There are three accepted rules of thumb when betraying a criminal syndicate. One: stick to the plan. Two: stick to the plan. And three?

Stick to the GORRAM plan.

However, for all his apparent genius, my dearest friend Brain seemed to be utterly incapable of understanding this fine point of logistics. I deduced this detail with fine and highly refined powers of observation. One, the alarm was blaring. Two, that Fucking Bitch Lovrina was screeching that he had decided to resign (Ahem). And three, I silently promised Brain an ass kicking.

Everything around me crystallized. My arms tensed, my heart sped up, my body sang with the danger. Muscle was the only allied trainer close at hand against several competent others. I barely traded a glance with the large man.

My gun was in my hands as Muscle kicked a grunt's knee in. I fired a pair of bullets, putting two grunts on the floor. One peon reached for his belt, and my enormous friend picked the poor guy up and flung him across the room. One of the bigger ones tried to tackle me, but he blatantly telegraphed the move. I dodged, squeezed the trigger, and the attacker suddenly lost his head.

Muscle and I were trained killers. We had the element of surprise. The deaths we caused were almost boring, really.

The metallic stench of blood hung in the air. Bodies littered the floor. Muscle and I were heaving, and I realized my ears were ringing. Despite wanting to scream at the nasty surprise, I simply barked, "Muscle. Clearly, there's been a change of plans. I'll get Tongue. Find Brain and defend him. Overall, keep moving."

I sprinted out, barely looking back to see that Muscle already sent out his Garchomp and the pair were running out the other door. I figured Muscle had the right idea, and I sent out Elaine.

Even for a Galvantula, Elaine is pretty hyper. When I broke into a sprint towards the interrogation rooms, Elaine was way ahead of me when an enormous noise nearly knocked us both on our asses.

A green ball the size of my head erupted from one of the interrogation rooms. Tongue was standing next his Gothitelle Mary as she made another Energy Ball at the opposite wall. A man I had never seen before stood with his mouth agape, "Y-you're a turncoat."

Tongue's grin was positively vulpine, "I like that term. Yup, we're turncoats. Eye," he gestured to me, "this is random prisoner number I-don't-care. He was just escaping."

The prisoner looked absolutely torn, "B-b-but, my Poke-"

"Go. Quickly. That giant hole in the wall is not just for kicks."

The man looked like he was going to argue, so I stepped in, "This floor. On the other side. If you're going to get your Pokémon, do it now while they're distracted."

He looked like he was going to gush with gratitude, but I waved him off, "Go."

As I heard the man's footsteps echoing in the hall, Tongue frowned at me, "You probably sent him on a suicide mission."

I shrugged and tried not to let that bother me, "The alternative was him arguing here and wasting time."

The Gothitelle before us cut in, /I find morality as interesting as the next woman, but we need to move, please. /

I resisted the temptation to smack myself as I saw grunts rushing in. Tongue and I quickly returned Elaine and Mary and ran out the hole as quickly we possibly could.

Outside was a freaking a war zone.

You see, we're all trained assassins, but Brain plays absolutely nasty. So while Muscle used his more mobile tanks of Pokemon to cover Brain's team, the lanky nerd was going completely to town with his Pokemon. A Vaporeon licked her paw as several soldiers clawed at the globes of water around their heads. A Gardevoir ghosted to and fro, casually ripping enemies apart with her mind or blowing holes in them with enormous blasts of light the size of a basketball across. A Breloom and a Gengar, working in concert: the latter blasting foes from a distance while the former literally punched holes through anyone trying to get close. A Skarmory firing feathers like storms of daggers, killing many with every blow.

But the star of the show was Brain's Charizard Albert. Brain had talked about stealing his sister's Mega Locket, but I didn't think he actually had the balls to do it. But based on the jet black dragon punching with blue fire coating his fists, I was wrong. His Charizard was absolutely rending everyone who got anywhere near either trainer with such an absolute ferocity that I wanted to hide in terror. It was simultaneously damn impressive and absolutely terrifying.

And Brain and Muscle were going to lose anyway.

Don't get me wrong, the two were absolutely deadly in pretty much every form combat you could think of, but there were a lot of bodies up against them, and eventually it didn't matter how good you were. You got worn down, tired, wounded. Even now, the two were starting to slow down, and Lovrina was screaming something about making sure they died or else she'd "soooooo kill everyone else here."

