DISCLAIMER: gagrummay deos not own Pemokon. Betch you couldn't read that, did you?

And hey all again, readers! =D

So, I was just writing that sentence just above this one, and I thought, why not take a page from a friend and acknowledge the reviewers in the author's notes? So, with a gratuitous gesture I'd like to thank Arceus Arcanus and JapanDreamer09 for their kind words and wisdom, as well as those other two people who generously left an alert but perhaps found themselves indisposed to leave a review. Fear not. I don't mind all that much if you settle for just an alert, actually. So long as I know there are people out there who're are ready and waiting to read what I have to offer, then I'm happy. Kinda' ironic given I always feel guilty when I lay off a review for a well-done story.

So, enough from me, let's get a move on. Our heroes will find themselves changed for better or worse soon enough.

Orbhunt - Chapter 4

Greenlush Valley

Blowing stuff up, May discovered, was probably going to be easier said than done.

That was certainly what she figured was the case as the two of them slowly wound their way towards the machine, avoiding the increasingly numerous ground patrols as they did so. Even with her team of five (one of which was a barely combat-worthy Beldum) and the villainous team's generally poor track record with grunt inventories, she doubted she'd be able to take on over seven dozen combatants if the alarm was raised. And that wasn't counting the elite troops Magma likely had in reserve somewhere. You didn't start a project this big and then leave it to be dismantled by a couple of teenagers, she empathized with a fair share of annoyance.

Brendan seemed to have noticed her uneasiness after a few minutes of silent approach and hiding. "There a problem?"

"Yes," she said. "We're gonna' have to be able to get up there using that staircase, right? But it's really exposed so we'll be seen instantly if we go up it. In that case, what's Plan B?"

Brendan suddenly hushed, pointing ahead of them and laying down low. The two paused and ducked their heads as a grunt rounded a tree, possibly having heard some of their conversation. He glanced around suspiciously for about thirty seconds, before shrugging, turning around and continuing on with his duties.

"Plan B…" Brendan resumed, squeezing his eyes shut. "Well, this is a lot bigger than I first thought it was. We can't take on so many grunts, so going loud would be stupid, and we don't know what's worth hitting inside that building."

"Try hitting the stilts?" she suggested meekly.

"Please." Brendan rolled his eyes. "That's the first thing I thought of. Trouble is if we can't knock it down fast enough we're going to have a whole legion of guys in red jackets bearing down on us. I don't even know if we can break those things at all. They looked pretty tough."

May sighed. Perhaps they should have called the police or something…

He stared up at the treetops. "Although… hmm. Have you got any good climbing Pokémon on you? I've got my Tropius, but I doubt he could carry a two people at once."

She thought for a second. "I'm sure Blaziken could climb if he wanted to. And carry me at the same time. What are you planning?"

"We can use the tree canopy for cover. The platform isn't much higher than that, so we can just leap up from there and skip the stairs. And then do some sabotage. Shouldn't be too hard, the grunts down here don't seem to look up all that often."

Calling out their respective Pokémon, the two hurriedly checked the vicinity for any grunts that might be watching them, then May and Brendan's Blaziken and Tropius leapt and flapped up to the thick branches suspended above them. It wasn't a comfortable place to be, as the thinner branches caught on her shirt and gear, but she was determined to put aside her discomfort for the time being.

And so they advanced, as they were, concealed by the vibrant green of the leaves from earth-based prying eyes. May often spotted Magma grunts patrolling the ground below them, but they almost never looked up, and the two instances they did so they failed to notice the four clambering onwards. Now that she had the luxury of observing without having to hide herself much at the same time, May took the time to take note of the sharp alertness and watchfulness of the grunts, vastly different to the subtle hints of fear in their movements she'd previously seen during the scuffle with Team Aqua many years ago.

Which was probably because they knew there was an insane madman bent on their destruction controlling their god's counterpart, she mused. And their leader was knocked out.

Why they were so confident here was likely because, if they actually did revive a Groudon, and maybe a Kyogre too, control over the beasts would practically be guaranteed, if she assumed quite rightly that there were measures in place to do such a thing. And there would be practically nothing that could stop the two, especially if Magma made targets out of anything that might pose a significant threat, like Rayquaza. May's jaw gaped once she realised the sheer scale of what the team was attempting to do.

