The Great Butler
Hush, keep it down
Colress’s mockery moved Yung to take another look at Mewtwo. The Mirage Pokémon was still pressing Nekou into the wall, but much to its creator’s shock, she was moving around underneath it.
Yung. The Mirage Mewtwo. Together the two of them had taken Ariana away, and that was the only coherent thought rising from the maelstrom in her head. She didn't even really feel the pain from Mewtwo's electricity. Her other self saw to that.
"I'll ****ing destroy this thing!!"
The presence in her head, if it had a physical form, would have embraced her and stroked her hair. She certainly felt the sensation as if it were real.
"Don't worry," the voice whispered to her, "we can do anything if we're together. Anything is possible."
In the course of her convulsions, Nekou felt her arms spring free. She was able to rip an iron bar off the wall, which she then smashed across Mewtwo’s face with a loud smack, making Mewtwo stumble away. Giving chase, she kept hitting Mewtwo with the metal rod despite the Mirage Pokémon already being dizzy from the first blow. Every strike forced Mewtwo to cede a few more feet until Nekou shifted to hitting it over the head instead. At that point, it wasn’t long before she viciously beat Mewtwo to the ground, keeping up her onslaught against it even after it lay stunned.
“Disappear! Disappear!!”
Yung couldn’t help but be totally stunned at what he was watching. “The Mirage System is the perfect invention…” he uttered, dumbfounded. “Mewtwo is supposed to be the world’s strongest Pokémon… and the Mirage System removes even its flaws… how can this be?!”
“Maybe your confidence in your little creation is your undoing?” Colress suggested. Even though he’d said this in a completely innocent voice, he was anything but well-intentioned. It was all an act, just to mock Yung more than ever. “That living hologram of yours? It’s a flawed specimen born of flawed theories. My methods are the only real way to draw out a Pokémon’s true strength!”
“Flawed specimen?” Those two words made something in Yung snap. He’d certainly been angry before, between Colress’s constant disrespect and having to face Ariana. But when he heard his colleague call the product of his life’s work a flawed specimen, he completely erupted. “Just watch! Prepare to witness the ultimate Mirage Pokémon, you corrupt fool!” Punching keys on his controller anew, Yung shouted, “Mewtwo, get rid of her!”
At its creator’s command, Mewtwo flipped over, driving its fist into Nekou’s throat. The hit threw her several feet into the air, but she still managed to land on her feet. She dropped the iron pole in the process, however, and clutched at her neck instead of trying to recover it. Mewtwo, seizing the opportunity presented by Nekou stunned and coughing, formed three Water Shurikens around its hands and threw them at her. The watery stars slashed into her face and hands, but like all the others, the wounds vanished in seconds. Not only did they heal, but the sensation of their regeneration snapped Nekou out of the daze Throat Chop inflicted on her.
“I’ll rip that ****ing thing to shreds!!” her voice, combined with that of her other self, rang out in her head. Pure instinct drove her to charge at Mewtwo again, entirely prepared to fight with her fists once more.
“Not this time!” Yung defiantly said. “Mewtwo, Iron Defense!”
Mewtwo spread its arms instead of taking direct action against Nekou. Its body retextured itself, taking on a much more sturdy constitution of solid, reflective steel. Nekou’s punch bounced off Mewtwo’s armor with a loud clang, shattering the bones in her hand and wrist for no gain against the creature.
“That’s about right,” Mewtwo’s creator concluded. “Now, Mewtwo, finish her off! Focus Punch!”
Colress couldn’t stop himself from laughing out loud when Yung issued that call. He bitingly accused his colleague, “You really don’t want to win this at all, do you? Giving her an opening now of all times? Surely you must see what’s happening right in front of you!”
He would never admit it, but Yung actually hadn’t noticed what Colress was referring to. Not until the visor-wearing scientist called his attention to it, anyway. While Mewtwo stood still and focused its power, Nekou’s broken bones were regenerating unhindered, restoring her hand to normal. Her bones cracking and popping as they shifted would have turned his stomach by itself, to say nothing of the compounding factor his shame over his mistake provided. No, what truly terrified him was how nonchalant she was about it. In fact, judging from the sigh that slipped from her lips as she shook off the last of the injury, he came to believe she was enjoying it.
Once her hand and wrist fully healed, Nekou sprang at Mewtwo with such speed that Yung couldn’t react. She seized Mewtwo around its torso and, the muscles in her limbs straining and swelling to exert their full strength, lifted it up.
“Impossible!” His confidence shattered, Yung frantically and incoherently entered commands into his controller. He wasn’t thinking anymore. “With the added weight of that metal body, there’s no way… fine, if that’s the way you want this to go down, Mewtwo, use Self-Destruct!!”
At first, Mewtwo didn’t react to its new directive. The state of near-perfect mental acuity it had reached while preparing to use Focus Punch took a few seconds to fade away, but when it did,the Mirage Pokémon released its stance and tucked in its arms and legs.
“You know, I don’t know how much more of my power you can handle right now.”
Nekou had no choice but to acknowledge that her other self was correct. As she lifted Mewtwo, she was starting to gasp for air. “I… y-you’re right… come on, let’s ****ing end this.”
“I’ve got enough left in me… in you… for that.”
With one last surge of strength, Nekou bet her spine back to heft Mewtwo above her. The artificial creature was, by then, radiating a bright light, but before it could detonate, she flung it straight at its creator.
“Fucking… take… that!” she roared at Yung between huffs for air. If anyone was going to be caught in Mewtwo’s Self-Destruct, it was going to be the one who took Ariana away from her. That was the one inevitable truth she held in that moment.
Or it was the one inevitable truth until Mewtwo actually reached Yung.
