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Morphic (R, possibly offensive to some)

Dragonfree

Just me
Hi, and welcome to my latest piece of Pokémon fanfiction I'm attempting to juggle with The Quest for the Legends, Morphic. It comes with a warning: it contains lots and lots of political references. They are not here to make a statement; they are humourous and meant to reflect some of the extremes of reality without preaching my opinion on anything. However, some people may still take offense to it and I suppose I can understand that. I apologize in advance if you are one of them and advise you to keep this in mind as you read or not read at all if you don't want to read something that involves touchy subjects. I just ask that you please, please, whatever else you may want to say, do not turn this thread into a debate about those issues. I repeat that I am not trying to make a statement with this. It's just a story whose world tries to imitate reality, all right?

The PG-13 is for swearing and as I don't consider language alone worthy of making it an R, I will not do so, although technically the MPAA would perhaps call it R-worthy if just for the number of four-letter words. In any case you have been warned. No, sorry, actually this ended up quite R-rated. There's not only a whole lot of uncensored swearing but also violence, death, sexual references, etc.


This fic is now complete, so the fourteen chapters linked below constitute the entirety of the fic; however, I am still writing some silly extras, which are listed below that.


Chapter index

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14 (part 2)

Extras

These things are very silly and stem from my personal utter adoration for the characters of Dave and Mia and their interactions. They're completely unrelated to the storyline and wildly different in tone, but some people have enjoyed them anyway.

Dave and Mia Discuss Sex / Dave and Mia Discuss Politics
Dave and Mia Discuss Horror / Chapter 9.5
Dave and Mia Discuss Relationships / Dave and Mia Discuss Hotdogs
Dave and Mia Watch Paint Dry

April Fools' Day special (fake first chapter of a supposed sequel)


Chapter 1

Calm down now. Be cool.

A dark-haired man in his thirties straightened his tie nervously in front of a large mirror. He ran his eyes yet again quickly up and down his reflection. His posture looked far too timid for such an important debate. He took a deep breath and tried to straighten himself, pushed the glasses a little further up on his nose and silently cursed himself for having shown up with them – they were too big and looked too dorky. Too stereotypical. He wished he’d gotten used to contacts sometime.

“Mr. Edwards, five minutes.”

He nodded, seeing in the mirror as a short member of the TV crew stepped out of the room. He was alone now.

“Damn it,” he swore under his breath, briefly taking his glasses off just to see how he looked. He depressingly assured himself that the blurry flesh-colored blob he could see in front of him definitely looked much better now than with the glasses on. Damn it all. Tomorrow he’d get himself some contacts and use them, no matter what. Who knew when he’d next have to appear on TV?

Why couldn’t they just have sent Dave? he thought to himself. I’m terrible with words. He could convince that audience that black is white if he wanted.

It was a rhetorical question, of course. Dave and his girlfriend were now at some fancy restaurant celebrating their anniversary. He had been practically begged to go; Dave had given him a long speech about what his relationship meant to him. And in some moment of pity, he had agreed to it, figuring it would perhaps, maybe, if he looked optimistically at it, not be quite as bad as it sounded. Damn it all. It was even worse.

“Mr. Edwards?”

“Yes. I’m coming.”

He took one last look at himself in the mirror – there were so many things that were still wrong! – but dragged himself through the door. A member of the TV crew ushered him into a chair. He felt his palms sweating at the sight of all the cameras; he quickly turned to his opponent in the chair opposite him. It was a well-built woman with long, black hair who would have been attractive if only her thick-rimmed purple glasses had been a little less extravagant and her expression not so awfully stern. She looked at him out of the corner of her eyes with the utmost contempt of one with the firm conviction that he could certainly be no less than a personal messenger of the devil. He shifted in his chair. She was no more comfortable to look at than the cameras. He desperately looked around for anything else to focus his attention on. With relief, he saw the host, a casual, stylishly-dressed man, come hurrying over to sit in a third chair and put up a shamelessly fake television smile.

“Good evening, and welcome to Friday Night with James Sullivan!” the host said suddenly, indicating that they were on air. “As most of you will already know, there has been much recent controversy around a team of scientists working for Heywood Labs! After the news had leaked out, their spokesman and leader, David Ambrose, publically admitted that the group actually managed to create ‘Pokémorphs’, fetuses with spliced human and Pokémon DNA, which now appear to be growing normally. In particular, the controversy is about this statement…”

A television screen behind them showed a handsome Dave, standing on the steps in front of the lab with a crowd of photographers below him: “Look,” he said irritably, “we have absolutely no plans to actually raise those things. We just wanted to see if it was possible, and okay, it is. We’re just going to watch them grow for a week or two to see how they’re developing and then destroy them. There will be no ‘freak children’ or ‘Pokémorph minority’. It’s no big deal. End of discussion.”

The screen turned off and James the host immediately began reading from the cue screens again: “As it turned out, it was quite the opposite: this comment, at least to a large and loud portion of the world’s population, was a very big deal and began a heated discussion that we will see the pleasure of continuing tonight, live on this very show! Please welcome Hannah Mariani, spokesperson for the Stop Abortion Movement –” the woman nodded curtly towards the camera “– and Brian Edwards, one of the scientists involved.”

Brian quickly realized he wasn’t supposed to be staring wildly at the show host and jerked his head towards the camera, giving it a nervous smile.

“So, Brian, why don’t you start?”

“Me?” slipped out of him before he could stop himself. “Oh, well… you see…”

He tried desperately to remember what he had been planning to say, flicking his gaze at his calm-faced opponent. Oh, yes, now he remembered. He cleared his throat loudly.

“Look,” he said, failing miserably at removing the nervousness from his voice, “if these children – if they ever became children – what – I mean, would you really send a child like that to a public school? They’d get bullied for sure. These children would lead perfectly miserable lives – if they ever were to become children, that is, because they certainly aren’t now…”

“I assume, then,” Hannah said coolly, “that you are of the opinion that fat children with glasses ought to be systematically murdered because they’ll probably be bullied at school?”

She looked at him with stinging blue eyes and Brian realized with dread that she had done her research: although it was impossible to tell now, he had been overweight as a kid and of course he had worn glasses.

Damn it. Why did she look so creepily calm?

“It’s… it’s not the same,” he said quickly. “They can’t feel anything. They don’t ‘want’ to live. It’s…”

“They will,” Hannah just said.

“Well, since you seem so eager to speak,” James said brightly, “why don’t you tell us your position, Hannah?”

“As I see it,” she said simply, “the case is dead already. It is even more dead than the general debate for or against abortion. What do those in favor always say? ‘What about rape?’ ‘What about what the sexually liberal call “accidents”?’ ‘What about if the child turns out to be seriously disabled and the parents wouldn’t be able to handle it?’ We don’t even need to complicate the matter with those here. This is not rape. It’s not an accident. Nothing is ‘turning out’ to be anything it wasn’t obviously to begin with. These men –” she pointed an accusing finger at Brian “– perfectly deliberately created children with perfectly deliberate qualities that could cause them problems in the future. You, Mr. Edwards, need to realize that if they get bullied, it is your fault. You have no excuse whatsoever.”

Brian stared at her, dumbfounded. “Why are you always calling them children?” he muttered, only half-convinced, while trying to think of something else to say.