And what would they do to normal people like us? she thought. They must know there's not going to be many people who agree with them. Just butcher us like Mareep in a slaughterhouse? Oh, Arceus-

A sharp thorn raking across her cheek was more than enough to snap her out of her thoughts. She frowned, angry, and swatted the offending branch aside with a rough sweep of her hand before putting it to the cut. A considerable sting and something sticky greeted her hand, and she pulled it away to see a small bloodstain on her fingertips. She grunted. She could put up with that too… for a while.

The trip to the platform was uneventful for the rest of the way, but as the two Pokémon halted and let their trainers get a good look at the monster May wished it had taken longer. The grey alloy of the machine loomed several metres above the canopy. A fence ringed the outside balcony, which itself had secure doors leading to its innards. After a whispered command from their respective masters, Blaziken jumped the whole distance and landed with a clang on the corrugated flooring, with the slower Tropius flying up behind them. May winced at the sharp noise. Hopefully nobody had heard that.

Brendan was careful not to make the same mistake as he disembarked and recalled Tropius, a measure which was totally wasted when he whistled while looking back down at the treetops. "Well, this is quite the bee's knees, huh? I'd give these guys an A for structural engineering, if they weren't all homicidal idiots."

"Keep your voice down," she insisted. "Somebody might hear us."

He smiled, but dropped the volume somewhat all the same. "Yeah, sorry about that. So, your call -should we split up and hit as many things as possible, or go together?"

"I'd go together," she said, without hesitation. "We don't know who or what's inside this thing, so we should play it safe."

He nodded, seeing her logic. "Point. Ladies first," he added, gesturing at the doorway with another grin gracing his countenance.

She glared at him. "Chicken. Fine." To her surprise, the door was quite hard to open, enticing a grunt of effort from her, but it swung outwards smoothly on well-oiled hinges despite its weight. A very inviting hallway made of a mass of dark black pipes of varying sizes and diameters and a steel floor lay behind it. Calling Blaziken forward to light up the passage ahead, the trio advanced, constantly wary for any sign of a hostile presence.

The group stopped at a fairly large circular room, which was mostly filled with whirring machinery and – to May's curiousity – a cluster of pulsing blue and red glass tubing which ran the height of the room. It occurred to her that the beams were probably what contained… whatever it was that would create the elemental duo, and hastily poked Brendan in the side to get his attention.

"There." She indicated the cluster. "We can crack that first."

"What is it?"

She fidgeted. "The beam Butler used to carve that Groudon into the ground looked a lot like those do," she explained. "One of them's blue, though, so that's gotta' be Kyogre's stuff in there. We can kill two birds with one st-"

"I don't appreciate Maxie's constant ranting about this 'new age' of his. It just gets on my nerves."

May's face went white. Someone was coming! Looking over at Brendan, she noticed him scrambling (quietly) to find a hiding spot. Turning to Blaziken, who was looking at her helplessly, she recalled him, and managed to find a hiding spot under a spinning pair of steel spheres just before the intruders entered the room and stopped before the pipe cluster.

"Ah, here we are," she heard one of them announce. A male voice, almost certainly Butler's. She rolled her eyes. She wouldn't be letting him get away with a clean slate this time.

Shifting around, she just managed to find a tiny gap in the pipes large she could look through with one eye. She could see two people standing there illuminated by the glow from the energy beams. One, of course, was Butler, still looking as pristine and dignified as ever even with his odd purple hair and casual clothes. The other was dressed in Magma uniform, but the slight flare of the hips and posture told her that she was a female. The hood of her uniform concealed her face.

"Well, what am I looking at?" The Magma's voice was a sharp feminine one, confirming May's suspicions.

"It's only really a conduit for the DNA tracer beam," Butler admitted, "so it's not anything critical, but it's probably the nicest-looking part of this machine, anyway. Hence, we're here."

"It sounds critical to me. Looks rather vulnerable, too. Why glass?"

"Oh no, this isn't just glass. You can't protect it with something that fragile. This is a special variant of bulletproof glass I made. You could let loose a Blast Burn in here and the only thing that'd be left standing out of all this would be this pipe node."

The Magma then chose to turn around and look around the rest of the room, giving May a clear view of her face. To her annoyance, for whatever reason, the woman was wearing a pair of shades, obscuring her eyes, but she could see a few strands of dark black hair escaping the hood she was in, framing a pale oval of a face.

