did he think you were just a lesser imp and not Satan himself?”
She shook her head absent-mindedly. Dave was peering through the windshield as he turned round a corner and didn’t notice.
“Don’t listen to them. I’ve told you, they’re batshit insane. You’d get more sense out of Babelfishing a Kadabra on crack. Just don’t even try.”
She didn’t understand them. Religious faith just didn’t make any sense. She couldn’t feel angry at them, like Dave did. Just baffled at their existence. Why they would want to believe in something they had no evidence for. It was just something she couldn’t wrap her head around.
“Goddamn kids,” Dave swore under his breath as a group of children scattered from the street in front of them.
“I don’t get it,” she muttered.
“What?”
“Religion.”
“That’s because unlike those nutsos you’ve got some sense in your head.”
“My parents believe in God too.”
Dave pretended not to have heard her for a few seconds. She watched a fly sit down on the back of his neck. If she slashed at it she could accidentally cut his head off. Haha. Oops.
But she liked him, so she didn’t actually do it. And even if she hadn’t liked him, there would have been complications. Too obvious who did it. No good Pokémorph sympathizers left to defend her in court. Somebody would point out her mental age of sixteen and say she was responsible for her actions. Everybody else would agree because they wanted to get rid of her. ‘That fly was getting on my nerves’ had never worked well for her. Jail. Tiny cell with stale air. Nothing decent to eat. It just wouldn’t pay.
He turned back to her. The fly took off and instead settled on the car window on his side. “Well, at least your parents don’t take it so damned seriously.”
She nodded and looked out the window.
“Hey, uh, want a hotdog?”
She shrugged.
“Great,” Dave replied and turned round the next corner.
-------
Howard Kerrigan was doing the dishes when he got the feeling that Lucy was standing behind him. She had a wonderful knack for being quiet and sneaking up on people, but she hadn’t yet tamed her abilities enough to stop a faint psychic signal from pushing gently at those she approached, alerting them of her presence.
He turned around, glanced at her and smiled. “Something bothering you?”
She looked up at him with wide, innocent eyes.
“Daddy, am I an abomination?”
He turned around and stared at her, pushing away the trace of hypnotic power in her eyes. “What? No. Who told you that?”
She pointed at the window above the kitchen sink. “There’s a guy with a sign outside in front of the door.”
Howard looked back at the window, and indeed, there was a man standing on the sidewalk outside the front door holding a sign that said simply ‘VISIONS 21.5’.
He ripped off his rubber gloves and ran to the front door. “Hey!” he shouted heatedly as he opened it, running towards the man. “Don’t you dare stand here giving my daughter ideas! Get away from my house right now!”
The protestor looked at him. It was a young man with pale skin and dark hair that would have been handsome if not for the icy coldness in his light blue eyes. Howard fleetingly recognized him as one of the scariest fundamentalists from church, somebody Daniels. He shivered.
“Get away from my house,” he repeated sternly. “You are not welcome here.”
“Realize what you have done and repent,” Daniels said in a quiet, cold voice. “The Pokémorphs are abominations before the Lord. He will make you pay for their creation, sooner or later. You will regret that He ever let you be born.”
“Get off my property now.”
A crazy glint appeared in the man’s piercing eyes. “He has already chosen His instruments. Those of true faith have received their calling. You will be punished.”
“I told you to leave.”
A smile flickered across Daniels’ features. “The rabbit who refuses to hear of the fox,” he said, “will regret it only when she wanders into his lair.”
Howard returned his icy stare for a second. He felt cold.
“Very well, Howard,” Daniels said quietly. “I see you cannot be persuaded.”
“Not by you. Go away.”
Daniels opened his mouth, but then flicked his eyes to the side. Howard looked to see Dave’s white car pull into their driveway. Both doors opened, and Dave and Mia stepped out. Mia glanced dully at Daniels while Dave pointed at the door to indicate that they needed to talk inside.
“Excuse me,” Howard said coldly to Daniels and walked to the door to meet them.
He took a last glance over his shoulder as he turned the key. Daniels looked at Dave with the creepiest grin Howard had ever seen, and then turned slowly around to walk down the street, still holding the daunting sign above his head.
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The Great Butler
Hush, keep it down
I actually started to feel angry as I read this latest part.
You do realize that's a good thing, right? That means you're conveying the emotion the characters are feeling to the reader impeccibly well.
But anyway.... on to the actual story.
When the Nutjobs (great name for them btw) were bothering Mia, I felt sorry for her. Very sorry for her. It isn't her fault she's the way she is... though I did have the thought that schoolyard bullies are unlikely to throw religion at people. That principal is a jerk.
Daniels makes me nervous.... whatever he's up to, it can't be good.
You do realize that's a good thing, right? That means you're conveying the emotion the characters are feeling to the reader impeccibly well.
But anyway.... on to the actual story.
When the Nutjobs (great name for them btw) were bothering Mia, I felt sorry for her. Very sorry for her. It isn't her fault she's the way she is... though I did have the thought that schoolyard bullies are unlikely to throw religion at people. That principal is a jerk.
Daniels makes me nervous.... whatever he's up to, it can't be good.
Sike Saner
Peace to the Mountain
Mia's already proving herself to be a very fascinating character, and I enjoy reading about her. I especially liked the scene with her and Dave in the car. ^^ Also, I get the feeling that we'll be seeing more of that blond-haired boy who seemed to pity Mia... That could have some interesting developments. o.o
Dave was great in that chapter, too, especially in the aforementioned car scene. He had some great lines there. ^^
Daniels, meanwhile, is CREEPY. X~X; Ugh, the thought of someone standing there outside someone's house holding a sign like that, and doing so for those reasons... harrassing a family like that... shame on him. And the way he smiled as he left... ugh. *shudders* Yes, very effectively creepy guy, that Daniels...
There's something very cool about the fact that Mia specifically noticed that... o.o
More coolness from Mia there. ^^
And yet again, she does something cool. God, I love that character. ^^
I loved that, both for the rather startling way she chose to deal with the fly and for her line there at the end: "I didn't like it." Classic.
Also, that part reminded me of something that happened at a relative's house once: From another room, I heard a very loud BAM!, as if against a wall or something, followed by an equally loud shout of "EW!" O___o; To this day, I still have no clue what sort of unfortunate little invertebrate met its end there (though I am sure that the killing of one was indeed what I heard), but its demise must surely have been messy... D:
One of Dave's great lines in that scene. ^^
XDDDD Yes, those're some more of Dave's words of bossness. I love the frell out of that quote.
I love the imagery that puts in my head. I also love the way that ends: "Haha. Oops." XD
Brrr! Creepy, creepy, creepy! O~O;
Dave was great in that chapter, too, especially in the aforementioned car scene. He had some great lines there. ^^
Daniels, meanwhile, is CREEPY. X~X; Ugh, the thought of someone standing there outside someone's house holding a sign like that, and doing so for those reasons... harrassing a family like that... shame on him. And the way he smiled as he left... ugh. *shudders* Yes, very effectively creepy guy, that Daniels...
There's something very cool about the fact that Mia specifically noticed that... o.o
More coolness from Mia there. ^^
And yet again, she does something cool. God, I love that character. ^^
I loved that, both for the rather startling way she chose to deal with the fly and for her line there at the end: "I didn't like it." Classic.
Also, that part reminded me of something that happened at a relative's house once: From another room, I heard a very loud BAM!, as if against a wall or something, followed by an equally loud shout of "EW!" O___o; To this day, I still have no clue what sort of unfortunate little invertebrate met its end there (though I am sure that the killing of one was indeed what I heard), but its demise must surely have been messy... D:
One of Dave's great lines in that scene. ^^
XDDDD Yes, those're some more of Dave's words of bossness. I love the frell out of that quote.
I love the imagery that puts in my head.
I also love the way that ends: "Haha. Oops." XDBrrr! Creepy, creepy, creepy! O~O;
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Dragonfree
Just me
Wow, it's been even longer since chapter five than I thought. <<;
I can't say I like this chapter that much. It's mostly just finishing off some morph introductions before the actual story can get going (which it will in chapter seven). But I like parts of it too. See what you think.
Chapter 6
“So who was that creep?” Dave asked as Howard closed the door behind them. Howard invited Dave and Mia to sit down at the kitchen table and collapsed into his own chair. Lucy the Misdreavus morph waved to Dave from a few meters away and he waved absent-mindedly back to her.
“It’s somebody from church,” Howard sighed. “Something Daniels. His beliefs are rather… extreme, from what I’ve seen of them.”
“So in other words, he’s a nut,” Dave said cheerfully. “What did he want?”
“He was trying to scare Lucy, apparently,” Howard replied with contempt. “Calling her an abomination. When I came out, he started making threats about the Wrath of God.” He shuddered. “I’m not sure whether to take him seriously.”
“Don’t,” Dave just said. “They feed on fear. Don’t give them the pleasure of seeing you get worried. What do you think is going to happen, anyway? Is he going to sit somewhere and pray for a meteor to strike you or what? Newsflash: it won’t work. Even if God existed, do you think he’d listen to a guy like that?”
“I don’t know. He scares me sometimes. He likes to make speeches about how he will rejoice in Heaven at the thought of the infidels burning forever in Hell…”
Dave snorted.
“…but I suppose it would be stupid to worry about him too much,” Howard finished with a sigh. “So. What did she do this time?”
“She got kicked out,” Dave replied in a tired voice, rubbing his forehead. “For good. She took off the sheaths and they went ballistic. And then chopped up a fly in the principal’s office. I think that took the cake.”
“Oh, Mia,” Howard sighed, looking wearily at his older daughter. “Why do you always get yourself into trouble like that?”
“It was a stupid fly,” she answered defensively. “It was too dumb to get out of the way. It deserved it.”
“What are we going to do with you now?” her father asked in frustration. “You can’t keep doing that all the time, Mia! You need to start learning how to function among normal people, or I’m going to go crazy. I mean it. How are you going to get schooling now? I have three other children to take care of and Cheryl is always…”
“I’ll just teach her at home, okay?” Dave interrupted. “There’s no need to make a big deal about it and start blaming her. Uh, Mia, why don’t you go play with Lucy or something?”
The Pokémorph stood up wordlessly, glanced at the smaller girl and went through a door on the other side of the hall and shut it behind her. Her sister walked after her, disappearing through the closed door as if nothing were more natural.