When Mewtwo should have struck its creator, it simply flew straight through him and crashed into the darkness beyond. Yung’s image flickered and distorted, but he wasn’t alone in suffering such an effect. Mewtwo’s piercing the shadows lining the lab’s perimeter glitched them as well, and within the cloud of static, a drone carrying a Mirage System generator became visible near where Mewtwo landed.
Normally, seeing the device giving her nemesis life would have directly led to Nekou attacking the drone itself. She had no need to in this instance, however. Mewtwo’s Self-Destruct, which went off moments later, saw to that. The explosion totaled the drone and kicked up a shockwave that knocked Nekou onto her back. With the drone disabled, both Mewtwo and the veil of darkness around the lab faded, reverting into the Mirage System’s lines of code before disappearing entirely.
“That’s it, I’m spent and so are you,” the presence in her mind said to her. “Besides, you don’t need me anymore, that monster’s gone. There was room for only one monster here, after all.”
Understanding what the voice was implying, Nekou spitefully answered, “**** you. I’m not what you say I am…”
Nekou could easily imagine the sort of sneering grin her other self was shooting her, even without a face to look at. “Aha. You’ll see… you’ll see.”
And then, just as suddenly as it arrived, Nekou felt her other self slip from her mind completely. She felt herself regain control of her body, and along with it, finally felt like she could breathe freely again.
“Aaah!!” she gasped, inhaling more than she was certain she ever had before. That feeling of relief derailed into a groan, however, when all the pain her other self had been shielding her from caught up with her at once. It nearly paralyzed her, but she forced herself to sit up anyway.
Somehow, even with the Mirage System in the lab offline, Colress and Yung were still there, standing just as they were when she went down. It wasn’t until then that it began to sink into Nekou’s mind that they actually weren’t there at all. The way Yung had hidden from detection until he wanted to appear. How he seemingly made the Mirage System controller appear out of thin air. Why Mewtwo passed through Yung when she threw it at him. All of it had only one explanation that made sense, and that explanation left her to stare wide-eyed at the two scientists.
“Yes, my dear Nekou, you’re beginning to understand, aren’t you?” Colress taunted her, stepping away from his console. “Jeunes and I have been one, two… no, three steps ahead street crooks like you from the start. We knew you were going to attack the Adenosine Base today, so we had plenty of time to get all our valuable research material off the platform! I know you must be thinking, ‘what about the Pokémon we were able to steal?’ right now. Well, those were just our failed research subjects! All the good ones are long gone! Everything that happened here today has unfolded exactly the way Polaris planned it!”
“Y-you’re saying… it was all for nothing…”
“I wouldn’t say it was for nothing, my dear. Hopefully you and your family will have learned a valuable lesson in humility and won’t cross our paths again. That said…” Colress jabbed a finger up in thought. “In case we somehow don’t run into each other again, I’d like to explain to you how we pulled this off. This base has been unmanned the entire time. It was thanks to a combination Jeunes and I cooked up that we tricked you so well… his Mirage System created the Mirage Pokémon and made you think there were crewmen aboard for you to worry about, but the two of us have been using a VR system I recently developed. That’s how we’re still here. Quite impressive, don’t you agree? Even the Mirage System has some use, in the end!”
Colress started laughing hysterically, amused by a joke only he thought was funny. Bitter at being made the punchline, Yung glared at him, only to spot something else he hadn’t expected to.
Ariana, still alive, had pulled herself up on Colress’s mainframe and was about to connect a cylindrical device to it. Between their preoccupation with fighting Nekou and Colress’s stepping away from the console, she had been able to drag herself behind Colress without notice.
“Colress, behind you!” Yung shouted.
Colress turned, but it was already too late. Even though she was struggling to hold herself up on the computer, she managed to click the cylinder into a port on the console, then glared spitefully at the hologram of the blond-haired researcher and pulled her phone from her uniform.
“Mission complete,” she uttered into her communicator. “Contact Pierce for extraction.”
“Maman!! You’re… you’re…” Nekou still struggled to speak, her body badly impaired by the pain she felt. Even though every inch of her being hurt in ways she could hardly comprehend, the sight of Ariana gave her the strength to fight it. She hoped against all odds that things might turn out alright.
“That appears to be quite the curious gadget you’ve got there,” Colress said to Ariana, scratching his chin with his finger as he spoke. Much to the surprise of those around him, his interest seemed to be genuine. “Might you be willing to tell me what it does?”
“Gladly,” Ariana spat, coughing before she could continue. “It’ll… it’ll let us send an energy pulse through all your machines in this base… they’ll overload, and then they’ll explode, and they’ll take the whole Adenosine Base down with them. Tough luck.”
“Remove it!” Yung angrily demanded.
“There’s no need, Jeunes,” Colress contradicted him. “Polaris has no more use the Adenosine Base anyway, so it’s hardly a loss. Besides, I’m sure she wouldn’t actually remove it, no matter how nicely we asked. In addition…” Tilting his head so he could shoot Nekou a dirty look over his shoulder, he added, “...I no longer have any need for these two. They have no value left for my research.”
That snide comment turned out to be Colress’s last. His hologram flickered and vanished, soon followed by Yung’s doing the same.
Nekou had no concern whatsoever about where they had gone. As far as she cared, their leaving the laboratory was as good as them leaving her mind altogether. They didn’t matter. Who did matter was Ariana, who finally lost her strength and slumped down with her back against the computer.
“Maman!”
-:-
Meanwhile, in another dark chamber far from the Adenosine Base, Colress and Yung removed the virtual reality helmets that projected their presence across the ocean.
“Lights up,” Colress said out loud.
“Roger,” a female voice replied over a loudspeaker. “Bringing up the holodeck lights.”