"And 'all this' is?" the woman asked, talking about the rest of the machinery in the room.

Butler looked up from a small console on one of the machines he was poring over. "Just some ventilators and the drivers for the supply lift. Actual non-critical stuff."

"Ah." Butler resumed his work on the console, and the woman appeared to be about to leave when she suddenly halted and reached a hand upwards to her ear, frowning. Presumably there was a microphone mounted there somewhere, for she began to speak in a dry tone a moment later.

"Rubaia. Go ahead." May couldn't catch anything of what was said, but whatever it was, it seemed to be serious, as the woman put on an alarmed look as the speaker continued talking. "Where?Near Route 117?" More talk. The Magma's expression darkened. "… I see. Track that trail. And do it fast. We're going to be firing in only a few minutes. Nothing must go wrong, do you understand me?" She let go of her ear and returned her hand to her side.

"There a problem, Scythe?" Butler quipped.

'Scythe' gave him an aside glance. "One of our patrols found a member of the sixteenth recon unconscious at the top of the bank, and there are signs on the slope that somebody's entered the valley. We have an intruder in our midst."

May just barely managed to stop herself from squeaking in fear, instead continuing to watch as her body went cold. Butler looked worried. "What are you going to do?"

A sigh."Nothing, for now. The team's following the trail they left behind, so I'll have to trust them with it. They could be still out there somewhere, but it looks like the incident happened a while ago. They're likely already in here."

"But we would've seen them coming up the stairs, surely."

She looked at him, unimpressed. "If I were trying to get in here, I would've hid in the canopy and jumped up, since the platform is ridiculously low-lying and the stairs are exposed and blatantly monitored. But I'm also low-lying on the information food chain, as you well know. I'm pretty sure if it's a need to know basis, then I need to know, you know?"

He held up his hands. "Blame Maxie. I'm not officially part of Magma, so I was forbidden to tell you anything."

"Whatever." Scythe stalked for the door. "Let's move. Maxie would want us to be present for this."

"Right." Butler followed her out of the room.

The relative silence that smothered the air after their departure was ironically deafening to May, who was sure she must have been missing something sounding over the constant drone of the machines. After what must have been a full minute, she peeked out of her cover to see Brendan ever-so-slowly pulling out of his hiding spot under a generator. The two both waited for the other to say something. Neither did.

Starting up first, Brendan made a hoarse laugh. "Well, that was a little close. I can see why that guy called her Scythe, now. It's like a brush with Death herself." Not waiting for May to reply, he stood, listening carefully for any more footsteps, and trotted over to the screen Butler had left active.

Brendan stared at the screen. It was displaying a map of the structure they were in the main window, helpfully highlighting in big letters 'YOU ARE HERE' on their current location, but more worryingly, not included on the map a small digital timer in the top-right was slowly ticking down. As he watched, the number passed the three minute mark and continued to drop.

"May, get over here."

She did as she was bade, a little colour having returned to her face. The colour drained again as she watched the timer also, however. "That's… a countdown," she said slowly.

"With three minutes left on the ticker," Brendan finished. "We've got to disable this thing fast. Once the process starts it'll probably be too late. That Butler bloke said these pipes here are tough to crack, so that idea's shot down. Any others you want to share?"

May racked her brain to come up with a solution, finding one a moment later that she would later feel quite proud of. "There could be access points for the pipes carrying the energy. They'd need to keep maintenance on these things, wouldn't they? We could get at them from there."

"Yeah…" Tracing a finger on the screen and skimming over the assigned names for all the sections, he stopped at one labelled 'Maint.[!] Access point – G'. "Look there's one."

May spotted something. "And there's another," she pointed out, indicating an identical room on the other side of the facility, labelled similarly except with a K instead of a G.

"K and G. That must mean Groudon and Kyogre," Brendan deduced. "Okay then. We're definitely not gonna' have enough time to hit both if we go together, so we're gonna' have to split up. You can take Kyogre's pipe and I'll go for Groudon's. Got it?"

May nodded, steel returning to her expression. "Got it."

Brendan turned on his heel and was almost out of the room before May called him again. "Brendan?"

"Hmm?"

She blushed. "Be careful."

He smiled kindly. "Don't worry. I'm always careful." With May frowning at his tempting of the universe, he promptly turned around and continued on, smacking his head clean against a low-running pipe he hadn't noticed before. "Ow."