“Look,” Dave said after making sure they were gone, looking back at Howard. “We’ve been through this. She’s basically a biologically defined sociopath. Telling her she needs to learn how to function will at most just irritate her and make her hurt somebody. Please don’t push her limits.”
“It can get pretty frustrating,” Howard answered quietly, glancing back at the door to the girls’ room, through which faint giggles could now be heard. “When you have children, you want them to be able to understand how you feel. Think in approximately the same terms… She’s so different from the other morphs. Lucy actually feels like a human being, but Mia is just so painfully nonhuman in the way she talks, thinks, acts…” He rubbed his eyes briefly and then blinked a few times. “I mean, I love her. I really do. But… God…” He shook his head. “Somehow I can’t give up the idea that I can change her. She looks like she’s supposed to be able to function like a human being. My brain likes to think that means she can.”
“Well, she can’t, and you’ll have to live with that,” Dave responded and looked around the house. “Is Cheryl around?”
Howard shook his head. “She’s out by the town hall protesting the lack of formal action against increased carbon emissions from the city’s cars.”
Dave rolled his eyes briefly. “Well, I’ll get in touch about the homeschooling thing, I suppose. Have to get going now so I’ll be in time to get Jean from school.”
Howard nodded and stood up, shaking Dave’s hand. “Thanks for visiting. And driving her. You know, you do so much for those kids, it’s unbelievable.”
Dave smiled slightly. “I made them. Least I could do. I’ll see you around.”
“Goodbye.”
And with that, Dave left the house and closed the door behind him. Howard saw him through the window straightening his jacket as he walked back over to his car. “You made them. Right,” he muttered to himself.
He sighed and knocked on the door to the girls’ room. He waited for a couple of seconds as the laughter quieted before opening it carefully.
Mia, her unsheathed scythe raised, had seemingly stopped mid-motion when he knocked; she stood deathly still, only her eyes pointed towards him. Her sister was standing below her, still grinning childishly.
The father shuddered at the sight. “Dave is gone. He’s going to be homeschooling you from now on, Mia.”
She didn’t answer, but he had grown to expect it. He looked between the two for a second and then said, “You know I don’t like this game at all.”
With a careless, sweeping motion, without looking away from her father, Mia swung her raised scythe straight through her sister’s currently insubstantial forehead. Howard felt his paternal instinct twitch in horror, but Lucy only continued to giggle, grinning happily at her father as if having a blade repeatedly driven through one’s head was every sane person’s idea of fun.
“I’ll leave you to it, I suppose,” Howard said, shaking his head. “Lucy, you remember to always stay insubstantial while she’s there with you, all right? And the moment you get the least bit tired, you stop before you become unable to keep it up. Is that clear? Let me see you go invisible.”
“Yes, Daddy,” the small girl answered, her pitch-black form briefly fading to a smoky sort of transparent and then becoming entirely invisible. Invisibility was more taxing for her than insubstantiality; if she could still make herself entirely invisible, it meant she had plenty enough energy to keep up her insubstantial form, and they had agreed on using it as a test. He nodded as she came back into view.
“Please be careful,” he said quietly before closing the door to the room again. He heard a high-pitched shriek that made him jump but quickly dissolved into another fit of giggles.
While Mia was generally not very social, she had always been a little closer to her sister than to anyone else, and they got along surprisingly well. Nonetheless, Howard didn’t doubt that she could easily end up hurting Lucy in the heat of the moment, and their typical games were just far too violent for comfort: Mia chasing Lucy and trying to slash her; Lucy covering something worthless and easily destructible in the folds of the thin, dress-like extra skin that covered most of her body and running around while Mia would try to slash the object apart; Lucy charging up a primitive Shadow Ball that Mia would slash away before it got to her…
It was all pretty creepy, and while nothing very serious had happened yet, there had been accidents. One time Lucy had gotten hurt when slashed in a semisubstantial state; she had been unable to feel her arm properly for a few days. Another time Mia had slashed her when she hadn’t been ready, but thankfully realized it and managed to stop her scythe before it made more than a shallow cut. Mia had lost her balance in mid-slash and hit her head on the floor or walls numerous times. Howard would have forbidden them to do it long ago, but Dave had convinced him that if Mia couldn’t let out her hunting instinct (he shuddered to think of it) in some relatively harmless way, she would practically be a ticking bomb, and it would be a good way for the sisters to bond a little more, and for Mia to feel freer and have an easier time forming relationships in general, to let them play these dangerous games together.
Howard couldn’t deny that Mia’s self-control and Lucy’s Misdreavus powers had greatly improved since this had been given the green light, but he still didn’t like it. Cheryl took it more lightly, usually brushing it off with some vague kids-can-kill-each-other-in-all-sorts-of-ways-if-they-aren’t-careful-but-the-girls-can-handle-this-responsibly-Howard-and-we-should-listen-to-Dave.
“Yeah, you made them, Dave,” he muttered to himself as he turned back towards the kitchen sink. “All the way until it’s getting inconvenient. Then it’s all Brian’s fault.”
-------
Incidentally, Brian was also doing the dishes and was currently picking up the last plate from beside the sink. He quickly scrubbed the remains of yesterday’s spaghetti off the surface and turned the plate a few times over under the faucet just as he heard the front door open and slam shut again. He put the wet plate down to dry, turned the knob to reduce the stream of water to a trickle and eventually nothing, and pulled the pink rubber gloves off his fingers to lay them down on the edge of the sink. “Gabriel?”
“Hi, Dad,” came the weary reply.
“How was school?”
“Decent.” Brian heard Gabriel sigh from the entrance as the boy took off his shoes. “Kids are still staring.”
“They’ll get used to it in a week or two,” Brian said as he walked out of the kitchen to meet his son in the doorway. “Oh, your hair…”
Gabriel reached blindly to the top of his head to extinguish the small flame that had gotten into a loose strand of hair. “Gone.”
“Yes, gone.” Brian looked the boy up and down and sighed with parental pride. “I’m really proud of you, Gabriel,” he said for the umpteenth time. Gabriel rolled his eyes, but not without the corners of his mouth curling into a small smile. “When you’d just been made we didn’t really think you’d survive, but you’ve just done so well and been so strong and grown into such a wonderful person.” He beamed down at the short boy and was overwhelmed, as so often, by the strange feeling of knowing he’d been raising that kid for the past ten years. It didn’t feel like that long, and all the headaches and complications of keeping him alive for the first few years had blurred into a hazy dark period in his memory. He’d been very stressed out then and several times begged Dave to make somebody else raise the Slugma.
Now he was infinitely glad that Dave had steadfastly refused.
“You’re the greatest kid in the world, Gabriel.”
“You’ve told me already, Dad,” Gabriel said with a weary smile.
“Pizza and a good movie?” Brian asked him with a grin.
“Sounds good,” the Pokémorph replied smugly, “but I think my skin is starting to harden, so if you’ll excuse me.”
Brian smiled and stepped out of the doorway. Gabriel walked into his room and closed the door.
The kid was still high-maintenance, of course. Being what he was, his gooey skin hardened slowly over the day and to counter this he had to massage some heat into the entirety of it at least once a day. When he stood still for too long and wasn’t thinking about rubbing his hands together every now and then, they would leave little orange globs of slime where he was standing, such as now in the doorway from the entrance hall (Brian was getting a mop to clean it up now), and he had to wear specifically made clothes that were coated with plastic on the inside. But one got used to it.
Brian still felt sorry for what Gabriel had to endure. He’d been bullied at school for being chubby with glasses himself; although Gabriel didn’t like to talk about it much and the teachers tended to try their best to make the parent-teacher meetings as short and sparse as possible, he could only imagine how much staring and snickering he’d face every weekday, not to mention general disgust. It had taken Brian himself years to get fully used to the idea that his son had slimy skin that left puddles in his bed every morning. Out of all eight Pokémorph children, Gabriel was the one that looked the most like, well, a freak. But he had an entirely human personality, which was more than could be said about someone like Mia Kerrigan.
In a way, Brian felt that in the end was the luckiest of them all.
-------
“Will?”
William McKenzie looked up at his father. Joe McKenzie was a dark-haired, brown-eyed man with glasses and an invariably friendly expression on his face, the kind of man it was impossible not to feel predisposed to like at the sight of him, and knowing him didn't disappoint. Both he and his wife Pamela had always been wonderful parents to Will. And still he couldn’t help partially hating them, in as much as he was capable of it, not for what they did but for what they didn’t do. And the other part of him hated himself for having that part which hated them, because he had no right to hate them and they hadn’t done anything wrong beyond loving all their kids.
“I’m going to shop for a bit. Your mom is still at work, but I’ve told James to watch you, all right? I won’t be long.”
“Okay,” Will said, although he felt everything but okay at the news. His father smiled, closed the door to his room while pulling on the last sleeve of his jacket, and seconds later the front door slammed.
Without really thinking about it, Will raised his hand to his mouth and began to bite his nails and slowly lick the fingertips in between. His parents had told him to stop it. He didn’t really care. It calmed him down. He stroked his fingers across his cheek, feeling the saliva cool his skin, ran them through his brown hair to find the soft, furred back of his triangular ear, and crumpled its floppy shape together with his fingers, scratching it, before releasing it, sliding his hand forward to his forehead as the ear returned to its natural perked shape, and finally returning the hand down to his mouth. He repeated the motion, a little faster this time. There was some intrinsic, satisfying perfection in it. Cleansing. Comfortable. Something reassuring about the way the ear invariably returned to its former shape no matter how he crumpled it. He did it a few more times, first with one hand and then the other. It was almost ritualistic. Trance-like. And, he reminded himself grimly, extremely strange. Freaky. Nobody else did it. People stared at him. So he just did it in his room. It was never as comforting to attempt to achieve the same effect in public, anyway. There would be sounds distracting him, things moving that his eyes would automatically follow, besides of course the uncomfortable stares and his siblings looking at him with disgust. He’d given that up years ago.
Remembering that his siblings were still in the house and could walk in on him, he stopped, stood up, locked his door and sat back down on his bed, licking his fingers briefly again. Then he guiltily dried them on his jeans. He couldn’t continue for too long, or the wetness in his hair would give away that he was still doing it.