“Because that is what they are,” she said shortly.

Brian took a deep breath, thinking of what the others had been talking to him about. “Okay, look. If we didn’t destroy the fetuses, who would raise them?”

She gave him an odd look, raising an eyebrow. “You, of course,” she said. “They’re your children which you created by your own free will. I haven’t known anybody who deliberately decided to have a child and then expected someone else to raise it.”

He stared at her, the implications of this zooming through his head. “What? Us? But… what are you talking about, anyway?” he asked heatedly. “We didn’t deliberately create children. We deliberately created fetuses we intended to destroy. We weren’t planning to raise…”

“Well, you should have thought about that before creating them, shouldn’t you?” Hannah remarked coldly.

There was some great way to respond to this, he was sure, and Dave would have said it in the blink of an eye, but his mind was being too numb and panicky at the moment to think of anything.

“It… it seemed like a much better idea at the time,” he said stupidly. “We’d had a little to drink that night since it was Dave’s birthday – he always gets weird ideas when he’s drunk – and it was just so obvious, I mean, look at all those book series – and after getting the idea and figuring out how it was possible in the party, we just figured the next day, hey, why not…” What the hell was he saying?

Hannah gave him a disgusted frown and looked at the camera. “Drunk scientists who want to imitate bestseller book series in some sad attempt to get attention make genetic experiments with unborn human children, and now, to top it all, they’re going to be murdering them. Clearly this is only another example of the immorality of some of the men we call intellectuals today. We cannot let them do this.”

“But…”

“Well, our time is running out,” James interrupted as a member of the TV crew gestured to him. “We will have our next guests after some advertisements.”

-------

Damn it.

Damn it all.

Fucking hell.

Brian shivered as he started his car. In the rear-view mirror, he could see that he was pale and sweaty. And his glasses still looked so damn stupid. He had failed so miserably it wasn’t funny. The public against them once and for all in one fell swoop. Why the hell had he been mentioning that they’d been drunk?

Those thoughts kept cycling through his head on the long journey to his house.

His cellphone started vibrating in his pocket just as he was pulling into the driveway. He slapped his hand over his face momentarily in some abstract hope that it would just stop ringing. It didn’t.

He fished the phone out of his pocket, opened it and held it shakily to his ear. “Yes?”

“Well, now you’ve gone and done it.”

Brian sighed heavily. “I told you, Dave. I suck at this kind of thing. You really should’ve…”

“I had no idea you sucked that much! I persuaded Jane to agree to go home a little early from the restaurant so we could watch you on the one-hour belated channel – I felt embarrassed for even knowing you!” the voice on the other end of the phone shouted angrily. There was a sigh followed by silence. “You’ve really fucked us up, Brian.”

“I know,” Brian said miserably. “She was just making so much sense and being so calm that I just…”

“Making sense?” the phone shouted at him. “She was making exactly no sense at all! You didn’t even say half of the stuff we talked about! And for Christ’s sake – well, not his, specifically, but you know what I mean – babbling on about how I have weird ideas when I’m drunk? What the fuck?”

“I don’t know,” Brian replied desperately. “I just… maybe she was right. I mean, it seems kinda cruel to create them at all if… maybe we should raise them…”

“Right? Right?” Dave repeated. “Of course there’s not much at stake for you here, since you’re single, but those of us whose home has a breast to spare – do you really expect Joe to go home to his kids and tell them, ‘Hey, guys, you’re going to have a brother and he’s a freak!’? And me, personally, I like my private time with Jane. Kids would really ruin that, especially freak kids. Maybe they’ll even be peeing all over the place to mark their territory or something! There’s no way we can abort them after that went on air. There’s no way we’re getting any financial support now unless we raise those kids. You seriously fucked us up, man. Remind me never to make you represent us again.”

“I know,” Brian muttered, but Dave had already hung up on the other end of the line. He sighed and closed the cellphone, pushing it back into his pocket. He stayed in the car for a few more minutes, staring at the garage door between burying his face in his hands. He had really messed things up. The others would never forgive him, ever.

Not much to do about that now.

He exited the car and thought for a moment before turning his cellphone off. Then he went in, made himself some instant noodles and went to bed.

The next day, Heywood Labs issued a public statement to apologize for their previous plans and state that the scientists involved would in fact themselves raise the Pokémorph children to the best of their ability.
 
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Pink Parka Girl

I wish I could change my username
This will be a wee bit difficult for me to review, simply because there are things I really like about it and things that I really...well...don't. Basically, I have a love/hate relationship with the premise.

I think it would be interesting to read a 'morph fic from the perspective of the scientists, and I like that aspect of it a lot. However, I have extreme disbelief that they'd reveal their work to the public unless they were somehow forced to (an employee ratted on them, a sting operation revealed their workings, or so on) simply because human experimentation is so taboo and bound to be utterly illegal in Pokeverse just like it is here. (Perhaps its that drunkenness rearing its ugly head). Also, the Christian far right are the LAST people I can imagine being supportive of morphs, seeing them as equivlient to human children, and wanting to preserve their life. PETA or Amnesty International like groups would be believable adversaries, but a prolife abortion group? As "God fearin' believers," they'd be more likely to condemn the scientists for messing wtih God's glorious creation and ending the life of the "freakish less than human monsters," pro life or not.

However, at the same time, I also really like the idea of the curious scientists, who just wanting to fiddle around, are instead suddenly saddled with a bunch of morphs they don't actually want to keep and having to learn to deal with them. It paves the way for some high comedy, along with some good oppurnities for drama. (Although I honestly can't imagine morphs ever being allowed in any sort of school, public or not). Although the premise is...well.......high nigh unbelievable, I'll keep an eye on the fic, because I also look forward to what sort of hijinks could evolve from the sitiation.
 

The Great Butler

Hush, keep it down
Very interesting. This is definitely something I'll continue to read, as it's piqued my interest....
 

Dragonfree

Just me
It's not entirely from the scientists' perspective; in the future it will have more of an omniscient narrator and focus more on the morphs themselves, but right now the morphs are unborn so obviously the scientists are the only people it can focus on. They will continue to have a central role, however.

It is likely that news of the experiment more or less just slipped out (very likely when Dave was drunk and around the wrong people) which forced them to publically admit it; I didn't really feel the need to particularly think about or elaborate on that part, although perhaps I should have. At least they certainly never intended for it to get all that attention and controversy around it; they were after all just curious to see if this was possible and would have preferred to just see that and then consider their curiosity satisfied.

Pink Parka Girl said:
Also, the Christian far right are the LAST people I can imagine being supportive of morphs, seeing them as equivlient to human children, and wanting to preserve their life. PETA or Amnesty International like groups would be believable adversaries, but a prolife abortion group? As "God fearin' believers," they'd be more likely to condemn the scientists for messing wtih God's glorious creation and ending the life of the "freakish less than human monsters," pro life or not.
Ah, but the ones protesting against the abortion aren't really extremists. They just believe in the sacredness of life. The real extremists are lurking in the shadows thinking just what you were saying and will come in later. ;)

Pink Parka Girl said:
(Although I honestly can't imagine morphs ever being allowed in any sort of school, public or not).
Why not? Sure, the staff would find them creepy as hell, but I find it decidedly unlikely that a modern government would be able to dig up any justification for a Pokémorph not being allowed to go to school and have other basic human rights as long as it can speak and clearly displays itself to have human intelligence. People can be prejudiced; governments can only be that explicitly prejudiced if they have a logical excuse, which they wouldn't have.
 
