Negrek
Lost but Seeking
Author's Notes: As it was foretold, so has it come to pass! Chapter 26, which apparently going to need to be two posts even though it's well under 10,000 words. =/
Pokémon League HQ is Indigo Plateau's oldest building. It's no soaring, fluted cathedral like the League's headquarters in Kalos, no slick office building like the one in Unova, but only ever what it was built to be: a fortress, squat, square, pricked by a row of slit windows near the top, great slabs of plateau stone raised in walls inches thick.
It used to mean something, reaching this place. You'd have to travel through the deepwilds where some of Kanto's strongest pokémon live, following nothing more than a vague, half-hidden trail. That was before the agreement that established the first routes, back when the local pokémon would exert every effort to kill you so your death might warn away other overambitious trainers. League HQ was humanity's farthest outpost, a symbol of its ascendancy as apricorn balls allowed trainers to raise enough pokémon to defend it for the first time.
Now the building's massive front doors have stood open since before the child was born, since before the great Nathaniel Morgan was born, even. Tourists mill and wander around the complex, 'navs out for pictures, browsing the T-shirts in the gift shop.
You pass them without looking, without stopping to admire the double line of stone statues that flank the path to the entrance. They stand more than twice as tall as you, lumpy suggestions of bipedal pokémon worn to anonymity by wind and rain and, sometimes, violence; one statue is no more than a pair of feet on a pedestal, another scored with marks that might have spelled out words before time crept in to rub them out--acts of rebellion that now warrant no more than small informational signs.
You stop beside the statue that stands just before the entryway, a much more recent one depicting a nidoqueen and nidoking in battle, the first rearing high, roaring, the second crouched with spines bristling and teeth bared. It's cast in bronze, but you're sure the pokémon are intended to be the deep blue-purple subspecies that lives in the Indigo Mountains, the ones that give them their human name.
Your hand strays towards the pocket where the pokédex should be, but you stop it before it can find the device missing. You are the great Nathaniel Morgan, you are going to your hearing, and you don't need help to remember it, either. You know the great Nathaniel Morgan well enough by now--far better than you'd like. You won't forget anything, aren't forgetting anything about him. You don't need the pokédex to remind you who you are, and you really don't need to be standing here going over your League history in your head.
Even so, you have to stop again in the HQ building's entry hall, your eyes taking a moment to adjust to the dim. Despite the chandeliers blazing overhead, this old building will always be one of long shadows. Tourists putter about on the left, visiting the Hall of Fame, the museum, the gift shop. And straight ahead, across the echoing stone-tiled floor, lies the cavernous entrance to the Elite Four's chambers. It's roped off for now, a small sign reminding visitors that challenges will resume after the tournament ends. The Four are no doubt booked solid for weeks, what with all the eight-badge trainers around who'll want to take a chance while they're in the neighborhood. There's only one slot that'll be empty, the very first one after the championship match, by tradition reserved for the tournament's winner to take the first shot at the next level of battling.
You're not here for the Four, though, not now. You want the humble right-hand passage, where there's a small plaque reading "Offices and Administration" above an arrow that points you down a cramped, shadowy corridor, electric lights burning in alcoves originally meant to hold torches. Ultimately you find yourself inside the office building squatting apologetically behind the League's ancient stone home, the place where the real work gets done. It's brighter here, the walls studded with actual windows, and all over dark blue, from the thick carpet to the tasteful abstract prints on the walls.
The receptionist has his eyes on you long before you reach the desk, and you have to remind yourself that you're the great Nathaniel Morgan. You are. Or, rather, you're the great Nathaniel Morgan who's going to be on time for his hearing so he doesn't get disqualified from the tournament, as opposed to the great Nathaniel Morgan who somehow vanished last night, slipped out before you even woke up. You'd thought he wasn't capable of closing a door without slamming it, but he must have managed somehow. You had no idea he'd left until you barged into the bedroom to demand he get up, only to find nothing there but the unmade bed.
So you'll be out looking for the great Nathaniel Morgan later, and in the meantime you'll be handling his business with the League. You have no idea why the receptionist is looking at you all funny; you know you look perfect. You even got your clothes off an unwary teenager headed out to the plateau alone, so they must look fine. You're even positive you put them all on the right way, and you are not, you are not going to stop and check. You are going to walk right up to the desk and say exactly what you've been rehearsing in your head.
"Did you need something else?" the receptionist asks before you can even open your mouth.
"Hello. I am the great Nathaniel Morgan. I am supposed to be at a hearing at ten. Where do I go?"
The receptionist's mouth tightens. "I know. You were here a couple minutes ago, remember? I thought Barry was taking you where you needed to go." For some reason he answers your blank silence by adding, "The nidoking."
"I--I was? I... Yes. Of course," you say, trying to piece the words together despite the spike of adrenaline that sets your heart humming. The great Nathaniel Morgan ran away to come here? What on earth is he doing? "I got lost. Because I am stupid. Can you tell me where I am supposed to go?"
"I can look that up for you, sure. Can I have your ID?"
"No. I, um, I forgot it."
"You had it with you earlier."
"Oh. Yes. I mean. I dropped it. Somewhere."
The receptionist straightens up in his chair, now openly frowning. "Weren't you wearing something completely different a few minutes ago?"
You have to come up with something. Every second of silence makes the receptionist more suspicious, means that whatever you say has to be that much better for him to buy it. You have to come up with something, you have to--you can't. You can't think of a single thing. All you can do is take a deep, fortifying breath and hope that whatever comes out on the exhale makes sense. "Well, actually, I am not the great Nathaniel Morgan. You see, I am his twin brother..."
You stand outside League HQ, away from the main flow of traffic, and stare up at its blank stone facade. The great Nathaniel Morgan's in there somewhere, deciding the fate of your entire mission, and here you are, barred from entry by one unreasonably suspicious office worker. Your hand strays towards the pocket where your pokédex should be. If only you'd remembered to swear every third word, you can't believe you forgot that--but no. You clench your hand into a fist and look the League building up and down. No time to dwell on that.
Old League HQ is ancient stone, built to withstand armies, no purpose to it but to keep people out. The offices around the back, though, are just brick and metal and glass. You could knock them down if you wanted, easy. Burn them down.
No, you can't get angry now. You need to think. The League has the great Nathaniel Morgan hostage in that building, and it's defended by receptionists and security guards and who knows what else. You've got to infiltrate the place, get in without being seen. How? How would Aleksandra Aksakov do it? Probably it would involve kicking somebody in the face. You can do that. But that won't help with the not being seen part.
You could pretend to be delivering a pizza? No, no time to get a disguise like that together. Maybe you could find a deserted room and go through the window, like with those window-cutter things that carve circles out of glass. You don't even need one of those; your claws will work just fine.
But when you're looking up high, thinking of where to try first, you spot a cluster of machines up on the roof, boxes with big fans and huge vents, humming and chugging and keeping it warm inside the building. And it's so obvious then, so obvious you can't help but smirk. Of course. What's the weak point of any evil fortress?
Forget climbing around peering in windows. You just need to find an air vent.
The ventilation system is a dark, twisty maze, full of sharp corners and sudden vertical drops. The only light is what spills in through scattered grates like portals showing glimpses of another world. There's no room for someone the great Nathaniel Morgan's size, but for the child it's perfect, a secret passage from which it will emerge delightfully filthy and ready for adventure. Any other day the child would have wandered for hours, popping in and out and getting into as much trouble as possible.
Today, though, it doesn't want adventure. It wants to find the great Nathaniel Morgan and figure out what he's up to, and unfortunately the ventilation system's charms are getting in the way. The booms and thuds that follow the child wherever it crawls are excellent fun, and ordinarily it would be making as big a racket as possible, but it's supposed to be stealthy, secret. And when it moves carefully, light and airy as can be, shifting its weight in slow, patient stages, it takes forever to get anywhere. On top of that, it doesn't even know where it's going.
The child can't smell the great Nathaniel Morgan from up here, wouldn't be able to even if it could take a deep breath without getting a lungful of dust. The glimpses it catches through the grates show nothing but desks and hallways, the occasional person looking up, probably wondering about the racket in the vents. The child strains its ears with listening--the great Nathaniel Morgan's loud, after all, and even more so when he's cranky. But more sensitive hearing only brings up the volume on the whoosh of blowing air. Below the roaring noise the child can just make out boring grown-up conversation, clacking keys, water running in bathrooms.
And there's that voice. The child knows that voice. It doesn't belong to the great Nathaniel Morgan.
The child starts forward in huge booming lunges, eyes watering as years' worth of dust goes spiraling into the air. There's a sudden drop around a corner and the child falls hard, lands with a bang that shakes the whole world, makes everything shiver so bad the child worries the duct's going to rip free of the ceiling. It untangles from its jumbled upside-downness, ignores the bleeding scrape from an arm caught on a rivet, and listens with heart pounding in its ears, waiting to hear the voice again. Maybe it was just a hallucination, some kind of mistake.
But no, there it is again, and then another voice--the great Nathaniel Morgan's voice this time. It is. The child's stomach fills up with icy dark liquid, its heart hammering, because there's no way those two talking can mean anything good.
It goes slow now, belly-down slither through the dust with its eyes narrowed against the breeze. Up ahead there's a grate, soft golden light spilling through along with the voices. The child has to be quiet now, so quiet, not just no one realizes it's there, but so it can hear what the humans are saying.
"...lay the fuck off already!"
"Stop wasting my time. I don't have all day, and I think the nidoking are starting to get impatient."
"I told you I ain't saying nothing until you get a fucking lawyer in here!"
"For the last time, you aren't under arrest. You don't get a lawyer. If a League investigation found you guilty of license fraud, law enforcement might get involved, but as we both--"
The child slides up to the grate as the great Nathaniel Morgan cuts him off. "Oh, so this is what you call a fucking League investigation, huh? You're gonna bring me in with some bullshit about how I stole my fucking 'dex, drag me off somewhere out of the way, put a couple bruisers on the door and give me a real fucking good 'questioning,' is that it? Think you can make me say whatever the fuck you want? Fuck you!"
"I'm a bruiser!"
"It's not a compliment, Benny."
The child has to lay its cheek against the bottom of the duct to see the nidoking. There are two of them flanking the door, arms crossed over chests. They're practically identical, down to the dusting of pale blue blotches just above their eyes--brothers, probably from the same hatch.