Will felt very much like a freak, but also a little like an addict. He felt a bit stupid about not having grown out of it, but it was too nice to give it up. There was no harm in it, after all, unlike all the pills and stuff that they taught you to avoid at school. The normal people around him had just decided it was freaky and gross, so they shouldn’t have to see it, but there was nothing wrong with doing it, per se.
He wasn’t quite sure whether he really felt the same way about the fact that he still loved to play with yarn. He was honestly making an effort to grow out of that. As for the shiny things… well, his parents had more or less gotten him to stop that.
Aw, what the heck. The room was locked.
Will reached under his bed, took out a white ball of yarn that he’d nicked from his grandmother’s knitting set a while ago, put it on his floor and spent a few minutes batting it around the room with his hands and catching it. It had no right to be this fun.
He wrapped the yarn back together as well as he could, feeling slightly embarrassed as always, replaced it under his bed, and decided to get something to eat.
Nicky was in the kitchen, eating a bowl of cornflakes while reading ‘Sarah Hooter and the Ultimate Fire Stone’. She gave him a dull glare before returning firmly to the book. When he attempted to tell his parents that his siblings hated him, they always spoke of sibling rivalry, of how the two-year-old Nicky and to a lesser extent her brother James had just gotten jealous when he was suddenly brought into the family and received all the attention, and how it was just the same as when James was two and Nicky had been born, and how they didn’t really mean anything by it. Of course, what they never really seemed to want to think about was that James and Nicky had, at least as far back as Will could remember, abandoned all of their own rivalry once they’d found a common enemy in him. Their parents had of course told the older siblings to be nice to Will, and that it wasn’t his fault he was different, and that he’d soon stop behaving like a cat, and that he was a kid just like them and shouldn’t be treated any differently, but that just meant James and Nicky kept their hatred towards him mostly to themselves and to the way they looked at him and to the way they reacted to most everything he did. And somehow, that little part of Will felt like his parents ought to be able to just magically make them stop thinking he was a freak, but of course that didn't make any sense and he had to stop thinking about it.
Will got himself a bowl and a spoon, reached for the cornflakes and milk, and poured himself some. Nicky glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. She was a pretty girl with wavy dark hair and fairly popular at school, but she never invited any of her friends to their house. Will knew exactly why.
He silently ate his cornflakes. Sarah Hooter, strikingly similar to Will’s one and only friend, winked at him from the cover of the book as if deliberately to irritate him, remind him that if only he were a fictional character everyone would probably love him.
Then again, not all the morphs had it as bad as he did. Jean herself, despite of course being viewed as a freak by most, was admired and envied at the same time because everyone loved those books and, as she never tired of reminding everyone, she was due to star in the movies when they came out. And somehow she just did it. She was open and confident, and she even had some normal friends. Will had no idea how she’d managed so well. Nobody ever wanted to talk to him.
He ate the last few spoonfuls and sighed. Nicky followed him with her eyes as he dumped his bowl and spoon into the sink. “Where’s James?” he asked her.
“Upstairs,” his sister replied shortly.
“Didn’t Dad tell him to watch out for us?”
Nicky gave him her signature exasperated glare. “You were in your room.”
Will shrugged. “Well, I’ll go back there, then,” he muttered and walked back to his bedroom door. It was better to stay in his room where he wouldn’t get in their way.
-------
Jack looked briefly over the school cafeteria. A number of people glanced up as he entered; he could tell which ones were freshmen just by seeing how freaked out they looked. He smiled to himself, eyed his friends at a table by the window, waved, and pushed himself through the crowd to meet them. He wasn’t very hungry.
An unfamiliar face looked up at him from the table and stared. Ah, so they’ve taken in a new guy, Jack thought. He waved again at the kid – it was a short boy with messy brown hair and large glasses – and sat down.
“Hey, Jack,” said Sid, a chubby, dark-haired guy with a severe addiction to MMORPGs. “Where have you been?”
“Sick,” Jack replied, glancing at the new guy, who was still staring at them. “Who’s that kid?”
The boy flinched, and Jack smiled. “I don’t bite.”
The kid laughed nervously.
“That’s Ben,” Vincent explained. “He plays Magic.”
“Really? Want a game? I’ve got a deck with me, if you…”
Jack feigned being stopped short in surprise. Ben was not staring at him anymore, but it was altogether too evident that that was only because he was trying not to.
“Come on. Look at me.”
Ben did. The kid had large, brown eyes, or maybe they were just magnified by the glasses.
“Welcome to the tour of me,” Jack said. “I’m Jack, I’m blue, and I’m half a Chinchou; glad you noticed. These things,” he went on, dangling at the glowing end of one of the antennae that hung down above his face, “are hella useful for reading in the dark, but can be annoying when you’re trying to sleep. Don’t shake my hand too firmly, since my fingers could crack. They’re webbed too, by the way. Get used to this stuff, and you’ll be fine. Okay?”
Ben nodded quickly. Jack knew that at this moment the kid was probably seriously considering trying to find another table, but from the sound of it he was enough of a geek to end up with them either way. And experience had taught him they were generally quicker to get used to him than they thought.
It was only to be a couple of weeks before Ben was happily playing Magic with Jack during breaks.
I can't say I like this chapter that much. It's mostly just finishing off some morph introductions before the actual story can get going (which it will in chapter seven). But I like parts of it too. See what you think.
Chapter 6
“So who was that creep?” Dave asked as Howard closed the door behind them. Howard invited Dave and Mia to sit down at the kitchen table and collapsed into his own chair. Lucy the Misdreavus morph waved to Dave from a few meters away and he waved absent-mindedly back to her.
“It’s somebody from church,” Howard sighed. “Something Daniels. His beliefs are rather… extreme, from what I’ve seen of them.”
“So in other words, he’s a nut,” Dave said cheerfully. “What did he want?”
“He was trying to scare Lucy, apparently,” Howard replied with contempt. “Calling her an abomination. When I came out, he started making threats about the Wrath of God.” He shuddered. “I’m not sure whether to take him seriously.”
“Don’t,” Dave just said. “They feed on fear. Don’t give them the pleasure of seeing you get worried. What do you think is going to happen, anyway? Is he going to sit somewhere and pray for a meteor to strike you or what? Newsflash: it won’t work. Even if God existed, do you think he’d listen to a guy like that?”
“I don’t know. He scares me sometimes. He likes to make speeches about how he will rejoice in Heaven at the thought of the infidels burning forever in Hell…”
Dave snorted.
“…but I suppose it would be stupid to worry about him too much,” Howard finished with a sigh. “So. What did she do this time?”
“She got kicked out,” Dave replied in a tired voice, rubbing his forehead. “For good. She took off the sheaths and they went ballistic. And then chopped up a fly in the principal’s office. I think that took the cake.”
“Oh, Mia,” Howard sighed, looking wearily at his older daughter. “Why do you always get yourself into trouble like that?”
“It was a stupid fly,” she answered defensively. “It was too dumb to get out of the way. It deserved it.”
“What are we going to do with you now?” her father asked in frustration. “You can’t keep doing that all the time, Mia! You need to start learning how to function among normal people, or I’m going to go crazy. I mean it. How are you going to get schooling now? I have three other children to take care of and Cheryl is always…”
“I’ll just teach her at home, okay?” Dave interrupted. “There’s no need to make a big deal about it and start blaming her. Uh, Mia, why don’t you go play with Lucy or something?”
The Pokémorph stood up wordlessly, glanced at the smaller girl and went through a door on the other side of the hall and shut it behind her. Her sister walked after her, disappearing through the closed door as if nothing were more natural.
“Look,” Dave said after making sure they were gone, looking back at Howard. “We’ve been through this. She’s basically a biologically defined sociopath. Telling her she needs to learn how to function will at most just irritate her and make her hurt somebody. Please don’t push her limits.”
“It can get pretty frustrating,” Howard answered quietly, glancing back at the door to the girls’ room, through which faint giggles could now be heard. “When you have children, you want them to be able to understand how you feel. Think in approximately the same terms… She’s so different from the other morphs. Lucy actually feels like a human being, but Mia is just so painfully nonhuman in the way she talks, thinks, acts…” He rubbed his eyes briefly and then blinked a few times. “I mean, I love her. I really do. But… God…” He shook his head. “Somehow I can’t give up the idea that I can change her. She looks like she’s supposed to be able to function like a human being. My brain likes to think that means she can.”
“Well, she can’t, and you’ll have to live with that,” Dave responded and looked around the house. “Is Cheryl around?”
Howard shook his head. “She’s out by the town hall protesting the lack of formal action against increased carbon emissions from the city’s cars.”
Dave rolled his eyes briefly. “Well, I’ll get in touch about the homeschooling thing, I suppose. Have to get going now so I’ll be in time to get Jean from school.”
Howard nodded and stood up, shaking Dave’s hand. “Thanks for visiting. And driving her. You know, you do so much for those kids, it’s unbelievable.”
Dave smiled slightly. “I made them. Least I could do. I’ll see you around.”
“Goodbye.”
And with that, Dave left the house and closed the door behind him. Howard saw him through the window straightening his jacket as he walked back over to his car. “You made them. Right,” he muttered to himself.
He sighed and knocked on the door to the girls’ room. He waited for a couple of seconds as the laughter quieted before opening it carefully.
Mia, her unsheathed scythe raised, had seemingly stopped mid-motion when he knocked; she stood deathly still, only her eyes pointed towards him. Her sister was standing below her, still grinning childishly.
The father shuddered at the sight. “Dave is gone. He’s going to be homeschooling you from now on, Mia.”
She didn’t answer, but he had grown to expect it. He looked between the two for a second and then said, “You know I don’t like this game at all.”
With a careless, sweeping motion, without looking away from her father, Mia swung her raised scythe straight through her sister’s currently insubstantial forehead. Howard felt his paternal instinct twitch in horror, but Lucy only continued to giggle, grinning happily at her father as if having a blade repeatedly driven through one’s head was every sane person’s idea of fun.
“I’ll leave you to it, I suppose,” Howard said, shaking his head. “Lucy, you remember to always stay insubstantial while she’s there with you, all right? And the moment you get the least bit tired, you stop before you become unable to keep it up. Is that clear? Let me see you go invisible.”
