Decrepit

by Nigel Yearning

TWR: A banette is captured by Interpol and the Kanto Regional Police. She is infected with a bio-weapon. The pokemon professor who has her under quarantine has one job: interrogate her to see who is she working for and why. Only problem was the banette's time was running out, so the professor need a little help. Oneshot.

"So what do you have for me?"

Pinki handed him the file, Dr. Andrew Westinghouse glanced at it. When he saw the picture of the banette, he said, "Oh we're going to have fun with this one."

The audino chuckled, but Andy can tell she was faking. Pinki wasn't that kind of pokémon who would laugh at a joke like this.

Three days ago a letter came in from the Faradian Intelligence Agency. It came by courier. Andy greeted the kid and, after exchanging a secret password only he, his source in the FIA, and the courier knew, the courier handed him the dead-drop spike. The doctor slipped him a twenty and sent him on his way.

Pinki huddled behind a desk, clutching her medical bag as Andy dialed the mechanical password on both ends of the spike. One wrong move and it can blow up in his face. Andy had studied and practice FIA spy equipment, so he solved the puzzle without issue. Pinki came crawling out of cover as Andy dumped the note out of the pipe. The note was encrypted, but Andy had the code memorized by heart.

PREP CONTAINMENT ROOM, PREP FOR SMALL GHOST-TYPE.

Translation: prep a room to hold a ghost so we don't all die and become ghosts.

Andy was no specialist in ghost-types, but every pokémon doctor was required to study the abilities of ALL pokémon types regardless of specialty. Worse-case scenario: a ghost-type can possess somebody and take control. Their will over the host. Few humans and pokémon have the will to resist their takeover. Tesla, his late grandfather's pikachu, told him a story where a ghost-type tried to possess him but "couldn't handle the power." Andy doubted it though. The old chu was drunk at the time and he never did say what kind of ghost-type that tried to possess him. However that old chu always spoke the truth when telling stories and he always comes clean when he bullshits.

With that in mind, Andy prepped the room. A simple cavernous cube. Best to have too much space than too little. Nothing was in the room that any pokémon could commandeer. No electronics, no furniture. Nothing. Just a whitewashed room constructed out of concrete and titanium alloy shell. The only way to see into the room was through a one-way mirror that stretched across the whole width of the wall. The window was reinforced to the point where it can withstand the blast of a tank round. Lights placed on the observation side rimmed the window and shined into the desolate space. The only way into that room was through an airlock, which was made up of two vault doors that slide down to the floor. Tougher than the walls of the cells themselves, they can withstand the blast of an atomic bomb.

Containing ghost-types though required an additional precaution. They have a habit of floating through walls and defying the laws of physics, which makes all that reinforcement wasted. So not one but two force fields were added to the room. When activated, both force fields will line all six sides of the room. Both force fields were tuned to handle ethereal energy of all types. No fairy-type, no dark-type, and no psychic or ghost-type can crack that shell. Both force fields were hooked up to an uninterruptible power supply and even then, if they were to fail, security measures built into the wall will shoot out fire and chlorine gas. Incinerating everything inside. To be sure that psychic and ghost-types will burn, a radio frequency would be broadcast within the room that will negate most of their special abilities.

So once a pokémon was sealed in that room, they were not getting out. Not even a mewtwo on crack cocaine can get out.

Or so that was the idea.

He took the note he fished out of the dead-drop spike and dropped it into the incinerator, then looked over the banette's file one last time. "Pinki," he said, "could you please keep an eye out for government officials on the security cameras? Let them in through the door, I will handle them myself. Once they're inside secure every door in the lab. We'll be going under quarantine.

"Audi?" the hearing pokémon asked.

Andy reached out and rubbed Pinki's head. "I can assure you that the change of things getting botched is very high."

Pinki tensed, her sky-blue marble eyes glistening under the LED lighting. Andy stared at her for a few seconds and laughed, then she laughed. Well, sort of. She was scared of a lot of things so it was pointless in giving her confidence. Sometimes Andy jokes with her to much of her dismay, but would never lie to her. Ever.

"No, seriously, things might be fucked. Ghost-type, an unstable one. Hope you haven't been watching any horror movies lately."

The audino's face turned white, not something she wanted to hear. The bitter truth will always be better than the sweetest lie. Without such level of trust, no pokémon will have the capacity to do what they are told.