The room itself is full of shelves stacked with dusty old boxes, here and there a haphazard pile of folders. There are signs propped against the wall advertising old tournaments and League events. One has a picture of the Champion on it, Pikachu in his arms; it must be from before he left for Mount Silver, nearly seven years ago now.
A couple of shelves are pushed back to make room for the small folding table where the great Nathaniel Morgan sits, his back to the vent. And standing across from him, laptop open on the table, is Leonard Kerrigan.
"As I was saying, we both know license fraud isn't why you're here, don't we? Drop the act," Leonard Kerrigan says. "Now, for the last time, what are you, and what in the hell did you do to my son?"
"I never met you in my fucking life! Who the hell is your son?"
The child scoots back from the grate and props itself up on its elbows, heart thumping so hard it's surprised the duct doesn't shiver with each beat. Leonard Kerrigan. He thinks the great Nathaniel Morgan is the child? It would be insulted if it weren't so worried.
"I did a bit of digging after our last little talk. I was wondering why you were so interested in that tentacruel. Why did you go to so much trouble to find Matt's pokémon, then only bother to take one of them?"
"Look, I seriously got no clue what in the fuck you're talking about. You got the wrong fucking guy."
"But Matt wasn't that tentacruel's first trainer, was he? There was a girl who owned it first. She had three other pokémon. And when Tentacruel got transferred to a new owner, all three of those did, too. Sound familiar?"
"Hey, dickface! I'm talking to you! Save your crazy story for somebody who gives a fuck, because I ain't your guy!"
"I bet you thought you were real clever, ditching your old ID like that. But did you really think I wouldn't notice when you re-registered your pokémon on another device?"
He figured it out. He figured it all out. The child has to get rid of him. It scoots back over to the grate and peers through. Two nidoking. It can handle that. It shouldn't even have to fight them. It can fire a good thunderbolt from up here.
"Those four pokémon--they certainly have an interesting history. They all belonged to that girl. She's dead. Her parents worked in that Cinnabar lab, the one that blew up. But funny thing is, so did that trainer, the one who went berserk in the Pokémon Center a few months ago. Everyone thought he was dead, too. And that magneton, what was it, some girl and the freak accident with the houndoom pack? She used to live on Cinnabar. Cousin used to be a researcher at the same place. They had a lot of trouble identifying that body."
The child slots its fingers through the grate, slowly, slowly, one at a time. It leans forward and feels the grate shift in its frame. Good. One solid push and it'll be out of the way. Then the child will have a clear shot.
"You've been busy, haven't you?" Leonard Kerrigan says. "I'm sure I don't know the half of it, but I think I have enough to interest the police a great deal, don't you?"
"Yeah, you sure are a fucking genius over there," the great Nathaniel Morgan says. He sounds tired. "Why don't you tell me more about all the shitty things I've been up t--"
The child covers its eyes with its arm, but even then the thunderbolt shows through blinding white. For a moment everything disappears into searing light and roaring heat and the smell of burning. Then it clears and the storage room's dimmer than before, one of the ceiling lights smoking and dead. The area around where Leonard Kerrigan was standing is blackened, a couple filing boxes gone up in flames. The human's crouching down, one hand braced against a shelf for support, but there's not a mark on him.
"Fuck! It wasn't me! It wasn't me, I swear!" The great Nathaniel Morgan nearly falls over his chair in his haste to get away, retreating behind a shelf as the nidoking move to put themselves between him and Leonard Kerrigan.
"Something's weird, Barry," says one. "I know Leo said he only looks like a human, but lightning? Can zoroark even do lightning?"
"We can deal with lightning," Barry replies. He takes a step forward, tilting his head to peer at the great Nathaniel Morgan around the edge of the shelf. "And come on, if he can do that, he's got to be some kind of pokémon, right?"
Leonard Kerrigan straightens up, keeping one hand white-knuckle splayed against the shelf. He adjusts his tie and looks at his laptop, which is still in pristine condition, the scorch marks halting in a neat ring about six inches away from it. "After the last time, did you really think I wouldn't take precautions?" he asks.
"I don't know what the fuck you're talking about! Fuck off with your fucking nidoking! This shit ain't legal, you better believe I'm gonna sue your ass for so many zeros you'll be seeing stars, you prick!" The great Nathaniel Morgan backs up further, wedging himself between a stack of old newspapers and a decomissioned photocopier.
The child kneels just inside the vent, one hand resting palm-up against its thigh, fingers loosely curled. It can deal with Leonard Kerrigan, whatever it is he did to survive that thunderbolt, in a minute. First, it needs the nidoking to come a little closer.
"I don't know about this, Barry," says the nidoking who's hanging back, reared up so he can see over his brother's shoulder. "He looks really scared."
"I'm not going to attack him unless he attacks first. I'm just curious."
The great Nathaniel Morgan's gaze darts between the nidoking; all he can hear from them are quiet, rattling growls. The one in front pushes the shelf aside, toppling a slurry of overloaded folders to the floor. The great Nathaniel Morgan tries to back up, but manages nothing more than banging his head against the wall. "Fucking call them off!" he yells.
"Figured out you can't run, have you?" Leonard Kerrigan says in a poisonously pleasant tone. "I guess we're going to find out whether you can take two nidoking at once. But we don't have to fight. I honestly don't care what you've been up to. As far as I'm concerned, no one else has to know about it. All I want to know is what happened to my son. Give me that, and I can make this all go away. You'll never hear from me again."
"I already told you, you crazy motherfucker, I ain't got the first fucking clue about your son!"
Leonard Kerrigan gives a shaky smile, plucking at the end of his sleeve. "Well, that's unfortunate for both of us, isn't it? Barry?"
The closer nidoking spreads his claws and growls, and the great Nathaniel Morgan turns his head aside, eyes closed, tensing in preparation for the attack. The child leans forward. Just a little closer, just a little. One step, and two, and--cold wind roars down the duct behind the child, freezing energy streaming between its fingers and lacing the gust with snow and glinting hunks of ice.
The nidoking screech as the blizzard pours from the vent and engulfs them both, the rear one tripping over his brother's tail and going down in a thrashing heap. The other lurches into the table, pushing it back against a shelf and pinning Leonard Kerrigan in place. The child pours on more snow and ice until the nidoking's roaring is muffled by a cloud of white, until its whole arm's aching and frostbitten and the blue light flitting between its fingers leaps free with a final crack of materializing ice.
The wind dies away, a few lazy snowflakes sifting down in its wake. The child leans out to get a better view and grimaces. The nidoking are already moving around down below, growling to each other as they struggle to pull themselves free. They're covered foot-deep in snow, and white spills out over the table and fills the narrow aisles between the shelves, reaching almost to the corners of the room. The child's rather impressed with itself.
Then Leonard Kerrigan yells, and the child looks over to find him staring up at it, pointing. The nidoking raise their heads, nervous eyes glinting out from icy masks, and there's no point hiding now. The child teleports to the table, ready to fight.
Except it doesn't. It's still hanging there from the end of the vent with Leonard Kerrigan yelling up at it. He's somehow completely dry and looking no worse for wear for having a table shoved into his gut.
The child shakes itself, annoyed, and tries to teleport again. Then it nearly overbalances and falls out of the duct when it starts moving, assuming the table will be under it. There's a thread of panic wending through its gut as it concentrates, hard, and tries once more. Once more it remains where it is, resolutely solid. And now the nidoking are up, one smacking his tail against his brother's back spikes to clear them of snow.
No time to worry, no time to wonder now. The child leaps from the duct and lands hard in the middle of the table, frost-damaged wood cracking from the impact. One nidoking keeps an eye on the great Nathaniel Morgan, who's huddled shivering against the wall, but the other wheels on the child. He reaches out, claws splayed and movements delicate like he's not sure he ought to touch it.
The child slams an ice punch into his snout, and he rears back with a screech. Now his brother's interested. There's no delicacy in their reaching now, claws slicing through the air. The nidoking are stuck, though, still mired in the snowbank and trapped in far too small a space. They try to slash the child without hitting each other, hurl gobs of poison without getting any on the humans. The child stays back, keeping the table between it and its opponents, and blasts them with streams of water.
Behind it Leonard Kerrigan is inching sideways, making for the exit. The child focuses for a second, then sends one of the nidoking flying into the door with a blast of psychic energy. Leonard Kerrigan recoils, clutching his laptop against his chest as the poison-type slams into the wall, roaring and clawing at the air. A second later the child slams his brother down on top of him and blasts them both with another blizzard. When the attack clears the nidoking lie in a frozen heap, only jutting spines and intermittent patches of purple showing through the snow. The child watches for a few seconds, working its numb fingers back and forth, but nothing moves.
It turns and locks eyes with Leonard Kerrigan, then approaches slowly, carefully, hoping he won't run. As it goes it scans the snow-dusted area around him for any sign of how he's been avoiding its attacks. Leonard Kerrigan trembles under the child's gaze, his Adam's apple working in his throat but no sound making it past his lips. Finally he chokes out, "Get help," and closes his laptop with a snap.
The child pauses, tensed, and glances around for whoever he was talking to. Then realization strikes, and it bares its teeth in irritation. His porygon. No big deal. It'll deal with this fast.
The child's leap rebounds from an invisible wall, a shock of energy standing its hair on end. It lands heavily on its rear, and Leonard Kerrigan bolts for the door. The child stares after him in a daze, its whole body sparking with pins and needles. That wasn't a protect; protect doesn't shock you like that. Light screen or reflect the child would be able to see. It can't think of any pokémon attack it might be, but as it rises, fumbling at the air with limbs it can't feel, it thinks it's encountered something like this not too long ago.
Leonard Kerrigan's flitting around the base of the mound of snow and spikes, looking for a way past. The child makes another cautious approach and easily cuts him off when he makes an abortive rush to its left. It herds him up against the edge of the snowpile, then stops, because what is it supposed to do now?
Leonard Kerrigan ducks out of the way and starts to slip around the child, and it snatches at him instinctively, only for its hand to rebound from something. The child hisses and shakes out its numbing hand, then shuffles forward, forcing Leonard Kerrigan back against the wall until it's within a hair's breadth of touching him. When the human can barely even move, the child stretches its hand out, slowly, even slower when it feels the tingle of the energy barrier sliding over its knuckles, and seizes him by the front of his shirt.