“Yes, Daddy,” the small girl answered, her pitch-black form briefly fading to a smoky sort of transparent and then becoming entirely invisible. Invisibility was more taxing for her than insubstantiality; if she could still make herself entirely invisible, it meant she had plenty enough energy to keep up her insubstantial form, and they had agreed on using it as a test. He nodded as she came back into view.
“Please be careful,” he said quietly before closing the door to the room again. He heard a high-pitched shriek that made him jump but quickly dissolved into another fit of giggles.
While Mia was generally not very social, she had always been a little closer to her sister than to anyone else, and they got along surprisingly well. Nonetheless, Howard didn’t doubt that she could easily end up hurting Lucy in the heat of the moment, and their typical games were just far too violent for comfort: Mia chasing Lucy and trying to slash her; Lucy covering something worthless and easily destructible in the folds of the thin, dress-like extra skin that covered most of her body and running around while Mia would try to slash the object apart; Lucy charging up a primitive Shadow Ball that Mia would slash away before it got to her…
It was all pretty creepy, and while nothing very serious had happened yet, there had been accidents. One time Lucy had gotten hurt when slashed in a semisubstantial state; she had been unable to feel her arm properly for a few days. Another time Mia had slashed her when she hadn’t been ready, but thankfully realized it and managed to stop her scythe before it made more than a shallow cut. Mia had lost her balance in mid-slash and hit her head on the floor or walls numerous times. Howard would have forbidden them to do it long ago, but Dave had convinced him that if Mia couldn’t let out her hunting instinct (he shuddered to think of it) in some relatively harmless way, she would practically be a ticking bomb, and it would be a good way for the sisters to bond a little more, and for Mia to feel freer and have an easier time forming relationships in general, to let them play these dangerous games together.
Howard couldn’t deny that Mia’s self-control and Lucy’s Misdreavus powers had greatly improved since this had been given the green light, but he still didn’t like it. Cheryl took it more lightly, usually brushing it off with some vague kids-can-kill-each-other-in-all-sorts-of-ways-if-they-aren’t-careful-but-the-girls-can-handle-this-responsibly-Howard-and-we-should-listen-to-Dave.
“Yeah, you made them, Dave,” he muttered to himself as he turned back towards the kitchen sink. “All the way until it’s getting inconvenient. Then it’s all Brian’s fault.”
-------
Incidentally, Brian was also doing the dishes and was currently picking up the last plate from beside the sink. He quickly scrubbed the remains of yesterday’s spaghetti off the surface and turned the plate a few times over under the faucet just as he heard the front door open and slam shut again. He put the wet plate down to dry, turned the knob to reduce the stream of water to a trickle and eventually nothing, and pulled the pink rubber gloves off his fingers to lay them down on the edge of the sink. “Gabriel?”
“Hi, Dad,” came the weary reply.
“How was school?”
“Decent.” Brian heard Gabriel sigh from the entrance as the boy took off his shoes. “Kids are still staring.”
“They’ll get used to it in a week or two,” Brian said as he walked out of the kitchen to meet his son in the doorway. “Oh, your hair…”
Gabriel reached blindly to the top of his head to extinguish the small flame that had gotten into a loose strand of hair. “Gone.”
“Yes, gone.” Brian looked the boy up and down and sighed with parental pride. “I’m really proud of you, Gabriel,” he said for the umpteenth time. Gabriel rolled his eyes, but not without the corners of his mouth curling into a small smile. “When you’d just been made we didn’t really think you’d survive, but you’ve just done so well and been so strong and grown into such a wonderful person.” He beamed down at the short boy and was overwhelmed, as so often, by the strange feeling of knowing he’d been raising that kid for the past ten years. It didn’t feel like that long, and all the headaches and complications of keeping him alive for the first few years had blurred into a hazy dark period in his memory. He’d been very stressed out then and several times begged Dave to make somebody else raise the Slugma.
Now he was infinitely glad that Dave had steadfastly refused.
“You’re the greatest kid in the world, Gabriel.”
“You’ve told me already, Dad,” Gabriel said with a weary smile.
“Pizza and a good movie?” Brian asked him with a grin.
“Sounds good,” the Pokémorph replied smugly, “but I think my skin is starting to harden, so if you’ll excuse me.”
Brian smiled and stepped out of the doorway. Gabriel walked into his room and closed the door.
The kid was still high-maintenance, of course. Being what he was, his gooey skin hardened slowly over the day and to counter this he had to massage some heat into the entirety of it at least once a day. When he stood still for too long and wasn’t thinking about rubbing his hands together every now and then, they would leave little orange globs of slime where he was standing, such as now in the doorway from the entrance hall (Brian was getting a mop to clean it up now), and he had to wear specifically made clothes that were coated with plastic on the inside. But one got used to it.
Brian still felt sorry for what Gabriel had to endure. He’d been bullied at school for being chubby with glasses himself; although Gabriel didn’t like to talk about it much and the teachers tended to try their best to make the parent-teacher meetings as short and sparse as possible, he could only imagine how much staring and snickering he’d face every weekday, not to mention general disgust. It had taken Brian himself years to get fully used to the idea that his son had slimy skin that left puddles in his bed every morning. Out of all eight Pokémorph children, Gabriel was the one that looked the most like, well, a freak. But he had an entirely human personality, which was more than could be said about someone like Mia Kerrigan.
In a way, Brian felt that in the end was the luckiest of them all.
-------
“Will?”
William McKenzie looked up at his father. Joe McKenzie was a dark-haired, brown-eyed man with glasses and an invariably friendly expression on his face, the kind of man it was impossible not to feel predisposed to like at the sight of him, and knowing him didn't disappoint. Both he and his wife Pamela had always been wonderful parents to Will. And still he couldn’t help partially hating them, in as much as he was capable of it, not for what they did but for what they didn’t do. And the other part of him hated himself for having that part which hated them, because he had no right to hate them and they hadn’t done anything wrong beyond loving all their kids.
“I’m going to shop for a bit. Your mom is still at work, but I’ve told James to watch you, all right? I won’t be long.”
“Okay,” Will said, although he felt everything but okay at the news. His father smiled, closed the door to his room while pulling on the last sleeve of his jacket, and seconds later the front door slammed.
Without really thinking about it, Will raised his hand to his mouth and began to bite his nails and slowly lick the fingertips in between. His parents had told him to stop it. He didn’t really care. It calmed him down. He stroked his fingers across his cheek, feeling the saliva cool his skin, ran them through his brown hair to find the soft, furred back of his triangular ear, and crumpled its floppy shape together with his fingers, scratching it, before releasing it, sliding his hand forward to his forehead as the ear returned to its natural perked shape, and finally returning the hand down to his mouth. He repeated the motion, a little faster this time. There was some intrinsic, satisfying perfection in it. Cleansing. Comfortable. Something reassuring about the way the ear invariably returned to its former shape no matter how he crumpled it. He did it a few more times, first with one hand and then the other. It was almost ritualistic. Trance-like. And, he reminded himself grimly, extremely strange. Freaky. Nobody else did it. People stared at him. So he just did it in his room. It was never as comforting to attempt to achieve the same effect in public, anyway. There would be sounds distracting him, things moving that his eyes would automatically follow, besides of course the uncomfortable stares and his siblings looking at him with disgust. He’d given that up years ago.
Remembering that his siblings were still in the house and could walk in on him, he stopped, stood up, locked his door and sat back down on his bed, licking his fingers briefly again. Then he guiltily dried them on his jeans. He couldn’t continue for too long, or the wetness in his hair would give away that he was still doing it.
Will felt very much like a freak, but also a little like an addict. He felt a bit stupid about not having grown out of it, but it was too nice to give it up. There was no harm in it, after all, unlike all the pills and stuff that they taught you to avoid at school. The normal people around him had just decided it was freaky and gross, so they shouldn’t have to see it, but there was nothing wrong with doing it, per se.
He wasn’t quite sure whether he really felt the same way about the fact that he still loved to play with yarn. He was honestly making an effort to grow out of that. As for the shiny things… well, his parents had more or less gotten him to stop that.
Aw, what the heck. The room was locked.
Will reached under his bed, took out a white ball of yarn that he’d nicked from his grandmother’s knitting set a while ago, put it on his floor and spent a few minutes batting it around the room with his hands and catching it. It had no right to be this fun.
He wrapped the yarn back together as well as he could, feeling slightly embarrassed as always, replaced it under his bed, and decided to get something to eat.
Nicky was in the kitchen, eating a bowl of cornflakes while reading ‘Sarah Hooter and the Ultimate Fire Stone’. She gave him a dull glare before returning firmly to the book. When he attempted to tell his parents that his siblings hated him, they always spoke of sibling rivalry, of how the two-year-old Nicky and to a lesser extent her brother James had just gotten jealous when he was suddenly brought into the family and received all the attention, and how it was just the same as when James was two and Nicky had been born, and how they didn’t really mean anything by it. Of course, what they never really seemed to want to think about was that James and Nicky had, at least as far back as Will could remember, abandoned all of their own rivalry once they’d found a common enemy in him. Their parents had of course told the older siblings to be nice to Will, and that it wasn’t his fault he was different, and that he’d soon stop behaving like a cat, and that he was a kid just like them and shouldn’t be treated any differently, but that just meant James and Nicky kept their hatred towards him mostly to themselves and to the way they looked at him and to the way they reacted to most everything he did. And somehow, that little part of Will felt like his parents ought to be able to just magically make them stop thinking he was a freak, but of course that didn't make any sense and he had to stop thinking about it.
Will got himself a bowl and a spoon, reached for the cornflakes and milk, and poured himself some. Nicky glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. She was a pretty girl with wavy dark hair and fairly popular at school, but she never invited any of her friends to their house. Will knew exactly why.
He silently ate his cornflakes. Sarah Hooter, strikingly similar to Will’s one and only friend, winked at him from the cover of the book as if deliberately to irritate him, remind him that if only he were a fictional character everyone would probably love him.
Then again, not all the morphs had it as bad as he did. Jean herself, despite of course being viewed as a freak by most, was admired and envied at the same time because everyone loved those books and, as she never tired of reminding everyone, she was due to star in the movies when they came out. And somehow she just did it. She was open and confident, and she even had some normal friends. Will had no idea how she’d managed so well. Nobody ever wanted to talk to him.
He ate the last few spoonfuls and sighed. Nicky followed him with her eyes as he dumped his bowl and spoon into the sink. “Where’s James?” he asked her.