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Pink Parka Girl

I wish I could change my username
Why not? Sure, the staff would find them creepy as hell, but I find it decidedly unlikely that a modern government would be able to dig up any justification for a Pokémorph not being allowed to go to school and have other basic human rights as long as it can speak and clearly displays itself to have human intelligence. People can be prejudiced; governments can only be that explicitly prejudiced if they have a logical excuse, which they wouldn't have.

The reason I'd have trouble suspending my disbelief on those grounds is because I tend to take the pessamistic view concerning how pokemorphs would be treated by society ^^; The truth is is that they aren't human, and their sudden introduction is something I can easily picture scientists and especially Big Business taking a keen interest in for explotation purposes. Slavery of human beings still exists in this modern era - morphs would be seen as a much more accepted by the general public means of achieving the same ends for these sorts of slimy folk, and I doubt they wouldn't at least TRY to get their interest across to the characters in the story, even if they don't succeed ^^; Secondly, I know you're not American, but in America at least, it took us forever to accept Black people - who are obviously human - into society. For pokemorphs, I can imagine their struggle for intergration would be even worse. At best, they might have a little school "just for them" set up in a sort of "seperate but equeal" establishment - I just can't imagine the world being liberal enough to see them as equeal to humans and fully deserving of intergration into society right off the bat ^^ Eventually, it could likely happen. But right off? I'm doubtful.
 

Dragonfree

Just me
The thing is that yes, it took a while for people to drop racism, but after they did, that's pretty much it. The battle for everybody who clearly displays ordinary human intelligence to be considered human and equal has already been fought - it doesn't need to be refought for every new minority that comes into existence. That's just not the way it works. Of course individuals are still going to be prejudiced and biased - but there is quite simply no way that a government in a developed country could today prevent an individual capable of human speech and intelligent thought from going to school.

Look at homosexuals. They're discriminated against and met with a great deal of prejudice from a large group of people, and of course their battle for acceptance is far from over - but there is no way a public school could get away with expelling people on the grounds that they're gay. While society is always prejudiced, it's never that blatant about it.

Of course there would be groups that didn't want Pokémorphs in their schools, and probably protests and such, but those would be the extremists we talked about before and would certainly not get to decide the law.
 
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Sike Saner

Peace to the Mountain
Well, this has grabbed my interest for sure.

I thought the debate scene was pulled off quite well--damn, watching Brian's performance was like watching something go down in flames. o_o; Boy, did I cringe when he let the "booze was involved" detail slip. XD Well, nerves'll do that to a guy, I suppose. And this:

“I assume, then,” Hannah said coolly, “that you are of the opinion that fat children with glasses ought to be systematically murdered because they’ll probably be bullied at school?”

She looked at him with stinging blue eyes and Brian realized with dread that she had done her research: although it was impossible to tell now, he had been overweight as a kid and of course he had worn glasses.

Not as big an "ouch" moment as letting the drink-factor slip, but still, yeah. I definitely got this great, vicarious "oh frell am I ever screwed" feeling there, and through much of the scene. I felt like I was the one getting my *** handed to me by Hannah. XD


This has already proven to be a great, thought-provoking piece, and furthermore it should be interesting to see how the scientists deal with raising the Pokémorph children, and what society might have in store for the kids, as well. I'll certainly be back for more. ^^
 

vareki

Psycotic with RAGE
well i have a few questions

1. how many pokemorphs are being studied
2. will the pokemorphs look human but be able to turn into pokemon and if so what will they turn into

p.s.dragonfree thanks for telling about this in the quest for legends
 

Dragonfree

Just me
I've yet to finalize the full plans for the morphs; I've decided on a few, but right now I'm not sure how many they'll become or exactly which Pokémon they'll be spliced with. It will be fully decided by the time I post chapter two, of course.

The Pokémorphs are just humans with some Pokémon features. For example, to pick random Pokémon from the trainer cards in your sig, if there were an Eevee morph, it would be likely to be brown-haired, with perhaps some traces of brown fur, have Eevee-like ears, big eyes, small fangs and an Eevee tail. If there were a Snorlax morph, it would maybe have white-yellowish skin/fur, Brock-like eyes, fangs in its lower jaw, triangular ears, black hair, and a monstrous appetite with a tendency to get overweight. An Aipom morph might have purple hair, a tail with a hand on it, Aipom ears, big and rounded eyes, a creepy smile when it smiles, and be very acrobatic. You get the idea. Basically their body is shaped like a human but some body parts resemble the Pokémon they're morphed with and they have some tendency to think and behave like that Pokémon, as well as some of their powers.
 

Dragonfree

Just me
All right, chapter two already. I was planning to actually introduce the morphs themselves years later in the second chapter, but then I realized that I kind of needed this chapter in between.



Chapter 2

“All right, guys and gals… I hope you all have at least some idea of what’s going on here, but for the sake of any spouses who haven’t been paying attention, I’ll still go into the nitty-gritty details.”

Dave looked over the table. He was sitting by the short side with his (beautiful as always) girlfriend Jane on his right side. The other nine were seated by the long sides, looking at him. He pressed a few keys on the laptop in front of him and turned the ceiling projector on by pressing a button on the remote.

“Well, as you almost definitely know, we decided a couple of months ago to attempt to create ‘Pokémorphs’, which means, in the unlikely case you haven’t read all that pseudoscientific crap like ‘The Life of a Morph’ or the ‘Sarah Hooter’ series, a human being spliced with a Pokémon to create… well, something like this.”

He pressed a key on his laptop. On the smooth, white wall behind him appeared the cover illustration of ‘Sarah Hooter and the Rocket Experiment’: a sexy teenage girl with Vulpix ears, a tuft of red hair that organized itself into unnaturally orderly curls on the top of her head, and six curly, reddish-brown tails fanning out behind her as she struck a pose. A couple of people snickered.

“Ridiculous, isn’t it? Well, it’s possible. We proved that here at Heywood Labs – of course the whole thing with Team Rocket suddenly turning an ordinary girl into half a Vulpix is bullshit and the real method is a lot different, but the end result is the same. We even specifically created a Vulpix morph who is likely to look very similar to Sarah Hooter here when she grows up. Of course,” he added with emphasis, “we never intended for her ever to grow up. She’ll be made fun of like all hell at school. But outside pressure and… some inside goofs have forced us to raise the Pokémorphs, and that’s why we’re here. We are all responsible, and thus we need to fairly distribute the morphs between us for rearing. Any questions?”

Apparently not.

“Good. Well, in the past weeks we have observed that the fetuses, which are currently growing in an artificial uterus in the lab, are developing at slightly different speeds, usually a little abnormal for humans. This was to be expected, as Pokémon grow a lot faster than humans, but it is different for each one how much influence the Pokémon is having and of course exactly how fast the Pokémon grows. We have also seen how they appear to be turning out and compared it with what we were going for when we created that morph to give the best idea possible of what you’ll be getting yourselves into if you adopt each one. Any questions now?”

