Revised as of 1-2-14 to make a small change. You can probably tell what it is. Chapters 2-4 will be back up shortly.

"A circle of fire coming in the sky, noiseless, one rod long with its body and one rod wide. After some days these things became more numerous, shining more than the brightness of the sun."

- Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs circa 1500 BC

Their chance was one fraction of one percent, so small that it had hardly been worth considering. But humans had overcome impossible odds before. It believed that to discount them so easily was a mistake; it only took one single member with the right qualifications to turn the tide in their favor. And now that one person had been found. Every variable had been accounted for, and the plan was above reproach. It had prepared for everything.

Outside the Nacrene University center for biological studies, the watcher waited.

Millions of miles overhead, a hunk of rock and iron the size of a football field hurtled through the vacuum of space, coming ever closer.

A few blocks away from the university, at a diner called the Cradily Café, Sidney stared at a stain on the wall above his supervisor's left shoulder.

"I told you before, you need to put the locks on the dumpsters at night. Otherwise the Patrat get in and make a huge mess."

"Yeah."

"And Lorenzo said the floor wasn't swept when he came in this morning. You know that's part of your job."

"Uh-huh."

"Are you even listening to me?"

"Yea—yes." No. The spot looked like two sparring Tranquill, he'd decided. Maybe they were fighting over food, or a mate.

"I mean it, Sidney, if you can't handle closing up after the night shift, I'll hire someone else who can."

"I know, I know. I'll do it right next time, okay?" He dropped his eyes and kept his head down until his boss accepted his lame half-apology and walked away. As soon as he was out of sight, Sidney pulled his phone from his pocket, where it had been buzzing the whole time.

3 new messages (Doug)
Did you ever think about all the things we don't know
Kerler's theory of evolution from Pokemon to human was never conclusively proven
We have no idea where we came from

Sidney sighed heavily and ran his hands through his unkempt brown hair before thumbing a message back: You know I don't understand any of that shit. Barely twenty seconds passed before the phone started buzzing again.

But did you ever think about it
There are people out there hiding things from us
The fossil record is all wrong and nobody says a thing

It had been going on like this for the better part of a day, hasty unpunctuated messages coming in as quickly as Doug could think them up. It hadn't seemed unusual at first; Doug was the kind of geek who thought every new idea was the most important thing in the world, sometimes calling up Sidney in the middle of the night to talk about "proteins" or "taxonomy" or whatever science junk it was that he did in that lab all day. Sidney never understand what the point was in Doug, a graduate student of biochemistry, talking about these things to him, someone who had only passed high school biology because the smart kid who'd sat next to him never covered his answers during tests, but it kept Doug happy, so he pretended to listen.

"Sidney, get out here!" His boss's voice came from the front of the diner. Sidney grunted his assent and slid his phone back into his pocket, even as it buzzed again, and picked up one of the rags from the table beside him. There were counters to clean, and he had to get on with it before his boss started riding his ass again. Doug could wait.

The café was of decent enough quality, not quite a hole in the wall, but still patronized mostly by students from nearby universities looking for a cheap place to eat. Sidney had been working here for… six, eight months now? He'd lost track. It didn't really matter. He cleaned and bussed tables, helped wash the dishes occasionally, and tidied up at closing. Not an exciting job, but it paid a living wage, and he got to meet some interesting people (like Doug). Still, on some days, it was just hard to give a shit, and that got him in trouble. It always did.

After a few more dull hours of menial labor, Sidney's shift ended. As soon as he'd pulled off his apron and tossed it into a bin in the back room, he checked his phone again. One hundred and eight new messages. Of course. He dutifully scrolled down the list. Even just by scanning the message previews, he saw the scientific jargon growing thicker and thicker until he reached the very bottom of the page.

N = R x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x L = ?
It's
Ggggggggggd
Listen I can hear it now the sound of space it's getting close
He is come the great creator comes to wipe the scourge from his planet
He is coming
He is com,,,,,,

Sidney squinted at the final messages that had been sent nearly half an hour ago, turning his head this way and that as though seeing them from a different angle would help make sense of the words printed across the screen. And then he decided that maybe he shouldn't make Doug wait any longer.

Calls to Doug's phone went straight to voice mail, but Sidney was pretty sure he knew where to find him in person. Doug spent nearly all of his time at the laboratories of Nacrene University, or so he'd said. Sidney drew some glances as he walked down the gleaming wooden corridors of the campus. Not that he blamed them—he didn't look much like he belonged in a prestigious university like this. He was lanky and far taller than an average scientist, with slumped shoulders, an unshaven face and the sort of absent, heavy-lidded eyes that tended to prompt random drug screenings. He didn't care much what people saw when they looked at him, but it did lead to problems sometimes.