“Upstairs,” his sister replied shortly.
“Didn’t Dad tell him to watch out for us?”
Nicky gave him her signature exasperated glare. “You were in your room.”
Will shrugged. “Well, I’ll go back there, then,” he muttered and walked back to his bedroom door. It was better to stay in his room where he wouldn’t get in their way.
-------
Jack looked briefly over the school cafeteria. A number of people glanced up as he entered; he could tell which ones were freshmen just by seeing how freaked out they looked. He smiled to himself, eyed his friends at a table by the window, waved, and pushed himself through the crowd to meet them. He wasn’t very hungry.
An unfamiliar face looked up at him from the table and stared. Ah, so they’ve taken in a new guy, Jack thought. He waved again at the kid – it was a short boy with messy brown hair and large glasses – and sat down.
“Hey, Jack,” said Sid, a chubby, dark-haired guy with a severe addiction to MMORPGs. “Where have you been?”
“Sick,” Jack replied, glancing at the new guy, who was still staring at them. “Who’s that kid?”
The boy flinched, and Jack smiled. “I don’t bite.”
The kid laughed nervously.
“That’s Ben,” Vincent explained. “He plays Magic.”
“Really? Want a game? I’ve got a deck with me, if you…”
Jack feigned being stopped short in surprise. Ben was not staring at him anymore, but it was altogether too evident that that was only because he was trying not to.
“Come on. Look at me.”
Ben did. The kid had large, brown eyes, or maybe they were just magnified by the glasses.
“Welcome to the tour of me,” Jack said. “I’m Jack, I’m blue, and I’m half a Chinchou; glad you noticed. These things,” he went on, dangling at the glowing end of one of the antennae that hung down above his face, “are hella useful for reading in the dark, but can be annoying when you’re trying to sleep. Don’t shake my hand too firmly, since my fingers could crack. They’re webbed too, by the way. Get used to this stuff, and you’ll be fine. Okay?”
Ben nodded quickly. Jack knew that at this moment the kid was probably seriously considering trying to find another table, but from the sound of it he was enough of a geek to end up with them either way. And experience had taught him they were generally quicker to get used to him than they thought.
It was only to be a couple of weeks before Ben was happily playing Magic with Jack during breaks.
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Gardevoir Girl
is NOT a girl
I never got a chance to review this any sooner, but I read it a while ago and loved it. In fact, it inspired me to write my own story about half-and-halfers.
Wow, I wouldn't want to be Mia's sister.
I thought that was an abnormally long sentence.
~GG~
Wow, I wouldn't want to be Mia's sister.
I thought that was an abnormally long sentence.
~GG~
The Great Butler
Hush, keep it down
I had almost forgotten about this fic, it's been so long. Everything was pretty on the norm for this chapter, nothing remarkably good or bad, just flowing well.
I did particularly like the last segment with the references to MMORPG's and Magic. That was funny.
I did particularly like the last segment with the references to MMORPG's and Magic. That was funny.
Sike Saner
Peace to the Mountain
Fwee, with that chapter came another scene with Gabriel. I do like the frell out of that character... ^^ Incidentally, I wonder if that orange slime he produces can cause stains? If so... I hope that his sheets are lined with plastic like his clothes are, and that his house has no carpet on its floors. X3
Will and Jack join the ranks of my favorite characters, definitely. The former's habits and the sheer kittiness thereof are just priceless, and his mixed fondness for and guilt about his catlike (not "carlike" as I just caught myself typing) activities are an aspect of his character that I find rather fascinating. As for the latter, his was another personality to which I instantly said, "Hell yes." Very cool guy, that Jack. I think his appearance is pretty boss, too, especially with regards to the blue coloration and antennae. I also like the way he talks. ^^
And I loved the scene where Mia and Lucy were playing their little game. XD Lucy's abilities are pretty damned cool as it is, IMO, but the fact that they allow her to safely be used as a target for Mia's scythes is one of if not the coolest thing about them, for the outlet for hunting instincts that it provides for Mia, for the fun that it provides for Lucy, and for the amusement that it provides for me. X3
Highlights:
Again, I loved this part. I find this priceless for three reasons: 1.) Mia's chopping through her sister's head! XD 2.) Lucy is giggling about it! XD 3.) And Howard's reaction provides the icing on the cake. XD Yes, I certainly do enjoy the ways in which Mia and Lucy take advantage of the latter's ability to go insubstantial...
This, too, was priceless. He was being such a kitty there! ^^
A nice example of just what it is about this character that makes me like him so much.
Will and Jack join the ranks of my favorite characters, definitely. The former's habits and the sheer kittiness thereof are just priceless, and his mixed fondness for and guilt about his catlike (not "carlike" as I just caught myself typing
) activities are an aspect of his character that I find rather fascinating. As for the latter, his was another personality to which I instantly said, "Hell yes." Very cool guy, that Jack. I think his appearance is pretty boss, too, especially with regards to the blue coloration and antennae. I also like the way he talks. ^^And I loved the scene where Mia and Lucy were playing their little game. XD Lucy's abilities are pretty damned cool as it is, IMO, but the fact that they allow her to safely be used as a target for Mia's scythes is one of if not the coolest thing about them, for the outlet for hunting instincts that it provides for Mia, for the fun that it provides for Lucy, and for the amusement that it provides for me. X3
Highlights:
Again, I loved this part.
I find this priceless for three reasons: 1.) Mia's chopping through her sister's head! XD 2.) Lucy is giggling about it! XD 3.) And Howard's reaction provides the icing on the cake. XD Yes, I certainly do enjoy the ways in which Mia and Lucy take advantage of the latter's ability to go insubstantial... This, too, was priceless. He was being such a kitty there! ^^
A nice example of just what it is about this character that makes me like him so much.
Dragonfree
Just me
Well, am I ever on a writing spree. Chapter 40 of The Quest for the Legends yesterday, chapter seven of this today.
Thanks for reviewing, you guys. I was worried everybody would have forgotten this story existed.
So. Chapter seven. This is very easily the most eventful chapter so far, putting an end to all those seemingly endless character introductions of the past six chapters. It is also easily my favorite chapter so far. I hope you enjoy it.
Chapter 7
“…and I’m gonna be in the movie!”
Will smiled awkwardly at Jean. “I know. You’ve told me before.”
“Yeah, but they’ve sent us a contract now! And I’m getting Dad to sign it. He doesn’t want me to be in the movie, but I want to.”
“Yeah,” Will muttered, wondering as he did occasionally whether Jean really was that much better than no company at all. He scratched his whiskers and said nothing more, although he cringed and pulled the hood of his sweatshirt further over his head as the pair of them approached Jean’s human friends. He wasn’t sure why he did that; after all, it wasn’t as if they hadn’t seen him before and weren’t aware that he was a Pokémorph, and definitely not as if it made them any less likely to ignore him completely (in fact, the opposite was probably true). But he liked to keep his Meowth features concealed anyway. It made him feel less self-conscious.
“You know what? They’ve sent us a contract! I’m gonna be in the Sarah Hooter movie!”
Her friends didn’t look overly impressed. “We don’t care, Jean!” moaned a girl with dark, curly hair. “Stop rubbing it in!”
Jean’s friends didn’t really appear to like her that much, Will had observed. They put up with her and didn’t mind talking to her occasionally, but the moment anything reminded them that she wasn’t like them, they’d reject her and make it obvious she didn’t really belong with human beings. Will wasn’t sure whether she ignored it or was just that oblivious.
This time Jean looked at the girls’ harsh faces in dumbfounded astonishment and then, abruptly, bared her teeth in a very surprisingly frightening manner and let out an intimidating, uncomfortably bestial snarl.
Will recoiled. Jean’s friends jumped and then, after a tense moment, just bolted towards the school building.
Jean’s face had returned to normal, her expression confused as if she wasn’t entirely sure where the snarl had come from either. She stared after the girls, and Will noted awkwardly that there were tears forming at the corners of her eyes. He backed away a little, not wanting to be the target of a tantrum while also not wanting to look like he was abandoning her as well. He’d never been good with cheering people up.
Jean closed her eyes and shook her head for a second; Will saw the ends of her six red tails curling up a bit more than they already were. Finally she reached for her pocket, grabbed her cellphone from it and opened it, punching in a number with great precision.
Jean’s cellphone was really loud. He could hear the slow beeps before her father picked it up even from where he was standing.
“What is it, sweetheart? I’m driving, so make it quick,” said Dave’s voice.
“My friends all got mad at me,” Jean sniffed. “And then I – I like growled at them.”
“Really?” her father answered on the other end. “Did you do it voluntarily or just sort of impulsively? What kind of growl was it?”
“I don’t know,” Jean replied and paused for a second. “They all stared at me and ran away and were all mean.”
“Well, honey, when your fire sac is active, you’re going to roast ‘em all if they’re mean to you, understand?”
The thought seemed to cheer Jean up considerably. “Yeah!” she shouted happily into the phone while punching the air.
“But hey, you can tell me all about it when I come to get you home, okay? And when I’m done driving you, I’ll have to go back to work. Brian and I have to finish some stuff for Gabriel.”
“But what about the contract?” Jean whined. (Will scolded himself for mentally calling it that, but it really was the most appropriate word.)
Dave let out a long sigh. “That’ll have to wait until I get back tonight, sweetheart. We won’t be able to mail it to them until tomorrow, anywa…” There was a sudden screech of tires. “Oh, ****!” Then, “Look, I love you, honey, but can you not call me while I’m driving? I think I nearly ran over a Meowth or something here. Bye, sweetie.”
“Bye,” Jean said, but from the sound of it Dave had already hung up. Will was meanwhile shivering at the thought of a Meowth being run over by a car. Especially Dave’s car. Even though he’d have loved to be an ordinary human being, he couldn’t help identifying slightly with the species he was spliced with. Sometimes he felt stupid about it. At other times he just wondered whether the other morphs felt the same way. It seemed awkward to ask them.
“Okay, so what do you want to do?” Jean asked. The human friends were apparently forgotten. Probably a good thing, since Will couldn’t help feeling that if he were them that snarl would have disturbed the hell out of him and there was little hope they would ever think of her the same way again. But Jean always got herself new groups who were semi-willing to hang out with her for a while, for as long as she did not go on about her awaiting acting career too much.