. . .

A convoy showed up by sundown. All of which were made up of FIPD marked interceptors. Lights flashing, no siren. The center of the convoy was a SWAT van. The lead squad cars pulled up and blocked the road while the van backed into the garage. Pinki let them in as instructed. Andy stood waiting in the loading bay as the van backed in. The engine died and the back doors swung open. SWAT officers came out. All bearing FIPD markings. Two workers came hauling in a large metal crate. Andy couldn't see inside, but the edges were glowing a bright pink. Forcefield, he thought. They put a pokémon in a forcefield and put that in a reinforced metal box.

Andy wasted no time leading the crew to the pokémon containment room. The workers sat the box in the center and rushed out. Andy hit a button and the containment room's blast proof doors slammed shut. The forcefield clicked on, giving the edges of the room a pinkish hue.

The SWAT officers began their patrols around the lab. Quarantine was in effect. Andy sipped his coffee as he stared at the black cube of death. Who knew what was happening inside. Was the banette fighting its way out? Or was it sitting there, waiting? No way to tell by just staring at it, that was for sure.

The door to the hall swung open. Two army scientists came in and manned the instruments by the side wall. Two SWAT team members followed from behind. One stood by the airlock, the other stayed in the hall as familiar friend stepped inside.

"Gizmo?"

Gizmo Westinghouse, Tesla's great-grandson, stepped in. This mutant mouse pokémon, a rikachu as they were called, had the cells of all electric-mice pokémon variants. His evolution was a mess, evolved into a hairless blob with nothing but a head and an arm. Doctors and engineers rigged him up with a cybernetic body. Military hardware spray-painted dark purple. IDs stamped on the back. The scalp above his eyebrows was nothing but an enameled glass dome that was bolted to his head. His brain exposed for all to see, flashing with purplish lights.

The general of the Faradian military's Cyberchu Division gave Andy a hug. His cybernetic metal parts were as warm as his pale skin. Had to be, or else he would freeze.

"So you're dragged into this too, huh."

Andy said, "I was going to say the same thing."

"Tesla's been notified, he's searching for a ghost-type right now to help us with the interrogation process."

"So what brings you into this?"

"They needed a translator, you?"

"They needed space to house it."

Gizmo glanced out through the glass. "The banette. She's quite a brat from what I heard. I guarantee that this sock puppet deserves the deepest hole in Agartha."

The rikachu passed him a folder, Andy took it and opened it up. It was all the information put together about the banette. The marionette pokémon was barely a year old. Evolved against its will by Team Rocket scientists and subjected to forced training and abuse. He smiled. Marionette pokémon tend to hold grudges over everything and anything. Hatred, evil. Pure envy. How could such a pokémon even live? Why do they even exist at all?

What Andy wanted to know about this particular banette was: what kind of beef did it have with the Faradian government? Few pokémon had entered these containment rooms in the past fifty years since their construction, none of whom got out on their own free will. The danger a banette posed was great, sure, but what made this banette any different? Why would such a small pokémon required all these levels of protection when a simple force field can contain them?

The rest of the file was filled with confirmed and suspected reports of the banette's handiwork. Possessing humans and pokémon alike, murdering them with their own hands. Often with a knife. Sometimes with something in the environment like a toilet or a car. Team Rocket had this banette under lock and key, hoping to control it. What the report didn't say was how the banette ended up in the hands of the Faradian government, and why the civilian sector of the Department of Defense was handling this operation and not the military.

Andy closed the file and tossed it on the table. "What do you think of all this?"

Gizmo breathed. "I think I want to sleep with the lights on. Tesla's right about ghost-types, they're nothing but trouble."

"They're not all bad."

"True, but this ghost-type is. But that isn't why we sealed her up in that box."

Gizmo turned to the scientists and nodded. One of them held up a remote and pressed a button. The box burst open and all six sides unfolded to reveal the banette inside.

Andy almost lost his lunch.

The banette sat there in a pile of black tar or goo. It had the consistency of sludge, similar to what would happen to engine oil if it hadn't been changed in a long while. Andy squinted. The banette's belly, thighs, right arm and eye were covered with the stuff. The banette's other eye opened, the pupil glowing a fluorescent green. Andy knew right there and then that it was under some control, but not by pokémon control waves. Something else more powerful caused this to the banette. Whatever happened to her, it did not go well.

