Chapter 10: Cyan City

Mitch sat at his computer, mouse in one hand, keyboard under the other. He smirked at the screen in front of him, on which he saw what seemed to be a spaceship painted red and gold. With the mouse, he ordered said spaceship to plant a landmine.

Golbat sat on Mitch's desk and watched his trainer play.

"I'll blow 'em up! Just watch me, Golbat!" Mitch said. "I'll wait until their robot steps on the landmine, and then I'll bring my trapping robot to the surface."

In the game, a bipedal robot with two cannons for arms charged at Mitch's spaceship. The robot stepped onto the landmine and got blasted away. When it got back up, Mitch ordered his trapping robot to drill its way to the surface right underneath the enemy robot.

Mitch grinned. "It's severely weakened. Perfect time for a barrage of missiles!" He ordered his spaceship to attack.

As dozens of missiles filled the screen every second, Golbat started flapping his wings and chanting, "Gol! Bat! Gol! Bat! Gol! Bat!" with increasing frequency as the enemy robot's hit points decreased. When the opponent was destroyed in an explosion of fireworks, Golbat lifted his left wing and yelled, "Golbat-baaat!"

Mitch gave his pokémon a high five. "Yeah! Now on to the next level!"

Golbat nodded. "Bat-bat!"

When Mitch realized his phone was ringing, he sighed. "It seems like the next level has to wait." He took the phone off his desk and saw the name Giovanni as the caller's ID. "Hi, Boss! What's up?"

"Your time to loaf around is up," Giovanni said. "Come to my office. I have what you'll need for your next assignment."

"I'll be right there!" Mitch said before the boss hung up.

Mewtwo was in Viridian City, approaching the pokémon center. It was about time to fix Buzz's bent wings and to reinvigorate Charles, who had chosen to rest in his poké ball for this trip.

When the building's doors opened, Mewtwo was shocked to see a very sad Yan hugging a whiskerless Nutcracker. "Yan! What happened?"

Yan looked up to see Mewtwo and then said, "Team Rocket! They stole some pokémon from three kids. Nutcracker and I tried to stop them. They defeated Nutcracker, and then they cut his whiskers! He loses his balance without them!"

"Those bastards!" Mewtwo said, whipping the air with his tail. "How could they do this to a pokémon?"

Yan patted his raticate on the head. "They don't care about pokémon. To them they are just tools."

"Can his whiskers be repaired by the healing machine?"

"I'm afraid not," Yan said. "You might think that potions and healing machines can work wonders on sick or wounded pokémon, but … it all depends on how much damage we're talking about, and on what pokémon sustained that damage. Bug pokémon and a few water pokémon can regrow limbs pretty fast, and putting them in the healing machine speeds up the process. They can have their limbs back within mere hours that way. But for normal types like my raticate … if he were to lose a limb, he'd be handicapped for life. Fortunately his whiskers can grow back, but it will take about three days, even with the machine's help."

"I'm sorry I didn't arrive there before this happened," Mewtwo said.

Yan looked up at him. "Don't be. You couldn't have known. You were somewhere else."

"But I knew that Team Rocket was causing trouble around. I should have warned people."

"That's not your job, Mewtwo. The police are already aware of these crooks, and there are posters with the mugs of the Rockets all over Viridian City. It's just that sometimes they get away with it because the police can't be everywhere."

Mewtwo clenched his right hand's three fingers into a fist. "It may not be my job, but I will assemble a strong pokémon team and put an end to Team Rocket's criminal activities soon." Then he remembered something, so he searched his backpack's pocket. "Oh. I came here to get my pokémon healed. Nurse Joy! Please reinvigorate my charizard and beedrill."

"Right away!" the nurse said as she took the balls from Mewtwo's hand. "So, your charmander evolved all the way into a charizard in just two days? Or was my computer acting up and showing it as a charmander last time you've visited here?"

Mewtwo had a puzzled look on his face. "Is it unusual for him to evolve this fast?"

"Charmander evolves at level 16 into charmeleon," Joy said, "and then into charizard at level 36. Even if you were to put him through the most intensive training, your Charles would at best still be a charmeleon today, because there is no way you'd have time to teach him all the skills necessary. You'd not even have time to feed him. There is only one way this could have happened, but ..."

"There wasn't much training involved, and he mostly battles on his own. I'm still trying to get his complete trust."

"I'm glad you didn't force him to train, but if training and battling wasn't the reason behind his rapid evolution, then maybe he touched an evolution stone."

Mewtwo lowered his left ear. "What does that stone look like?"