The League's energy shields are designed to keep attacks contained, so no careless battler can send something flying off-target to injure a bystander. It happened now and again in the old days, and not always by accident. But the shields don't stop everything. The League wanted something that would take the edge off a hyper voice but still let the battlers hear their commands, something to stop a rock throw landing on a trainer without blocking their pokéball toss. The shields are calibrated to negate only high-energy events: anything too hot, too fast, too loud. If the child threw a punch at Leonard Kerrigan's face, it'd crack off the barrier and result in nothing but aching knuckles. But when it reaches through gently, like it's just going for a handshake, the shield won't do anything to stop it.
Now that the child's hand is through, of course, it can do anything it likes. It could blast a thunderbolt out of its fingertips and there'd be nothing left of Leonard Kerrigan but a hazy gray outline, flecks of ash stuck to the inside of his shield.
That would be a waste, though, wouldn't it? There's no question the child's going to kill him, but there's something he might be able to help it with first.
The human's frozen, wide-eyed, pulse racing under the child's fingertips. It smiles big for him and twists its fingers tighter into his shirt.
"Hey!"
The child had forgotten the great Nathaniel Morgan was even there. It hears him scrabbling through the snow behind it, but there's no way it's letting him interrupt. "Hey, what're you--stop!"
Leonard Kerrigan makes a raspy gulping noise as the thunder wave hits. He folds up around the child's hand, muscles contracting as the electricity races through his body. The child swats his laptop from between paralyzed fingers, and the tingle of the energy shield against its arm vanishes as the machine clatters to the ground. The child keeps the attack going anyway, enjoying the pain on Leonard Kerrigan's face, until it realizes the smell of char in the air is the human's skin burning. Then it lets go, and Leonard Kerrigan collapses at its feet, gasping and wheezing for air.
"Oh my God, what the fuck are you doing?" The great Nathaniel Morgan grabs the child's shoulder and tries to pull it away from Leonard Kerrigan, and it gives him a casual shove that knocks him hard into a shelf. The child imagines he wants his revenge on Leonard Kerrigan, too, but for now he'll have to wait. It has business with Leonard Kerrigan first.
Whatever device he was using to block the child's teleports is fried. It reaches down to grab him again, and a second later it's gone.
You return as Leonard Kerrigan. You had to ditch his glasses--all they did was make everything blurry--and after a wrestle with his tie you threw the strangling thing away in disgust. Overall you're quite pleased with how everything turned out, though. You run a hand over your face, which feels loose and baggy, like you're skin's a size too big. Being old is weird.
While you were gone the great Nathaniel Morgan climbed on top of the comatose nidoking, and now he's trying to push the poison-types away from the door, digging at the snow with his bare hands. Your sudden appearance makes him jump, and one of the nidoking's spines carves a gash down his arm.
"Come down here," you say over his vehement cursing. "I am going to move that."
You didn't mean he ought to jump on you. Light as he is now, he doesn't even knock you over, and he has to cling to you so he doesn't fall. You try to push him away, but he grabs your arm and says, "You fucker! What the hell'd you do? Where's the League guy?"
"Elsewhere. It is none of your concern."
"Ain't none of my concern, huh? Ain't none of my fucking concern? Fuck that! What the hell've you been up to? What the fuck was that guy talking about, huh, all them trainers gone missing and you stole their pokémon?"
"It is none of your concern." You twist out of his grip and shove him away. The great Nathaniel Morgan stumbles back against the nidoking pile, nearly impaling himself on another spike. But as soon as he catches his balance he comes lurching back at you, fists raised.
"Like hell it ain't none of my fucking concern!" he yells. "When your bullshit gets me dragged off to get tortured by some psycho, you had damn well better believe it's my concern! If you've been murdering your way across all fucking Kanto, that's my fucking concern, too! Because maybe I wanna know if my fucking partner in crime is a douchebag serial killer!"
"I did not kill anybody." What is he so worked up about?
"Oh yeah, I blieve the hell out of that! Then where the fuck is pencil-neck, huh?"
"Who?"
"The guy! The dude you fucking electrocuted right in front of my fucking face!"
"Leonard Kerrigan? I told you he is fine. I only used a thunder wave on him. That is not fatal."
"Oh, it's not, huh? Well, you know what is fucking fatal? It's my fucking fists when they're beating the shit out of a lying little jackass like you!"
You step back from one flailing punch, then duck under another. A solid blow to the chest knocks the great Nathaniel Morgan over on his back. You pin him under one foot, making yourself heavier and heavier until the great Nathaniel Morgan's squirming ends with a hissing whine. "Calm down. I am telling the truth. Leonard Kerrigan is fine. I do not go around killing people. I know it is bad."
The great Nathaniel Morgan gasps, "Oh, yeah? How many people you kill out in--in Viridian? With Mewtwo? How many times you tried to fucking murder me? 'I know killing is bad,' that's... that's some bullshit."
"Well, obviously it is different with Rockets. I do not have a problem killing people who ought to die." You peer into the great Nathaniel Morgan's face, which is flush with anger, tears leaking from the corners of his eyes as his cracked ribs bow under your weight. "I do not understand. Even if I was a murderer, even if I had killed Leonard Kerrigan just now, why would you care? You were a member of Team Rocket. They kill people. A lot of people. And they beat people and torture them and steal from them and everything. But you worked for them anyway. So why would you care if I was a murderer?"
The great Nathaniel Morgan stares up at you for a long moment, wheezing deep, noisy breaths. Then he turns his head aside with a smile stretched painfully wide across his face. "Damn. Got me there, don't ya, Freak? You're right. Why give start giving a shit now?"
"Exactly." You pause, caught by a sudden burst of inspiration. "Wait, did you ever kill anybody? Ice 'em? Bump 'em off? Make 'em sleep with the fish--"
"Saffron ain't even got any water, you fucking moron."
Footsteps outside the door. There's a knock, and someone says, "Hey, Leo?"
You raise your voice. "Help! We are trapped in here! Help, help!"
"What, seriously? Is this...?" The door shudders, setting off a tiny avalanche of disturbed snow, but there's no shifting the nidoking's bulk. The handle rattles ineffectually, and the voice comes again. "Hey! What happened?"
"The nidoking got into a fight and knocked each other out. They are lying against the door."
"What, Barry and Benny?" There's silence a moment, and then the door shudders violently but remains closed. "Look, I'll go get help, okay? Hang tight in there."
"I will. Thank you." When the footsteps fade away again, you look down at the great Nathaniel Morgan. He's still spread-eagled on his back, staring at the wall. "Are you ready to cooperate? We need to get out of here."
"Yeah, sure," the great Nathaniel Morgan says listlessly. "What's it gonna be today, huh? Mugging little old ladies? Drowning baby skitty? Stealing money from charity?"
"No. I am going to handle this. All you need to do is follow me and not talk for once." You step back and glare at him until he gets up, then keep a suspicious eye on him while you go over and retrieve Leonard Kerrigan's laptop.
You were hoping the electricity would make it explode, but it just turned off. It won't come back on again no matter how many times you jab the power button. You turn it over and over, contemplating blowing it up now just to amuse yourself. Meanwhile the great Nathaniel Morgan stares at nothing in particular, a morose expression on his face. He actually is being quiet. It's weird.
More footsteps out in the hall, and something much stronger than any human shoves the door open in one sudden, violent motion. The door moves a hand-span inward, shifting the limp nidoking minutely aside. Thick gray fingers grasp the edge, then lever the door open wide enough for a machoke to poke her head through. "Whoah. What happened in here?"
"Leo? Are you okay?" It's the voice you heard earlier.
"Yes. I am fine. We are coming out." You pick your way over the slushy pile of ice and nidoking, the machoke holding the door open for you as you squeeze through into the hallway.
"Jesus, Leo, what happened?" your rescuer asks, hurrying over to help you down. He looks familiar somehow, a disheveled young man sweating through his shirt. He stands wringing his hands and staring as the great Nathaniel Morgan climbs down to join you.
"I told you, the nidoking started a fight with each other for some reason. They knocked each other out and blocked the door."
A haze of shifting blue and red light bursts from the League employee's pocket, revolving a moment before swirling into the shape of a porygon-Z. It darts forward, clicking and whirring as it does a complete loop around you. "Aid acquired. Do you require further assistance?" it asks in a flat, synthetic voice.
"No. I am fine." You dig around in your pockets and are relieved to find two minimized pokéballs. The lighter one must be it. "Return."
"I don't get it," the League employee says. He's staring at the nidoking, a sad frown on his face. "I've never seen these two fight. What set them off?"
"Yeah, it's weird," the machoke says. She toes a thread of snow leaking around the edge of the door. "And what's with all the snow, anyway?"
"How would I know? I could not understand a word they were saying. It does not matter anyway. I need you to remove the restrictions from this man's account and apologize for causing him trouble," you say.
"Huh? What are you talking about?"
You point at the great Nathaniel Morgan. "This man was told to come here because he was using a stolen pokédex, but that was wrong. He is not. I need you to take the hold off his record so he can continue to compete in the League Championship. And then apologize."
"What? Leo, you showed me"--the man lowers his voice to a mutter, shooting a sideways look at the great Nathaniel Morgan--"you showed me the analysis. There was definitely a backdoor there, and the MAC address--oh!" He rushes over to stand by the machoke as she bends down, offering a hand to one of the nidoking. The poison-type blinks groggily and reaches up to take it, then collapses again when you clench your fingers behind your back, sending an invisible pulse of psychic energy lancing through his skull.
The machoke lets out a nervous growl and straightens up. "I'm going to go get some healing items," she says. "We can't just leave them on the floor like this."
"Hey, wait! Crusher, where are you going?" the human calls after the fighting-type, who's already hurrying off down the hall. "I need you to move these guys somewhere they can get healed! We can't just leave them lying here!"
"She is going to get healing items."
"Oh, that's good," he says. "Wait, how did you--?"
"Anyway, the analysis I did on the pokédex was wrong. Obviously I am bad at my job. I need you to change the entry."
The human massages his temple with one hand. "What? I mean... Look, Leo, you do whatever, okay? If the data was bad, fine, just change the record yourself. I don't want anything to do with this."
"I cannot do this myself. I am leaving for a vacation. Right now."
"You what? Leo, you can't just, you--"
"I will be back in a couple of weeks. There is nothing to worry about. It is not like I am getting kidnapped or anything."
"Leo, no, you can't--this has to stop, Leo." The human stares at you wide-eyed, hands out in a pleading gesture. "Look, this whole thing you've got going on, whatever it is, it has to stop, okay? I don't know why you dragged this guy out here to do whatever in some back room, or why you've been sneaking around, requisitioning all those old files, but I'm done. I can't keep covering for you. You need help, Leo. I mean, look... you sound kind of weird today, all right? Why don't we sit down a minute, talk things over, see what we can figure out?"