She would get over it before he could say ‘That’s not friendship’.
“Tag,” he said, touching her shoulder before bounding off in a random direction. “You’re it.”
-------
Night had fallen by the time Dave and Brian stepped out of the main building of Heywood Labs.
“Jean’ll be worried,” Dave was saying. “I promised I’d be back home by nine o’clock. I just left her some lasagne, but I don’t know if she’ll have gotten into bed.”
“Well, Gabriel knows how to take care of himself,” Brian said as Dave motioned to open the door of his car. “I’d call it a good day’s wo …”
He was cut off by a gunshot. It took a while for Dave to register all the blood.
“****,” he swore while his brain numbly attempted to start itself. His eyes refused to look for the wound, instead fixing themselves on the steadily spreading pool of red around Brian’s unmoving body as it lay awkwardly on the sidewalk. “Oh, ****, Brian.”
It wasn’t until the second gunshot, which chipped some concrete from the wall of the building behind him, that he realized who the gunman had actually meant to shoot.
His brain bolted awake with a sudden rush of adrenaline and before he really realized it, he had ducked behind the car.
“****. ****. Goddamnit.” Where the hell was his cellphone? While his hand dug through his pockets, another bullet hit the windshield of the car, and Dave somehow found the time to evaluate the yelp the sound squeezed out of him as extremely stupid-sounding before he bolted up and started towards the next car, Brian’s, parked a few dozen meters away along the same sidewalk. He finally manoeuvred the phone out of his pocket, opened it and attempted to punch in 911, but the actual outcome on the screen looked more like 986121, either because he was still running or because his hands were trembling too much. He didn’t really care which.
Dave threw himself onto the sidewalk behind Brian’s car just as a third bullet tore through the air behind him and landed on the wall of a side building of the lab.
He pushed himself into a crouching position, hammered the cancel button on his cellphone and retyped the number. He hit the call button as quickly as he could and jerked the phone up to his ear, surprising himself by how broken his voice sounded.
“Emergency? I think some crazed **** just shot my coworker – yes, still here and still trying to shoot me now, so if you don’t mind – just outside Heywood Labs, Grace City – the **** should I know? – Look, can you just send some cops and an ambulance already…? You did? Right. Okay. Thank you. I’ll get back to cowering behind this– ****!” Shards of glass suddenly exploded out from the car window just above him as a bullet shattered the pane. Dave tried to cover his head as the rain of broken glass bombarded his back; he felt a couple of pieces pierce the back of his neck before it subsided. He looked quickly at his phone; it was dead. He stuffed it clumsily back into his pocket. The car alarm had gone off with a blaring siren noise.
Dave leapt back to his feet after a moment of thought, racing for the next car which was in front of the next building. “I’ve called the police!” he screamed on the way, hoping to scare the attacker off even though an increasingly large part of him was sure he had probably given up the wrong information in that phone call or something. “They’re on their way!”
He heard another gunshot and felt something strike the side of his forehead, a kind of oddly powerful sting, and warm blood began to leak down the side of his cheek as he attempted to keep running.
****, he thought to himself in disbelief as the power left his legs and he crumpled to the ground. I'm dead. ****er shot me in the head. I'm dead. ****.
While he fell he was hazily surprised at how long it seemed to be taking his brain to shut down, but then his head hit the concrete sidewalk and his vision faded away.
-------
Dave blinked. This was strange, because people had made up the notion of an afterlife in a bout of wishful thinking and that was not supposed to make it exist.
“You’re awake?” said a voice. He blinked again and realized that there was a short man in a white coat standing over him. The side of his head throbbed with dull pain.
“Wow,” he muttered as his frontal lobes began to process the situation logically. “I didn’t think doctors could cure that.”
The man gave him a curt smile. “The bullet only grazed your forehead, Mr. Ambrose. You were very lucky.”
“What?” Dave tried to sit angrily up, but the attempt drowned in all the pillows in the hospital bed. “No way in hell that just grazed me. I felt how I died, for ****’s sake.”
The doctor gave him another one of those irritating smiles of his, something reminiscent of the way people smiled to a child talking about an imaginary friend. “The psychological shock made you fall, and you were knocked out when you hit your head on the sidewalk. A security guard in one of the nearby buildings came to inspect the noise and stopped the bleeding until the ambulance arrived.”
“What?” he asked again, unable to think of anything else to say.
“I assure you you did not die at any point this evening. I’m sorry if this upsets you.”
“Stop being a wiseass,” Dave said, trying to pull his thoughts back into something coherent. “Where’s Brian?”
“I’m afraid there was nothing that could be done for your friend when we got there. The bullet went through his heart. I’m sorry.”
Dave blinked yet again a few times. He rubbed his forehead and turned away, trying to convince himself that he just had dust in his eye.
“Well, ****.” Brian. How could Brian be dead? That was goddamned messed up. Brian wasn’t supposed to be murdered. That was just not the way things happened. “****,” he repeated to fill the silence. It didn’t help very much.
There were a few more seconds of awkward silence.
“Well, there is a policeman here who would like to speak with you, but if this is a bad time…”
“No,” Dave said, making some vague gesture with his hand without looking at the doctor. Partly it was just to get rid of him, really. “It’s fine. Send him in.”
He looked back up now that the doctor was walking out of the room and took a few deep breaths. All this was so ****ed up. Why couldn’t there be a time machine to just rewind everything by… how long had it been, anyway? He looked around and found a clock on the wall above the door. It was a quarter to two AM. He reached carefully up to his head; it had been wrapped in some bandages. The pain still throbbed there vaguely as background noise. There were blue curtains hanging by the sides of his bed, presumably concealing other patients.
A comfortably overweight, uniformed police officer with round glasses stepped into the room, walked over to Dave’s bed and sat down on a chair beside it. “Good evening, Mr. Ambrose,” the man said. “I just have a couple of questions for the time being. First off, I’m sorry about your friend.”
“He wasn’t really a friend,” Dave mumbled. “Just a coworker.”
“Well, sorry about your coworker, then,” the policeman corrected himself, flipping briefly through a notebook. “Can you think of anyone who would have a motive to want him dead?”
Dave snorted. “Brian? ****, no. He’s the least offensive person you’ve ever met.”
The policeman raised his eyebrows and scribbled something into his notebook, but said nothing. “So you have no idea who might have been behind this?”
“Truth to be told, I think the guy was just trying to shoot me and got him instead.”
The cop wrote some more. “So you think they had a motive to attack you?” he asked without looking up.
“Oh, sure,” Dave replied. “There are all sorts of nuts I’ve upset in some way or another.” And as he said it, he came to the unsettling realization that seeing as whoever it was had clearly not been caught, the psycho was still after him. “He’ll try to kill me again,” he muttered aloud. “****.”
The policeman nodded, pencil still furiously scratching the notebook. “It’s possible. I’d be careful if I were you. You should try to stay in your apartment for a while once you get out of here, at least until the guy is caught or we find out more. We’ll get a couple of guys to hang around nearby just in case he tries to get you at home.”
“Thanks,” Dave mumbled, not quite sure what he was thanking the man for as he hadn’t really been listening.
“Did you see the attacker?”
“Not a hair.”
The cop finished writing, looked up at him and smiled. “Well, that will be all for now. We’ll contact you later as the investigation continues.”
“All right.”
The policeman left. Dave was starting to get a severe headache and wanted to sleep, but the irritating doctor stepped in again. “You also have some visitors. Should I show them in?”
“Sure,” he replied, waving the doctor off. He wasn’t even sure who the visitors were and wasn’t at all sure he would like to meet them, but he said it anyway. As it turned out, the visitors were Howard and Mia, which partly cheered him up and partly didn’t; after all, it could have been somebody like his mother (or worse, Jane), but at the same time he was dully disappointed that they were the only people who cared enough to visit him.
Howard hurried over to the bed and attempted to give him a hug, not succeeding very well as he was standing by the side of the bed.
“Brian… oh, God, I can’t believe it. I’m glad you got out okay. I’m not sure what the morphs would do without you. But… God…”
Howard actually did have tears in his eyes, which made Dave feel awkward. He looked over at Mia, who stood by the other side of the bed and looked at him with an empty expression. There was no better person to trust not to be sentimental.
“Cheryl stayed home to watch out for Lucy. Joe is on the way and he was going to pick Jean up. Everybody over in Taillow Springs has been contacted. They’re all in shock about this. I think your mother…”
“Christ, don’t bring her here,” Dave muttered, rubbing his head. The headache was getting worse.
“Well,” Howard continued after a second’s pause, “what I’m saying is everybody is kind of scared now. I mean, there’s somebody targeting us, obviously, and from what I heard the killer ran for it the moment the security guard announced he had a gun and he didn’t see anything. I think the cops found some bullets, though, and are working on trying to trace down the owner of the gun they came from… oh, God, Dave, he killed Brian. He killed Brian.”
“I kind of noticed,” Dave mumbled and wished Howard would at least attempt to hide the fact he was crying. “I think he’s after me more than you guys. I mean, I’m the main guy behind the Pokémorphs and all.”
“You think it has to do with them?” Howard sighed and started trying to wipe his face with his sleeve. “I guess it makes sense, I suppose, but…”
“What else? Most ****ing controversial thing we’ve ever done. Didn’t you get some fundamentalist nut waving a sign in front of your house the other day?”
“You think it was him?”
“Probably not. He seemed more the sort to just wait for God to strike me with lightning.” Dave rubbed his forehead again, wishing he could go to sleep. “I see you brought Mia,” he said to change the subject.
“She wanted to come.”
Dave turned to the girl, who was still standing in the same spot beside the bed as before, unmoved. “Well, that was nice of you.”
Mia just looked at him in silence, her eyes flicking between the bandages on his head and his neck.
“It just grazed you,” she observed.
“Apparently. Didn’t feel that way.”
“They took us to the morgue,” she went on. “Brian was there. There was a lot of blood. It smelled nice. I think I wanted to eat him.”
Howard gave her a very disturbed look which Dave took to mean she had not mentioned this to him.
“Well, you’re not going to eat him, Mia,” he said, trying to sound as conversational as he could while pushing the image of the half-Scyther tearing Brian’s throat out with her teeth firmly out of his head.
