Silver's meganium created a hundred blades of grass, and directed them upon the gyarados. Silver smiled. Meganium was a more experienced fighter, that much was clear, but its training was getting better and better. Soon, Silver and his team would fear no threat from any in all of the world – beyond Johto, beyond Kanto, beyond the oceans.
The gyarados roared, and the terrible sound was followed by the apparition of a high-pressure jet of water. When it hit Meganium, Silver shuddered, thinking how horrible it'd have felt if it hit him. But Meganium seemed to shrug it off without trouble. That was why it was pokemon fighting, really. They were made for this.
Suddenly, a beam of red light hit the gyarados, and it disappeared. Silver looked frantically around, hoping to see the trainer – strange, to not come earlier or talk, he had thought it was a wild gyarados – but there was no one to be seen all around the lake. In fact, the beam seemed to have come from the sky. Silver shook his head, thinking it was just like some arrogant trainer to hide while their pokemon lost, called back Meganium, and left.
The rain was unbelievable. While Bianca tried, not without difficulty, to keep her umbrella in place, Fifi, the laboratory's panpour, happily skipped in puddles. Well, thought Bianca, at least some of us are having fun with this research project. Bianca could think of several assignments she'd have liked better than learning about the diet of the palpitoads at the moor of Icirrus to find out whether it was something they ate that helped them resist the cold of the winter months. She had to help the professor Juniper, though, and there were some sacrifices to be done for science.
Fifi pulled at Bianca's skirt. She bent down. "What's up, Fifi?"
Fifi did not answer, but her cries became more insistent. Bianca knelt, holding Fifi in her arm, and looked carefully. Behind the rocks covered in algae, something was moving. A feeding palpitoad? Bianca hoped it would be that simple.
Moving very carefully, stopping when Fifi indicated, she slowly turned around the rocks, until she saw what was behind them: a person clothed in a strange green and brown uniform. The palpitoads, who didn't have great sight, seemed to be unaware of the stranger's presence. Trainer or researcher? Bianca wondered what it was the person was hiding from.
The stranger, a man, was fiddling with a sort of radio half-hidden inside his jacket. When Bianca finally revealed herself, he looked briefly at her, and longer at Fifi, then stood up, and nodded at her. Bianca was about to ask his name, when a slow tremor shook the ground. Were the palpitoads acting up?
More tremors followed. Bianca, Fifi, and the stranger in brown were running to safety, and, risking a look behind her, Bianca observed a seismitoad had crawled out of the water, and its bumps were growing. What a crummy day, she thought. Rain, and earthquakes, and apparently someone's provoked the pokemon. On an ordinary, peaceful day in the moor, the seismitoads spent more time in the water, and Bianca had counted on not seeing any this time around.
The earthquake intensified, and Bianca was projected towards the still-shaking tried to place her elbows before her to avoid the brunt of the damage, and while she rolled over mostly unharmed, one of her Poké Balls came loose from her bag, and kept rolling until it hit a tree. Fifi's Poké Ball, she realized. She ran her hand along her belt; her own pokemon were still untouched.
And then, something very unexpected happened. Bianca had stood (difficult as it was) and gained enough fragile balance to go fetch Fifi's ball. The stranger had got out some sort of weapon (Bianca thought; they had tranquilizer guns in the Safari Zones, and the man's weapon was a little like one, except Bianca was fairly sure you needed to be on steady ground to get a good tranquilizer shot), and the fallen Poké Ball fell open with a small buzzing noise.
Before Bianca, shocked, could turn back to the man to wrestle the thing out of his hand, he'd put it back, and was back to fiddling; and Fifi, poor Fifi who hadn't quite understood what was going on, was touched by a red light from the sky, and vanished.
"Fifi!"
The man was running, and Bianca thought she'd done quite enough watching. She grabbed a Poké Ball from her own collection, and Stoutland soon jumped out, growling and barking after the man in green and brown. Stoutland reached the man effortlessly, wrestling him to the ground within seconds, and only then Bianca approached to examine the radio device.
It was bigger than a cellphone and smaller than a home radio, and seemed to be currently turned off. Apart from the glossy screen, it seemed very sturdy, block-shaped with no visible battery compartment. (Though, even if there had been an obvious way to open it, Bianca never felt very at ease with electronics.) There were several lights and switches dotting its surface.
Under Stoutland, the man, coughing and breathing with difficulty, occasionally spoke words. Bianca thought she might have understood the words, like he spoke in a thick accent rather than a distinct language; yet, she didn't. Bianca ordered the pokemon away, and as the man slowly sat back up, she bombarded him with questions.
"What's the device? What are you doing? What was that?"
But she couldn't make out a word of his answer.
"Do you have any pokemon?"
This time, he shook his head. No.
"Did you break the Poké Ball?" She got out another ball, and made a buzzing sound. "Did you do this?" Pointing to him, more buzzing. Finally, either because he feared Stoutland or she was being really tiresome, he nodded.
