"So you're the girl that angered Steelix." His name was Vincent and he had the eyes of a predator.

I debated spitting out some witty line about not angering me but instead I replied with a simple, "that's me."

He playfully winked at me. "So what's the real story on that? I heard you broke into the spatial distortion alone."

As much as I'd love to have been the lone discoverer of the iron snake I told him the truth. "Actually I was there with three others, but the next day they were too scared to admit they'd broken in with me so I got all the credit." Alright, I guess John wasn't so much scared as he was suddenly obsessed with phantom cats, but these are small details.

He nodded his head with a mixture of admiration and lust. "Damn, you are something else. I do not know a single girl who could face a Rhydon without breaking out crying, let alone a Steelix."

I knew at least twenty girls content to watch me and John face that thing as if it were a gladiator match and they didn't shed a tear but hey, whatever.

"You know what people have been calling you?" he asked.

I casually shook my head. "Haven't heard." Of course I'd heard, but it sounds so good when other people say it.

He leaned in and gave me one of those you're-gonna-like-what-I'm-about-to-say eyebrow raise. "They're calling you the girl who taunted Rhydon."

Damn right they are.

I was almost back to feeling good when Anna returned carrying our drinks. "So Vince," she said, "now that you've met Liz, did she tell you that she's single?"

I took a drink.

Vincent shook his head. "I hadn't got around to asking."

Anna winked at me and continued. "Yeah, she just dumped her boyfriend. Real loser. He had a Pikachu and you know what they say about people with Pikachus."

"You don't have to lie about it," I told her. "He broke up with me."

"Yeah, but that story's no fun," she said.

"You think I give a shit what this goober thinks about it?" I said, pointing to Vincent. "Luigi broke up with me, whatever, I'm over it."

Vincent chuckled. "Hey now, no need for name calling."

I took another drink.

Anna stopped talking for a moment, trying to read my expression like she usually does. She'd been talking about setting me up with some guy ever since I told her I got dumped, despite my vehement protestations. "I thought you hated Luigi?" she said. "What's the big deal, I thought you were going to break up with him anyway?"

"Yeah, I was."

Anna looked flustered so she turned back to Vincent. "Anyway, so what else do you do?"

"Outside of school? I volunteer at the foster home." He answered Anna but he was still thinking of me. I was hot, a major badass, and just a little bit of a moody bitch, which was more than enough to set his mind wandering into a thousand little tangents, trying to figure out how he'd get me to his place tonight.

"Mostly I just help clean or move shit," he continued, "but I'm thinking of applying to become a mentor."

"Hey, I'm getting a call," I interrupted him. "I'll be outside for a bit." Of course I wasn't getting a call, I just wasn't in the mood to deal with him. Especially if he wanted to talk about the importance of the mentoring program.

I knew all about the mentoring program; I'm one of the genome babies. Back when birth rates fell below death rates and people were having a fit over the impending population crisis, someone in the government had the idea to start growing some lab babies. The technology had been around for a while to not only grow humans outside the womb, but to select for genetic traits, and even though the proposal was almost entirely unsuccessful, here on the island they managed to acquire the funding and legislative support to go ahead with it, and so here I am. I was designed in a lab, given longevity and above average intelligence, selected to have charisma, ambition, empathy, humility, and stubbornness, then told that they had high hopes I would one day join the political elite. So I decided to become a scientist instead.

Anyway, the mentoring program, that was the most recent change to the program. Since the beginning they'd hired child development professionals to guide our growth while we lived at the home, but considering most of us were supposed to be highly intelligent and ambitious and the fact that we outnumbered the staff, they occasionally had to fight a rebel uprising.

They introduced the mentoring program in an attempt to address this. They had people closer to our age sign up and each take a kid under their wing, with the hope that we'd find them to be more relatable authority figures and not act out so much, but these were usually successful university students looking to score community outreach points for future job opportunities. Not quite the types best suited for babysitting. At the end of the first day with my mentor, we agreed that I'd lie and say we met weekly in exchange for neither of us having to see each other again.

"Liz, what's going on with you?" She found me.

I don't know how she does it but she knows something is bothering me. "Luigi didn't even know about John."

She's keen enough to ask me how I'm feeling but can't figure out my meaning. "But you said that you told him about it."

"Yeah, but only after he broke up with me." Luigi told me that he met someone else and that he didn't think we worked well together. I told him that I'd cheated on him with John that time he asked me to look after Faraday. I told him how John came up to my room and climbed on top of me and that stupid little Pikachu just watched from the corner and all Luigi said was 'Why are you telling me this?' He wasn't even angry.

"So you mean he broke up with you without knowing you cheated on him?"

"Yes! For fuck sake yes."

Anna shook her head and her voice took on an angrier tone. "What the hell is wrong with you Liz? So you're not upset he broke up with you, but you are upset that he did without knowing you cheated on him? Are you that full of yourself?" She paused for a sanctimonious shake of her head. "You know what, I'm going inside."

And so she went back in and I didn't say a thing.

I woke up the next day to an overcast sky and the usual Rain Dance text alerts. I walked to Alcubierre's lab in a mild drizzle and amid low rumbles of distant thunder I caught myself a couple times looking to the sky in search of white flashes of light but none came.