"No. I am leaving right now. If you do not get this man's license sorted out, I am sure there will be trouble."
"Look, no, just... give me a minute, okay?" the man says, putting his hand up like he intends to cover his face but not quite making it.
The great Nathaniel Morgan's gazing at nothing in particular, a blank look on his face. He finally rouses when the League man grabs his arm.
"Hey! What the fuck?"
"Here, just one second, over here," the man stammers, dragging the great Nathaniel Morgan a few yards away. He starts talking in an undertone, and you sharpen your hearing to listen in.
"...anything at all?"
"Hell if I know. He was going on about some bullshit like about his son or something, acting like I had any fucking clue what he was talking about. I don't know jack shit! I ain't no pokédex thief, there's no fucking reason for me to be here in the first place!"
"Oh God," the League employee says, and this time he really does cover his face, fingers clutching at his skin. "Oh God, I am so, so sorry."
"Listen, you better do what that guy said and clear my record, because otherwise I'm gonna sue your ass like you wouldn't believe. What the fuck is this shit? I show up for your bullshit hearing and instead I get dragged to some fucking interrogation room with that guy spouting bullshit and threatening to have the nidoking beat the shit outta me?"
"I know, I know, I'm really sorry, I promise I'll get it sorted out for you as quickly as I can. I was just wondering if you might have any idea where Leo, uh, where that man is planning to go? Or can you think of anything you said that might have given him the idea that he needed to leave?"
"Fuck no. That dude's crazy as a bag of fucking skitty. You want to figure out where he's going, ask him your own goddamned self. What I wanna know is when you're gonna do something about this fucking hold on my license."
"Yes, okay, I'll deal with it as soon as I can." The League employee starts to turn away, but the great Nathaniel Morgan steps forward and shoves his arm in the man's face. The League employee winces backwards at the sight of the bloody gash.
"Yeah, that's right," the great Nathaniel Morgan says. "One of your fucking nidoking gave me a present to remember him by."
The League employee's gaze moves from the cut to the great Nathaniel Morgan's face, and his eyes widen as he takes in the rest of your companion's injuries. "Oh God, they didn't--you didn't--I, I mean, if that happened to you while, I mean if Barry and Benny, they--"
It takes a bit of babbling before the great Nathaniel Morgan figures out what the man's getting at. He gives the League employee one of his hideous smash-toothed grins, and the desperate stream of words dies on the man's lips. "Nah, I was ripped up before I got here. Fucking lucky for you, ain't it? But still. What've we got, wrongfully accusing me, hauling me out here to some fucking fake 'hearing,' and then one of your fucking nidoking taking a bite outta me? I ain't no lawyer, but that sounds like one pretty fucking huge lawsuit to me. And are there more chumps that dipshit dragged up here for one of his little heart-to-hearts? I ain't just talking about reaming you and all the other dick-twiddlers who're supposed to be in charge of shit, I'm talking about ruining your entire fucking organization. And if--"
"Okay, okay." The League employee scrubs his face with his sleeve, sweat glistening under the harsh fluorescent lights. "Do you have your license with you?"
The great Nathaniel Morgan wordlessly hands over his pokédex, and the League employee flips it open and pulls a PDA out of his pocket. He keeps shooting glances back at you, like he's worried you're going to sneak away to start your "vacation."
You wish you could. A vacation would be nice, really, after a day like today. Instead you're watching the machoke, who's back with a first aid kit. She kneels by the nidoking and starts going through it, pulling out a couple of spray bottle potions and a flask of glittering revive crystals.
You'd rather those nidoking not wake up just yet. They saw you. You have no idea what anyone else will make of their story, but with all the strangeness surrounding the great Nathaniel Morgan and Leonard Kerrigan, you don't want people poking around and investigating further. You don't need to kill them. You're not really like what the great Nathaniel Morgan thinks. But you do need them to go away, at least until the end of the tournament.
The machoke's absorbed in her task, neatly re-packing the box before reaching for the revives. You open your mouth just slightly, enough to make it the proper shape, and make a gut-wrenching screeching noise. The machoke lurches forward, medicine and bandages scattering in all directions as she drops the box to shield her ears.
The League employee is squinting between the devices in his hands, thumb flying across his PDA's keys. The great Nathaniel Morgan catches you looking and serves you a cold stare. Neither of them could have heard the supersonic, which is too high-pitched for human ears.
The machoke grunts and shakes her head, then stares around the hallway, looking for whatever let off the attack. Of course, the only people here besides her look like humans. She shakes her head again, harder this time, and starts gathering up the scattered bits of the first-aid kit. She can't seem to aim properly, though, fingers scuffing through the carpet a couple inches shy of whatever she reaches for. She manages to grab a bottle of antiseptic, then fumbles and drops it again.
"There you go. You're all set," the League employee says, handing the pokédex back to the great Nathaniel Morgan. "Again, I'm sorry about all of this. I hope you understand--"
"Yeah, yeah, enough with the bullshit. I'm good. But you guys better not fuck with me again, hear? Next time I may not be so fucking forgiving."
"Sure, sure. But for now--Crusher? Can you show this man to the door once you're done over there?"
The machoke keeps her head down, tics jumping in her shoulders and sides. Her hands are shaking. "Don't feel too good."
"Oh. Oh, well, uh," the League employee says, shooting a nervous look at the great Nathaniel Morgan.
"Ain't a problem. I remember the way back. But before I go, what's your name? And that dude over there?"
"My name? Uh, it's Mike. Mike Fitzwallace. And that's Leo Kerrigan."
"Great, Mike. Fucking excellent." The great Nathaniel Morgan gives another gap-toothed smile. "I'll remember that. And if the League fucks with me when I've got a tournament to win, I'll remember who to mention, won't I?" He seems to appreciate Mike Fitzwallace's blanch, sounds almost cheerful when he says, "Catch you later, Mike. You take care, now."
He stomps off down the hall with one hand pressed to the cut on his arm. Mike Fitzwallace lets out a huge sigh, scrubbing his hands over his face then tousling up his hair, staring into the great Nathaniel Morgan's absence. Meanwhile the machoke's managed to pick up a full heal and is struggling with the injector.
"Leo." Mike Fitzwallace comes up to you, slowly, like he's afraid you'll spook. "Leo, what the hell was that? If you wanted to get that guy, you should have tipped off somebody in enforcement instead of... whatever this was. Now nobody can lay a finger on him. Look, I don't know what you've been up to, but I think we should, you know, we should talk about it. Before you go and do anything... Before your vacation."
"No. I am leaving." But first you need to get the nidoking away. You need a distraction.
The machoke grunts a curse as she drops the full heal. Her coordination's improving, though, and she's got hold of it again in a matter of seconds.
And right there is your answer. You turn away from Mike Fitzwallace, then drop down and pretend to be tying your shoelace. Darkness rises in you, a spreading chill that unfurls from the center of your body, radiating outwards in a tingling wave. Out of the corner of your mouth you hiss, "What do you think you're doing, you clumsy idiot?"
The machoke stiffens. "Leo?" Mike Fitzwallace sounds concerned. "What are you doing?"
"Tying my shoelace." Then, in a low tone, "Why are you handling something delicate like that? Shouldn't you be out bench-pressing boulders or something? Why is a pokémon like you even working in an office, anyway?"
The muscles stand out in the machcoke's arms as she clenches her fists. You can hear her breathing, short, ragged bursts of air through her nose. "Leo, please," Mike Fitzwallace says, and he's practically right behind you now. "You've been acting really strange, and I think it would be best if we took a minute and--"
"Look at you, getting worked up over a few little insults," you hiss. You can feel the darkness weaving its way into your voice, the words leaving your lips so cold and biting you're almost surprised they don't fog the air white. "What are you going to do about it, huh?" you ask. "You savage."
The full heal crumples in the machoke's hand, liquid dribbling between her fingers. She lets out a roar so loud even you're caught off guard.
"Crusher? Crusher!" Mike Fitzwallace gasps as the machoke surges to her feet and aims a mega kick at your head. It misses completely, but you know how to make it look close.
You stumble backwards, and Mike Fitzwallace steps up in your place, waving his arms in the machoke's face. "Jesus, Crusher! Hey!"
The machoke turns to him, of course, and he backs off again immediately. "Okay, just calm down now, calm--Leo, Porygon! W-wh--Leo, wait!"
Of course you're not going to wait. The human got himself into trouble, and now he can get himself back out. You tear off down the hall at what you hope is a convincing human speed, leaving the machoke's roars and the Mike Fitzwallace's shouts behind.
You round a corner and nearly bowl over a flygon making her way towards the commotion. Curious faces poke from conference rooms and offices, looking vaguely in the direction of the noise and calling out to you as you race past.
You ignore them and turn another corner, and another, and now you're too far away to hear the machoke anymore. You sprint down another hallway just in case, glance around to make sure no one's coming, then fling yourself back to the storeroom with a thought.
Outside the machoke's roars have been joined by the flygon's droning cries, but you ignore the sounds of battle and bend over the nidoking. For a moment you feel smooth, cool armor under your fingertips, and then a teleport carries you far away.
If anything, the nidoking slush pile looks even stranger in the middle of the open field. This is the deepwilds, but here in Indigo's foothills the wild pokémon aren't very scary. And these two are nidoking, after all. They'll be fine. It'll take them a few days to stumble back into civilization, and at that point nothing they say will matter.
You sigh and rub your neck, trying to massage away some of your tension. You got the great Nathaniel Morgan's license cleared, you got away fine, and you even picked up a bonus into the form of Leonard Kerrigan. It's been a good day. You turn your head towards the sun, eyes closed and warm red shining through your eyelids. A good day.
You stand there soaking in the sun until you hear groaning behind you, the scrape of armor over armor as the nidoking rouse. Then you're gone on a whim, from open sunlight to the shade of your front porch.
It's even shadier inside the house, leaf-filtered sunlight leaving most of the room dark. Leonard Kerrigan's struggling with the spiderwebs pinning him to the wall, discarded strands of webbing littering the floor around him. You grimace. You'll need to layer on some more if he's prying himself free that fast.
Leonard Kerrigan freezes when he hears your footsteps, squinting into the dim. His mouth opens slightly when you come closer, prying fingers going still in the mass of webbing. "Do not say anything," you say, kneeling in front of him so he can get a good look at your face--his face. "Just listen, and I will tell you what you need to do to stay alive."