A moment later, the spacious room was illuminated by the spotlights mounted on its ceiling. Aside from a prop mimicking Colress’s computer, there was nothing else contained within its black walls.
“So how did you like my VR system, Jeunes?” Colress didn’t actually care what Yung thought, so he kept talking without giving his colleague a chance to answer. “Tell me, is your lust for revenge sated?”
“No, not yet.” Yung’s reply was met with a dismissive shrug from Colress, but Yung elected to ignore it for the time being. “There’s still much work to be done… only when my Mirage Mewtwo is perfected and I destroy all of Team Rocket with it, will I be satisfied.”
“That doesn’t surprise me at all.” Colress grinned. “Go work on that, if that’s what you wish. I’m going to give a report to Finansielle.”
“I’m a Chromosome too, so it should be me,” Yung argued.
“Nah. I’m telling Finansielle.” Practically dancing on air with cheer over his accomplishments, Colress bound toward the holodeck’s exit and only stopped to turn back and taunt Yung, “My operation went fantastically! Exactly how she said it would! So… you work on that little toy of yours, and I’ll see you around! Ta ta!”
If he had the Mirage System handy in the room, Yung would have used a Mirage Pokémon to pulverize the door after Colress left through it. “One day, you’ll get yours… you wait and see.”
-:-
“Maman… why…” Even in the face of the great physical pain she felt, Nekou had forced herself to move, one step after another, until she could kneel at Ariana’s side. “Why did you push me away…? I easily could have survived that… you know that…”
“I couldn’t… just let you go through that again. Not after Ecruteak…” Ariana coughed again, and when she lifted her hand to her mouth, Nekou gasped in horror at the crimson stain spreading across Ariana’s abdomen. “Just because you could survive it doesn’t mean you should have to.”
“But at what cost?!” Nekou grabbed Ariana’s shoulders, but consciously had to refrain from shaking her by them. “You can’t just throw your life away like that! I need you!”
“And I’ll always be there with you, even if you can’t see me.” Ariana reached up and gently placed her hand on Nekou’s cheek, an act that made the water welling up in Nekou’s eyes flow freely.
“But… but…” In the midst of her tears, Nekou struggled to speak clearly. As if the loss she faced wasn’t bad enough, “There’s not… how can you be here if you’re not there? How can you be there if you’re nowhere?”
Ariana understood perfectly what Nekou was alluding to. She’d expressed her feelings regarding death plenty of times before, and sadness wasn’t the only thing Ariana saw in the twisted, crying face looking down on her. There was also fear, the kind of crippling fear that begged for some sort of reassurance, which Ariana tried to give her by stroking her face. “I’m not scared of what’s going to happen to me… you shouldn’t be, either. As long as I’m in your memory… I’ll still be here.”
“There has to be another way,” Nekou frantically insisted. “There has to be.”
Right as Nekou said that, an explosion from above destroyed a portion of the ceiling over the the left side of the room, creating a hole through which sunlight flowed freely in. When the blast initially shook the laboratory, Nekou’s first instinct was to cover Ariana’s body with her own, but the next voice she heard brought her some relief.
“Hey, you two!” Petrel called out from the other side of the newly-opened crater, where he and Proton were hovering with jetpacks. “Your ride’s here, it’s time to go!”
“That’s… that’s right, our escape…” In all the confusion, some of the specifics of Team Rocket’s plan for the operation had slipped her mind. Still, even though Nekou was able to remember, it felt like divine providence when Petrel dropped two more jetpacks down for her and Ariana to use. She scampered over to the machines and strapped one onto her back, then hurried the other one to Ariana. “Maman, let’s go,” she pleaded, trying to force the jetpack onto the executive. A broken smile had wormed its way onto her face, a reflection of what she wanted to believe even while her tears told the truth she refused to accept. Her racing thoughts came out in the form of rambling, saying, “Come on, let’s go. We’ll get out of here and get on the helicopter and head back to Olivine and then you can get fixed up and…”
“No.” Ariana pushed the jetpack back into Nekou’s arms, only for Nekou to drop it when her arms went limp. “Even if I make it to Olivine… I’m not coming back from this.” To emphasize her point, Ariana gingerly touched the blood on her uniform. The stain had grown significantly in just the short time since they last looked at it. “Even if I got out of here… besides, my illness… even if the one in a million chance where I survive this came to pass, I haven’t got enough time left to make what I’d put you through worth it. Like I told you in Ecruteak, all we were doing was delaying the inevitable… you and Rosalie weren’t curing me, we all know that. There was always going to be a day when it couldn’t stop everything from catching up to me again. Nekou, listen to me. If you leave me behind now, you can move forward… I can’t bear to force you to watch me falling apart and keep wearing yourself out hoping some miracle will happen.”
Nekou froze, her previously spiraling, irrational thinking coming to an abrupt halt. How could she have forgotten Ariana summoning her the morning she was supposed to be at Ecruteak’s Dance Hall with Matt, Olivia and the others? No, the truth was she hadn’t forgotten at all. She wanted to, oh, had she wanted to. But no matter how hard she ran away from it, there was no escaping the truth. With Rosalie’s help, she had been concocting various homemade medications to sustain Ariana’s life and comfort for as long as possible. That morning, Nekou had received the news she long dreaded - their creations wouldn’t help anymore. As Ariana had just said, her time was running out.
“But...but…” Nekou stuttered, growing increasingly hysterical. The pointlessness of it all wasn’t lost on her. If Ariana wasn’t already facing death, she wouldn’t have been so impulsive in sacrificing herself to Mewtwo’s attack. Even if she did still take the same actions, without her illness, Nekou believed she’d go back to Olivine and let Rosalie save her. It was all pointless. All Yung had done was rob them of the last bit of time they had.
In her panic and grief, Nekou failed to notice Proton and Petrel descend until they had already landed.