The banette's eye locked on to Andy, as if it could see him through the one-way mirror. Maybe it could.

"What happened to it?"

"What happened to her," Gizmo said. "This banette is infected with a type of mold. A superorganism. We aren't sure who made it, the FIA is still trying to trace the serial number on the broken vial found near the area where the banette was captured. Just by looking at her, you can see that the infection started in her belly and had eaten its way out. The mold had made her more powerful but it is also killing her. We aren't sure how much time she has left."

The banette climbed up on her stubby feet, dripping black gunk onto the floor. She reached up and placed her moldy hand against the box's force field. The fungus appeared to be dissolving and reforming itself. Pieces of it fell from the banette and dropped to the floor of the cage to no end. Andy sat down his coffee mug. He had seen some bad diseases torment their hosts in his time, but this was a first. A real first.

"What information are we trying to get out of her?"

"Where she got the mold and why," Gizmo said. "Interpol and the WHO wants the fungus neutralized at the source. It's a biological weapon that can and will go amok if left uncontained. We need to know where it came from so we can track down more mold samples. We also need to know who she is working for. This banette's history is full of solo missions that involves tormenting people and pokémon, not breaking into labs to steal samples for profit."

Andy asked, "Did you ask Tesla if he knew of any bio-weapons Team Rocket were testing during his time with them?"

"I talked to him earlier, he said he heard nothing of it. So this is new."

Andy turned back to the banette. Her zipped up smile stretched ear to ear, her one eye glaring.

"She seems confident."

Gizmo said, "Wait for it."

Within seconds the box's forcefield went down and the banette shot herself across the room. It smashed into the glass at near super-sonic speed, bouncing off of it like a rubber ball. Andy toppled back but Gizmo caught him in time. He adjusted his glasses and breathed. "Damn."

Gizmo grinned, "She's a jokester, gave Officer Jenny a lot of trouble before her backup arrived."

Mold splattered over the spot where the banette crashed into, trailing down to the floor like used car oil. Andy pressed the button for the sanitation spray. Two nozzles from the top of the one-way mirror sprayed over the mold with a vinegar solution. The mold cleared away, revealing the banette hurling itself against the reinforced walls. Mold splattered everywhere. Some in chunks, some in a fine mist. The banette flew up and smashed against the ceiling, then against the side wall for a second time. Finally, she balled her fists and pounded the wall one last time. She then stared at the back corner of the containment cell for a full second before zipping back to the window.

She pressed her face against the glass, her one eye locked on to Andy as she floated in mid-air. Mold dripped down from her legs and onto the floor, he swore he thought the mold was pulsating.

The banette let out garbled speech, unintelligible to Andy's ears.

Gizmo approached the glass. "She said, 'What. Are. You?'"

The banette pulled away and dropped to the floor. Another glob of mold dropped off its back. She kicked the blob against the wall. It splattered into an oily spray, covering the wall in black dots.

Gizmo pressed a button. "I'm your best-friend here. Looks like you got yourself in a pickle."

The banette screeched. "Ban! Ban!"

She then went on a tangent, swinging its arms, flinging mold to and fro. Andy almost laughed when it turned around, bent over, and gave him the finger with her right clean hand.

Gizmo sighed. "She's long gone. The mold had dug itself into her brain. She knows her time is coming soon."

"Will she be willing to cooperate?"

"Maybe, maybe not. But we'll see."

. . .

The banette wandered around in circles jabbering away while Gizmo took notes. Andy wasn't sure what he was supposed to be doing. Nobody told him anything beyond getting a room ready. So he pulled out a notepad and wrote everything he could about the mold and what it was doing to the banette. He didn't like what he was seeing. The mold just fell off in a semi-liquid state, as if the pokémon was shedding it. More just kept growing back, she couldn't seem to shed it all off. Could it be that the mold had become part of the banette's body? The skin underneath might've been eaten away. If the mold were to be removed, the banette's lifeforce would drain away as if her mouth's unzipped. Either she would turn into a stuffed doll or just dropped dead on the spot, Andy wasn't sure. It could be eating her alive from the inside out, or the mold could be rewriting her genetic code for all he knew.

The banette stopped mid-air and dropped to her knees. Andy readied his pen. She hunched over, getting ready to puke. The banette then reached up with her unaffected hand and unzipped her mouth. Mold gushed out of her system in a torrent, spilling out over the floor, spreading like stale syrup. Purple ethereal energy spewed out. The banette squacked and rezipped her mouth, snarling at the wall.