“Actually, yes.”

It was Cheryl Jones, a woman in her thirties that Howard, a research assistant for Heywood Labs, had been seeing recently. She had also, according to Howard, always been passionately interested in the Pokémorph project. She was one of those intelligent blondes who wore glasses, liked to protest and did volunteer jobs.

“If the Pokémorphs are developing at abnormal speeds now, does that necessarily mean they keep developing like that after they’re born?”

“We’ve been able to calculate fairly well how fast they’ll age after birth and that’s what we’ll be telling you,” Dave replied. “We compare how fast the fetus is growing with the normal fetus growth speed of humans and that Pokémon, and then assume their Pokémon half will influence their later growth to about the same extent. It may not be entirely accurate, but it should be accurate enough.”

Cheryl nodded and Dave scanned the room for any signs that somebody else had a question.

“Okay, let’s just get right to it, then,” he sighed and pressed a key on his laptop to go to the next slide; Sarah Hooter disappeared from the wall and was replaced by information about the first morph to be discussed.

“First up, Meowth morph. Male. It is presumed that he’ll be around twelve years old physically at ten human years of age. We’re not sure exactly how much we influenced any instincts or what, but be warned that at worst he’ll be marking his territory around the house by the time he’s a teenager and you’ll be morally restricted from getting him neutered.”

A few of them laughed.

“I meant that,” Dave said. “His appearance should be mostly human; it’s mainly the head. He’ll probably have fangs, and we’re beginning to see the development of Meowth ears and tail… and although it hasn’t started appearing yet in the fetus, he’ll almost definitely have whiskers and a gold charm on his forehead like we planned. I won’t guarantee he’s not going to be any cattier than that, though, since sometimes it’s a bit shady how those genes end up influencing one another. Any volunteers to take him?”

There was silence as the researchers looked nervously at one another. He saw Joe McKenzie’s wife Pamela, a plump woman with curly brown hair, whisper something in his ear and he whispered something back. They waited for a few moments.

“Okay, we’ll take him,” Joe said finally.

“Great,” Dave said, writing it down. “It’s probably a good thing, since you’ve raised two kids already. If anybody can toilet train him, it’s you.”

Another round of nervous laughter. Joe nervously wiped his glasses with his sleeve and put them back on.

“Right,” Dave sighed. “Now… that lovely Sarah Hooter-clone I mentioned. Damn, I must have been on crack when I thought of that.”

Nobody said anything.

“Oh, yeah, forgot the details. Well, it’s a female Vulpix morph, obviously, and basically she’ll look almost exactly like that Sarah Hooter picture I showed you,” he put that slide back up, “except I can’t guarantee she’ll look that hot. And I don’t know if her hair will really curl like that. Like the Meowth, she’ll be around twelve physically in ten years.”

Jane leant in at him. “Maybe we should take her, honey.”

He turned around. “Why?”

She shrugged, and Dave was momentarily captivated by the smooth movement of her wavy, red hair. “I always liked those books as a kid, and at least she’s mixed with a cute Pokémon. We’ll have to take one, won’t we? At least it’s better than some of the others you’ve been telling me about.”

“Whatever you say, sweetheart,” Dave replied and kissed her before writing that down. Man, he’d do anything for that woman, even if she read stuff like Sarah Hooter.

“Two down, six to go,” he said. “Okay, this is one of the really fast-growing ones. Scyther morph, female. Likely to be physically around sixteen in ten years. Don’t worry; she won’t be a cripple with no hands who murders people every time she waves her arms. Her hands are already beginning to develop, but sometime after birth, the bone in her forearms will grow out of her skin in a sharp blade going from her wrist to her elbow which then transforms to be metallic if how the process works in actual Scyther is any indication. We don’t know how far out it will go exactly, but I think it’s safe to say you shouldn’t hug her too much. She may have fangs and will almost certainly have wings, although she’d be way too heavy to actually fly on them. Her legs also look very weird right now, although I don’t know what will become of them later, since this wasn’t really planned. Any takers?”

“Let’s take her, Howard,” Cheryl said almost immediately. “I’ve always liked Scyther.”

The slightly chubby, dark-haired man beside her winced. “Eh… are you sure we…”

“Oh, come on,” she said and smiled. “We’ll be fine.”

“Anybody want to argue with that? No? Good. Then she’s yours.”

Howard still looked a little skeptical, but shrugged. “Well, nobody will be able to say I had an uninteresting life.”

“Next up, Taillow morph,” Dave said. “It’s a male. Growing just a little faster than a human, might end up maybe one year ahead for every ten human years…”

“One other question,” Cheryl interrupted. “Kids grow up at different speeds, start puberty at different ages and stuff like that, so…”

“This is just an approximation,” Dave answered in the middle of her sentence. “The odds little Taillow guy here will have started puberty at ten will be the same as the odds of a normal boy having started puberty at eleven. That’s all it means. Can I continue now?”

She nodded.

“Great. Well, I think this is the most human morph of them all. It’s pretty much just that he might grow feathers instead of hair in some places, and he’ll have a pair of wings too small to carry him, unless we missed something. We realized when we were making them that it would be too difficult to give him a beak as we were first planning. Of course I can’t say anything about behavioral effects.”

Daniel, a blond-haired man with glasses who Dave knew was the husband of lab researcher Martha Harrison, suddenly raised his hand. “Wait. Are they going to be like… able to use Pokémon attacks?”

Dave sighed. “Maybe. If at all, then only to a very limited extent. I think I could make out a fire sac beginning to form in the Vulpix, so I’m getting my hopes up that she’ll at least be able to use Ember and stuff like that. For the others, I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. Of course some things are just a given – everybody can tackle.”

“What about the Pokémon language? Will they speak it?”

“No idea. Can I continue?”

Daniel sighed disappointedly and nodded.

“Where was I…” Dave muttered, going over the points on the slide that was up. “Right. Yeah, he’s the most human of the bunch, but I can’t promise you he won’t demand a bowl of earthworms for breakfast every morning or something. Who wants him?”

Daniel shrugged, twisting a lock of his wife’s curly black hair between his fingers. “Didn’t you say you were mostly handling that one, Martha? Maybe we can take the kid…”

“Sure,” she replied and smiled. “Unless somebody else wants him…?”

Most people just shrugged. Nobody protested, even though Dave could tell some of them would have wanted that boy. He had been kind of hoping for him himself, but if Jane wanted the Vulpix, that was it.

“All right, then,” Dave said and wrote that down before switching slides. “So… Chinchou morph. Male. He’ll be physically around thirteen after ten human years. The most noteworthy unhuman thing about him is that he’s blue, and he’s got those anglerfish antennae starting to develop too. His hands and feet are a little odd and may end up kind of halfway between fins and digits or something, I don’t know. As in webbed with weak fingers. Otherwise he’s pretty humanlike – he hasn’t got Chinchou eyes or anything. Volunteers?”

“We’ll take him,” Bill Ray said. He had shoulder-length black hair and was sitting at the far end of the table with his red-haired fiancée Sharon. From the sound of it they had decided on the Chinchou together before they had come there. At twenty-five, Bill was the youngest person working in the lab, two years younger than Dave himself. Dave had always liked the guy, but couldn’t help being a little surprised that he’d picked the Chinchou of all things. He’d thought Bill would be more of a Scyther person.