The nurse searched through her desk's drawer and brought out a semitransparent orange stone that had a still flame inside it. "It probably looks like this. This is a fire stone, but it should have no effect on charmander nor on charmeleon."

"I've seen a lot of rocks in Pewter City, but they all looked like normal rocks. Charles did evolve into charmeleon there, but then he evolved in Celadon City later on. No strange rocks there either."

"Then ..." Nurse Joy began, "maybe it is a different breed of charmander, kind of like the Alolan forms, which come from the Alola region."

"I don't think Charles has ever been to Alola. He and I were created by some scientists on Cinnabar island."

"You're created? Well, that explains a lot. Your intelligence seems to be way higher than any pokémon known to us so far. Is your charizard as civilized as you?"

Mewtwo's ears drooped. "Uh, no. He acts kind of feral at times."

"Sounds like you'll have to train him better. Just remember to treat your pokémon with kindness and you will earn their respect."

"I try my best, but it seems there's something bothering him. I'll find out what it is, eventually. At least I hope so. I mean, I've been taught by a meowth how to understand pokémon, but Charles is just so difficult to read ..."

"You've been taught by a meowth?!" Yan said. "You mean … the talking meowth?!"

Mewtwo looked at him and said, "Yes, he seems to be a nice pokémon. The poor fellow roams the streets begging for food. I need to find him as soon as I can to tell him that Professor Oak's going to give him a place to stay and food to eat. He was in this city last time I saw him, but I could not find him anymore."

Yan smiled. "Wow! So he does exist! I want to meet him too! Can I tag along?"

"Sure, as long as your parents don't mind."

"Don't worry, they're fine with me traveling as long as I keep in touch with them through my phone."

"Alright then," Mewtwo said.

The nurse brought his poké balls back. "Your beedrill's wings have been unfolded and your charizard is well-rested. Here they are."

He took them smiling and said, "Thank you, Nurse Joy! Have a good day!"

She smiled back. "Thanks, may you have a nice day too!"

When Mewtwo and Yan came out of the pokémon center, they saw a golbat that was hanging upside-down from the top of a lamppost. The creature stared at them with its tiny eyes as if it were scanning them, and then flew away in the blink of an eye.

"Man, golbat sure look ugly," Yan said.

"Well, I wouldn't call them ugly," Mewtwo told him, "but they're not exactly cuddly creatures either."

Yan looked at the poké ball he held in his right hand. "I like my raticate. He's tough, he's cool, and fluffy too."

"You and Nutcracker are long time friends, huh?" Mewtwo asked.

"Yeah. Five years ago, I heard this strange noise in the attic. I went up there with a flashlight and saw something scurry through the gnawed cardboard boxes of nuts. Then I saw it jump into one of those boxes, so I went to see what it was. When it jumped at me, I screamed. My dad heard me and, when he saw what had scared me, he gave me a poké ball and told me to relax because it was just a rattata. He encouraged me to go catch it. And so, I threw the ball at that rattata and captured my first pokémon without even being an official trainer. Since then, Nutcracker and I have been training along with a few kids from the neighborhood, and then he evolved into the raticate he is today."

"I guess you'll become official once you're ten years old, right?"

"You betcha!" Yan said and then grinned.

The scientists from the lab next to the Pewter City Museum sat at a round, glass table and discussed with serious expressions on their faces.

"I'm not so sure it was a good idea for Professor Oak to let a pokémon carry the helix fossil. What if it runs off with it?" one man from their team said.

The woman next to him said, "Have a little faith; if it's an intelligent pokémon, I don't think it would just steal stuff like that."

"Abra are quite intelligent, and some of them still use their telekinesis to steal round objects while people aren't looking," the guy from earlier told her.

All six scientists turned their heads to look at the doorway through which Mewtwo came.

"Hi! I'm Mewtwo and I've brought that fossil the professor gave me."

The eldest of the scientists, who had long, gray hair, got up and approached Mewtwo. "Welcome to the Pewter Museum of Science! This is our laboratory section, as Oak may have told you. I'm Boulder Pebble, the head of our team."

"So, is it true that you guys revive pokémon out of fossils?" Mewtwo asked.

"We wouldn't really call it reviving. What we do here is called cloning. By finding out how a fossil's DNA looked like, we apply its patterns in stem cells of closely related species with the help of our cloning machine. The machine basically prints out a living replica of any prehistoric pokémon."

"Have you cloned anything yet?"

"Well, there was Mary, the mareep. She was not cloned from a fossil, but all we did was give the pattern of the original mareep's DNA to the machine, and it built a perfect replica of the original within four days!"

"Wow!" Mewtwo said, his eyes wide with awe. "Where is Mary? Can I see her?"