"Did you do it with that thing?" She held up the device. No. Well, so much for trying to investigate. She pushed it back into his hands, not too politely, and he immediately tried to stand back up – but Stoutland growled. Aha! Perhaps she wasn't such a bad trainer, after all. And clearly, those years as Juniper's assistant had taught her a lot about investigation. She'd already gained three valuable pieces of information. Now to go for the most important one.
"Where is Fifi?"
He didn't seem to understand, so Bianca made Stoutland hold him in place while she searched his belt, jacket and pack. No traces of a Poké Ball anywhere. That made Bianca even more suspicious than the rest – how could that guy have made it here, when he clearly didn't have even a single pokemon?
Finally, furious that she hadn't found anything, she let him leave, not without asking several more time who he was coming on behalf of. "Team Plasma?" she'd tried. "Rocket?"
He said an incomprehensible half-sentence, and then seemed to give up. "Terra," he finally said, two or three times.
Well, all of Unova was going to hear about this new threat. Just he wait until she reached Cheren.
The lights on the communications pad were on, and some barely intelligible words covered by radio noise came out of it, but the screen remained obstinately black. What kind of encryption were their news stations using for the video feeds, anyway? Wade tapped a few places on the screen while muttering under his breath about incompetent software design, and eventually, the voice of an announcer filled the one room of the hut.
"Recents reports have mentioned a new gang of pokemon thieves calling themselves Team Terra, associated with strange laser weapons that could steal trainer's pokemon without a fight. Professor Juniper, one of the first victims after the tragic kidnapping of her lab's panpour..."
Wade tapped another random area, and this time, the user interface for the pad's news chooser came on, informing him for the twelfth time that it had failed to obtain video data for the transmission. Wade was beginning to think these people just didn't stream high-definition video to their receivers, which meant either he'd drawn a backwater part of the world or civilization really was set back in the last few centuries.
He looked outside at the raging thunderstorm and sighed. It really threw a wrench in the whole operation that he couldn't get the pad to link to Singh with the locals using up all the frequencies his card supported. Did the Poké Balls really need a permanent connection to the worldwide Storage System? What about those pokemon encyclopedias the trainers carried, surely they could've worked without auto-update? Even worse was, she was the scientist. Perhaps she'd found a way to switch up her frequency, and he would never know.
Discouraged, he switched to his journaling interface. It was almost time, and perhaps the AI up here could find a way to reach Singh for him.
April 20 – Day 4 – 2AB56EE3 - 1800
We're still separated. The whole operation would go smoother if the Unova group could gather sooner than the expected TargetDate. A local was alerted to our presence today as my camouflage was insufficient. If any more groups are to be sent I recommend equipping them with invisibility uniforms. If I am to be sent any upgrade, I am within biking distance of RallyPoint2.
I am still late on the previously agreed objectives. For 1stPassObjective1, I have only acquired three of the machines, and the last has been reported by the local news stations.
If you have any tips on switching frequencies in the provided connection equipment – on changing connection bands – you know, fixing up the card – please respond through my farmessaging interface. (Radio doesn't work.)
Locals may actually be speaking English. I think I got asked "Where" previously. Please advise the others to not introduce ourselves as "Terra-" anything. My camouflage failure led to some unfortunate misinformation.
The small group gathered in the space station's conference room 3642. All had smartsheets in hand, some neatly laid out on their shells, some hastily uncrumpled and flattened on the table. They turned to stare at the wall, and waited in uncomfortable silence for two to three minutes while said wall struggled to detect the central computer.
Finally, large text was printed on the wall: the first day's reports from the field teams. When a map of the American region of the planet appeared next to the text, Takahashi sighed. He was probably going to go last again. Three seats to the left, his American colleague had stopped brutalizing her smartsheet and was looking in silence at the report.
The locals to their region called it "Unova". Like most places on the planet, they had grown to use their terraforming machines as combatants in a national competition called the League. Videos and calculated maps and plans succeeded each other on the wall, showing a green place of great architectural diversity. The people, said the report, seemed to have largely foregone the intellectual, athletic and artistic pursuits of Earth to instead express their impulses through said combatants, their "pokemon". A noisy radio broadcast that sounded like it ought to have been two hundred years old filled the conference room, and an announcer gave the day's statistics for pokemon races, pokemon contests, and challenges at the pokemon gym.
Takahashi thought that sounded harmless enough. So these people led lives of environmentally friendly leisure, and didn't seem to ever harm each other directly. He toyed with the idea of getting a flight to that planet once the mission was over and travel was finally re-established.