"She's cursing BioPrompt over the mold," Gizmo said. He tossed his pen back onto the table and leaned back. "She's also giving quite mouthful insults about Team Rocket, about us. How many grudges can a banette have anyway?"

"Apparently not enough."

Gizmo said, "She doesn't get it. She is looking for someone to blame, and yet she did this to herself. I'm so tempted to tell her that fact but I don't want to make things worse."

Andy surveyed his notes. "Are we getting any closer to figuring out where she got the mold?"

"No, she's just so full of rage that she just want something to vent at. We need to calm her down," Gizmo turned to him. "On the way here, I stopped by at your house and spoke with Tesla to locate a particular pokémon. A pokémon that we might need. If only the Defense Secretary gave me warning about this, I would have the pokémon on hand to deal with her."

Andy stepped out of the room and got onto the videophone. Since the lab was under government control, two SWAT officers had to accompany him. The line would be traced to be sure Andy was contacting Tesla and nobody else. He dialed in the number to Tesla's tablet and waited.

He picked up on the second ring. The old pikachu was sitting on the couch back home. Andy half-expected to see him being moody since it was a Monday. Instead the old Master of Electricity was content. "Hey," he said, adjusting his eye-goggles. "About time someone called."

"Hey, Tesla. Gizmo said something about a pokémon you have."

The pokémon in question hovered down over Tesla's head. A shuppet, and a pretty friendly one to be exact. "Shuppet!" it chirped.

"You know," said Tesla, "it is very hard to yell at the TV when you have a shuppet sapping your rage."

"Shup, shup!" it said.

Tesla let out a terse pika, then turned back to Andy. "Mark's not home, could you have somebody else pick him up?"

"Sure, Gizmo can send somebody over."

"Okay, have fun with that banette. Tell her to stuff it, why don't cha?"

The videofeed was cut and the screen went black. Andy chuckled, the shuppet did a good job sapping Tesla's rage. However, can it handle the rage of its evolved form?

That last thought sent a shiver up his spine.

He had no idea. Electric-types were his specialty, not ghost-types.

. . .

A police interceptor arrived and Pinki let it in through the loading bay. Within minutes the shuppet came flying into the observation room. It floated up to Andy and nuzzled his face. He reached out and held its plush head. Nothing but fabric-like skin, which was typical for these pokémon. Unlike banettes, shuppets tend to be friendly. Great for kids too, keeps their tantrums under control while giving them a companion to play with. Tesla always had a hot temper that cannot always be cooled. If this shuppet could calm him down, then it could help tame this banette long enough for her to be in the mood to spill the beans. Well, in her case, more mold.

"Shup shup!" The shuppet chirped. It circled Andy a few times and licked his cheek.

Gizmo said, "Ah, she seems to like you."

"I am a very likeable person," Andy said.

"Sure you are."

The shuppet flew up to the glass and peeked inside. As if on cue, the banette slapped its moldy face against the glass. The shuppet let out a high-pitched scream and zipped back, taking cover behind Andy.

"Banette ban," the banette giggled.

"She knows what we're planning," Gizmo said. "She says give it your best shot."

The shuppet screeched. "Shup! Shuppet!"

Andy cradled the puppet pokémon in his arms, the poor thing buried herself in his lab coat. "What is he saying, Gizmo?"

"She wants to get as far away from that banette as possible. 'Tainted,' she says. 'Decrepit."

"Decrepit," Andy held up the shuppet, her eyes overflowing with tears. "Don't worry, the banette can't hurt you. No way she's getting out of containment. We just need your help."

"Shuppet!"

Gizmo said, "She's too scared to do anything."

"Look," Andy said. "We just need you to absorb her anger, just calm her down, and you don't need to deal with her after that."

The shuppet shrugged. "Shuppet."

"She doesn't know if she can," Gizmo translated. "She never done it before."

"Some moves can be used through force fields, you can give it a shot." Andy held the shuppet up to eye-level, thick tears trailing down her cheeks. "Don't worry, she won't hurt you. I'll be ready to take care of you in case she does."

The shuppet buried her face into Andy's chest. "Shuppet shup."

Gizmo shrugged. "She says to get on with it."