“What’s wr-” Proton cut himself off when he got a look at Ariana’s condition. The sight of his superior in such a dire state broke right through his carefully constructed self-image. He lost control over his voice and yelled, “What the hell happened here?!”
“It’s too fucking long to explain!” Nekou choked out. “Help me get her up!”
“No!” Ariana immediately overruled, the strain causing her to wheeze painfully. “I’m going to detonate the Adenosine Base… leave me behind and get Nekou out of here! Go!”
Nekou, too deep in denial of what was happening, protested, “I won’t go without her!”
“It’s an order!”
Petrel shook his head sadly at Nekou and Ariana one-upping each other. “It hurts my heart to see the two of you like this… Ariana, what happened to you...”
“You can say that again,” Proton agreed. “But Ariana did say it was an order…”
“No, please, don’t!” Nekou begged him. “We’ll both go!”
“I don’t have a choice. I’m sorry.” Proton’s uncharacteristic apology caught Nekou by surprise, buying him enough time to whip his phone out of his pocket. “Pierce, send your Braviary down! We need help!"
Nekou's face sank further at the sight of the eagle as he descended from the hole in the ceiling. Any other time, she would have had the strength to fend him off, but in her crashed, weakened state, she didn't stand a chance.
"Come, Miss Nekou," Petrel gently urged her. "I do understand why you feel the way you do, but there's so much still ahead of us. I'm sure Ariana wants you to see it all."
"I can't…"
"Nekou, listen," Ariana spoke up. "He's completely right. You're stronger than you think. Go forward, stand on your own two feet, and live. Just like I've always told you to."
"I…" Nekou suddenly found herself losing all will to keep fighting to change Ariana's mind. Despair had taken hold in her mind and she couldn't shake it. "Maman, I don't know what I can do…"
"You can do anything," Ariana replied, "and everything, if you want. You've got it in you."
"Maman…"
Petrel set a reassuring hand on Nekou's shoulder. "We should go. There's nothing good here for any of us."
"Y-you're right…" Nekou finally conceded. She took one last glance at Ariana before averting her eyes, unable to look at her beloved mother figure any longer. "Maman, I'm sorry… I couldn't save you like you saved me…"
"You never had to. That wasn't your responsibility. What is your responsibility is how you choose to embrace your life going forward."
Unable to take any more, Nekou's body and mind gave out. She fell to her knees, and hung like a ragdoll in Braviary's talons as he held her by the shoulders and flew her out of the base.
"Sayonara, kid," Ariana muttered. The last vestiges of her strength were starting to fail, so she settled in against the console.
Proton and Petrel, meanwhile, stood side-by-side in front of her. It was something they'd done plenty of times before, when they couldn't get assignments from Giovanni or Stacia instead. Obviously, this time was vastly different, and although neither of them said so, they were both well aware it would be the last time they stood like that before her. It was the end of an era.
"Are you really sure about this?" Proton asked. Although he wasn't completely breaking like Nekou had, the quivering in his voice and tremble in his hands made plain how rattled he was.
“I am,” Ariana answered with as much authority as either executive had ever heard from her. She beckoned Proton to her, and as he approached, slipped off the belt that her three Poké Balls were attached to. Handing them over to him, she asked, “Can you keep Arbok, Victreebel and Magcargo safe?”
“I will,” he promised. “It was an honor to serve alongside you.”
“Indeed,” Petrel added. “Your name will be legendary in the history of Team Rocket.”
“Thank you… make sure everyone is taken care of.”
“We will.” Proton affirmed.
Nothing more needed to be said. Proton nodded at Petrel, and the two of them activated their jetpacks, carrying them up and out of the laboratory.
Once she was alone, Ariana reached into her uniform and withdraw two objects. One was her Team Rocket phone, and she activated its Matori by tapping on its screen.
“At your service, Executive Ariana,” the artificial intelligence greeted her.
“Matori…” Ariana coughed again. “Start the countdown to the pulse detonation.”
“Right away.” Matori bowed, and a timer appeared over her image.
With the appearance of the rapidly declining digits, Ariana concluded her work was done. It was then that she turned her attention to the second object that had been tucked in her uniform - a photograph of herself with a younger Nekou and Silver. She was the only one of the three smiling, while Nekou looked away nervously and Silver pouted in anger, but the photograph still meant much to her. Whereas Giovanni was never close to their son thanks to his strained relationship with his own mother, Ariana always felt close to both Silver and her adopted daughter.
“I wish I could have been able to patch things up with him…” she wistfully said. As the clock counted down, she tapped the phone’s screen to bring Matori back. “Matori, I want to ask you… do you think I lived the right way?”
“Executive Ariana…” Matori paused, as if she was considering her next words carefully. “As an artificial intelligence, I am afraid I cannot make such a judgment. However, based on my analysis of the subject in available data, I see that people generally consider a life lived without regrets to be one that was well lived.”
Ariana already knew this, but hearing it again gave her a feeling of peace. She shut her eyes as she felt her strength ebb away, whispering to herself, “I won’t say I have no regrets. I really do wish I could have made peace with Silver. But in the end… I think I lived a good life. I just hope everyone will be able to live like that, too…”
-:-
Aboard the helicopter en route back to Olivine City, Nekou, Proton and Petrel all stood near the open cargo hatch at the back of the craft, watching as the Adenosine Base faded into the distance.
Nekou silently prayed that somehow, what she knew was coming would never happen. It was an irrational hope but all she had to hold on to. Yet, the inevitable came, heralded by a bright light from the facility. Seconds later, the one event she begged the fates to prevent came.
The Altru Northstar, otherwise known as the Adenosine Base, exploded into a massive fireball. Nekou, all her hopes burning with the flames, fell to her knees and let out an inhuman wail that carried her anguish across the sea.
