I don't own Pokemon.
My name is Blackout. Beyond that, you don't need to know anything else about me as a person, such as how I look, and all that shit. I control electricity, and I kill people. The Pokemon League despises my very existence, and the feeling is fucking mutual. They're too soft on criminals like Colress, Lusamine, Team Flare, Team Rocket, and the upper echelons of Team Galactic. In fact, that leads very nicely into where I am now.
I lay flat against a hot roof, staring down at a fairly ordinary looking man who was staring at a menu in a cafe, unaware that he was soon to be another body added to my tally. I had been stalking him for over two weeks now, and, while he was under League protection, he had no visible guards.
Perhaps they think that since I hadn't made my move yet, he's safe I thought to myself, before dismissing the notion as ludicrous. I began feeling the familiar tingle of static electricity in the palms of my hands that signaled that I was ready to earn my nickname. I moved into a kneeling position, quickly backing away from the ledge, and placed my hands in front of me, silently willing myself to create a massive surge of electricity. Once upon a time, this would have knocked me out for a few days, but now it just made me dizzy. I felt the energy building up to unreasonable levels, and I felt panic surge through me as something went wrong, and a massive storm of electricity erupted from my body, frying the entire power grid with a massive electrical blast.
I heard screams, and I saw people falling, and twitching as electricity began to flow through them at nearly lethal levels. With a sinking feeling in my gut, I sprinted towards the edge of the roof, and I jumped off, drawing a knife from a sheath as I fell, and before I hit the ground, I drove the blade into the convulsing body of my target. He was a notorious pokemon trafficker, and I had judged him guilty of pokephilia, a crime that I deemed worse than murder, due to the implicit moral complications, where I would have to make a case-by-case determination. As I stood up, I saw the people who had fallen beginning to convulse harder as the electricity became wilder.
I heard whispering coming from all of the people lying on the ground, accusing me of their murders, but I had one last trick up my sleeve. I don't just generate electricity. In order to just do that, I would require an impossible caloric intake, and that would be fatal after 2 or 3 days. I could also absorb electricity, but it was excruciating to do so.
I braced my body, and I opened myself up to the electricity, reducing the resistance around me to zero, and making my body lose all but a slight bit of charge, and I felt my body ignite as the energy that I had discharged ripped out of the civilian's bodies, and blasted straight into me, causing me to jerk around like I was having a seizure, but I felt the amount of electricity in the area decrease to zero, and I knew that I had succeeded, but the cost on me had been enormous. My skin was blackened with soot, and I knew that these people were going to need medical attention, but I wasn't sticking around. At this point, it was no longer my problem.
Of course, if I had known that I was going to permanently paralyze the champion of Hoenn, I wouldn't have even bothered to stay in the region.
"You're stronger than I could have ever imagined. Good luck with the rest of the Elite 4!" Phoebe said in a chipper voice to the challenger, who simply smiled at her, and waved as he left.
"What an asshole. He could have at least said 'Good match', or 'You fought well'," she muttered under her breath, but her irritation was quickly replaced by fear as the lights in the room blew out, spraying glass shards down at her. Before she was hit, however, the shards were sent flying by a Tailwind from her drifblim. She heard crackling, and the door opened, revealing chaos in the lobby, and smoke pouring from Sidney's room, as his houndoom extinguished small fires.
Every device that had been connected to the power grid had been destroyed. The PC had ignited from the sheer heat, and the machines used to heal their pokemon were all locked shut. As the machines lay still, I felt something like a vacuum, and all of the static around me disappeared, and the machines let out high pitched beeps to acknowledge that they were rebooting.
"Is everyone alright?" Phoebe shouted over the general wailing of alarms.
"I think so, but there's little electrical here beyond typical machines. Go see if Steven is okay. I heard rumbling earlier, and he may need help. I'll see what I can do for these people," Nurse Joy shouted back, before resuming bandaging glass wounds on a person who couldn't have been more than 20.
Phoebe turned, and ran, passing through Glacia's chamber, where she had a dazed look on her face, and the stands had been collapsed, and all of the ice had shattered as if it had been struck with tremendous force.