May sighed. "You idiot…"

All the mooks are probably out watching the stuff being set up, Brendan speculated, feeling midly fortunate as he walked through the behemoth at a brisk pace thanks to a noticeable lack of security. His loyal Delcatty still padded along beside him, constantly on watch for any disturbance with her sensitive hearing.

He didn't know how well May was doing, but he assumed she wasn't facing any resistance either, if his conditions proved to be true throughout the building. Still, it seemed lax, even for something which he guessed would be a heck of a big deal for Magma.

Not just a big deal, he reminded himself. This is planet-wide terraforming they're about to commit. For the worse.

Reminded of the grim situation, he doubled his pace. Just past this corner, and…

Brendan rounded the junction, and just barely managed to get back again before the Magma grunt stationed at the doorway glanced over in his direction at the shuffling. He gave the corridor a sweep of his gaze just in case, then returned to waiting at his post.

That was a little close.

Inwardly, Brendan berated himself. It would've been silly to leave such a point unguarded, after all, especially since they'd been detected and were fully on watch for them. He shouldn't have been so surprised. Now how to disable him…

The grunt jumped in surprise as a Delcatty leapt out from the corner he'd heard noises from previously, and screeched loudly while charging a Thunder Wave attack in her maw. He threw himself to the left as his hand lunged for the radio and Pokeballs on his belt, but he didn't quite manage to accomplish either before the Thunder Wave tracked him with uncanny accuracy and struck him down. He slumped, twitching and paralyzed.

Brendan peeked out to see his Delcatty preening itself and the man convulsing on the floor. "Coco, now's hardly the time, you little thing." She mewed in response, unimpressed. He grinned and stepped out to nearly stride into the room the grunt had been guarding, but paused and gave the man an apologetic look. "Sorry about that, dude, but I think I'd prefer you than having two great big engines of destruction over our heads. Coco, keep an eye him while I do my magic, will you?" The person glared at him at best he could with one eyelid twitching. Brendan wasn't quite sure if that was out of rage or just the paralysis working its charms, but he didn't stop to find out as he finally entered the maintenance area.

The room was dominated by a thick, see-through hollow pipe half-embedded into the wall to his right. It had to be at least a foot in diameter. The rest of the place looked a little less impressive, sporting a couple of sturdy-looking control panels. Brendan considered just messing about with the multiple dials the largest one had, but after stabbing a big red button (It's always the red ones that mess things up most, he thought) to no apparent effect, an LCD display in the centre lit up with 'Password Required: _'. Not exactly willing to guess and likely get it wrong and have all sorts of trouble come down on his head, Brendan considered the rest of the room. Literally nothing of value was gracing the rest of the room, aside from the pipeline, and Brendan could assume that it'd be as indestructible as the ones in the circle room back a minute ago.

… or was it? Leaning in a little closer to inspect, Brendan managed to make out a barely discernible hatch in the side of the pipe, large enough for a small person to fit through with a little effort. He smiled. Perfect!

Yanking the handle, he snorted as the door didn't budge. Looking around the edge to discover the source of his problem, he spotted a thin metal lock holding the door firmly in place just over the crest of the pipe. Now how to disable that, then…

May, having had the misfortune of picking Kyogre's room, which was situated closer to the bridge of the platform, was being held up considerably by grunts who were charging around, trying to each get secure a good view of… wherever their resurrection was due to take place, as well as technicians just performing odd jobs and last-minute preparations. It infuriated her having to hide every five seconds, desperately aware of the perhaps two minutes she had left, but she reminded herself that too much was at stake here to risk blowing her cover just for her feelings.

As a stroke of impossibly good luck, May somehow managed to get within sight of the maintenance room without alerting even one grunt. It probably helped that none of them were actively patrolling, but still, that was an achievement. Casting a nervous look around the passage and seeing not even somebody to guard the room, she carefully padded over into the open.

Of course, her luck was not indomitable. Just as she was running over to the doorway to finally carry out her sabotage, a grunt and well-dressed Magma captain rounded the corner at the opposite end of the hall, chatting excitedly. Her running and their talking abruptly ceased as both parties caught sight of each other at the exact same time.

There was a horrible pause, during which May felt her blood pressure rise by a few dozen beats per minute. She tried to force her legs to resume their rush for the door, but the grunts recovered first.