Chapter 26
Pokémon League HQ is Indigo Plateau's oldest building. It's no soaring, fluted cathedral like the League's headquarters in Kalos, no slick office building like the one in Unova, but only ever what it was built to be: a fortress, squat, square, pricked by a row of slit windows near the top, great slabs of plateau stone raised in walls inches thick.
It used to mean something, reaching this place. You'd have to travel through the deepwilds where some of Kanto's strongest pokémon live, following nothing more than a vague, half-hidden trail. That was before the agreement that established the first routes, back when the local pokémon would exert every effort to kill you so your death might warn away other overambitious trainers. League HQ was humanity's farthest outpost, a symbol of its ascendancy as apricorn balls allowed trainers to raise enough pokémon to defend it for the first time.
Now the building's massive front doors have stood open since before the child was born, since before the great Nathaniel Morgan was born, even. Tourists mill and wander around the complex, 'navs out for pictures, browsing the T-shirts in the gift shop.
You pass them without looking, without stopping to admire the double line of stone statues that flank the path to the entrance. They stand more than twice as tall as you, lumpy suggestions of bipedal pokémon worn to anonymity by wind and rain and, sometimes, violence; one statue is no more than a pair of feet on a pedestal, another scored with marks that might have spelled out words before time crept in to rub them out--acts of rebellion that now warrant no more than small informational signs.
You stop beside the statue that stands just before the entryway, a much more recent one depicting a nidoqueen and nidoking in battle, the first rearing high, roaring, the second crouched with spines bristling and teeth bared. It's cast in bronze, but you're sure the pokémon are intended to be the deep blue-purple subspecies that lives in the Indigo Mountains, the ones that give them their human name.
Your hand strays towards the pocket where the pokédex should be, but you stop it before it can find the device missing. You are the great Nathaniel Morgan, you are going to your hearing, and you don't need help to remember it, either. You know the great Nathaniel Morgan well enough by now--far better than you'd like. You won't forget anything, aren't forgetting anything about him. You don't need the pokédex to remind you who you are, and you really don't need to be standing here going over your League history in your head.
Even so, you have to stop again in the HQ building's entry hall, your eyes taking a moment to adjust to the dim. Despite the chandeliers blazing overhead, this old building will always be one of long shadows. Tourists putter about on the left, visiting the Hall of Fame, the museum, the gift shop. And straight ahead, across the echoing stone-tiled floor, lies the cavernous entrance to the Elite Four's chambers. It's roped off for now, a small sign reminding visitors that challenges will resume after the tournament ends. The Four are no doubt booked solid for weeks, what with all the eight-badge trainers around who'll want to take a chance while they're in the neighborhood. There's only one slot that'll be empty, the very first one after the championship match, by tradition reserved for the tournament's winner to take the first shot at the next level of battling.
You're not here for the Four, though, not now. You want the humble right-hand passage, where there's a small plaque reading "Offices and Administration" above an arrow that points you down a cramped, shadowy corridor, electric lights burning in alcoves originally meant to hold torches. Ultimately you find yourself inside the office building squatting apologetically behind the League's ancient stone home, the place where the real work gets done. It's brighter here, the walls studded with actual windows, and all over dark blue, from the thick carpet to the tasteful abstract prints on the walls.
The receptionist has his eyes on you long before you reach the desk, and you have to remind yourself that you're the great Nathaniel Morgan. You are. Or, rather, you're the great Nathaniel Morgan who's going to be on time for his hearing so he doesn't get disqualified from the tournament, as opposed to the great Nathaniel Morgan who somehow vanished last night, slipped out before you even woke up. You'd thought he wasn't capable of closing a door without slamming it, but he must have managed somehow. You had no idea he'd left until you barged into the bedroom to demand he get up, only to find nothing there but the unmade bed.
So you'll be out looking for the great Nathaniel Morgan later, and in the meantime you'll be handling his business with the League. You have no idea why the receptionist is looking at you all funny; you know you look perfect. You even got your clothes off an unwary teenager headed out to the plateau alone, so they must look fine. You're even positive you put them all on the right way, and you are not, you are not going to stop and check. You are going to walk right up to the desk and say exactly what you've been rehearsing in your head.
"Did you need something else?" the receptionist asks before you can even open your mouth.
"Hello. I am the great Nathaniel Morgan. I am supposed to be at a hearing at ten. Where do I go?"
The receptionist's mouth tightens. "I know. You were here a couple minutes ago, remember? I thought Barry was taking you where you needed to go." For some reason he answers your blank silence by adding, "The nidoking."
"I--I was? I... Yes. Of course," you say, trying to piece the words together despite the spike of adrenaline that sets your heart humming. The great Nathaniel Morgan ran away to come here? What on earth is he doing? "I got lost. Because I am stupid. Can you tell me where I am supposed to go?"
"I can look that up for you, sure. Can I have your ID?"
"No. I, um, I forgot it."
"You had it with you earlier."
"Oh. Yes. I mean. I dropped it. Somewhere."
The receptionist straightens up in his chair, now openly frowning. "Weren't you wearing something completely different a few minutes ago?"
You have to come up with something. Every second of silence makes the receptionist more suspicious, means that whatever you say has to be that much better for him to buy it. You have to come up with something, you have to--you can't. You can't think of a single thing. All you can do is take a deep, fortifying breath and hope that whatever comes out on the exhale makes sense. "Well, actually, I am not the great Nathaniel Morgan. You see, I am his twin brother..."
--
You stand outside League HQ, away from the main flow of traffic, and stare up at its blank stone facade. The great Nathaniel Morgan's in there somewhere, deciding the fate of your entire mission, and here you are, barred from entry by one unreasonably suspicious office worker. Your hand strays towards the pocket where your pokédex should be. If only you'd remembered to swear every third word, you can't believe you forgot that--but no. You clench your hand into a fist and look the League building up and down. No time to dwell on that.
Old League HQ is ancient stone, built to withstand armies, no purpose to it but to keep people out. The offices around the back, though, are just brick and metal and glass. You could knock them down if you wanted, easy. Burn them down.
No, you can't get angry now. You need to think. The League has the great Nathaniel Morgan hostage in that building, and it's defended by receptionists and security guards and who knows what else. You've got to infiltrate the place, get in without being seen. How? How would Aleksandra Aksakov do it? Probably it would involve kicking somebody in the face. You can do that. But that won't help with the not being seen part.
You could pretend to be delivering a pizza? No, no time to get a disguise like that together. Maybe you could find a deserted room and go through the window, like with those window-cutter things that carve circles out of glass. You don't even need one of those; your claws will work just fine.
But when you're looking up high, thinking of where to try first, you spot a cluster of machines up on the roof, boxes with big fans and huge vents, humming and chugging and keeping it warm inside the building. And it's so obvious then, so obvious you can't help but smirk. Of course. What's the weak point of any evil fortress?
Forget climbing around peering in windows. You just need to find an air vent.
--
The ventilation system is a dark, twisty maze, full of sharp corners and sudden vertical drops. The only light is what spills in through scattered grates like portals showing glimpses of another world. There's no room for someone the great Nathaniel Morgan's size, but for the child it's perfect, a secret passage from which it will emerge delightfully filthy and ready for adventure. Any other day the child would have wandered for hours, popping in and out and getting into as much trouble as possible.
Today, though, it doesn't want adventure. It wants to find the great Nathaniel Morgan and figure out what he's up to, and unfortunately the ventilation system's charms are getting in the way. The booms and thuds that follow the child wherever it crawls are excellent fun, and ordinarily it would be making as big a racket as possible, but it's supposed to be stealthy, secret. And when it moves carefully, light and airy as can be, shifting its weight in slow, patient stages, it takes forever to get anywhere. On top of that, it doesn't even know where it's going.
The child can't smell the great Nathaniel Morgan from up here, wouldn't be able to even if it could take a deep breath without getting a lungful of dust. The glimpses it catches through the grates show nothing but desks and hallways, the occasional person looking up, probably wondering about the racket in the vents. The child strains its ears with listening--the great Nathaniel Morgan's loud, after all, and even more so when he's cranky. But more sensitive hearing only brings up the volume on the whoosh of blowing air. Below the roaring noise the child can just make out boring grown-up conversation, clacking keys, water running in bathrooms.
And there's that voice. The child knows that voice. It doesn't belong to the great Nathaniel Morgan.
The child starts forward in huge booming lunges, eyes watering as years' worth of dust goes spiraling into the air. There's a sudden drop around a corner and the child falls hard, lands with a bang that shakes the whole world, makes everything shiver so bad the child worries the duct's going to rip free of the ceiling. It untangles from its jumbled upside-downness, ignores the bleeding scrape from an arm caught on a rivet, and listens with heart pounding in its ears, waiting to hear the voice again. Maybe it was just a hallucination, some kind of mistake.
But no, there it is again, and then another voice--the great Nathaniel Morgan's voice this time. It is. The child's stomach fills up with icy dark liquid, its heart hammering, because there's no way those two talking can mean anything good.
It goes slow now, belly-down slither through the dust with its eyes narrowed against the breeze. Up ahead there's a grate, soft golden light spilling through along with the voices. The child has to be quiet now, so quiet, not just no one realizes it's there, but so it can hear what the humans are saying.
"...lay the fuck off already!"
"Stop wasting my time. I don't have all day, and I think the nidoking are starting to get impatient."
"I told you I ain't saying nothing until you get a fucking lawyer in here!"
"For the last time, you aren't under arrest. You don't get a lawyer. If a League investigation found you guilty of license fraud, law enforcement might get involved, but as we both--"
The child slides up to the grate as the great Nathaniel Morgan cuts him off. "Oh, so this is what you call a fucking League investigation, huh? You're gonna bring me in with some bullshit about how I stole my fucking 'dex, drag me off somewhere out of the way, put a couple bruisers on the door and give me a real fucking good 'questioning,' is that it? Think you can make me say whatever the fuck you want? Fuck you!"
"I'm a bruiser!"
"It's not a compliment, Benny."
The child has to lay its cheek against the bottom of the duct to see the nidoking. There are two of them flanking the door, arms crossed over chests. They're practically identical, down to the dusting of pale blue blotches just above their eyes--brothers, probably from the same hatch.
The room itself is full of shelves stacked with dusty old boxes, here and there a haphazard pile of folders. There are signs propped against the wall advertising old tournaments and League events. One has a picture of the Champion on it, Pikachu in his arms; it must be from before he left for Mount Silver, nearly seven years ago now.