(I'm not kidding. She actually said it like a valley girl. I always hated the sound of her voice.)

I hated the thought of doing it, but I'd need to create a huge amount of destruction extremely quickly if I wanted us to have a decent chance at getting away. I made eye contact with Brain's Gardevoir in between her various bouts of destruction.

Eye? Do you have an idea? she asked.

Yup. Start running like hell. I'm gonna use Mort.

The Gardevoir paled slightly, but relayed the situation to Brain and Muscle. A second later, most all of their Pokemon were safely in their balls except for their fliers. They started fleeing at a very high pace as Lovrina whooped. It was almost pathetic to see how much Brain could manipulate his sister.

You see, despite being human, Lovrina was a predator at the end of the day. Predators cannot help but seize upon any weakness they see. It was their nature. And someone with that knowledge could use that to her advantage.

I threw my ball, and a Heat Rotom burst out. Without any prompting, a large amount of fire grew in his hand and a manic grin spread across his face.

I never got the point of Cipher's obsession with Shadow Pokemon. They were really not easy to control at all, and Mort was a little erratic even for a Shadow. My voice was sharp as I firmly scolded him, "No, Mort! No fire for now. Use Shadow Storm on the army over there!"

And then chaos erupted.

It's very very hard to describe a Shadow Move. Thomas with his Togekiss brand aura sight described them as not-purples and not-blacks shrouding the Pokemon executing the move, or else forming into different shapes for special attacks. When he took a look at Mort performing Shadow Storm, for example, Thomas said he saw an enormous twister the same not-purples and not-blacks as all Shadow techniques.

But most people don't see auras.

So instead of seeing a twister of the not-colors, all I saw were masses of people flying through the air. Legions of them, suddenly lifted off the ground hundreds of feet with absolutely no discernable cause. They circled at incredibly high speeds, and whenever two people collided, at least one of them would be ground to an absolute paste, or become otherwise obliterated in a gruesome explosion of blood and gore. Lovrina had noticed the invisible twister heading for her and long since teleported away with her Gallade, but everyone caught in that cyclone simply died. If not from colliding with people in the air, then either from being flung from the invisible vortex at high speed into something decidedly solid, or from falling hundreds of feet from the air and onto dry, cracked earth.

How did Sesame Street put it? Oh yeah: this day was brought to you by the color red.

Even I wasn't quite jaded enough yet to be completely immune to the sheer amount of life just… finished, today. I returned Mort to his ball before he could decide to burn something to the ground and took a solid second to just think. The plan was to steal into the dead of night a week from now. Just quickly be gone. Now as far I was aware, we were all majorly worn down before the main events even start, we were kicking off low on supplies, and everyone in Cipher was doubtless going to be made aware of our betrayal very very quickly.

In all likelihood, all of us-all 28 of us-were going to end up exactly like the spatters on the ground before long.

Almost literally reading my mind, Tongue pondered aloud, "How long until we follow these guys? How long until we die too? People don't just up and betray Cipher."

I was about to answer when, in the direction of the base, I heard a sudden explosion. Almost certainly Brain's handiwork: at least he didn't choose a time when we were completely unprepared, just 90% unprepared. It didn't take a lot to see his thought process: even though it had only happened twice before, it was almost traditional that betraying Cipher was accompanied by blowing shit up.

I restrained a giggle at the thought of Lovrina's face when she saw the explosions on top of everything else that happened today. It was the sort of random, almost delusional thing that lightened my mood after I spent way too much time fighting for my life. It beat curling up into a ball and crying about it, for sure.

Aloud, I only said, "Of course people just up and betray Cipher. We're people. We did it. God knows for how long, but we did do it."

Tongue gave a half choke, half laugh at that. He then reached into his pocket and threw a ball. Shiba, his Talonflame, gave a look of absolute disdain of all the filth around her, then consented to allow Tongue to climb on. I followed suit by sending out Thomas and saying, "Come on. We have a rendezvous point, and I'll be damned if I let Brain ruin all of the plan."

Hey guys! This is my first real crack at a systematic fanfiction. Since I am entirely too busy and too unmotivated to do this under normal circumstances, I am getting my ass in gear by using NaNoWriMo as incentive to do this. This is not, of course, super well polished, so I would be much obliged if you review.

narphoenix, over and out.