The American was taking fast notes on her smartsheet, which prompted Takahashi to listen more closely again. Seemed like the Unova crew had trouble with communications. He was suddenly proud to have given his agents clear instructions and checkpoints beforehand. As pictures kept rolling before the next report finished loading, Takahashi wondered why nobody had bothered going back for the terraforming devices before now. Perhaps the components had been easy enough to find then that it wasn't worth the trip? Wasteful, either way. Takahashi had to keep himself from shaking his head. Well, that was the first day's report, he remembered. By the time the data made it to the station, three more days must have passed on the planet, and it would be all done and over with soon enough.
"But what I'm wondering," said Bianca, glancing at Cheren again to make sure he was listening, "is why he didn't use a Poké Ball to steal Fifi."
Cheren kept washing the dishes without a word, and she thought she was maybe bothering him, which partly filled her with shame and partly annoyed her. There was a new threat on the loose, and Cheren, as the newest Gym Leader, was a very likely victim. He should be thanking her for taking the time to visit and warn him.
Of course, because that weird guy hadn't had any pokemon, he wasn't much of a concern to Cheren, even though Bianca had tried to describe the weapon and the strange radio device as best she could.
"Cheren!" she insisted. "Are you listening?"
He confirmed. "I was thinking. There was a recent communication from the League to us Gym Leaders," he said. "One of the past champions from Johto saw a gyarados being recalled by something in the sky. He didn't think much of it, but mentioned it to Lance as something strange. It really fits your story with Fifi."
Bianca fought off the urge to rise off her chair and shout in a childish reaction to victory, but not the smile that crept up her face. Cheren smiled at her, too.
"You'll be careful, right?"
She couldn't outright say she was going to look out for him, and pierce through the mysteries of Team Terra, because Cheren was nothing if not proud. But she fully intended to, either way, and only hoped he and his pokemon would scare them away if necessary. If they were all like the guy with the radio device, they were strange, but not strong.
Cheren nodded. Bianca knew what he thought of her: that she wasn't strong, that she couldn't make it as a professional trainer. She'd known all along. But it was plain he trusted her nonetheless, and perhaps there was the clearest proof that Cheren valued more in life than strength.
She stood up to take her leave, as she'd have to get back to Professor Juniper early the next morning. At first, after putting on her coat, she smiled, and raised her hand to wave at him; but then, as Cheren walked her to his front door, she changed her mind, and they shared a light hug.
While walking home with no bouncy monkey pokemon to distract her, Bianca kept her thoughts busy, and she wondered why she'd felt the need to reach out to him first – but of course, they were the only ones left. First there had been her friend Hilda, chosen by a legendary pokemon, who never came back from the journey she imposed to herself upon becoming a League champion. Professor Juniper was nice, but Bianca always felt intimidated by her and her deep knowledge about pokemon. Besides, these days, Professor Juniper had been less and less available, often leaving her studies behind to take long walks in the village.
Bianca brushed her own Poké Balls with her hand, feeling the six pokemon she had used in her journey, however mediocre as a trainer she turned out to be. Stoutland had smelled the guy up close, and she'd seen how closely he guarded his device. Maybe someone else than a trainer was meant to defeat the new gang, for once.
The mini-computer buzzed along slowly. Getting the networking right so that the data could be transferred up to the satellite hadn't been that easy, but Singh was most proud of having successfully deceived the locals into hiring her at the local data hub. Called "Pokemon Centers" by the inhabitants, they were present in every city. There, locals would come over and willingly hand her the authentication keys to those terraforming machines they controlled for storage or repair. She'd just had to copy the data over while the customers were waiting, and now she estimated there were about fifty compromised Poké Balls carried around by unaware trainers. Strangely, her bosses seemed very ignorant about technology: Marisa, the manager, had no idea how to get the system back online if the electricity went down – not that this had ever happened.
Storage was slightly less performant as a result of her manipulations, true, but since this world seemed to have no hackers (and Singh could see why – if she'd had a fire-breathing pig as a companion since she was ten years old, she wouldn't have bothered with top engineering schools either), she didn't expect anybody to smell trouble. No, decided Singh, the only trouble in the horizon was the bit where her teammate, according to the AI that was their project coordinator, couldn't even dial a damned radio signal right. He'd wanted to come up here but never took a telecommunications class? It was a wonder they'd let him on the spacecraft.
In the large waiting room a young boy was looking at League posters, surrounded by the machines shaped like strange and wondrous animals his society ran on. Singh couldn't get used to that concept of pokemon, yet. The mission said bring back "old, unused" terraforming devices, and here there were, adopted by prosperous colonists who seemed to have forgotten all about their roots. Rather than safely store the blueprint data of the devices and let their nanomachines self-disintegrate normally, they'd kept using them. For work, like finding and growing food. For energy, by making cheap electricity. For sport. For politics. For fighting. For entertainment. And now, mere children walked about with automated slaves made of technology that, some centuries ago, had changed a planet.
The boy stroked the fur of those pokemon, like they were his teddy bears or his friends. Singh's eyes darted to her communication's pad dashboard. She was meeting objectives all right. And that boy would make a nice new addition to her numbers.