To prep the shuppet for the task, Andy went through storage and uncovered an everstone. He returned and, using his amazing doctoring skills, duct-taped the everstone to the back of the shuppet's head. That should prevent the shuppet from evolving when she taps into the banette's corrupted aura. The puppet pokémon tilted her head from side to side, then grunted. "Shup shup!"

"She doesn't like that," Gizmo said. "She doubts you know what you're doing."

"I've spent eight years of my life to get my doctorate and then some, I know what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing!"

Then again, who doesn't like random stones duct-taped to the back of their heads?

The shuppet glanced through the glass. The banette was just sitting there on the floor, scraping globs of mood off its body and tossing it against the ceiling. The marionette pokémon giggled as the mold dripped back down to the floor. It then hunched over again, unzipped its mouth, and coughed out another glob of mold. She zipped it up and gathered the mold with her hands, squishing it into a medieval tower like she was making it out of sand at the beach.

The shuppet was right about one thing: Andy had no idea what would happen when the the shuppet starts bleeding the banette's anger. Tapping the rage off of random humans? Sure. Tapping the rage from its evolved form? That was like trying to hug a grenade to stop it from exploding. Andy called Pinki in. She stepped in, medical bag in tow. The shuppet eyeballed Pinki, then turned back to Andy. Trembling, unsure of herself. It was amazing that the poor thing didn't hightailed it out of there and back to wherever she came from. This shuppet had put a lot of trust in Andy, he couldn't afford to wreck it.

He petted the shuppet's head, then pressed the call button. "Hey, Banette, we have a friend for you."

The banette climbed back to its feet and limped to the window. It stuck itself onto the glass and pulled itself up. The shuppet floated up, their faces centimeters apart, separated by a thick layer of glass. The shuppet trembled, the banette giggled. Andy took a step back as Pinki squeezed his hand. He half-expected the banette to curse the shuppet, or punch through the glass and infect it. Yet, nothing happened. The banette just looked it over, then spoke. The shuppet responded. The marionette pokémon then raised both hands and slapped them against the glass. Mold crept up over its head and chest. Getting thicker, more mature.

The banette gave the shuppet a simple nod. The puppet pokémon hesitated, and then got to work. Her horn glowed sky-blue, forming a ball of light. The SWAT officers in the room readied their guns as the ball of light floated through the glass and covered the banette.

Multiple things happened at once. First, the banette exploded, covering her side of the glass with black mold and purple blood. Next, the shuppet got thrown against the back wall, bending and contorting her body. The power flickered and the room went dark for a second. The instruments on the computer spiked. An alarm went off. Gizmo toppled out of his chair. Pinki screamed. The everstone exploded into powder. Andy shat his pants.

He dove to the floor and scooped the shuppet up. Blood oozed out of its eyes and mouth. "He's having a seizure! Quick, Pinki! Get the OR ready!"

. . .

Dr. Westinghouse had the shuppet in the CT scanner in less than five minutes. The scan showed an aneurysm had burst inside the cerebral artery. Andy jabbed an anesthesia shot into the shuppet, knocking her out in seconds. Andy took a long-thin wire with a camera and made an incision in a blood vessel at the back of the shuppet's mouth, then slipped it into the blood vessel toward the brain. It went up to the affected artery. There, he drained most of the blood that had leaked before stitching the aneurysm closed. He then withdrew the scope and handed the shuppet off to Pinki for her to tend.

All that in less than two hours. Couldn't have gone any better, could've been a whole lot worse.

Andy washed his instruments clean and downed a shot of whiskey, then went to the locker room and showered. All in a day's work, he supposed. Maybe this was why the FIPD needed to use his lab, because the doctor who mans it can take an organism apart piece by piece and stitch them back up again without any ill effects. He done that once with a pikachu that got ran over by a truck, would've been roadkill if it wasn't for his determination and the alcohol in his system.

After changing into a fresh pair of clothes. He returned to the observation room to find Gizmo resting his head on the table. The glass had been sprayed and cleaned. The SWAT officer in the room had his SMG trained at the containment room door, finger hovering over the trigger. Andy peaked through the window. The banette was lying just a meter away. Her body was splayed out in a puddle of mold. The fungus bloomed out and solidified, almost like she had been epoxied to the floor.

Gizmo held up his head, his brain-case lighting up again. "That could've gone better."