Boulder lowered his gaze to the ground.

"She was, uh, taken out of the container a bit too early," a young man with brown hair and big, round glasses said as he went up to Mewtwo.

"So what happened to her, mister?"

"Do not call me mister! I am Seymour! Seymour the scientist!"

"Sorry!" Mewtwo said, lowering his ears.

"But to answer your question … Mary's lungs weren't fully developed on the fourth day, so she was unable to breathe properly when my colleagues took her out of the container. Unfortunately, she didn't survive."

"Wait! If you were unable to create a creature that could survive, what makes you think you could recreate something as old as omanyte?"

Seymour placed his glasses better on his nose. "She could have survived, but these numskulls were too eager. They could have waited, but too soon they took out the creature. We won't be making the same mistake on this event! Six days is the minimum we will have spent, for the machine to finish preparing the clone for its extraction, so that we may see it in action."

Boulder face-palmed. "The rhymes … The awful rhymes ... Seymour, you'll have to work on those. Anyway, Mewtwo, since we're on the topic of cloning and such, Professor Oak told me that you yourself are a created pokémon."

"That's true," Mewtwo said.

The old man smiled. "Cinnabar Island, huh? Those guys were actually way ahead of us."

Mewtwo gasped. "Y-you knew them?"

"Not all of them, but Dr. Fuji, their head scientist, recruited me for a short while. He asked me to supervise the first clones – a charmander, a squirtle, and a bulbasaur. They didn't even look like the starters they were cloned from. If anything, they looked like tiny, pathetic fish. Those three … they didn't make it past the first month."

"That's sad," Mewtwo said.

"But Dr. Fuji didn't give up. He made a second batch, and those pokémon failed to grow past the first month as well. I've seen two more batches fail this way before I gave up working for him. He was so determined to successfully clone a pokémon that he didn't really care how many times he would see this kind of failure. God knows what pushed the guy to be so serious about it."

"So he cloned me … from what?"

"I don't know," the old man said. "I've never seen anything like you before. But the guy did have a habit of adding a 'two' at the end of the clones' species name. If you're Mewtwo … then what is a mew?"

Mewtwo tilted his head to the side. "A mew? I don't know. I would like to see one."

"Anyway, I need your help, if the cloning of omanyte is to happen."

"Sure, Mr. Boulder, I'll help."

"There is this other scientist who has a laboratory in Cyan City. He is working on a liquid that is similar to the one Dr. Fuji used for his cloning experiments. Please go there and retrieve a five liter bottle of it. His name is Dr. Windmill and he lives at house number 20. Cyan City is smaller than most Kanto cities, so the house will be easy to find."

"I'm heading there right now!" Mewtwo said with a grin.

Yan waited for Mewtwo outside the lab. When he saw him, he asked, "Did they revive the omanyte?"

"Not yet," Mewtwo said. "I need to retrieve something from Cyan City. Are you coming?"

"Of course! I've always wanted to go to the mountains! Also, Cyan City has a gym. You might want to challenge it while we're there."

"Great! Let's go!"

It took them one hour to reach the top of the mountain to the north of Pewter City, but the effort was worth it. There they found Cyan City, where not a single skyscraper could be spotted. Instead, all houses were made of wood, and most of them were smaller than even the ones from Pallet Town. There were conifers growing everywhere on each side of the place, and various bird pokémon watched from among the trees' needled branches. Small, rodent-like pokémon – some of which were light blue while others were pink – scampered as soon as they saw Mewtwo and Yan walk on the path near them.

"Look at that! Cyan City's gym!" Yan said while pointing at the biggest wooden building in the city. Atop its cyan roof, there was a pair of wings made of wood.

"It's as if it could take off any second now," Mewtwo said.

"Yeah, this gym focuses on flying types. But that shouldn't be a problem for you since you got a charizard."

Mewtwo lowered his ears. "It wouldn't be a problem if he could actually fly."

"He can't fly?!"

"Well, as soon as he evolved, he struggled to use his wings."

"Maybe the gym leader could teach Charles how to fly," Yan said.

"I hope so," Mewtwo said. Then he perked up when he saw the number 20 on a metal plate on a building. "Oh, there's Dr. Windmill's house! He even has a windmill near it!"

Mewtwo knocked on the door and waited. Then the door was opened by a black-haired, middle-aged man with square glasses.

"Hello! Are you Dr. Windmill?"

The man took one look at the pokémon in front of him and said, "Good day! You must be Mewtwo, the pokémon Professor Oak told Boulder about. Glad to see the old man didn't go bonkers."