“Well, okay,” Dave just said and wrote that down. “Now… after this there’s a Pokémorph assigned to every home except Brian’s, correct? Well, he can’t breastfeed, so now some of you – us, I mean – will have to take another one. Only do it if you think you can handle two freak kids in your home in addition to whatever you might have already, okay?”

Nobody spoke.

“All right. Only three morphs left. Next,” he pressed a key on his laptop to go to the next slide, “the only one who’s actually growing slower than an ordinary human. Only take her if you really like young children, because she’s going to be one for a while. Misdreavus morph, female, will probably grow at only about 80% the speed of a normal human after birth. She’s unnaturally pitch-black – as in much blacker than an ordinary black person – but otherwise the fetus looks, well, entirely human at this stage, aside from growing slowly. She is going to have creepy hair and eyes when she grows up and will probably do some ghostly ****, though.” He looked between the couples around the table. Cheryl looked excitedly at Howard.

“Well, we already took the Scyther,” he said and sighed. “Won’t get a lot more messed-up than that. We’ll take her.”

Cheryl leant in and kissed him. Howard seemed thoroughly puzzled at himself, but didn’t say anything to indicate a change of mind, so Dave shrugged and wrote it down.

“Okay, great. Two left, and then we can all go home.” He switched slides. “Roselia morph. Female. She’s the fastest-growing of the bunch; she’ll be physically around seventeen when she’s ten. She is a little problematic, because we actually got stupid enough to give her roses instead of hands.”

“Oh, dear,” he heard Daniel Harrison mutter.

“Then she seems to grow faster in sunlight. That’s pretty much it about her, although she may turn out to have some other Roselia or generally flowery traits in the end. She does grow rather ridiculously fast, though. Don’t know what they’ll do with her at school, although that applies to the Scyther as well. Who’s up for it?”

“Let’s take her, Daniel,” Martha said to her husband. “I had a big part in making her, too. The Taillow boy probably won’t be too hard to deal with.”

“But we do have Sarah…” Daniel muttered. Sarah was their baby daughter.

“The Roselia girl is going to grow fast. She’ll be an adult in no time at all. We’re both parents and breeders, so we’re the best-equipped here. Dave and Jane and Bill and Sharon are so young and have never raised kids before. They shouldn’t need to have two Pokémorphs to worry about. And the McKenzies have two kids to deal with in addition to their morph.”

Her husband finally agreed to it, and then that was settled. Dave breathed in relief to himself; he had been worrying that he and Jane would have to take another one.

“Well,” he said. “The last one. The Slugma boy. The bad part is that he’s pretty much a total failure; it’s lucky – or unlucky, depending on how you look at it – that he’s survived at all to this point. For one thing, his skin is looking to be liquid – as in some kind of thick ooze. This ooze appears to slowly harden at room temperature, which would make him immobile unless his skin is rubbed or heated or something. In addition to that, his blood is far too hot, so he’s really just begging for some sort of organ failure at some point. The organs do seem to be developing some resistance to it, and we’ll have to hope that’s enough. Oh, and we had to take him out of the artificial uterus and put him in a heated glass cage. Somehow he’s already self-sustaining, although if something attacked him at this stage he’d obviously be completely helpless. We don’t even know if we should consider him already born or what, and we have no idea how his physical age is going to change. Basically we’ve got some sort of a human blob and we have no idea what is going to happen to it next.”

The spouses stared at him in horror.

“Yeah, his life is going to suck,” he agreed. “If for any reason you are ever going to try to mix a human being with a blob of lava in the future, don’t. But regardless, we can’t kill him, so somebody needs to take care of him if he survives.”

Nobody volunteered. Dave took a deep breath. He hadn’t expected anybody to.

“I think Brian should take him.”

The man to his left stared at him. “What? Me? But…”

“This is the only one that’s not actually a mammal and won’t need to be breastfed,” Dave said, sighing. “Look, Brian, you were the one who messed up the talk show. It would be very unfair if you could avoid raising one of the stupid things just because you’re single. No easily accessible breast milk? This one doesn’t need any. From what I’ve heard about Slugma, they eat nothing but rocks throughout their lives. Feeding him sand has worked for a couple of months, so that appears to be it. You can raise him.”

Brian looked wildly around for some supporters, but found only the others’ looks of pity. Of course they wouldn’t switch with him if they were paid for it.

“Fine,” he sighed hopelessly and sank back in his chair.

“All settled, then,” Dave said, closing his laptop and turning the projector off. He had assigned the Slugma kid to Brian before they had even sat down at the meeting.

“Vulpix morph,” he muttered to himself. “This will be interesting.”
 
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Yashe

Silverwing
I can already tell that this is going to be interesting. I've actually been intrigued with the idea of pokemorphs for a while now, but I have such a hard time describing them with words...

All that to say, looks good, keep it up, and can't wait for the next chapter.

Oh yeah, and sucks to be Brian right now. Sloppy Kid sandwich anybody?
 

Psychic

Really and truly
XD Wow, this is certainly interesting. I have yet to see a Morph story done like this, and it's both fascinating and quite realistic, which is usually quite rare for a Morph fic and which might have to do with why I feel so hooked on it. I'd been meaning to read this for awhile and was actually just starting reading it the day before you posted the second chapter. ^^;

Anyhow, I really like the entire idea of this- how the Pokémorphs were just the result of drunk ramblings and messing around and were meant to be aborted. Ah, but those gosh-darned Pro-Life people argue and consequently mess up not only five relationships but also bring eight poor souls into the world. Oh my, and they're forced to live normal lives and not fight teh ebul 0rganissatione!

And I'm so happy to see them all done so realistically. Though while making hands into full-out roses seems somewhat ridiculous, the rest of it really evens it all out and I like the way you blended human with Pokémon: a lot more evenly than most people. And it doesn't look like they'll be able to do all the superhero things most Pokémorphs do, and if they do it'll be a lot more in moderation. I REALLY look forward to seeing how they all turn out to be as they grow. XD

Characters I LOVE so far. The humans are just a bunch of scientists who were simply playing around but therefore got themselves into this nice big mess, often dragging their fiancés into the problem. They're all your average Joes and Josephines who have no clue what they're doing, not to mention the bumbling Brian who is just...great, in every way a character can be.
And it looks like the Pokémorphs will shape up to be pretty darn interesting themselves: among them, the ones I'll pay the most attention to will be the Vulpix, Slugma, Misdreavus and, you guessed it, Scyther. But since the Vulpis has somewhat of a "name" to live up to...gosh, you're gonna have a LOT of fun with that one. XD Oh, and interesting choices in Pokémon.

On the note of interesting:
She was one of those intelligent blondes who wore glasses, liked to protest and did volunteer jobs.
o.o Wow, there's actually such thing as a smart blonde! :O
Kidding, kidding: I'm also the stereotypical blondie with blue eyes and pale skin, and I do have glasses...though I despise wearing them. XD

And I don't suppose that this character and the Morphs she took in would be some kind of hint at...anything in particular, oh Dragon-of-Freeness?