"Yeah," Andy glanced at the banette for a second. "Well, the shuppet's going to be okay."

"What happened to her?"

"Aneurysm burst, stitched it closed with a vein-thick camera wire."

"You've been waiting to use that for a while?"

"No, but I've been waiting for the whiskey that comes after every surgery."

Gizmo chuckled. "Yup, Tesla was right about you after all. You're just like your grandfather. Drunk when you're at your best."

Andy stared out at the banette. Her chest rose and fell. Still alive. Not dead, yet.

He pressed the talk button. "You're alright in there, Banette?"

The banette stirred and sat up, peeling itself off the floor like a scab. She stared out into the one-way mirror with its bloodshot eye and began let out a low, gravelly speech.

Gizmo flipped to a fresh page on his notebook and scribbled down notes. He relayed everything to him after the banette finished. It started off in breaking into the Team Rocket base. She knew what it was looking for. The mold, the superorganism. Being a ghost, she just sailed through the walls invisible to where the mold was being housed. There were several samples. Six of them. All of which were housed inside of a glass case and shielded with a forcefield. The banette couldn't break through the shielding so it had to cut power to that room via a circuit breaker. Instead she just destroyed the whole breaker box to add confusion. With the field down, she reached in and, using Shadow Seek, scooped one of the mold samples out of the protective casing. She didn't have a backpack or pockets to hide the sample, so she unzipped her mouth and dropped the vial into her stomach.

That would've worked if the sample didn't breach its casing. Team Rocket had other ghost-types in the area and they tagged her. Exposed, she had to fight her way out. Got banged up in the process. After escaping and getting to a safe place, she coughed out the vial, but not the mold. "She wasn't sure what to think about that," Gizmo added.

Before she could do anything about it, Kanto's regional police had tracked her down. They caught her with a plasma ray and locked her down in a forcefield, which they encased in a box. "The last time she ever saw the stars," Gizmo said. "From there, the Kanto regional police analyzed the vial she coughed out and discovered the mutagen. Contacted Faraday Island who has one of the best quarantine and containment measures in the world. This interrogation would've been done in an underground bunker up at Mt. Faraday, but it is undergoing extensive renovations at the moment. That was where the Defense Secretary pulled your number."

While the banette was in that box. She could feel the mold growing inside her belly. The way she explained it, it grew itself into a mass and she could feel it stick to the inner walls of her abdomen. "It felt good," Gizmo said. "Maybe the equivalent of an opiate high, or close. I'm not too sure."

It still felt good when it ruptured through her skin, piercing through her gut before tearing its way out. It soon became clear that she had signed her own death certificate when the mold started creeping up and down her body. The change started when she first arrived in Faraday Island via a plane. The mold now felt like a part of her, she could no longer feel her skin underneath. It still gave her that euphoric high. She had no incentive in curing it, in fact, she couldn't help it. However, she did say that she wouldn't have tried to hide the sample in her stomach if she had something to at least to store it in while she was making her escape from the Team Rocket lab.

"Could you," Gizmo spoke into the mike, "tell us why you took the sample?"

The banette stood there, dripping more and more mold. It started creeping along her chest and right arm. Bit by bit, she became less pokémon and more of an abomination.

"Banette," she said.

Gizmo turned to Andy. "She was working for someone."

When the mold covered up the banette's right hand, she raised it up for all to see. Three long dagger-like digits emerged, plus a fourth digit that served as a thumb. It kind of reminded Andy of the sharp claw pokémon, but their claws were a pale cry to the machete fingers the banette had.

"Ban ban banette. Ban ban."

Gizmo said, "He said he would've offered her a home, or a place to crash if the banette would deliver the sample to him. Looks like that isn't going to happen."

Andy held down the call button again. "Who is he? What is his name?"

The banette shrugged. "Banette, banette ban."

"She doesn't know," Gizmo said. "All she knows is that he's tall and has green eyes. You'll know him when you see him, whatever that means."

The marionette pokémon glanced at its mold-infused claw one last time and stared back at the one-way mirror. Either at Andy or Gizmo, it didn't matter. "Banette ban ban banette!"

She closed her remaining eye, drew back her arm and raked her claws across her throat. Purple blood and mold spewed everywhere, then the banette dropped to her knees. Within seconds the mold just consumed her body, and then her familiar shaped melted.