The lab was almost empty except for the professor and Michael the lab tech.

"Hey, it's our resident celebrity," Michael said. "Nice to know we have somebody to defend us from the Mons."

I shrugged like it was no big deal. "I'm very intimidating."

The both laughed and Alcubierre stood up. "Well at least we know if science doesn't work out then you've got the fight clubs." He walked over to me and handed me a copy of some research notes. "We might actually have to evacuate soon, but at least you can read up on the compression designs."

"Really? You think it's a legit Rain Dance this time?" I asked.

Alcubierre didn't respond but Michael nodded toward the window. "See the swirl?"

He was right, the characteristic curling cloud formation had just begun. At least in the meantime I had reading material. "I guess we should start heading to the basement?"

They both sighed and nodded in agreement, and a few minutes later the alarms went off so we made our way underground. There was a dedicated underground office space for these situations, admittedly a small area but most people actually stayed home today. Alcubierre and Michael took seats at a couple workstations and delved into some debate about maglev technology, and I almost joined them but I saw John at the other end of the room with his new best friend so I walked over to say hi.

"Oh man, it's Liz!"

I waved back. "Hey Blaine."

"Dude, this is perfect, now you and John can go outside and kick some Gyarados ass."

John saw the paper I was holding. "What you reading?"

"Sevii project," I said.

Blaine's eyes widened in recognition. "So you're working on, like, those pocket dimensions?"

I nodded but John only gave me a blank stare so I explained the project to him. Alcubierre and a group of other professors had recently secured a large grant from the Sevii corporation, a shipping company operating primarily between here and Sinnoh, to develop a cargo compression system based on spatial distortion technology.

One of Alcubierre's main research thrusts was in studying the anti-gravity properties of distortions and he'd found that in some cases compactifying a large region of space into a smaller one could decrease the weight of the mass contained inside. The issues at present were primarily instabilities in the distortions as well as the energy requirements to maintain them. In addition to the reduced fuel costs that a compactified and lighter load would bring them, Sevii also had an interest in making their shipping vessels easier to accelerate in the open ocean on account of the Gyarados attacks.

As I finished explaining, John only grinned off into space. "What?" I said. "You look like an idiot right now."

He shook his head. "Nothing. Just thinking of the night we went to the old distortion."

Then Blaine nodded as if he'd been there with us. "Yeah, wish I could have been there to see it. Hey, you know what we should all do? We should see Carlos."

I've noticed he goes off on tangents like this. "Who is Carlos and what does he have to do with spatial distortions?"

"You haven't heard of Carlos?" Blaine leaned toward us in excitement. "He's the Alakazam at the southern foot of the volcano."

"They call him Carlos now?" I remember stories about him. It's nearly impossible to find Alakazam in the wild and the ones that have been spotted disappear so quickly but this one just sits around in the forest doing nothing. Sometimes you can find a few Kadabra or Abra nearby too, but he's been there for the longest time. People speculate he's meditating, but people usually come up with stupid explanations. People also say the Gyarados Rain Dance is a sign from God that if we don't shape up, the world is going to end.

Anyway, since the Alakazam's been there so long, the southern foot of the volcano is now a somewhat popular tourist attraction. They hang around, call out to… Carlos, I guess, they take pictures, but no one's been too close. People say there's a large force field around him, but you already know what I think of that.

Blaine nodded. "Don't know how they settled on Carlos, but I heard they got him to respond to the name a few times."

John tapped me on the shoulder and pointed behind me. "Check it out."

Hanging from the ceiling was a screen with a news report on the weather. The cloud curl was now clearly visible and shadowy snakelike figures plunged intermittently through the clouds. The Rain Dance had begun. The reporter cut to another clip of a Hyper Beam. The straight flash of light and charged particles tore through the atmosphere and lit up the clouds above like lightning. Moments later a Gyarados fell from the sky.

Most people feared the Rain Dance because of Hyper Beam. It can instantly kill a human being and most of the smaller Mons, but it's usually fired at such high altitudes that it's sufficiently dispersed if it ever hits the ground, and doesn't cause much damage. The real danger is falling Gyarados. After firing a Hyper Beam they fall unconscious and plummet to the ground, usually dying on impact and occasionally crushing some unlucky structure.

This time it landed in the middle of downtown. And it wasn't dead.

"Holy shit!" Blaine yelled. "It's still breathing. Look at that."

It's body lay in a pile of rubble, slowly inhaling and exhaling. The three of us exchanged shocked looks. The authorities would have to kill it before it woke up again. An injured Gyarados couldn't fly upon waking up, especially not after firing a Hyper Beam. It would thrash about and possibly fire another, injuring itself even further and most likely succumbing to a painful death anyway.

But then something else happened. The reporter had said that no civilians were in any of the structures at the time because they'd been evacuated earlier, but the station cut to footage of first responders arriving at the scene and finding a Pikachu cowering next to one of the unharmed buildings. It fired weak electric discharges at the rescuers out of fear and when the camera cut back to the reporter in the studio she started speculating whether the tiny electric mouse belonged to anyone.

A thought passed through my mind but I shoved it away. "No, that couldn't be."