END of CHAPTER 26
Yung. The Mirage Mewtwo. Together the two of them had taken Ariana away, and that was the only coherent thought rising from the maelstrom in her head. She didn't even really feel the pain from Mewtwo's electricity. Her other self saw to that.
"I'll ****ing destroy this thing!!"
The presence in her head, if it had a physical form, would have embraced her and stroked her hair. She certainly felt the sensation as if it were real.
"Don't worry," the voice whispered to her, "we can do anything if we're together. Anything is possible."
In the course of her convulsions, Nekou felt her arms spring free. She was able to rip an iron bar off the wall, which she then smashed across Mewtwo’s face with a loud smack, making Mewtwo stumble away. Giving chase, she kept hitting Mewtwo with the metal rod despite the Mirage Pokémon already being dizzy from the first blow. Every strike forced Mewtwo to cede a few more feet until Nekou shifted to hitting it over the head instead. At that point, it wasn’t long before she viciously beat Mewtwo to the ground, keeping up her onslaught against it even after it lay stunned.
“Disappear! Disappear!!”
Yung couldn’t help but be totally stunned at what he was watching. “The Mirage System is the perfect invention…” he uttered, dumbfounded. “Mewtwo is supposed to be the world’s strongest Pokémon… and the Mirage System removes even its flaws… how can this be?!”
“Maybe your confidence in your little creation is your undoing?” Colress suggested. Even though he’d said this in a completely innocent voice, he was anything but well-intentioned. It was all an act, just to mock Yung more than ever. “That living hologram of yours? It’s a flawed specimen born of flawed theories. My methods are the only real way to draw out a Pokémon’s true strength!”
“Flawed specimen?” Those two words made something in Yung snap. He’d certainly been angry before, between Colress’s constant disrespect and having to face Ariana. But when he heard his colleague call the product of his life’s work a flawed specimen, he completely erupted. “Just watch! Prepare to witness the ultimate Mirage Pokémon, you corrupt fool!” Punching keys on his controller anew, Yung shouted, “Mewtwo, get rid of her!”
At its creator’s command, Mewtwo flipped over, driving its fist into Nekou’s throat. The hit threw her several feet into the air, but she still managed to land on her feet. She dropped the iron pole in the process, however, and clutched at her neck instead of trying to recover it. Mewtwo, seizing the opportunity presented by Nekou stunned and coughing, formed three Water Shurikens around its hands and threw them at her. The watery stars slashed into her face and hands, but like all the others, the wounds vanished in seconds. Not only did they heal, but the sensation of their regeneration snapped Nekou out of the daze Throat Chop inflicted on her.
“I’ll rip that ****ing thing to shreds!!” her voice, combined with that of her other self, rang out in her head. Pure instinct drove her to charge at Mewtwo again, entirely prepared to fight with her fists once more.
“Not this time!” Yung defiantly said. “Mewtwo, Iron Defense!”
Mewtwo spread its arms instead of taking direct action against Nekou. Its body retextured itself, taking on a much more sturdy constitution of solid, reflective steel. Nekou’s punch bounced off Mewtwo’s armor with a loud clang, shattering the bones in her hand and wrist for no gain against the creature.
“That’s about right,” Mewtwo’s creator concluded. “Now, Mewtwo, finish her off! Focus Punch!”
Colress couldn’t stop himself from laughing out loud when Yung issued that call. He bitingly accused his colleague, “You really don’t want to win this at all, do you? Giving her an opening now of all times? Surely you must see what’s happening right in front of you!”
He would never admit it, but Yung actually hadn’t noticed what Colress was referring to. Not until the visor-wearing scientist called his attention to it, anyway. While Mewtwo stood still and focused its power, Nekou’s broken bones were regenerating unhindered, restoring her hand to normal. Her bones cracking and popping as they shifted would have turned his stomach by itself, to say nothing of the compounding factor his shame over his mistake provided. No, what truly terrified him was how nonchalant she was about it. In fact, judging from the sigh that slipped from her lips as she shook off the last of the injury, he came to believe she was enjoying it.
Once her hand and wrist fully healed, Nekou sprang at Mewtwo with such speed that Yung couldn’t react. She seized Mewtwo around its torso and, the muscles in her limbs straining and swelling to exert their full strength, lifted it up.
“Impossible!” His confidence shattered, Yung frantically and incoherently entered commands into his controller. He wasn’t thinking anymore. “With the added weight of that metal body, there’s no way… fine, if that’s the way you want this to go down, Mewtwo, use Self-Destruct!!”
At first, Mewtwo didn’t react to its new directive. The state of near-perfect mental acuity it had reached while preparing to use Focus Punch took a few seconds to fade away, but when it did,the Mirage Pokémon released its stance and tucked in its arms and legs.
“You know, I don’t know how much more of my power you can handle right now.”
Nekou had no choice but to acknowledge that her other self was correct. As she lifted Mewtwo, she was starting to gasp for air. “I… y-you’re right… come on, let’s ****ing end this.”
“I’ve got enough left in me… in you… for that.”
With one last surge of strength, Nekou bet her spine back to heft Mewtwo above her. The artificial creature was, by then, radiating a bright light, but before it could detonate, she flung it straight at its creator.
“Fucking… take… that!” she roared at Yung between huffs for air. If anyone was going to be caught in Mewtwo’s Self-Destruct, it was going to be the one who took Ariana away from her. That was the one inevitable truth she held in that moment.
Or it was the one inevitable truth until Mewtwo actually reached Yung.