Without pausing, Phoebe bolted through Drake's chamber, where something had created a large pile of metal debris, presumably protecting the dragon master, but Drake was nowhere to be seen.
Pausing slightly, Phoebe attempted to push open the door to Steven's chamber, and she was greeted with a grisly sight.
Blood splattered the floor on the challenger's side, with crushed pokeballs lying around like they had been hit away, and a flygon hung from a metal pipe that had pierced its midsection, blood pouring down the pipe and onto the floor. And then she saw the metagross.
The metagross was still alive, despite having been impaled by several support beams, and having lost an arm to a large pile of rubble. It roared in pain as it tried to smash a free arm down on a salamence which gracefully dodged the clumsy punches, and returned fire with a roaring firey blast that tore into the metal, further enraging the pseudo legendary, which swung wildly in a futile attempt to hit the faster dragon. As its eyes glowed with rage, the salamence dove into striking range, and bit down, crushing the metal and leaving the metagross pinned to the ground, completely unconscious.
As Phoebe ran past the metagross, she saw nothing but destruction surrounding it. The once sturdy floor had been reduced to mostly dust, and the walls had apparently been ripped away by an unseen force, displaying gaping holes, with loose wires sparking like lit fireworks, and smoke pouring from the electrical system. She stared, stunned by the devastation, when she heard a voice calling out in pain. As she looked around, she saw blue hair peeking out from the rubble on the side of the battlefield, and she ran, carefully avoiding wires and sharp metal rods lying in the dust.
She saw Steven's face covered in blood, and she quickly began digging through the rubble, driven by the human desire to be a hero. She was vaguely aware of Drake, who summoned his flygon, which hurled the stones aside like they were made of cardboard. Quickly, the duo grabbed the champion, and Drake lifted him onto the back of his Flygon.
"Why aren't you putting him on your salamence? He's faster!" Phoebe questioned while lifting Steven's legs onto the back of the ground dragon.
"Salamence is the reason that my chamber was trashed! He was out while I was healing him after the battle, and then the lights blew out, and he began spewing flames everywhere, and biting things. Were it not for my altaria blasting him out of the sky with a fairy type return, he would have been much more destructive. After returning him, he seemed to go back to normal, but if another blast hits, flygon is a ground type. He won't be affected by it," Drake shouted, as he jumped onto the back of the flygon, which quickly took off through a hole in the wall.
Phoebe quickly ran back to the lobby, where she saw a small group of people sitting around with dazed looks on their faces, as Nurse Joy checked their bandages.
"Steven was hurt, but Drake's taking him to a hospital. What happened?" Phoebe said quietly to the nurse as she examined the bandages on the last one.
"From what I've been able to put together from the reports, the terrorist who uses electricity discharged a massive electromagnetic pulse, and it scrambled the internal compasses of flying types, and made steel and electric types go insane. He's in custody now, but most of the police force was lost when the pulse went off, because they had electrike and manectric partners, who turned on them, so they're probably going to send either you and Sidney or someone like Volkner. According to him, it was completely accidental, but people want to see him executed, so he's probably going to die." Nurse Joy quietly said.
As Phoebe processed this, a flygon descended, and she saw a person dressed in a blue police uniform step off of its back.
"Miss Phoebe, we're going to need you and Mr. Sidney to join us. We apologize for the short notice, but all communications are down. For the foreseeable future, messages are going to be delivered by flygon," the police officer said quickly.
"Alright, what do you need us for?" Sidney exclaimed, his eyebrows rising sharply as if in disbelief of her asking him to join her for something.
"We needed the 2 best available members of the Elite 4, and Glacia is currently busy dealing with ships adrift due to motor failure. We can't locate Drake, and Steven Stone is also missing. So that leaves you two. We need answers, and the bastard behind all of this refuses to talk, so we can't gain a motive, or figure out why he would create a pulse of this magnitude,"
"Alright, we'll go with you. So, what, if anything, has he said so far?" Sidney said.
"He hasn't said anything, and you may need to use more... persuasive methods to extract information from him,"
Sidney remained silent, but Phoebe knew that he wasn't happy about this. He had a long history of trouble with the law, and he had only really stopped when he had joined the Pokemon League.