Anyhow, the style itself is really great, and the language used just lacks the seriousness that most Pokémorph fics have, even while it actually is somewhat serious. But it's humorous to read just because it's more as if the scientists, these mortal people who AREN'T cold and cruel, were the ones narrating (whether or not that was your goal...)
Grammar was...strangely not as good as usual. In general it was just kinda iffy, with a few random mistakes sprinkled here and there. I wish I could remember more than two. >< But otherwise it was good, though I just feel like you were...tired while you were writing. o_O

The next day, Heywood Labs issued a public statement to apologize for their previous plans and state that the scientists involved would in fact themselves raise the Pokémorph children to the best of their ability.
Shouldn't it be "and stated"?

“I was largely in making her, too. The Taillow boy probably won’t be too hard to deal with.”
It ought to be ANYTHING other than "I was largely in making her" because that just...doesn't make sense. o_O



Oh, and great idea to have those Pokémorph books. What really took the cake for me:
Drunk scientists who want to imitate bestseller book series in some sad attempt to get attention make genetic experiments with unborn human children, and now, to top it all, they’re going to be murdering them. Clearly this is only another example of the godlessness of some of the men we call intellectuals today. We cannot let them do this.”
I loved that whole "how mature are the people imitating fantasy books?" idea, and wow, I can't get over how badly Brian got BURNED. Not every day on SPPf you see something like that happen to a (currently) main character, and then face even MORE crummy consequences. XD





Ah, I shall most certainly keep watching this, as I am VERY eager to see what happens in the future. I'm certainly hooked, and I can't believe it's not getting more recognition!

~Psychic
 

Dragonfree

Just me
Psychic said:
Though while making hands into full-out roses seems somewhat ridiculous
Actually, they turn out to not actually be full-out roses but really, really messed-up hands. :p

Psychic said:
I REALLY look forward to seeing how they all turn out to be as they grow. XD
Well, I'm jumping ten years into the future in the next chapter, so you won't have to wait long.

Psychic said:
But since the Vulpis has somewhat of a "name" to live up to...gosh, you're gonna have a LOT of fun with that one. XD
Heh, she was the first morph I decided on, and in fact I decided on it before I started actually writing the fic. I will have fun with her.

Psychic said:
And I don't suppose that this character and the Morphs she took in would be some kind of hint at...anything in particular, oh Dragon-of-Freeness?
Heehee, somebody noticed. :p Yes, she is a warped self-cameo. Likes the same Pokémon as I do and looks somewhat like me. Don't worry, she's not going to come and omgsavetheday!1. She's just there for kicks. Well, aside from the obvious role of being one of the moms.

Psychic said:
But it's humorous to read just because it's more as if the scientists, these mortal people who AREN'T cold and cruel, were the ones narrating (whether or not that was your goal...)
The narration in chapter one is obviously Brian's point of view, and in the second one it's loosely Dave's although that chapter doesn't have quite as much of what is happening inside his head. I plan to do something in this direction throughout the fic, with the point of view shifting between characters in each one. It is likely that some chapters will require the narrator to be omniscient, however. As it's all third-person, I don't think such a switch between limited and omniscient will be too awkward.

Psychic said:
Grammar was...strangely not as good as usual. In general it was just kinda iffy, with a few random mistakes sprinkled here and there. I wish I could remember more than two. >< But otherwise it was good, though I just feel like you were...tired while you were writing. o_O
Well, chapter two was all written today (that chapter isn't very complicated when you've already got all the characters written down), which means it doesn't have quite as much proofreading as when I write for example The Quest for the Legends (where writing the chapter takes me months and I keep rereading what I've already written and fixing up stuff I didn't notice too soon after I'd written it). Chapter one was written fairly quickly, too (I think it was over the course of two days, more or less). That may be the reason.

Psychic said:
Shouldn't it be "and stated"?
Actually, no. What I was going for was "...issued a public statement to apologize for their previous plans and [to] state that the scientists..." It's the infinitive, not the past tense.

The other one, though, man, that is oddly-worded. o_O; Maybe I was the one on crack.

Psychic said:
I can't get over how badly Brian got BURNED. Not every day on SPPf you see something like that happen to a (currently) main character, and then face even MORE crummy consequences. XD
Heh, poor Brian. Unfortunately for him, I'm not through with him yet. He's a very unlucky guy.
 

Sike Saner

Peace to the Mountain
Even in their fetal stage, those morphs are already very cool (or perhaps more accurately, the way they are projected to turn out as they develop, as described by Dave). I particularly like the Chinchou morph (blueness = awesome ^^), the Misdreavus morph (I do so like Ghost-types…), and perhaps most of all, the Slugma morph—I’ve never even remotelybeen able to imagine how that species would be like in morph form, and here you’ve come up with a very interesting answer to that.

I also have to say that that chapter also provided a very good introduction for quite a few characters, establishing them nicely to start.

One last order of business: There’s just something about this quote that I love the hell out of:

If for any reason you are ever going to try to mix a human being with a blob of lava in the future, don’t.
 

vareki

Psycotic with RAGE
wait a minute are these morphs going to evolve!

i picked this up when i realised that all of the pokemorphs where spliced with basic pokemon all of them with evolved forms. that would be a good twist if that is what you where planning

as well as some of their powers.
 

Dragonfree

Just me
Everybody seems to be asking that question...

...and nobody figures that maybe you're not supposed to know yet.
 

Dragonfree

Just me
Readers of The Quest for the Legends probably feel like murdering me right now for churning out chapters of this instead of writing chapter 35 of that, but hey, I can't control inspiration...

There are parts I like and don't like about this chapter, but the ones I like I really like. I ended up not skipping ten years into the future right away after all (but that will happen in chapter four). As always, I'd appreciate any input on possible edits, etc.


Chapter 3

“I can’t stand this, Dave!” Jane said desperately. Her smooth face was tearstruck and her beautiful blue eyes were red and puffy. “I hate that freak!”

“Please, Jane, be reasonable…” Dave began in the most soothing voice he could manage, but was cut off.

“Reasonable! It’s all you think about, isn’t it?” She sniffed. “Your precious science and career! Keeping a journal of every little thing that little ***** does! You write happily about how she’s teething, and meanwhile I’m getting hormone injections every day and her fangs are digging into my nipples, just because you still insist on her being fed ‘naturally’ for your stupid research! Everything was so much better before the freak came along and we could spend our time together without the stupid howls waking us up at night!”

“I’d do anything for you, Jane!” Dave pleaded, trying to approach her. “Just please, don’t drop her…”

“You’re too caught up in your job now to do anything for me!” she screamed, still waving the Pokémorph baby threateningly over the balcony handrail. The Vulpix morph screamed as loudly as she could. “We haven’t even had the time to sit down and give her a proper name…”

Jane started crying again. Dave hated situations like this. He’d never been able to handle them properly.

“Please, Jane, I love you,” he muttered, taking a few steps nearer to her. “Why can’t her name just be Jane too as I’ve been saying?”

“I’m not sure I love you anymore,” she said quietly and continued to sob. He felt his heart sting.

“Don’t say that,” he said, laying a hand on her shoulder and moving her other hand that threatened to drop the Pokémorph safely within the balcony. “We’ll sit down together and talk. Everything will be better…”

“No, it won’t,” she sobbed. “You said that last time, too, and it just stayed the same.”