“I know. But I don’t want to eat you because you’ve got bandages on.”
“That’s nice.”
“Mia, you should probably wait outside,” Howard said, his voice brokenly high-pitched and pathetic. The girl obeyed, walking casually back out the door.
“Why the **** did you take Mia to a morgue of all places?”
“We were the first people to arrive and they wanted us to identify him before the autopsy,” Howard said miserably. “I didn’t really think before bringing her along.”
Howard sighed and looked down. “God,” he muttered suddenly. “Who’s going to tell Gabriel?”
Dave groaned. “Gabriel. Right.” He rubbed his eyes, trying to think. “I’ll do it. I was there. You got a phone?”
Howard fished a cellphone out of his pocket and handed it silently to Dave. He found Brian’s name in the contact list and pressed the green button, holding the phone to his ear.
He waited for a while, the calm beeps of the phone searing through his ear and magnifying his headache. He was about to hang up when a sleepy voice answered, “Hello?”
“Hey, Gabriel.”
“Dave? What… why are you calling in the middle of the night?” Gabriel sounded only sleepy and irritated and had clearly not noticed that Brian hadn’t come home yet. That made it worse.
“Your father, he, uh…”
“He what?”
“He died.” Dave paused and then decided that was too short and abrupt. “Some psycho shot him when we were coming out of the lab. I think he was trying to shoot me, but I moved and he was behind me, and… he died.” Then he realized that was absolutely not the right way to approach this and tried again. “I mean, there was that gunman, and he shot him, and then he tried to get me too but I called an ambulance and then the bullet just grazed me. I’m in the hospital right now. They didn’t catch the guy.”
That didn’t really sound good enough either, as evidenced by the complete lack of a response on the other end of the phone.
“Gabriel?” Dave asked carefully. There was a short silence and then the sound of hanging up.
Dave rubbed his forehead again. Goddamned headache. “****.”
Howard made no comment, staring at the curtain on the other side of the bed. “What did he say?” he asked at length.
“Nothing. Absolutely ****ing nothing.”
“I should call one of the others in Taillow Springs and get them to go over to him. See if he’s okay.”
Dave gave him back the phone without words. Howard began to dial a number.
“Any word from Jane?” Dave asked him suddenly. Howard looked up.
“What? No. Why would there be? It’s been ten years since you were involved.”
Dave shrugged. “Just wondering.”
He lay back in his bed and heard vaguely as Howard talked to Bill Ray and asked him to check on Gabriel. He didn’t really notice it happening, but by the time Howard hung up, he was fast asleep, dreaming of Mia eating Brian and bullets shattering windshields.
Thanks for reviewing, you guys. I was worried everybody would have forgotten this story existed.
Yes, it rather is. I need to edit that...
I enjoyed putting those in. Fictional nerds playing real games for the win. :3
It causes stains, and yes, his sheets are lined with plastic and their house has an easy-to-clean floor.
Thanks. I really enjoyed how that part came out. :3
So. Chapter seven. This is very easily the most eventful chapter so far, putting an end to all those seemingly endless character introductions of the past six chapters. It is also easily my favorite chapter so far. I hope you enjoy it.
Chapter 7
“…and I’m gonna be in the movie!”
Will smiled awkwardly at Jean. “I know. You’ve told me before.”
“Yeah, but they’ve sent us a contract now! And I’m getting Dad to sign it. He doesn’t want me to be in the movie, but I want to.”
“Yeah,” Will muttered, wondering as he did occasionally whether Jean really was that much better than no company at all. He scratched his whiskers and said nothing more, although he cringed and pulled the hood of his sweatshirt further over his head as the pair of them approached Jean’s human friends. He wasn’t sure why he did that; after all, it wasn’t as if they hadn’t seen him before and weren’t aware that he was a Pokémorph, and definitely not as if it made them any less likely to ignore him completely (in fact, the opposite was probably true). But he liked to keep his Meowth features concealed anyway. It made him feel less self-conscious.
“You know what? They’ve sent us a contract! I’m gonna be in the Sarah Hooter movie!”
Her friends didn’t look overly impressed. “We don’t care, Jean!” moaned a girl with dark, curly hair. “Stop rubbing it in!”
Jean’s friends didn’t really appear to like her that much, Will had observed. They put up with her and didn’t mind talking to her occasionally, but the moment anything reminded them that she wasn’t like them, they’d reject her and make it obvious she didn’t really belong with human beings. Will wasn’t sure whether she ignored it or was just that oblivious.
This time Jean looked at the girls’ harsh faces in dumbfounded astonishment and then, abruptly, bared her teeth in a very surprisingly frightening manner and let out an intimidating, uncomfortably bestial snarl.
Will recoiled. Jean’s friends jumped and then, after a tense moment, just bolted towards the school building.
Jean’s face had returned to normal, her expression confused as if she wasn’t entirely sure where the snarl had come from either. She stared after the girls, and Will noted awkwardly that there were tears forming at the corners of her eyes. He backed away a little, not wanting to be the target of a tantrum while also not wanting to look like he was abandoning her as well. He’d never been good with cheering people up.
Jean closed her eyes and shook her head for a second; Will saw the ends of her six red tails curling up a bit more than they already were. Finally she reached for her pocket, grabbed her cellphone from it and opened it, punching in a number with great precision.
Jean’s cellphone was really loud. He could hear the slow beeps before her father picked it up even from where he was standing.
“What is it, sweetheart? I’m driving, so make it quick,” said Dave’s voice.
“My friends all got mad at me,” Jean sniffed. “And then I – I like growled at them.”
“Really?” her father answered on the other end. “Did you do it voluntarily or just sort of impulsively? What kind of growl was it?”
“I don’t know,” Jean replied and paused for a second. “They all stared at me and ran away and were all mean.”
“Well, honey, when your fire sac is active, you’re going to roast ‘em all if they’re mean to you, understand?”
The thought seemed to cheer Jean up considerably. “Yeah!” she shouted happily into the phone while punching the air.
“But hey, you can tell me all about it when I come to get you home, okay? And when I’m done driving you, I’ll have to go back to work. Brian and I have to finish some stuff for Gabriel.”
“But what about the contract?” Jean whined. (Will scolded himself for mentally calling it that, but it really was the most appropriate word.)
Dave let out a long sigh. “That’ll have to wait until I get back tonight, sweetheart. We won’t be able to mail it to them until tomorrow, anywa…” There was a sudden screech of tires. “Oh, ****!” Then, “Look, I love you, honey, but can you not call me while I’m driving? I think I nearly ran over a Meowth or something here. Bye, sweetie.”
“Bye,” Jean said, but from the sound of it Dave had already hung up. Will was meanwhile shivering at the thought of a Meowth being run over by a car. Especially Dave’s car. Even though he’d have loved to be an ordinary human being, he couldn’t help identifying slightly with the species he was spliced with. Sometimes he felt stupid about it. At other times he just wondered whether the other morphs felt the same way. It seemed awkward to ask them.
“Okay, so what do you want to do?” Jean asked. The human friends were apparently forgotten. Probably a good thing, since Will couldn’t help feeling that if he were them that snarl would have disturbed the hell out of him and there was little hope they would ever think of her the same way again. But Jean always got herself new groups who were semi-willing to hang out with her for a while, for as long as she did not go on about her awaiting acting career too much.
She would get over it before he could say ‘That’s not friendship’.
“Tag,” he said, touching her shoulder before bounding off in a random direction. “You’re it.”
-------
Night had fallen by the time Dave and Brian stepped out of the main building of Heywood Labs.
“Jean’ll be worried,” Dave was saying. “I promised I’d be back home by nine o’clock. I just left her some lasagne, but I don’t know if she’ll have gotten into bed.”
“Well, Gabriel knows how to take care of himself,” Brian said as Dave motioned to open the door of his car. “I’d call it a good day’s wo …”
He was cut off by a gunshot. It took a while for Dave to register all the blood.
“****,” he swore while his brain numbly attempted to start itself. His eyes refused to look for the wound, instead fixing themselves on the steadily spreading pool of red around Brian’s unmoving body as it lay awkwardly on the sidewalk. “Oh, ****, Brian.”
It wasn’t until the second gunshot, which chipped some concrete from the wall of the building behind him, that he realized who the gunman had actually meant to shoot.
His brain bolted awake with a sudden rush of adrenaline and before he really realized it, he had ducked behind the car.
“****. ****. Goddamnit.” Where the hell was his cellphone? While his hand dug through his pockets, another bullet hit the windshield of the car, and Dave somehow found the time to evaluate the yelp the sound squeezed out of him as extremely stupid-sounding before he bolted up and started towards the next car, Brian’s, parked a few dozen meters away along the same sidewalk. He finally manoeuvred the phone out of his pocket, opened it and attempted to punch in 911, but the actual outcome on the screen looked more like 986121, either because he was still running or because his hands were trembling too much. He didn’t really care which.
Dave threw himself onto the sidewalk behind Brian’s car just as a third bullet tore through the air behind him and landed on the wall of a side building of the lab.
He pushed himself into a crouching position, hammered the cancel button on his cellphone and retyped the number. He hit the call button as quickly as he could and jerked the phone up to his ear, surprising himself by how broken his voice sounded.
“Emergency? I think some crazed **** just shot my coworker – yes, still here and still trying to shoot me now, so if you don’t mind – just outside Heywood Labs, Grace City – the **** should I know? – Look, can you just send some cops and an ambulance already…? You did? Right. Okay. Thank you. I’ll get back to cowering behind this– ****!” Shards of glass suddenly exploded out from the car window just above him as a bullet shattered the pane. Dave tried to cover his head as the rain of broken glass bombarded his back; he felt a couple of pieces pierce the back of his neck before it subsided. He looked quickly at his phone; it was dead. He stuffed it clumsily back into his pocket. The car alarm had gone off with a blaring siren noise.
Dave leapt back to his feet after a moment of thought, racing for the next car which was in front of the next building. “I’ve called the police!” he screamed on the way, hoping to scare the attacker off even though an increasingly large part of him was sure he had probably given up the wrong information in that phone call or something. “They’re on their way!”
He heard another gunshot and felt something strike the side of his forehead, a kind of oddly powerful sting, and warm blood began to leak down the side of his cheek as he attempted to keep running.
****, he thought to himself in disbelief as the power left his legs and he crumpled to the ground. I'm dead. ****er shot me in the head. I'm dead. ****.