"I'll go in first, and if he doesn't talk, then you can use further methods to gain information from him," Phoebe offered, and she could tell that Sidney was more comfortable with that.
"Yeah, I'm fine with that. You can go first, and I'll do what is necessary after that," Sidney said, with a hint of relief in his eyes.
Ten minutes later, the two Elite 4 members and the police officer were standing in front of a large containment cell, padded with rubber, with a pair of angry eyes staring back at them, as if he saw through the 2 way mirror that separated them. Phoebe felt her legs shaking, and she saw Sidney shifting from side to side, obviously very uncomfortable with the hostility presented by the person across from them.
"I see you. If you want me to talk, I'll give you 20 minutes to ask what you need to, and I'll answer to the best of my ability. But know this- I ain't afraid of you cowards. You locked me up because you fuckers knew that it was only a matter of time before your corrupt asses ended up dead by my hand. And know this- I'm not dead yet, so you ain't safe yet," the figure said with cold fury in his voice, that sent shivers through everyone present.
"Now's as good a time as any," Phoebe said as cheerfully as she could, shaking with fear, as the guards opened the door, and the arcanine with them began growling, and prepared to fill the cell with fire if they had to.
"Yes it is. You're safe. Your partner, however, is a different story. Even a reformed criminal is still a criminal at heart," the man said, the cold fury still evident in his voice.
As Phoebe walked in, she saw steel handcuffs that had been welded to the table, and the table crackled with electricity.
"Ask, or get the fuck out. Criminals won't kill themselves," he said, and she felt herself fill with panic.
"And if you reach for your pokemon, know this- I can vaporize you before your hand can even reach them,"
She swallowed, feeling her heart beginning to pound.
"W-Why did you kill those people?" she stammered.
He smirked, obviously amused by her question.
"You really are as naive as the crooks in here said you were. Aww, that's almost cute. Now ask a real question," he said as if he were talking to a small child.
"That is a real question! Now answer it!" she shouted.
"Heh, that's great. I get a girl with more balls than the guys in this glorified concentration camp. That's fucking fantastic,"
"Answer the question,"
"I kill because I'm damn good at it, and because it is the right thing to do,"
"Alright, moving on..." Phoebe said, noticing the electricity beginning to crackle around his hands.
"Why did you EMP Hoenn?" she said.
"That was a complete accident. If you knew anything about how I received these powers, you would know that I'm barely capable of controlling these. I don't even know what my limits are, but when I tried to hold back my EMP for a localized communications blackout, I felt like I was being electrocuted. The surge came from somewhere else than from my parasite. If I had that level of power on my own, holding it in would be beyond my current range of powers. Seriously, I had to go into the desert and then I blew out all of my electricity. That's the only reason that you were able to catch me was because I took back all of the pulse. If you thought that you knew pain, imagine every single nerve in your body being lit on fire. And the only reason that I decided to do that was because I was saving the lives of the people who I accidentally hurt with my power. If I could do that again, I sure as hell wouldn't! Having your body used as a conduit for a massive surge of electricity isn't exactly comfortable." he said, calming down. "I sincerely hope that someone is listening to this beyond the corrupt fuckers out there, because I'm just as scared of this as you are. Possibly more, because I have no idea where it came from. And if this happens again, it may become prohibitive for my goals,"
"That will be all, thank you," Phoebe said, before exiting, to the stunned expressions of the guards.
"The longest anyone has been in there was two minutes. You were in there for over three hours." one of them whispered.
"I have no idea what he was talking about, but when he mentioned a parasite giving him his powers, we need to look into that more. Are you open for another session, possibly tomorrow?" the police officer said. "You managed to calm him down, which is beyond strange, given how he hasn't said anything that wasn't a threat all day,"
Phoebe felt her eyes growing more tired.
"Whatever. I just want to go home and sleep for a bit right now, but I'll see about tomorrow," she said, as she and Sidney walked out, and to the flygons who were waiting for the duo, and they flew off into the night.
Hopefully this wasn't too bad, because I promise that this will get faster fairly soon.
Have a good day, morning, afternoon, evening, or night.
Or don't, I don't really care. I'm just a poorly done drawing of a fish.