It took some asking, but eventually he was pointed towards a laboratory in a building on the edge of campus. Someone told him he would know it by the sound of squawking coming through the door, and they turned out to be right. The first thing he heard when he walked through the door was an ear-splitting shriek, somewhere between a braying Bouffalant and a shrieking Staraptor. The room was a pen of half-height cubicles, plastic tables and desks, and scuffed tile floors, not quite as glamorous as the hallways outside it. On one table in the middle of the room, there was a large rectangular cage with two Pokémon inside. Two women, one with a stern expression and a blonde bob of curls and another with Kantonese features who was holding a camcorder, stood around it, engrossed in a hushed discussion.

"—told you it wasn't—"

"—training method is fundamentally flawed. We have to—"

"—if we could just get a psychic in here—"

He waited for a few moments, but they didn't notice him standing there. Finally, he cleared his throat to get their attention. "Uh, hey."

They both spun around in perfect unison to stare at him.

"Who're you?'

"You're not supposed to be in here. You're interfering with an experiment."

"I told Jessie to fix the lock."

Sidney scratched the long hairs on the back of his neck. "I'm just, uh, looking for Doug. Has he been around here?"

The blonde girl scoffed. "No, not since he ran out of here an hour ago. He was ranting about all these pseudo-science conspiracy theories."

"We've been trying to finish the experiment by ourselves ever since." As if on cue, another shriek came from the cage on the table. Against his better judgment, Sidney strode further into the room to take a look.

The walls of the cage were made of scratched-up transparent plastic, and it was divided down the center by what appeared to be a one-way mirror. On the left, mirrored side was a Pidove, which was puffing up its feathers and hooting anxiously. On the right sat a creature Sidney had never seen before. It was a beastly, feral-looking bird Pokémon nearly twice as big as the pigeon, which it watched through the glass with bulging eyes. Its unkempt mustard-yellow feathers quivered in anticipation, and it ground its beak with a soft clacking noise. As Sidney watched, it shifted its weight, revealing knifelike talons on the tips of its toes and wings, and let out another SKREE.

"What is that thing?"

"Archen," the blonde said. "A fossil Pokémon."

"Doug calls him Archer," camcorder girl supplied helpfully, to which the blonde one rolled her eyes. "They're the ancestor of all modern bird Pokémon. We're testing his intelligence." She gestured to the floor of the cage, where both the Pidove and the Archen had three different-colored shapes lined up at their feet. "Like this. Archer, find the color blue."

The Archen didn't respond except to snap his oversized clay-colored beak at the Pidove again.

"Archer, what color is blue?"

Still nothing.

"Come on, you can—" She was cut off as the Archen snapped to attention, letting out a war cry before running to the front of his cage. He passed right over his symbols—yellow star, green circle, blue triangle—to slam his head against the clear plastic. The cage shook from the impact, but the walls held, making the Archen squawk and slam his head against it in frustration.

"Thankfully, we don't need him to get it right to finish the test," the blonde said. "It's only meant to show how stupid primitive Pokémon were."

"Oh, he's not stupid, he just has a hard time communicating," camcorder girl said.

"No, Dani, he's stupid. The cognition gap between modern and primitive Pokémon is already well-documented, so I don't know why we have to—get away from there!" The Archen had caught the scent of a pinky Rattata thawing on the table and was now scrabbling against the plastic walls with his talons in an attempt to reach it.

"No, Archer! Food later! Colors now!" Dani shouted, though she pushed the camcorder closer to document the flailing bird.

Sidney vaguely recalled Doug saying something like that about fossil Pokémon to him. It supposedly had to do with humans selectively breeding Pokémon over tens of thousands of years to make them smarter. Since they didn't have the benefit of that evolution, fossil Pokémon were evidently as dumb as the rocks they came from. To see it in action was something else, though. The spazzing bird looked even stupider than the dumbed-down Tauros herds farmers raised for meat.

Speaking of Doug—"So you haven't seen him?"

"He won't even pick up his phone. If you see him, tell him I don't care if he's had some kind of psychotic break, he needs to get his ass back in here and hold it together until we're done with this project."

"Arcadia…"

"No, I wasn't the one who wanted to work with this thing." She gestured violently at the Archen. "That was all his idea, and if he tries to back out now, I will be giving him a piece of my mind!"

Sidney took this as his cue to leave, backing away silently as the blonde scientist continued ranting. He'd try to find Doug—except he had no idea where to look for him now. He didn't even know where he lived. The best he could do was keep calling and hope he ran into him on the street.

As it turned out, he wouldn't even get the chance to do that.

It had prepared for everything. Every scenario, every contingency. Except for the chance that the enemy would get to him first.

Above the atmosphere, the asteroid spun gently as it swooped closer, hurtling beyond the speed of sound. The entity on it watched and waited, biding its time.

Underneath the tiles of the laboratory, the timers wired to the bundles of explosives hit zero.

Cover image is by FigBeater from deviantART. Used with permission.