"I know it's hard to believe that a pokémon could understand humans so well and communicate with them. It's not exactly something you humans see everyday."

"Well, you don't look like anything I've seen before. Do you happen to have any ties to what happened on Cinnabar Island?"

Mewtwo nodded. "I was created there. My charizard is also one of their creations. Two other pokémon that were in the containers there were already dead when I woke up to the world."

"Amazing! Boulder and I thought they'd never succeed, especially after that explosion," Dr. Windmill said and then smiled. "Oh, and on the topic of the liquid I'm supposed to give you … I'm afraid it might take about four hours until it finishes stabilizing. In the meantime, feel free to explore Cyan City. I've heard you are a trainer, so maybe you could challenge the Cyan Gym if you desire to do so."

"Indeed, I was thinking of challenging that gym. See you later, sir!"

After leaving Dr. Windmill's house, Yan looked up at Mewtwo and asked, "So, you're going to challenge Aquila after all? Even with a flightless charizard?"

Mewtwo looked at the ground. "Well … at least Buzz can fly, now that his wings have been repaired."

"I hate to break it to you, pal, but bug types are weak against flying types," Yan said. "Your beedrill's poison type moves might help him out, but beedrill doesn't learn any rock or electric type moves to deal super effective damage. Uh, except electroweb, but he would have to learn how to use it from a pokémon that knows it, and then Buzz could train to master it. At best you could train him to use hyper beam, but I'm not sure if less than four hours would be enough for that."

Before Mewtwo could send another telepathic message Yan's way, he heard a high-pitched scream, possibly from a distressed pokémon. He and the youngster looked in the direction of the cry and saw the source of it.

A brown, quadrupedal creature with long ears, fluffy tail and matching collar kept yelling, "Veev!" while its owner kept tugging its leash. The pokémon's ears were constricted by pink bows at their bases.

"Come on, Vixie! You're going to be late for the beauty salon!" The owner was a young, blonde woman with a slim figure, wearing a pink, sparkly dress accompanied by a red bag and shoes with high heels. She tugged the leash some more when she saw that her pokémon kept pulling toward a patch of green grass.

"Looks like that eevee wants to play and roll around in the grass a little," Yan said.

"Just like my charizard," Mewtwo told him.

The woman gave a nasty look to her eevee and shouted, "No! You are a lady! Ladies do not roll in the dirt! Now come on!" She tugged the leash so hard that Vixie basically flew into the woman's leg.

Yan's jaw dropped. Then he turned his hands into fists. "Hey! That's no way to treat a pokémon!"

"She's too aggressive with it," Mewtwo said, frowning.

Yan couldn't stand to watch as the woman dragged the poor pokémon after her. He ran up to her and yelled, "Hey, you!"

She turned around and said, "Hm?"

He pointed at her. "Yeah, you! The one who treats pokémon like they're nothing but dolls that should look pretty for you!"

The blonde raised her lip in disgust and said, "A brat telling an adult what to do? Go play in the traffic, kid! I just washed my eevee's fur, I'm not gonna let her get dirty again." She turned to leave, adding, "Pesky little snot."

Behind her, Yan remained glaring daggers while Mewtwo looked with concern at the screeching eevee that was being dragged on her back over the sidewalk.

"Oh, that would definitely qualify as pokémon abuse!" Officer Jenny said to Yan and Mewtwo.

"What can we do about it, Officer?" Mewtwo asked.

"Well, I can't arrest people without evidence. I need at least photographic proof if not some videos of this woman mistreating her eevee."

Yan looked at Mewtwo. "Do you have a camera with you?"

"I doubt anything I've packed in my backpack is a camera."

"Snap!" Yan said while snapping his fingers. "My phone doesn't have one either."

Mewtwo looked into the officer's eyes. "How are we going to save that eevee? If she keeps pulling her around like that, the poor thing might get strangled. I'd interfere, but I don't want to get in a fight with a human. I don't really know my own strength yet."

"I'm gonna mess that witch's shit up!" Yan yelled.

"Mind your mouth, young man!" Officer Jenny told him. "I understand that you're angry about this. I have a solution: rent a camera."

Yan calmed down and stared at her. "We can do that?"

"There is a professional photographer near the gift shop of this city. He lends his cameras to people for a small fee, but you must leave your pokédex there as a guarantee that you won't run off with his camera."

With a determined look on his face, Yan said, "I'll pay that fee. I don't have a pokédex, but … Mewtwo, would you temporarily give yours to the photographer?"

Mewtwo smiled at him. "If that is what it will take to save a pokémon from such horrible treatment, then I'm prepared to give not just that, but anything it takes."

▶ To be continued.