"Hey, you!" the grunt roared. He released a Numel, but the order to launch an attack was stopped in his mouth after his partner blasted forward, evidently intent on snagging the girl who'd dared to trespass on their ground.

This was all the encouragement her legs needed. May yelped as she ducked a hasty flying grab from the Magma and practically tossed herself into the room as he went skidding away behind her. Hearing the first grunt yell, "Stop her, Numel!" she cast her gaze around in a panic, spotting the first thing that looked important enough: the pipeline, identical to the one Brendan had seen earlier.

She snatched her Pokeball from its belt in a rush. "Blaziken, quick! Blow that pipe open somehow!"

Her charge materialised in a flash of red light. The starter was momentarily disoriented from the haphazard way his master had summoned him, but nevertheless regained his composure a moment later and delivered a powerful Fire Punch to the glass. It didn't even so much as crack, but the hinges of the door broke on the impact and the door fell inwards, forming a neat square hole in the tube.

May briefly wondered if that would be enough to stop the machine from working, but before she could come up with a back-up plan, the second grunt and the Numel from before both appeared in the doorway outside. The former immediately rushed in and grabbed May from behind in a choke hold before she could put up a defence, but his eyes widened when he heard Blaziken snarl, and felt the furious Pokémon snatch him by the hood and bodily hurl him back out again. The Numel hurriedly charged a Flamethrower, and made to fire it, but the attack was arrested as Blaziken forced the Pokémon right out of the room in a huge full-body tackle.

Back in the conduit room, the machines remained whirring in an endless drone, and the network of pipes remained as silent as ever with all sorts of foreign material being pumped through them, but there was one thing that did change.

The small control panel the duo had been watching earlier still displayed the map as they had left it (though two blaring red dots had appeared in two of the rooms), but the timer in the corner was still ticking down, just past five seconds left. As the little Numel attempted to roast the intruder with a Flamethrower and was forcibly ejected from the room by Blaziken for his troubles, and Brendan triumphantly managed to shatter the lock at last using the disabled grunt's sturdy radio, it hit zero.

The bright energy within the conduit of pipes shifted noticeably, speeding up their travel and slowly beginning to brighten even further…

May gasped as she witnessed her beloved Pokémon and his victim of a Numel fly out of the room again. A scuffle started shortly after as Blaziken fought to keep a Ninetales the captain had summoned from flaying him alive.

Behind her, the pipe was still empty… but the air inside slowly began to rush from somewhere down the trail, being forced out by something else coming up behind it. By the time it had progressed enough that May became aware of it and turned around to regard it, puzzled, the intense glow of the energy blasting towards it reached a peak as it passed by. The energy, behaving much like a strange liquid, diverted right through the open hole in the pipe, and May was engulfed in a sea of fluorescent blue ichor.

"Haha! See, I told you that radio would work!" Brendan crowed. Outside, Delcatty huffed at his exaggerated response to the victory. The grunt, paralyzed as he was, could only manage a vaguely horrified look.

Despite the obvious stupidities of such a thing, he was curious nonetheless, so Brendan carefully stuck his head inside the pipe to have a look down the length on either side. Unsurprisingly, it made off into darkness quite a short distance away due to lack of lighting.

He 'Ahh''d appreciatively at the gentle breeze flowing through it, though. It seemed a bit excessive for just ventilation. He was honestly expecting something like what he'd seen in the circle room back a while ago…

Oh? Was that light? Frowning at the now brightening ring appearing a good while ahead, it occurred to him that that was just the shadow of his head. But that meant something must have been coming up behind him-

He practically flung himself backwards with his entire upper body in an attempt to avoid whatever it was that was approaching, suddenly embarrassingly aware of how he'd completely lost track of time, but his evasive efforts proved to be futile, as the red pulsing energy beam blasting down the tube reached the access point and swallowed the room whole in an eerie scarlet luminescence.

And CLIFFHANGER! OH! WHAT IS THE DEAL!

Well, A) it's a great point to change chapters, and B) I personally felt like I'd be stuffing too much information into the chapter if I continued on. My incessant inner demand to keep the word count fairly consistent might've had a part too, lol.

So! That's all from me this week. Leave a review, put an alert, or tack it in the favourites list (or preferably all three!), and I will see you next week! =)

Signing off,
grammaguy