Andy grabbed the purge lever. Flames erupted out of the walls and ceiling, washing the observation room in orange light. Dr. Westinghouse stepped back and watched the fire consumed what was left of the banette. He could make out some of the mold boiling away, changing into dust.

. . .

After the fires came a vinegar-enriched shower that cleaned up what was left of the ash. The scientists reassured Andy that the supermold was just as vulnerable as simple black mold. The heat and acidity should neutralize what was left of the stuff. As for the banette herself, all that was left was just a stain. Disposable drones were soon sent in where they sanded away the singed areas where the mold used to be. The whole room would then be painted and the drones themselves be burned. Typical protocol that always worked.

Gizmo slammed down a bottle of coke and tossed it into the trash can. "I'm going to sleep with the light on tonight."

Andy said nothing, he already had his second shot of whisky. The cybernetic rikachu leaned back in his chair. His cable-like tail twirled behind him. The lightshow of his brain case dimmed as he took deep, slow breaths.

After a minute, he said, "The CDC should be arriving to do a final inspection on the containment room to make sure there isn't a single cell of mold that remain. The most important thing is: our jobs are done. The CDC will make good use of your notes to figure out as much as they can of the mold."

"Do they need a sample?"

"They said they salvaged a sample from the broken vial the banette coughed out, but I'm not sure how they found it. Then again, I don't care. I'm already paid my bonus so it's not going to be my problem for a while."

"Am I going to be paid for this?"

"Yeah, however, you'll also be receiving a small bonus for treating the shuppet. You and Pinki both. If I recall the money came indirectly from Tesla's account, so don't tell him."

Gizmo tossed the bottle into the nearby bin. "I'm out of here. Is it alright with you if I spend the night at your place?"

"Yeah, go ahead. The couch is always yours."

He got up and stretched his real arm. "Okay, see you later tonight."

As Gizmo left, Andy checked up on the shuppet. The puppet pokémon was just coming to, and she had a surprise waiting for him. Both of the shuppet's eyes were bloodshot red, as if they had been dipped in paint. Andy grabbed a orthoscope and checked her pupils. Blood inside the corneas. Was it that bad? Could he had prevented it? No way to tell.

The shuppet didn't seem to notice, it just stared straight up at the ceiling. Andy waved the orthoscope's light around. No flinching or blinking, she couldn't see it.

"Shuppet," it said. "Shuppet shup."

Andy placed bandages over both of the shuppet's eyes and then wrapped them with a gauze blindfold. Pinki stepped in and pressed one of her stethoscope-like earlobes against the shuppet's forehead. She shook her head, the damage was done.

But at least the shuppet will live, right? Andy saved its life, but can she live?

Andy cradled the shuppet in his arms. At least the thing didn't see what happened to the banette. That pokémon knew her time was up. Self-destructed without hesitation, nothing Andy hadn't seen before.

Seen?

He shook that thought out of his head, wrong choice of words.

The shuppet coughed, stirring. "Shuppet? Shuppet?"

Andy didn't need a translation. The shuppet's telekinetic powers were shot when she tapped into the banette's rage. It was just too much power. Andy cursed himself, he should've looked it up before putting the shuppet's life on the line. Now the shuppet was blind. Her tiny trust wrecked. Her independence over.

Well, there may be hope to fix her eyes. Andy could schedule an appointment with one of his occulology buddies to survey the damage. However, if the shuppet's telekinetic powers remained stripped, there would be no hope for him to move around on his own.

"I'm going to take the shuppet home with me," he said. "Stay here and lock up once the CDC are done, then head home for the night."

"Audi," Pinki nodded. She was shaken up, but she was used to that. The hearing pokémon was a veteran in the field. Not as long as Andy, but just as experienced. However, there was so much she could take. Which was why she was mostly working for him and Tesla rather than a pokémon center, or Faraday City's own pokémon hospital.

Andy wrapped the shuppet up in a blanket and carried it out to his car. He sat the puppet pokemon in the passenger seat, got in, and drove away. The pokémon lab itself fading from his rear-view mirror. On the way back home, the shuppet pressed her face against the seat cushion. She was miserable, yes, but she wasn't showing any signs of being in pain. Was that a sign that there may be some hope for the shuppet? Andy sure hoped it was.

He tightened his grip on the steering wheel and drove on. He had plenty to think about on the way home.