A couple of shelves are pushed back to make room for the small folding table where the great Nathaniel Morgan sits, his back to the vent. And standing across from him, laptop open on the table, is Leonard Kerrigan.
"As I was saying, we both know license fraud isn't why you're here, don't we? Drop the act," Leonard Kerrigan says. "Now, for the last time, what are you, and what in the hell did you do to my son?"
"I never met you in my fucking life! Who the hell is your son?"
The child scoots back from the grate and props itself up on its elbows, heart thumping so hard it's surprised the duct doesn't shiver with each beat. Leonard Kerrigan. He thinks the great Nathaniel Morgan is the child? It would be insulted if it weren't so worried.
"I did a bit of digging after our last little talk. I was wondering why you were so interested in that tentacruel. Why did you go to so much trouble to find Matt's pokémon, then only bother to take one of them?"
"Look, I seriously got no clue what in the fuck you're talking about. You got the wrong fucking guy."
"But Matt wasn't that tentacruel's first trainer, was he? There was a girl who owned it first. She had three other pokémon. And when Tentacruel got transferred to a new owner, all three of those did, too. Sound familiar?"
"Hey, dickface! I'm talking to you! Save your crazy story for somebody who gives a fuck, because I ain't your guy!"
"I bet you thought you were real clever, ditching your old ID like that. But did you really think I wouldn't notice when you re-registered your pokémon on another device?"
He figured it out. He figured it all out. The child has to get rid of him. It scoots back over to the grate and peers through. Two nidoking. It can handle that. It shouldn't even have to fight them. It can fire a good thunderbolt from up here.
"Those four pokémon--they certainly have an interesting history. They all belonged to that girl. She's dead. Her parents worked in that Cinnabar lab, the one that blew up. But funny thing is, so did that trainer, the one who went berserk in the Pokémon Center a few months ago. Everyone thought he was dead, too. And that magneton, what was it, some girl and the freak accident with the houndoom pack? She used to live on Cinnabar. Cousin used to be a researcher at the same place. They had a lot of trouble identifying that body."
The child slots its fingers through the grate, slowly, slowly, one at a time. It leans forward and feels the grate shift in its frame. Good. One solid push and it'll be out of the way. Then the child will have a clear shot.
"You've been busy, haven't you?" Leonard Kerrigan says. "I'm sure I don't know the half of it, but I think I have enough to interest the police a great deal, don't you?"
"Yeah, you sure are a fucking genius over there," the great Nathaniel Morgan says. He sounds tired. "Why don't you tell me more about all the shitty things I've been up t--"
The child covers its eyes with its arm, but even then the thunderbolt shows through blinding white. For a moment everything disappears into searing light and roaring heat and the smell of burning. Then it clears and the storage room's dimmer than before, one of the ceiling lights smoking and dead. The area around where Leonard Kerrigan was standing is blackened, a couple filing boxes gone up in flames. The human's crouching down, one hand braced against a shelf for support, but there's not a mark on him.
"Fuck! It wasn't me! It wasn't me, I swear!" The great Nathaniel Morgan nearly falls over his chair in his haste to get away, retreating behind a shelf as the nidoking move to put themselves between him and Leonard Kerrigan.
"Something's weird, Barry," says one. "I know Leo said he only looks like a human, but lightning? Can zoroark even do lightning?"
"We can deal with lightning," Barry replies. He takes a step forward, tilting his head to peer at the great Nathaniel Morgan around the edge of the shelf. "And come on, if he can do that, he's got to be some kind of pokémon, right?"
Leonard Kerrigan straightens up, keeping one hand white-knuckle splayed against the shelf. He adjusts his tie and looks at his laptop, which is still in pristine condition, the scorch marks halting in a neat ring about six inches away from it. "After the last time, did you really think I wouldn't take precautions?" he asks.
"I don't know what the fuck you're talking about! Fuck off with your fucking nidoking! This shit ain't legal, you better believe I'm gonna sue your ass for so many zeros you'll be seeing stars, you prick!" The great Nathaniel Morgan backs up further, wedging himself between a stack of old newspapers and a decomissioned photocopier.
The child kneels just inside the vent, one hand resting palm-up against its thigh, fingers loosely curled. It can deal with Leonard Kerrigan, whatever it is he did to survive that thunderbolt, in a minute. First, it needs the nidoking to come a little closer.
"I don't know about this, Barry," says the nidoking who's hanging back, reared up so he can see over his brother's shoulder. "He looks really scared."
"I'm not going to attack him unless he attacks first. I'm just curious."
The great Nathaniel Morgan's gaze darts between the nidoking; all he can hear from them are quiet, rattling growls. The one in front pushes the shelf aside, toppling a slurry of overloaded folders to the floor. The great Nathaniel Morgan tries to back up, but manages nothing more than banging his head against the wall. "Fucking call them off!" he yells.
"Figured out you can't run, have you?" Leonard Kerrigan says in a poisonously pleasant tone. "I guess we're going to find out whether you can take two nidoking at once. But we don't have to fight. I honestly don't care what you've been up to. As far as I'm concerned, no one else has to know about it. All I want to know is what happened to my son. Give me that, and I can make this all go away. You'll never hear from me again."
"I already told you, you crazy motherfucker, I ain't got the first fucking clue about your son!"
Leonard Kerrigan gives a shaky smile, plucking at the end of his sleeve. "Well, that's unfortunate for both of us, isn't it? Barry?"
The closer nidoking spreads his claws and growls, and the great Nathaniel Morgan turns his head aside, eyes closed, tensing in preparation for the attack. The child leans forward. Just a little closer, just a little. One step, and two, and--cold wind roars down the duct behind the child, freezing energy streaming between its fingers and lacing the gust with snow and glinting hunks of ice.
The nidoking screech as the blizzard pours from the vent and engulfs them both, the rear one tripping over his brother's tail and going down in a thrashing heap. The other lurches into the table, pushing it back against a shelf and pinning Leonard Kerrigan in place. The child pours on more snow and ice until the nidoking's roaring is muffled by a cloud of white, until its whole arm's aching and frostbitten and the blue light flitting between its fingers leaps free with a final crack of materializing ice.
The wind dies away, a few lazy snowflakes sifting down in its wake. The child leans out to get a better view and grimaces. The nidoking are already moving around down below, growling to each other as they struggle to pull themselves free. They're covered foot-deep in snow, and white spills out over the table and fills the narrow aisles between the shelves, reaching almost to the corners of the room. The child's rather impressed with itself.
Then Leonard Kerrigan yells, and the child looks over to find him staring up at it, pointing. The nidoking raise their heads, nervous eyes glinting out from icy masks, and there's no point hiding now. The child teleports to the table, ready to fight.
Except it doesn't. It's still hanging there from the end of the vent with Leonard Kerrigan yelling up at it. He's somehow completely dry and looking no worse for wear for having a table shoved into his gut.
The child shakes itself, annoyed, and tries to teleport again. Then it nearly overbalances and falls out of the duct when it starts moving, assuming the table will be under it. There's a thread of panic wending through its gut as it concentrates, hard, and tries once more. Once more it remains where it is, resolutely solid. And now the nidoking are up, one smacking his tail against his brother's back spikes to clear them of snow.
No time to worry, no time to wonder now. The child leaps from the duct and lands hard in the middle of the table, frost-damaged wood cracking from the impact. One nidoking keeps an eye on the great Nathaniel Morgan, who's huddled shivering against the wall, but the other wheels on the child. He reaches out, claws splayed and movements delicate like he's not sure he ought to touch it.
The child slams an ice punch into his snout, and he rears back with a screech. Now his brother's interested. There's no delicacy in their reaching now, claws slicing through the air. The nidoking are stuck, though, still mired in the snowbank and trapped in far too small a space. They try to slash the child without hitting each other, hurl gobs of poison without getting any on the humans. The child stays back, keeping the table between it and its opponents, and blasts them with streams of water.
Behind it Leonard Kerrigan is inching sideways, making for the exit. The child focuses for a second, then sends one of the nidoking flying into the door with a blast of psychic energy. Leonard Kerrigan recoils, clutching his laptop against his chest as the poison-type slams into the wall, roaring and clawing at the air. A second later the child slams his brother down on top of him and blasts them both with another blizzard. When the attack clears the nidoking lie in a frozen heap, only jutting spines and intermittent patches of purple showing through the snow. The child watches for a few seconds, working its numb fingers back and forth, but nothing moves.
It turns and locks eyes with Leonard Kerrigan, then approaches slowly, carefully, hoping he won't run. As it goes it scans the snow-dusted area around him for any sign of how he's been avoiding its attacks. Leonard Kerrigan trembles under the child's gaze, his Adam's apple working in his throat but no sound making it past his lips. Finally he chokes out, "Get help," and closes his laptop with a snap.
The child pauses, tensed, and glances around for whoever he was talking to. Then realization strikes, and it bares its teeth in irritation. His porygon. No big deal. It'll deal with this fast.
The child's leap rebounds from an invisible wall, a shock of energy standing its hair on end. It lands heavily on its rear, and Leonard Kerrigan bolts for the door. The child stares after him in a daze, its whole body sparking with pins and needles. That wasn't a protect; protect doesn't shock you like that. Light screen or reflect the child would be able to see. It can't think of any pokémon attack it might be, but as it rises, fumbling at the air with limbs it can't feel, it thinks it's encountered something like this not too long ago.
Leonard Kerrigan's flitting around the base of the mound of snow and spikes, looking for a way past. The child makes another cautious approach and easily cuts him off when he makes an abortive rush to its left. It herds him up against the edge of the snowpile, then stops, because what is it supposed to do now?
Leonard Kerrigan ducks out of the way and starts to slip around the child, and it snatches at him instinctively, only for its hand to rebound from something. The child hisses and shakes out its numbing hand, then shuffles forward, forcing Leonard Kerrigan back against the wall until it's within a hair's breadth of touching him. When the human can barely even move, the child stretches its hand out, slowly, even slower when it feels the tingle of the energy barrier sliding over its knuckles, and seizes him by the front of his shirt.
The League's energy shields are designed to keep attacks contained, so no careless battler can send something flying off-target to injure a bystander. It happened now and again in the old days, and not always by accident. But the shields don't stop everything. The League wanted something that would take the edge off a hyper voice but still let the battlers hear their commands, something to stop a rock throw landing on a trainer without blocking their pokéball toss. The shields are calibrated to negate only high-energy events: anything too hot, too fast, too loud. If the child threw a punch at Leonard Kerrigan's face, it'd crack off the barrier and result in nothing but aching knuckles. But when it reaches through gently, like it's just going for a handshake, the shield won't do anything to stop it.