While he fell he was hazily surprised at how long it seemed to be taking his brain to shut down, but then his head hit the concrete sidewalk and his vision faded away.
-------
Dave blinked. This was strange, because people had made up the notion of an afterlife in a bout of wishful thinking and that was not supposed to make it exist.
“You’re awake?” said a voice. He blinked again and realized that there was a short man in a white coat standing over him. The side of his head throbbed with dull pain.
“Wow,” he muttered as his frontal lobes began to process the situation logically. “I didn’t think doctors could cure that.”
The man gave him a curt smile. “The bullet only grazed your forehead, Mr. Ambrose. You were very lucky.”
“What?” Dave tried to sit angrily up, but the attempt drowned in all the pillows in the hospital bed. “No way in hell that just grazed me. I felt how I died, for ****’s sake.”
The doctor gave him another one of those irritating smiles of his, something reminiscent of the way people smiled to a child talking about an imaginary friend. “The psychological shock made you fall, and you were knocked out when you hit your head on the sidewalk. A security guard in one of the nearby buildings came to inspect the noise and stopped the bleeding until the ambulance arrived.”
“What?” he asked again, unable to think of anything else to say.
“I assure you you did not die at any point this evening. I’m sorry if this upsets you.”
“Stop being a wiseass,” Dave said, trying to pull his thoughts back into something coherent. “Where’s Brian?”
“I’m afraid there was nothing that could be done for your friend when we got there. The bullet went through his heart. I’m sorry.”
Dave blinked yet again a few times. He rubbed his forehead and turned away, trying to convince himself that he just had dust in his eye.
“Well, ****.” Brian. How could Brian be dead? That was goddamned messed up. Brian wasn’t supposed to be murdered. That was just not the way things happened. “****,” he repeated to fill the silence. It didn’t help very much.
There were a few more seconds of awkward silence.
“Well, there is a policeman here who would like to speak with you, but if this is a bad time…”
“No,” Dave said, making some vague gesture with his hand without looking at the doctor. Partly it was just to get rid of him, really. “It’s fine. Send him in.”
He looked back up now that the doctor was walking out of the room and took a few deep breaths. All this was so ****ed up. Why couldn’t there be a time machine to just rewind everything by… how long had it been, anyway? He looked around and found a clock on the wall above the door. It was a quarter to two AM. He reached carefully up to his head; it had been wrapped in some bandages. The pain still throbbed there vaguely as background noise. There were blue curtains hanging by the sides of his bed, presumably concealing other patients.
A comfortably overweight, uniformed police officer with round glasses stepped into the room, walked over to Dave’s bed and sat down on a chair beside it. “Good evening, Mr. Ambrose,” the man said. “I just have a couple of questions for the time being. First off, I’m sorry about your friend.”
“He wasn’t really a friend,” Dave mumbled. “Just a coworker.”
“Well, sorry about your coworker, then,” the policeman corrected himself, flipping briefly through a notebook. “Can you think of anyone who would have a motive to want him dead?”
Dave snorted. “Brian? ****, no. He’s the least offensive person you’ve ever met.”
The policeman raised his eyebrows and scribbled something into his notebook, but said nothing. “So you have no idea who might have been behind this?”
“Truth to be told, I think the guy was just trying to shoot me and got him instead.”
The cop wrote some more. “So you think they had a motive to attack you?” he asked without looking up.
“Oh, sure,” Dave replied. “There are all sorts of nuts I’ve upset in some way or another.” And as he said it, he came to the unsettling realization that seeing as whoever it was had clearly not been caught, the psycho was still after him. “He’ll try to kill me again,” he muttered aloud. “****.”
The policeman nodded, pencil still furiously scratching the notebook. “It’s possible. I’d be careful if I were you. You should try to stay in your apartment for a while once you get out of here, at least until the guy is caught or we find out more. We’ll get a couple of guys to hang around nearby just in case he tries to get you at home.”
“Thanks,” Dave mumbled, not quite sure what he was thanking the man for as he hadn’t really been listening.
“Did you see the attacker?”
“Not a hair.”
The cop finished writing, looked up at him and smiled. “Well, that will be all for now. We’ll contact you later as the investigation continues.”
“All right.”
The policeman left. Dave was starting to get a severe headache and wanted to sleep, but the irritating doctor stepped in again. “You also have some visitors. Should I show them in?”
“Sure,” he replied, waving the doctor off. He wasn’t even sure who the visitors were and wasn’t at all sure he would like to meet them, but he said it anyway. As it turned out, the visitors were Howard and Mia, which partly cheered him up and partly didn’t; after all, it could have been somebody like his mother (or worse, Jane), but at the same time he was dully disappointed that they were the only people who cared enough to visit him.
Howard hurried over to the bed and attempted to give him a hug, not succeeding very well as he was standing by the side of the bed.
“Brian… oh, God, I can’t believe it. I’m glad you got out okay. I’m not sure what the morphs would do without you. But… God…”
Howard actually did have tears in his eyes, which made Dave feel awkward. He looked over at Mia, who stood by the other side of the bed and looked at him with an empty expression. There was no better person to trust not to be sentimental.
“Cheryl stayed home to watch out for Lucy. Joe is on the way and he was going to pick Jean up. Everybody over in Taillow Springs has been contacted. They’re all in shock about this. I think your mother…”
“Christ, don’t bring her here,” Dave muttered, rubbing his head. The headache was getting worse.
“Well,” Howard continued after a second’s pause, “what I’m saying is everybody is kind of scared now. I mean, there’s somebody targeting us, obviously, and from what I heard the killer ran for it the moment the security guard announced he had a gun and he didn’t see anything. I think the cops found some bullets, though, and are working on trying to trace down the owner of the gun they came from… oh, God, Dave, he killed Brian. He killed Brian.”
“I kind of noticed,” Dave mumbled and wished Howard would at least attempt to hide the fact he was crying. “I think he’s after me more than you guys. I mean, I’m the main guy behind the Pokémorphs and all.”
“You think it has to do with them?” Howard sighed and started trying to wipe his face with his sleeve. “I guess it makes sense, I suppose, but…”
“What else? Most ****ing controversial thing we’ve ever done. Didn’t you get some fundamentalist nut waving a sign in front of your house the other day?”
“You think it was him?”
“Probably not. He seemed more the sort to just wait for God to strike me with lightning.” Dave rubbed his forehead again, wishing he could go to sleep. “I see you brought Mia,” he said to change the subject.
“She wanted to come.”
Dave turned to the girl, who was still standing in the same spot beside the bed as before, unmoved. “Well, that was nice of you.”
Mia just looked at him in silence, her eyes flicking between the bandages on his head and his neck.
“It just grazed you,” she observed.
“Apparently. Didn’t feel that way.”
“They took us to the morgue,” she went on. “Brian was there. There was a lot of blood. It smelled nice. I think I wanted to eat him.”
Howard gave her a very disturbed look which Dave took to mean she had not mentioned this to him.
“Well, you’re not going to eat him, Mia,” he said, trying to sound as conversational as he could while pushing the image of the half-Scyther tearing Brian’s throat out with her teeth firmly out of his head.
“I know. But I don’t want to eat you because you’ve got bandages on.”
“That’s nice.”
“Mia, you should probably wait outside,” Howard said, his voice brokenly high-pitched and pathetic. The girl obeyed, walking casually back out the door.
“Why the **** did you take Mia to a morgue of all places?”
“We were the first people to arrive and they wanted us to identify him before the autopsy,” Howard said miserably. “I didn’t really think before bringing her along.”
Howard sighed and looked down. “God,” he muttered suddenly. “Who’s going to tell Gabriel?”
Dave groaned. “Gabriel. Right.” He rubbed his eyes, trying to think. “I’ll do it. I was there. You got a phone?”
Howard fished a cellphone out of his pocket and handed it silently to Dave. He found Brian’s name in the contact list and pressed the green button, holding the phone to his ear.
He waited for a while, the calm beeps of the phone searing through his ear and magnifying his headache. He was about to hang up when a sleepy voice answered, “Hello?”
“Hey, Gabriel.”
“Dave? What… why are you calling in the middle of the night?” Gabriel sounded only sleepy and irritated and had clearly not noticed that Brian hadn’t come home yet. That made it worse.
“Your father, he, uh…”
“He what?”
“He died.” Dave paused and then decided that was too short and abrupt. “Some psycho shot him when we were coming out of the lab. I think he was trying to shoot me, but I moved and he was behind me, and… he died.” Then he realized that was absolutely not the right way to approach this and tried again. “I mean, there was that gunman, and he shot him, and then he tried to get me too but I called an ambulance and then the bullet just grazed me. I’m in the hospital right now. They didn’t catch the guy.”
That didn’t really sound good enough either, as evidenced by the complete lack of a response on the other end of the phone.
“Gabriel?” Dave asked carefully. There was a short silence and then the sound of hanging up.
Dave rubbed his forehead again. Goddamned headache. “****.”
Howard made no comment, staring at the curtain on the other side of the bed. “What did he say?” he asked at length.
“Nothing. Absolutely ****ing nothing.”
“I should call one of the others in Taillow Springs and get them to go over to him. See if he’s okay.”
Dave gave him back the phone without words. Howard began to dial a number.
“Any word from Jane?” Dave asked him suddenly. Howard looked up.
“What? No. Why would there be? It’s been ten years since you were involved.”
Dave shrugged. “Just wondering.”
He lay back in his bed and heard vaguely as Howard talked to Bill Ray and asked him to check on Gabriel. He didn’t really notice it happening, but by the time Howard hung up, he was fast asleep, dreaming of Mia eating Brian and bullets shattering windshields.
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Gardevoir Girl
is NOT a girl
Wow. The plot is really starting to pick up. I definitely didn't see this coming! I couldn't find any mistakes in this sentence (unless the rather irritatingly large amounts of profanity count - that swear filter can get annoying at times), so I'll just point out the highlights:
Upsets him? O.O
Wow, Scyther are certainly carnivores, aren't they, even wanting to eat their family friends? Although, I guess anything with blood would smell like food.
~GG~
Upsets him? O.O
Wow, Scyther are certainly carnivores, aren't they, even wanting to eat their family friends? Although, I guess anything with blood would smell like food.
~GG~