When Mewtwo should have struck its creator, it simply flew straight through him and crashed into the darkness beyond. Yung’s image flickered and distorted, but he wasn’t alone in suffering such an effect. Mewtwo’s piercing the shadows lining the lab’s perimeter glitched them as well, and within the cloud of static, a drone carrying a Mirage System generator became visible near where Mewtwo landed.
Normally, seeing the device giving her nemesis life would have directly led to Nekou attacking the drone itself. She had no need to in this instance, however. Mewtwo’s Self-Destruct, which went off moments later, saw to that. The explosion totaled the drone and kicked up a shockwave that knocked Nekou onto her back. With the drone disabled, both Mewtwo and the veil of darkness around the lab faded, reverting into the Mirage System’s lines of code before disappearing entirely.
“That’s it, I’m spent and so are you,” the presence in her mind said to her. “Besides, you don’t need me anymore, that monster’s gone. There was room for only one monster here, after all.”
Understanding what the voice was implying, Nekou spitefully answered, “**** you. I’m not what you say I am…”
Nekou could easily imagine the sort of sneering grin her other self was shooting her, even without a face to look at. “Aha. You’ll see… you’ll see.”
And then, just as suddenly as it arrived, Nekou felt her other self slip from her mind completely. She felt herself regain control of her body, and along with it, finally felt like she could breathe freely again.
“Aaah!!” she gasped, inhaling more than she was certain she ever had before. That feeling of relief derailed into a groan, however, when all the pain her other self had been shielding her from caught up with her at once. It nearly paralyzed her, but she forced herself to sit up anyway.
Somehow, even with the Mirage System in the lab offline, Colress and Yung were still there, standing just as they were when she went down. It wasn’t until then that it began to sink into Nekou’s mind that they actually weren’t there at all. The way Yung had hidden from detection until he wanted to appear. How he seemingly made the Mirage System controller appear out of thin air. Why Mewtwo passed through Yung when she threw it at him. All of it had only one explanation that made sense, and that explanation left her to stare wide-eyed at the two scientists.
“Yes, my dear Nekou, you’re beginning to understand, aren’t you?” Colress taunted her, stepping away from his console. “Jeunes and I have been one, two… no, three steps ahead street crooks like you from the start. We knew you were going to attack the Adenosine Base today, so we had plenty of time to get all our valuable research material off the platform! I know you must be thinking, ‘what about the Pokémon we were able to steal?’ right now. Well, those were just our failed research subjects! All the good ones are long gone! Everything that happened here today has unfolded exactly the way Polaris planned it!”
“Y-you’re saying… it was all for nothing…”
“I wouldn’t say it was for nothing, my dear. Hopefully you and your family will have learned a valuable lesson in humility and won’t cross our paths again. That said…” Colress jabbed a finger up in thought. “In case we somehow don’t run into each other again, I’d like to explain to you how we pulled this off. This base has been unmanned the entire time. It was thanks to a combination Jeunes and I cooked up that we tricked you so well… his Mirage System created the Mirage Pokémon and made you think there were crewmen aboard for you to worry about, but the two of us have been using a VR system I recently developed. That’s how we’re still here. Quite impressive, don’t you agree? Even the Mirage System has some use, in the end!”
Colress started laughing hysterically, amused by a joke only he thought was funny. Bitter at being made the punchline, Yung glared at him, only to spot something else he hadn’t expected to.
Ariana, still alive, had pulled herself up on Colress’s mainframe and was about to connect a cylindrical device to it. Between their preoccupation with fighting Nekou and Colress’s stepping away from the console, she had been able to drag herself behind Colress without notice.
“Colress, behind you!” Yung shouted.
Colress turned, but it was already too late. Even though she was struggling to hold herself up on the computer, she managed to click the cylinder into a port on the console, then glared spitefully at the hologram of the blond-haired researcher and pulled her phone from her uniform.
“Mission complete,” she uttered into her communicator. “Contact Pierce for extraction.”
“Maman!! You’re… you’re…” Nekou still struggled to speak, her body badly impaired by the pain she felt. Even though every inch of her being hurt in ways she could hardly comprehend, the sight of Ariana gave her the strength to fight it. She hoped against all odds that things might turn out alright.
“That appears to be quite the curious gadget you’ve got there,” Colress said to Ariana, scratching his chin with his finger as he spoke. Much to the surprise of those around him, his interest seemed to be genuine. “Might you be willing to tell me what it does?”
“Gladly,” Ariana spat, coughing before she could continue. “It’ll… it’ll let us send an energy pulse through all your machines in this base… they’ll overload, and then they’ll explode, and they’ll take the whole Adenosine Base down with them. Tough luck.”
“Remove it!” Yung angrily demanded.
“There’s no need, Jeunes,” Colress contradicted him. “Polaris has no more use the Adenosine Base anyway, so it’s hardly a loss. Besides, I’m sure she wouldn’t actually remove it, no matter how nicely we asked. In addition…” Tilting his head so he could shoot Nekou a dirty look over his shoulder, he added, “...I no longer have any need for these two. They have no value left for my research.”
That snide comment turned out to be Colress’s last. His hologram flickered and vanished, soon followed by Yung’s doing the same.
Nekou had no concern whatsoever about where they had gone. As far as she cared, their leaving the laboratory was as good as them leaving her mind altogether. They didn’t matter. Who did matter was Ariana, who finally lost her strength and slumped down with her back against the computer.
“Maman!”
-:-
Meanwhile, in another dark chamber far from the Adenosine Base, Colress and Yung removed the virtual reality helmets that projected their presence across the ocean.
“Lights up,” Colress said out loud.
“Roger,” a female voice replied over a loudspeaker. “Bringing up the holodeck lights.”
A moment later, the spacious room was illuminated by the spotlights mounted on its ceiling. Aside from a prop mimicking Colress’s computer, there was nothing else contained within its black walls.