Now that the child's hand is through, of course, it can do anything it likes. It could blast a thunderbolt out of its fingertips and there'd be nothing left of Leonard Kerrigan but a hazy gray outline, flecks of ash stuck to the inside of his shield.
That would be a waste, though, wouldn't it? There's no question the child's going to kill him, but there's something he might be able to help it with first.
The human's frozen, wide-eyed, pulse racing under the child's fingertips. It smiles big for him and twists its fingers tighter into his shirt.
"Hey!"
The child had forgotten the great Nathaniel Morgan was even there. It hears him scrabbling through the snow behind it, but there's no way it's letting him interrupt. "Hey, what're you--stop!"
Leonard Kerrigan makes a raspy gulping noise as the thunder wave hits. He folds up around the child's hand, muscles contracting as the electricity races through his body. The child swats his laptop from between paralyzed fingers, and the tingle of the energy shield against its arm vanishes as the machine clatters to the ground. The child keeps the attack going anyway, enjoying the pain on Leonard Kerrigan's face, until it realizes the smell of char in the air is the human's skin burning. Then it lets go, and Leonard Kerrigan collapses at its feet, gasping and wheezing for air.
"Oh my God, what the fuck are you doing?" The great Nathaniel Morgan grabs the child's shoulder and tries to pull it away from Leonard Kerrigan, and it gives him a casual shove that knocks him hard into a shelf. The child imagines he wants his revenge on Leonard Kerrigan, too, but for now he'll have to wait. It has business with Leonard Kerrigan first.
Whatever device he was using to block the child's teleports is fried. It reaches down to grab him again, and a second later it's gone.
--
You return as Leonard Kerrigan. You had to ditch his glasses--all they did was make everything blurry--and after a wrestle with his tie you threw the strangling thing away in disgust. Overall you're quite pleased with how everything turned out, though. You run a hand over your face, which feels loose and baggy, like you're skin's a size too big. Being old is weird.
While you were gone the great Nathaniel Morgan climbed on top of the comatose nidoking, and now he's trying to push the poison-types away from the door, digging at the snow with his bare hands. Your sudden appearance makes him jump, and one of the nidoking's spines carves a gash down his arm.
"Come down here," you say over his vehement cursing. "I am going to move that."
You didn't mean he ought to jump on you. Light as he is now, he doesn't even knock you over, and he has to cling to you so he doesn't fall. You try to push him away, but he grabs your arm and says, "You fucker! What the hell'd you do? Where's the League guy?"
"Elsewhere. It is none of your concern."
"Ain't none of my concern, huh? Ain't none of my fucking concern? Fuck that! What the hell've you been up to? What the fuck was that guy talking about, huh, all them trainers gone missing and you stole their pokémon?"
"It is none of your concern." You twist out of his grip and shove him away. The great Nathaniel Morgan stumbles back against the nidoking pile, nearly impaling himself on another spike. But as soon as he catches his balance he comes lurching back at you, fists raised.
"Like hell it ain't none of my fucking concern!" he yells. "When your bullshit gets me dragged off to get tortured by some psycho, you had damn well better believe it's my concern! If you've been murdering your way across all fucking Kanto, that's my fucking concern, too! Because maybe I wanna know if my fucking partner in crime is a douchebag serial killer!"
"I did not kill anybody." What is he so worked up about?
"Oh yeah, I blieve the hell out of that! Then where the fuck is pencil-neck, huh?"
"Who?"
"The guy! The dude you fucking electrocuted right in front of my fucking face!"
"Leonard Kerrigan? I told you he is fine. I only used a thunder wave on him. That is not fatal."
"Oh, it's not, huh? Well, you know what is fucking fatal? It's my fucking fists when they're beating the shit out of a lying little jackass like you!"
You step back from one flailing punch, then duck under another. A solid blow to the chest knocks the great Nathaniel Morgan over on his back. You pin him under one foot, making yourself heavier and heavier until the great Nathaniel Morgan's squirming ends with a hissing whine. "Calm down. I am telling the truth. Leonard Kerrigan is fine. I do not go around killing people. I know it is bad."
The great Nathaniel Morgan gasps, "Oh, yeah? How many people you kill out in--in Viridian? With Mewtwo? How many times you tried to fucking murder me? 'I know killing is bad,' that's... that's some bullshit."
"Well, obviously it is different with Rockets. I do not have a problem killing people who ought to die." You peer into the great Nathaniel Morgan's face, which is flush with anger, tears leaking from the corners of his eyes as his cracked ribs bow under your weight. "I do not understand. Even if I was a murderer, even if I had killed Leonard Kerrigan just now, why would you care? You were a member of Team Rocket. They kill people. A lot of people. And they beat people and torture them and steal from them and everything. But you worked for them anyway. So why would you care if I was a murderer?"
The great Nathaniel Morgan stares up at you for a long moment, wheezing deep, noisy breaths. Then he turns his head aside with a smile stretched painfully wide across his face. "Damn. Got me there, don't ya, Freak? You're right. Why give start giving a shit now?"
"Exactly." You pause, caught by a sudden burst of inspiration. "Wait, did you ever kill anybody? Ice 'em? Bump 'em off? Make 'em sleep with the fish--"
"Saffron ain't even got any water, you fucking moron."
Footsteps outside the door. There's a knock, and someone says, "Hey, Leo?"
You raise your voice. "Help! We are trapped in here! Help, help!"
"What, seriously? Is this...?" The door shudders, setting off a tiny avalanche of disturbed snow, but there's no shifting the nidoking's bulk. The handle rattles ineffectually, and the voice comes again. "Hey! What happened?"
"The nidoking got into a fight and knocked each other out. They are lying against the door."
"What, Barry and Benny?" There's silence a moment, and then the door shudders violently but remains closed. "Look, I'll go get help, okay? Hang tight in there."
"I will. Thank you." When the footsteps fade away again, you look down at the great Nathaniel Morgan. He's still spread-eagled on his back, staring at the wall. "Are you ready to cooperate? We need to get out of here."
"Yeah, sure," the great Nathaniel Morgan says listlessly. "What's it gonna be today, huh? Mugging little old ladies? Drowning baby skitty? Stealing money from charity?"
"No. I am going to handle this. All you need to do is follow me and not talk for once." You step back and glare at him until he gets up, then keep a suspicious eye on him while you go over and retrieve Leonard Kerrigan's laptop.
You were hoping the electricity would make it explode, but it just turned off. It won't come back on again no matter how many times you jab the power button. You turn it over and over, contemplating blowing it up now just to amuse yourself. Meanwhile the great Nathaniel Morgan stares at nothing in particular, a morose expression on his face. He actually is being quiet. It's weird.
More footsteps out in the hall, and something much stronger than any human shoves the door open in one sudden, violent motion. The door moves a hand-span inward, shifting the limp nidoking minutely aside. Thick gray fingers grasp the edge, then lever the door open wide enough for a machoke to poke her head through. "Whoah. What happened in here?"
"Leo? Are you okay?" It's the voice you heard earlier.
"Yes. I am fine. We are coming out." You pick your way over the slushy pile of ice and nidoking, the machoke holding the door open for you as you squeeze through into the hallway.
"Jesus, Leo, what happened?" your rescuer asks, hurrying over to help you down. He looks familiar somehow, a disheveled young man sweating through his shirt. He stands wringing his hands and staring as the great Nathaniel Morgan climbs down to join you.
"I told you, the nidoking started a fight with each other for some reason. They knocked each other out and blocked the door."
A haze of shifting blue and red light bursts from the League employee's pocket, revolving a moment before swirling into the shape of a porygon-Z. It darts forward, clicking and whirring as it does a complete loop around you. "Aid acquired. Do you require further assistance?" it asks in a flat, synthetic voice.
"No. I am fine." You dig around in your pockets and are relieved to find two minimized pokéballs. The lighter one must be it. "Return."
"I don't get it," the League employee says. He's staring at the nidoking, a sad frown on his face. "I've never seen these two fight. What set them off?"
"Yeah, it's weird," the machoke says. She toes a thread of snow leaking around the edge of the door. "And what's with all the snow, anyway?"
"How would I know? I could not understand a word they were saying. It does not matter anyway. I need you to remove the restrictions from this man's account and apologize for causing him trouble," you say.
"Huh? What are you talking about?"
You point at the great Nathaniel Morgan. "This man was told to come here because he was using a stolen pokédex, but that was wrong. He is not. I need you to take the hold off his record so he can continue to compete in the League Championship. And then apologize."
"What? Leo, you showed me"--the man lowers his voice to a mutter, shooting a sideways look at the great Nathaniel Morgan--"you showed me the analysis. There was definitely a backdoor there, and the MAC address--oh!" He rushes over to stand by the machoke as she bends down, offering a hand to one of the nidoking. The poison-type blinks groggily and reaches up to take it, then collapses again when you clench your fingers behind your back, sending an invisible pulse of psychic energy lancing through his skull.
The machoke lets out a nervous growl and straightens up. "I'm going to go get some healing items," she says. "We can't just leave them on the floor like this."
"Hey, wait! Crusher, where are you going?" the human calls after the fighting-type, who's already hurrying off down the hall. "I need you to move these guys somewhere they can get healed! We can't just leave them lying here!"
"She is going to get healing items."
"Oh, that's good," he says. "Wait, how did you--?"
"Anyway, the analysis I did on the pokédex was wrong. Obviously I am bad at my job. I need you to change the entry."
The human massages his temple with one hand. "What? I mean... Look, Leo, you do whatever, okay? If the data was bad, fine, just change the record yourself. I don't want anything to do with this."
"I cannot do this myself. I am leaving for a vacation. Right now."
"You what? Leo, you can't just, you--"
"I will be back in a couple of weeks. There is nothing to worry about. It is not like I am getting kidnapped or anything."
"Leo, no, you can't--this has to stop, Leo." The human stares at you wide-eyed, hands out in a pleading gesture. "Look, this whole thing you've got going on, whatever it is, it has to stop, okay? I don't know why you dragged this guy out here to do whatever in some back room, or why you've been sneaking around, requisitioning all those old files, but I'm done. I can't keep covering for you. You need help, Leo. I mean, look... you sound kind of weird today, all right? Why don't we sit down a minute, talk things over, see what we can figure out?"