“No, it didn’t, until you started complaining about nothing again! Why do you keep having these ridiculous hysteria fits about everything?” slipped out of Dave in frustration. He regretted it immediately; Jane pushed his hand off her shoulder and turned away.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean that…”

Jane threw the baby into his hands and stormed back into the apartment.

“Wait, Jane!” Dave called desperately, running in after her with the morph squirming in his hands. “I really didn’t mean it! I haven’t slept for days! I was just…”

“Goodbye, Dave,” she called over her shoulder.

“No, please, don’t leave…”

The door slammed. Dave stared at it.

He bit his lip and blinked a few times to clear his eyes out. “****,” he muttered.

The baby still howled. Momentarily, he felt that maybe Jane had had the right idea and felt an urge to throw it at the wall or out of the window as hard as he could, but had the sense to stop himself. He tried for a couple of seconds to keep it in and then gave up.

“****!” he screamed at the clothing rack. Then at the bawling Vulpix morph in his hands, “I hope you’re happy, you little freak!”

She continued to howl for food. He looked at her for a few seconds and didn’t have the energy to be angry anymore. He quickly splashed some infant formula milk from the refrigerator into a baby bottle and fed her absent-mindedly; after a moment he opened the refrigerator again and got out a few cans of beer that he put onto the table before closing the fridge with his foot.

He suddenly realized that the little Vulpix girl was already asleep. Everything seemed so unreal that he hadn’t noticed.

“****,” he muttered again, carried her into the bedroom and put her down on the bed before taking out his cellphone and entering Jane’s number. He slumped down on one of the couches in the living room, still staring at the number on the screen.

“Later,” he muttered to himself. “When she’s gotten over it.” Then he added, as if to reassure himself, “She always does.”

Admittedly she had never before gone quite as far as to walk out of the apartment on him. She had locked herself in the bathroom and refused to come out, and she had verbally told him she was going to leave, but she had never actually left.

“She always gets over it,” he repeated, retrieved a can of beer from the kitchen table and opened it. “She loves me…”

And he took a good, long sip.

-------

He awoke to the muffled crying of the morph from the bedroom and found himself lying in an awkward position on the couch with a couple of empty cans on the table. He could only really remember one of them. He’d been too sleep-deprived to notice exactly how much he was drinking.

Dave groaned and stood up, rubbing his eyes. He checked his watch; it was one in the morning. He walked sleepily towards the bedroom and pushed the half-open door ajar. The Vulpix morph was flailing her arms and legs and screaming at the top of her lungs.

“What is it you want this time?” he said disdainfully. “Need your diaper changed? More food, you greedy little *****? Or are you just screaming for your mommy because your daddy isn’t good enough for you?”

He left the room, got his cellphone out and dialed Jane’s number again.

“Hello?” he heard her voice.

“Jane?”

There was a long sigh on the other end of the line.

“Look, Jane, I’m sorry,” Dave said. “I slept a little… please tell me you’re coming back.”

“Not while the freak is there,” he heard her say.

“I can ask one of the others to take her.”

There was a long silence.

“I don’t love you anymore, Dave,” she said softly. He gripped the phone tighter, squeezing it like he could make it tell him Jane was saying something else. “You get so stupid when you drink…”

“I’ll stop drinking,” he said immediately.

“…and you seem to be married to your job…”

“I’ll quit my job.”

“…like on our anniversary, when you begged like a child to get to watch that horrible debate…”

“I’ll never watch TV again.”

“…and those few times we do get to be alone together, all you think about is sex.”

“I’ll…”

He stopped. No, he wouldn’t.

“Look, Jane,” he said instead, “maybe there are some things where you’re the one who needs to come towards my needs…”

She sighed again on the other end. “Goodbye, Dave. Don’t call me.”

And she hung up.

The *****.

He closed the cellphone and threw it at the couch. “****ing *****!” he shouted at the phone.

He hurried over to the refrigerator and opened it, but didn’t find any alcohol. He closed it again and wasn’t sure what he’d do. Finally he went into the bedroom to the still-crying Pokémorph baby and collapsed onto the bed next to her.

“Jane…” he moaned. He was silent for a long while, listening obliviously to the cries of the little Vulpix girl.

“It’s just you and me now, isn’t it, little Jane?” he muttered, turning to the child. “Jane…”

He winced. “No, I really can’t call you Jane. Not quite that, anyway. Too much painful association.”

Dave looked at his adoptive daughter. Her tiny fangs were visible in her open mouth and whitish hair was already growing on her head and organizing itself into unnatural curls. He sat up and stroked her face carefully, scratching behind her triangular ear; her mouth latched on to his finger and instinctively started to suck on it. He smiled briefly and stroked her one soft, white tail that would one day split into six and gain color.

“How about something more like… Jean?”

The baby was quiet, still sucking on his finger in an attempt to get milk out of it. He decided to take that as a yes.

“God, I’m unoriginal when I’m halfway sober,” he muttered to himself as he went into the kitchen to make some more formula milk.

-------

“Hello?” Dave grumpily answered the telephone. “I’m kind of going out the door, if you don’t mind…”

“You’re the guardian of Jean Ambrose, the Vulpix Pokémorph, correct?” said the voice on the phone.

“Uh, yes…?”

“Good afternoon. I’m from Rayquaza Studios, and we have just bought the rights to filming the Sarah Hooter books. We would be ready to pay very handsomely if you would agree to signing a contract for your daughter to be in the main role – in a few years when the script is ready and everything, of course…”

Dave chuckled. “Isn’t this a little early to start making contracts? Or did your Xatu foresee that she’ll be a great actress when she’s a teenager?”

“Publicity, you know,” the person on the other end said. “Putting some girl in a costume is both more of a bother and much less intriguing for the fans, you know. Nobody expects kid actors to actually be any good. What matters is that the kids will love to know that Sarah Hooter in the movie is actually real! They’ll be able to go meet her! Of course, there is always the problem of how to do the scenes before she’s transformed – we’d either need an actress who looks a lot like her or to digitally remove her Vulpix features…”

“Look, I’m busy, and I really think you should speak with her about this sometime when she’s ready, okay?” Dave sighed and hung up. “Stupid media. Who in their right mind would want to film that crap?”

“Daddy?” asked Jean. “Are we going yet?”

“Yes, sweetheart,” he replied and took her tiny hand.

-------

“I’m here to see Mr. Rogers.”

The lady behind the desk took one glance at Jean, who was standing on tiptoe, peeking up past the edge and looking at her with big, round, chestnut-brown eyes.

“Go right in, Mr. Ambrose. He’s been expecting you.”

“Come on, Jean.”

He led her to a door on the left, adorned with large black letters.

“P-R-I-N-C-I-P-A-L,” Jean spelled as Dave hesitantly turned the doorknob.

“That’s right, sweetie,” he said as he opened the door, ruffling the curls of her now-red hair. “You’re so smart.”

She beamed up at him as they walked into the office. A balding, elderly man was writing something by a desk straight ahead; the wall behind it was covered completely in intimidating bookshelves. Jean looked curiously around the room, perking her ears.

The man looked up. “Sit down, Mr. Ambrose.”