“So how did you like my VR system, Jeunes?” Colress didn’t actually care what Yung thought, so he kept talking without giving his colleague a chance to answer. “Tell me, is your lust for revenge sated?”
“No, not yet.” Yung’s reply was met with a dismissive shrug from Colress, but Yung elected to ignore it for the time being. “There’s still much work to be done… only when my Mirage Mewtwo is perfected and I destroy all of Team Rocket with it, will I be satisfied.”
“That doesn’t surprise me at all.” Colress grinned. “Go work on that, if that’s what you wish. I’m going to give a report to Finansielle.”
“I’m a Chromosome too, so it should be me,” Yung argued.
“Nah. I’m telling Finansielle.” Practically dancing on air with cheer over his accomplishments, Colress bound toward the holodeck’s exit and only stopped to turn back and taunt Yung, “My operation went fantastically! Exactly how she said it would! So… you work on that little toy of yours, and I’ll see you around! Ta ta!”
If he had the Mirage System handy in the room, Yung would have used a Mirage Pokémon to pulverize the door after Colress left through it. “One day, you’ll get yours… you wait and see.”
-:-
“Maman… why…” Even in the face of the great physical pain she felt, Nekou had forced herself to move, one step after another, until she could kneel at Ariana’s side. “Why did you push me away…? I easily could have survived that… you know that…”
“I couldn’t… just let you go through that again. Not after Ecruteak…” Ariana coughed again, and when she lifted her hand to her mouth, Nekou gasped in horror at the crimson stain spreading across Ariana’s abdomen. “Just because you could survive it doesn’t mean you should have to.”
“But at what cost?!” Nekou grabbed Ariana’s shoulders, but consciously had to refrain from shaking her by them. “You can’t just throw your life away like that! I need you!”
“And I’ll always be there with you, even if you can’t see me.” Ariana reached up and gently placed her hand on Nekou’s cheek, an act that made the water welling up in Nekou’s eyes flow freely.
“But… but…” In the midst of her tears, Nekou struggled to speak clearly. As if the loss she faced wasn’t bad enough, “There’s not… how can you be here if you’re not there? How can you be there if you’re nowhere?”
Ariana understood perfectly what Nekou was alluding to. She’d expressed her feelings regarding death plenty of times before, and sadness wasn’t the only thing Ariana saw in the twisted, crying face looking down on her. There was also fear, the kind of crippling fear that begged for some sort of reassurance, which Ariana tried to give her by stroking her face. “I’m not scared of what’s going to happen to me… you shouldn’t be, either. As long as I’m in your memory… I’ll still be here.”
“There has to be another way,” Nekou frantically insisted. “There has to be.”
Right as Nekou said that, an explosion from above destroyed a portion of the ceiling over the the left side of the room, creating a hole through which sunlight flowed freely in. When the blast initially shook the laboratory, Nekou’s first instinct was to cover Ariana’s body with her own, but the next voice she heard brought her some relief.
“Hey, you two!” Petrel called out from the other side of the newly-opened crater, where he and Proton were hovering with jetpacks. “Your ride’s here, it’s time to go!”
“That’s… that’s right, our escape…” In all the confusion, some of the specifics of Team Rocket’s plan for the operation had slipped her mind. Still, even though Nekou was able to remember, it felt like divine providence when Petrel dropped two more jetpacks down for her and Ariana to use. She scampered over to the machines and strapped one onto her back, then hurried the other one to Ariana. “Maman, let’s go,” she pleaded, trying to force the jetpack onto the executive. A broken smile had wormed its way onto her face, a reflection of what she wanted to believe even while her tears told the truth she refused to accept. Her racing thoughts came out in the form of rambling, saying, “Come on, let’s go. We’ll get out of here and get on the helicopter and head back to Olivine and then you can get fixed up and…”
“No.” Ariana pushed the jetpack back into Nekou’s arms, only for Nekou to drop it when her arms went limp. “Even if I make it to Olivine… I’m not coming back from this.” To emphasize her point, Ariana gingerly touched the blood on her uniform. The stain had grown significantly in just the short time since they last looked at it. “Even if I got out of here… besides, my illness… even if the one in a million chance where I survive this came to pass, I haven’t got enough time left to make what I’d put you through worth it. Like I told you in Ecruteak, all we were doing was delaying the inevitable… you and Rosalie weren’t curing me, we all know that. There was always going to be a day when it couldn’t stop everything from catching up to me again. Nekou, listen to me. If you leave me behind now, you can move forward… I can’t bear to force you to watch me falling apart and keep wearing yourself out hoping some miracle will happen.”
Nekou froze, her previously spiraling, irrational thinking coming to an abrupt halt. How could she have forgotten Ariana summoning her the morning she was supposed to be at Ecruteak’s Dance Hall with Matt, Olivia and the others? No, the truth was she hadn’t forgotten at all. She wanted to, oh, had she wanted to. But no matter how hard she ran away from it, there was no escaping the truth. With Rosalie’s help, she had been concocting various homemade medications to sustain Ariana’s life and comfort for as long as possible. That morning, Nekou had received the news she long dreaded - their creations wouldn’t help anymore. As Ariana had just said, her time was running out.
“But...but…” Nekou stuttered, growing increasingly hysterical. The pointlessness of it all wasn’t lost on her. If Ariana wasn’t already facing death, she wouldn’t have been so impulsive in sacrificing herself to Mewtwo’s attack. Even if she did still take the same actions, without her illness, Nekou believed she’d go back to Olivine and let Rosalie save her. It was all pointless. All Yung had done was rob them of the last bit of time they had.
In her panic and grief, Nekou failed to notice Proton and Petrel descend until they had already landed.