"No. I am leaving right now. If you do not get this man's license sorted out, I am sure there will be trouble."
"Look, no, just... give me a minute, okay?" the man says, putting his hand up like he intends to cover his face but not quite making it.
The great Nathaniel Morgan's gazing at nothing in particular, a blank look on his face. He finally rouses when the League man grabs his arm.
"Hey! What the fuck?"
"Here, just one second, over here," the man stammers, dragging the great Nathaniel Morgan a few yards away. He starts talking in an undertone, and you sharpen your hearing to listen in.
"...anything at all?"
"Hell if I know. He was going on about some bullshit like about his son or something, acting like I had any fucking clue what he was talking about. I don't know jack shit! I ain't no pokédex thief, there's no fucking reason for me to be here in the first place!"
"Oh God," the League employee says, and this time he really does cover his face, fingers clutching at his skin. "Oh God, I am so, so sorry."
"Listen, you better do what that guy said and clear my record, because otherwise I'm gonna sue your ass like you wouldn't believe. What the fuck is this shit? I show up for your bullshit hearing and instead I get dragged to some fucking interrogation room with that guy spouting bullshit and threatening to have the nidoking beat the shit outta me?"
"I know, I know, I'm really sorry, I promise I'll get it sorted out for you as quickly as I can. I was just wondering if you might have any idea where Leo, uh, where that man is planning to go? Or can you think of anything you said that might have given him the idea that he needed to leave?"
"Fuck no. That dude's crazy as a bag of fucking skitty. You want to figure out where he's going, ask him your own goddamned self. What I wanna know is when you're gonna do something about this fucking hold on my license."
"Yes, okay, I'll deal with it as soon as I can." The League employee starts to turn away, but the great Nathaniel Morgan steps forward and shoves his arm in the man's face. The League employee winces backwards at the sight of the bloody gash.
"Yeah, that's right," the great Nathaniel Morgan says. "One of your fucking nidoking gave me a present to remember him by."
The League employee's gaze moves from the cut to the great Nathaniel Morgan's face, and his eyes widen as he takes in the rest of your companion's injuries. "Oh God, they didn't--you didn't--I, I mean, if that happened to you while, I mean if Barry and Benny, they--"
It takes a bit of babbling before the great Nathaniel Morgan figures out what the man's getting at. He gives the League employee one of his hideous smash-toothed grins, and the desperate stream of words dies on the man's lips. "Nah, I was ripped up before I got here. Fucking lucky for you, ain't it? But still. What've we got, wrongfully accusing me, hauling me out here to some fucking fake 'hearing,' and then one of your fucking nidoking taking a bite outta me? I ain't no lawyer, but that sounds like one pretty fucking huge lawsuit to me. And are there more chumps that dipshit dragged up here for one of his little heart-to-hearts? I ain't just talking about reaming you and all the other dick-twiddlers who're supposed to be in charge of shit, I'm talking about ruining your entire fucking organization. And if--"
"Okay, okay." The League employee scrubs his face with his sleeve, sweat glistening under the harsh fluorescent lights. "Do you have your license with you?"
The great Nathaniel Morgan wordlessly hands over his pokédex, and the League employee flips it open and pulls a PDA out of his pocket. He keeps shooting glances back at you, like he's worried you're going to sneak away to start your "vacation."
You wish you could. A vacation would be nice, really, after a day like today. Instead you're watching the machoke, who's back with a first aid kit. She kneels by the nidoking and starts going through it, pulling out a couple of spray bottle potions and a flask of glittering revive crystals.
You'd rather those nidoking not wake up just yet. They saw you. You have no idea what anyone else will make of their story, but with all the strangeness surrounding the great Nathaniel Morgan and Leonard Kerrigan, you don't want people poking around and investigating further. You don't need to kill them. You're not really like what the great Nathaniel Morgan thinks. But you do need them to go away, at least until the end of the tournament.
The machoke's absorbed in her task, neatly re-packing the box before reaching for the revives. You open your mouth just slightly, enough to make it the proper shape, and make a gut-wrenching screeching noise. The machoke lurches forward, medicine and bandages scattering in all directions as she drops the box to shield her ears.
The League employee is squinting between the devices in his hands, thumb flying across his PDA's keys. The great Nathaniel Morgan catches you looking and serves you a cold stare. Neither of them could have heard the supersonic, which is too high-pitched for human ears.
The machoke grunts and shakes her head, then stares around the hallway, looking for whatever let off the attack. Of course, the only people here besides her look like humans. She shakes her head again, harder this time, and starts gathering up the scattered bits of the first-aid kit. She can't seem to aim properly, though, fingers scuffing through the carpet a couple inches shy of whatever she reaches for. She manages to grab a bottle of antiseptic, then fumbles and drops it again.
"There you go. You're all set," the League employee says, handing the pokédex back to the great Nathaniel Morgan. "Again, I'm sorry about all of this. I hope you understand--"
"Yeah, yeah, enough with the bullshit. I'm good. But you guys better not fuck with me again, hear? Next time I may not be so fucking forgiving."
"Sure, sure. But for now--Crusher? Can you show this man to the door once you're done over there?"
The machoke keeps her head down, tics jumping in her shoulders and sides. Her hands are shaking. "Don't feel too good."
"Oh. Oh, well, uh," the League employee says, shooting a nervous look at the great Nathaniel Morgan.
"Ain't a problem. I remember the way back. But before I go, what's your name? And that dude over there?"
"My name? Uh, it's Mike. Mike Fitzwallace. And that's Leo Kerrigan."
"Great, Mike. Fucking excellent." The great Nathaniel Morgan gives another gap-toothed smile. "I'll remember that. And if the League fucks with me when I've got a tournament to win, I'll remember who to mention, won't I?" He seems to appreciate Mike Fitzwallace's blanch, sounds almost cheerful when he says, "Catch you later, Mike. You take care, now."
He stomps off down the hall with one hand pressed to the cut on his arm. Mike Fitzwallace lets out a huge sigh, scrubbing his hands over his face then tousling up his hair, staring into the great Nathaniel Morgan's absence. Meanwhile the machoke's managed to pick up a full heal and is struggling with the injector.
"Leo." Mike Fitzwallace comes up to you, slowly, like he's afraid you'll spook. "Leo, what the hell was that? If you wanted to get that guy, you should have tipped off somebody in enforcement instead of... whatever this was. Now nobody can lay a finger on him. Look, I don't know what you've been up to, but I think we should, you know, we should talk about it. Before you go and do anything... Before your vacation."
"No. I am leaving." But first you need to get the nidoking away. You need a distraction.
The machoke grunts a curse as she drops the full heal. Her coordination's improving, though, and she's got hold of it again in a matter of seconds.
And right there is your answer. You turn away from Mike Fitzwallace, then drop down and pretend to be tying your shoelace. Darkness rises in you, a spreading chill that unfurls from the center of your body, radiating outwards in a tingling wave. Out of the corner of your mouth you hiss, "What do you think you're doing, you clumsy idiot?"
The machoke stiffens. "Leo?" Mike Fitzwallace sounds concerned. "What are you doing?"
"Tying my shoelace." Then, in a low tone, "Why are you handling something delicate like that? Shouldn't you be out bench-pressing boulders or something? Why is a pokémon like you even working in an office, anyway?"
The muscles stand out in the machcoke's arms as she clenches her fists. You can hear her breathing, short, ragged bursts of air through her nose. "Leo, please," Mike Fitzwallace says, and he's practically right behind you now. "You've been acting really strange, and I think it would be best if we took a minute and--"
"Look at you, getting worked up over a few little insults," you hiss. You can feel the darkness weaving its way into your voice, the words leaving your lips so cold and biting you're almost surprised they don't fog the air white. "What are you going to do about it, huh?" you ask. "You savage."
The full heal crumples in the machoke's hand, liquid dribbling between her fingers. She lets out a roar so loud even you're caught off guard.
"Crusher? Crusher!" Mike Fitzwallace gasps as the machoke surges to her feet and aims a mega kick at your head. It misses completely, but you know how to make it look close.
You stumble backwards, and Mike Fitzwallace steps up in your place, waving his arms in the machoke's face. "Jesus, Crusher! Hey!"
The machoke turns to him, of course, and he backs off again immediately. "Okay, just calm down now, calm--Leo, Porygon! W-wh--Leo, wait!"
Of course you're not going to wait. The human got himself into trouble, and now he can get himself back out. You tear off down the hall at what you hope is a convincing human speed, leaving the machoke's roars and the Mike Fitzwallace's shouts behind.
You round a corner and nearly bowl over a flygon making her way towards the commotion. Curious faces poke from conference rooms and offices, looking vaguely in the direction of the noise and calling out to you as you race past.
You ignore them and turn another corner, and another, and now you're too far away to hear the machoke anymore. You sprint down another hallway just in case, glance around to make sure no one's coming, then fling yourself back to the storeroom with a thought.
Outside the machoke's roars have been joined by the flygon's droning cries, but you ignore the sounds of battle and bend over the nidoking. For a moment you feel smooth, cool armor under your fingertips, and then a teleport carries you far away.
--
If anything, the nidoking slush pile looks even stranger in the middle of the open field. This is the deepwilds, but here in Indigo's foothills the wild pokémon aren't very scary. And these two are nidoking, after all. They'll be fine. It'll take them a few days to stumble back into civilization, and at that point nothing they say will matter.
You sigh and rub your neck, trying to massage away some of your tension. You got the great Nathaniel Morgan's license cleared, you got away fine, and you even picked up a bonus into the form of Leonard Kerrigan. It's been a good day. You turn your head towards the sun, eyes closed and warm red shining through your eyelids. A good day.
You stand there soaking in the sun until you hear groaning behind you, the scrape of armor over armor as the nidoking rouse. Then you're gone on a whim, from open sunlight to the shade of your front porch.
It's even shadier inside the house, leaf-filtered sunlight leaving most of the room dark. Leonard Kerrigan's struggling with the spiderwebs pinning him to the wall, discarded strands of webbing littering the floor around him. You grimace. You'll need to layer on some more if he's prying himself free that fast.
Leonard Kerrigan freezes when he hears your footsteps, squinting into the dim. His mouth opens slightly when you come closer, prying fingers going still in the mass of webbing. "Do not say anything," you say, kneeling in front of him so he can get a good look at your face--his face. "Just listen, and I will tell you what you need to do to stay alive."
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