Dave sat down on one of the small chairs in front of the desk and motioned to Jean to take the other.

“So,” the principal said. “Your daughter. You applied for schooling for her, correct?”

Dave just nodded, watching the man carefully. “A problem with the paperwork?”

“No, no,” Mr. Rogers said, waving his hand casually. “But…” He looked at Jean’s curious face and then back at Dave. “You must understand that your daughter is quite unusual.”

“Oh, I get it,” Dave said coldly. “You don’t want her in your school, do you?”

The principal peered at him through electric blue eyes. “My personal opinion is hardly a matter worth discussing, Mr. Ambrose,” he replied, “as this is a public school.”

“Then what is the problem? Trying to find some other excuse not to take her?”

“How old did you say she was again?” Mr. Rogers asked, ignoring Dave’s comment.

“Five,” Dave replied, “but her development happens a little faster than that of an ordinary human being, so she is capable of all the mental tasks of a six-year-old. I’ve taught her the alphabet, too, and plan to have her able to read fluently by the time she starts school.”

“I see,” the principal replied ambiguously, collecting some papers from his desk into a stack and placing it aside. “Well, the law for public schools says that potential students are only to be denied admission or expelled from the school if they seem to be repeated troublemakers or of insufficient intellect to keep up with others in their grade…”

“Get to the point.”

“Well,” Mr. Rogers said, not without a hint of annoyance, “does she… light things on fire, intentionally or unintentionally? Does she bite people? Does she use the toilet as one would expect of other students?”

Dave looked at him for a second and then laughed. “You know, I know exactly what you’re thinking. It’s what I was thinking before I got to know those kids. Now that I do know them, I can testify that they’re more pleasant company than half of the morons you let into your school just because they happen to be fully human. And for the record, she may learn Fire attacks in the future, but doesn’t know any yet, and if she did, she wouldn’t use them.”

The principal cleared his throat. “Mr. Ambrose, I do hope you can understand why we don’t allow children to bring weapons to school.”

“Well, yeah, but the fact the morphs can’t remove their ‘weapons’ is a very crucial point,” Dave argued. “Both the obvious fact that either they’re going to school with them or not at all, and that the reason you have something to worry about when a normal child brings a weapon to school is that they wouldn’t be bringing a weapon if they didn’t intend to use it. I mean, true, the morphs would be easily able to smuggle a ‘weapon’ in if they felt like doing somebody harm, but how often does a well-raised kid really feel that way? Feel free to expel them if they try to use them, but my daughter has a right to professional education as long as she isn’t hurting anyone.”

Mr. Rogers did not look convinced. “Anything that is that easily able to attack the other children should not be in a public school.”

“I told you, she can’t use fire yet. You can reconsider when she learns it if you absolutely have to, sure, but according to our calculations that is not likely to be until she’s a teenager from the way her fire sac is maturing…”

The principal sighed. “Fine, but what about biting? Or any other… what to call it, ‘Pokémonlike’ behavior?”

“She’ll bite under exactly the circumstances an ordinary kid would bite and no more often than that,” Dave replied irritably. “She behaves like a human in all but very insignificant ways. I mean, she snarls and bares her fangs when she’s provoked sometimes, but I’d laugh if you tried to use that as an excuse not to accept her into your school.”

“I’m bored,” Jean whispered from Dave’s side, looking up from the paperclips she’d been playing with. “When can we go?”

“Not yet, honey,” he replied, his voice dripping with subtle sarcasm. “The nice man doesn’t want you to go to school, see.”

She looked up at him with an innocent expression of puzzlement. “Why not?”

“I don’t know, sweetheart. Why don’t you try asking him?”

She turned to Mr. Rogers and looked adorably up at him.

Just try to tell those puppy eyes that she’s a danger to the other students! Dave thought triumphantly to himself, trying to hide the amusement in his expression. Just try!

The principal didn’t try.

“Well, Mr. Ambrose,” he finally mumbled, “I suppose if she is really incapable of using fire as you say, there can’t be much harm in having her, but for her sake, I must beg you to consider the social issues…”

“I have considered them,” Dave replied, “and I came to the conclusion that she would be a great deal better off socially by mingling with some kids of roughly her mental age than if isolated from them.”

Mr. Rogers waved his hand hopelessly. “Fine. We’ll register her. But I assure you that we will reconsider if she starts burning things. You may leave.”

Dave smiled victoriously. “Thank you, Mr. Rogers,” he said, took Jean’s hand and walked with her out of the room.

“You are a genius,” he muttered on the way out with a fond grin. “Classic. Truly masterful timing.”

She giggled innocently. “You’re always saying weird things.”
 
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Sike Saner

Peace to the Mountain
Those scenes involving Dave and Jane and their breakup were awesome. o.o Great emotion, great dialogue. And damn… I was worried for Jean there for a couple of moments here and there… first Jane was looking like she’s going to drop her, and then Dave was talking to the kid in such a way that had me wondering if he might brain her or something. O___O; I do feel bad for Dave, though, being left as he was by Jane, but at the same time I can see where she’s coming from and understand. I like it when I’m able to sympathize with all the characters in a situation like that; somehow it makes them seem even more human in my eyes.

I also really liked the scene with the principal, especially when he was finally convinced that she wasn’t going to fry the other students or anything. No mere mortal can resist the power of PUPPY EYES! X3

Other favorite excerpts:

You write happily about how she’s teething, and meanwhile I’m getting hormone injections every day and her fangs are digging into my nipples, just because you still insist on her being fed ‘naturally’ for your stupid research!

A bit of fair warning to any who may have considered breastfeeding a fox. XD

“…and those few times we do get to be alone together, all you think about is sex.”

“I’ll…”

He stopped. No, he wouldn’t.

XP
 
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Yashe

Silverwing
That was quite funny, and a good read all at once. My favorite part:
She looked up at him with an innocent expression of puzzlement. “Why not?”

“I don’t know, sweetheart. Why don’t you try asking him?”

She turned to Mr. Rogers and looked adorably up at him.

Just try to tell those puppy eyes that she’s a danger to the other students! Dave thought triumphantly to himself, trying to hide the amusement in his expression. Just try!

The principal didn’t try.
I can just see the big, beady, anime eyes staring up at the meanie old pricipal right now. Dave IS a genious with that one...ha...
 

vareki

Psycotic with RAGE
Readers of The Quest for the Legends probably feel like murdering me right now for churning out chapters of this instead of writing chapter 35 of that, but hey, I can't control inspiration...

There are parts I like and don't like about this chapter, but the ones I like I really like. I ended up not skipping ten years into the future right away after all (but that will happen in chapter four). As always, I'd appreciate any input on possible edits, etc.

i am very annoyed about that but still having read both i can't really hold it againts you

I don’t know, sweetheart. Why don’t you try asking him?”

She turned to Mr. Rogers and looked adorably up at him.

Just try to tell those puppy eyes that she’s a danger to the other students! Dave thought triumphantly to himself, trying to hide the amusement in his expression. Just try!

The principal didn’t try.

best way of getting into school ever:D

“Well,” Mr. Rogers said, not without a hint of annoyance, “does she… light things on fire, intentionally or unintentionally? Does she bite people? Does she use the toilet as one would expect of other students?”
 
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