“What’s wr-” Proton cut himself off when he got a look at Ariana’s condition. The sight of his superior in such a dire state broke right through his carefully constructed self-image. He lost control over his voice and yelled, “What the hell happened here?!”
“It’s too fucking long to explain!” Nekou choked out. “Help me get her up!”
“No!” Ariana immediately overruled, the strain causing her to wheeze painfully. “I’m going to detonate the Adenosine Base… leave me behind and get Nekou out of here! Go!”
Nekou, too deep in denial of what was happening, protested, “I won’t go without her!”
“It’s an order!”
Petrel shook his head sadly at Nekou and Ariana one-upping each other. “It hurts my heart to see the two of you like this… Ariana, what happened to you...”
“You can say that again,” Proton agreed. “But Ariana did say it was an order…”
“No, please, don’t!” Nekou begged him. “We’ll both go!”
“I don’t have a choice. I’m sorry.” Proton’s uncharacteristic apology caught Nekou by surprise, buying him enough time to whip his phone out of his pocket. “Pierce, send your Braviary down! We need help!"
Nekou's face sank further at the sight of the eagle as he descended from the hole in the ceiling. Any other time, she would have had the strength to fend him off, but in her crashed, weakened state, she didn't stand a chance.
"Come, Miss Nekou," Petrel gently urged her. "I do understand why you feel the way you do, but there's so much still ahead of us. I'm sure Ariana wants you to see it all."
"I can't…"
"Nekou, listen," Ariana spoke up. "He's completely right. You're stronger than you think. Go forward, stand on your own two feet, and live. Just like I've always told you to."
"I…" Nekou suddenly found herself losing all will to keep fighting to change Ariana's mind. Despair had taken hold in her mind and she couldn't shake it. "Maman, I don't know what I can do…"
"You can do anything," Ariana replied, "and everything, if you want. You've got it in you."
"Maman…"
Petrel set a reassuring hand on Nekou's shoulder. "We should go. There's nothing good here for any of us."
"Y-you're right…" Nekou finally conceded. She took one last glance at Ariana before averting her eyes, unable to look at her beloved mother figure any longer. "Maman, I'm sorry… I couldn't save you like you saved me…"
"You never had to. That wasn't your responsibility. What is your responsibility is how you choose to embrace your life going forward."
Unable to take any more, Nekou's body and mind gave out. She fell to her knees, and hung like a ragdoll in Braviary's talons as he held her by the shoulders and flew her out of the base.
"Sayonara, kid," Ariana muttered. The last vestiges of her strength were starting to fail, so she settled in against the console.
Proton and Petrel, meanwhile, stood side-by-side in front of her. It was something they'd done plenty of times before, when they couldn't get assignments from Giovanni or Stacia instead. Obviously, this time was vastly different, and although neither of them said so, they were both well aware it would be the last time they stood like that before her. It was the end of an era.
"Are you really sure about this?" Proton asked. Although he wasn't completely breaking like Nekou had, the quivering in his voice and tremble in his hands made plain how rattled he was.
“I am,” Ariana answered with as much authority as either executive had ever heard from her. She beckoned Proton to her, and as he approached, slipped off the belt that her three Poké Balls were attached to. Handing them over to him, she asked, “Can you keep Arbok, Victreebel and Magcargo safe?”
“I will,” he promised. “It was an honor to serve alongside you.”
“Indeed,” Petrel added. “Your name will be legendary in the history of Team Rocket.”
“Thank you… make sure everyone is taken care of.”
“We will.” Proton affirmed.
Nothing more needed to be said. Proton nodded at Petrel, and the two of them activated their jetpacks, carrying them up and out of the laboratory.
Once she was alone, Ariana reached into her uniform and withdraw two objects. One was her Team Rocket phone, and she activated its Matori by tapping on its screen.
“At your service, Executive Ariana,” the artificial intelligence greeted her.
“Matori…” Ariana coughed again. “Start the countdown to the pulse detonation.”
“Right away.” Matori bowed, and a timer appeared over her image.
With the appearance of the rapidly declining digits, Ariana concluded her work was done. It was then that she turned her attention to the second object that had been tucked in her uniform - a photograph of herself with a younger Nekou and Silver. She was the only one of the three smiling, while Nekou looked away nervously and Silver pouted in anger, but the photograph still meant much to her. Whereas Giovanni was never close to their son thanks to his strained relationship with his own mother, Ariana always felt close to both Silver and her adopted daughter.
“I wish I could have been able to patch things up with him…” she wistfully said. As the clock counted down, she tapped the phone’s screen to bring Matori back. “Matori, I want to ask you… do you think I lived the right way?”
“Executive Ariana…” Matori paused, as if she was considering her next words carefully. “As an artificial intelligence, I am afraid I cannot make such a judgment. However, based on my analysis of the subject in available data, I see that people generally consider a life lived without regrets to be one that was well lived.”
Ariana already knew this, but hearing it again gave her a feeling of peace. She shut her eyes as she felt her strength ebb away, whispering to herself, “I won’t say I have no regrets. I really do wish I could have made peace with Silver. But in the end… I think I lived a good life. I just hope everyone will be able to live like that, too…”
-:-
Aboard the helicopter en route back to Olivine City, Nekou, Proton and Petrel all stood near the open cargo hatch at the back of the craft, watching as the Adenosine Base faded into the distance.
Nekou silently prayed that somehow, what she knew was coming would never happen. It was an irrational hope but all she had to hold on to. Yet, the inevitable came, heralded by a bright light from the facility. Seconds later, the one event she begged the fates to prevent came.
The Altru Northstar, otherwise known as the Adenosine Base, exploded into a massive fireball. Nekou, all her hopes burning with the flames, fell to her knees and let out an inhuman wail that carried her anguish across the sea.
END of CHAPTER 26