A/N: Alright, shout out to the Anon for picking up on Radiolab in my Q&A section regarding mutations, and shout out to the four hundred views this has. I usually update every one hundred views give or take a few days. So if you want to get more chapters, read, share, review.

"I swear I didn't have that much to drink…" Mikita's first groans after the five hours of sleep were pained and groggy. One of the leather mats of the huts had been a good place to collapse on but he never remembered doing so.

Mikita wasn't a heavy drinker, but there was no other explanation to why he had felt so bad waking up and rising.

The sharp pain in his side where a bullet had cut through had been slept on unfortunately, so he limped out into the still darkened Guyana with his pistol in his hand just in case someone had come and checked in.

Bullet wounds were a very common injury he had to treat during his service, to himself was not an odd occurrence and his body had been used to the pain, but that hadn't stopped the surged of sharp bites at his pain tolerance that had come with the injuries. Thankfully modern medicine had progressed from the textbooks of the twentieth century he had often studied, and the biofoam that he had brought from the medical van had been diligently painted on his wounds before they had been bandaged up. The foam filled in the holes to an extent, the healing process of his weathered body sped up underneath the bandaged wraps.

His hand ran over his face in an attempt to wipe the dreariness off his being. He should've been used to this; he really had to have been through years of waking up in the middle of pirate raids. But then again army doctrine never allowed drinking on base.

Still, the morning shot of the remaining moonshine was substitute enough for the coffee the officers were allowed.

The bodies that were thrown in the gully hadn't moved from their still positions. For a second Mikita contemplated taking the starter fluid that he had found around the camp and dousing the bodies before taking a burning stick from the fire and lighting them like a pyre. But he had been apparently too drunk before to do it and he was too hung over now.

The hang over he had wasn't that bad however, the shock of water against his face by dumping his entire head in one of the buckets they had mostly taken that weariness off as he shouldered the Dragunov once again and faced the trail leading out of the camp.

It was hardly a trail but rather just a dirt line cutting through an increasingly claustrophobic brush, but he wasn't complaining, not when four hundred thousand in money lay at the end of it.

"Dreamstone. Stolen. No-Eye'd bastard. Retrieve." He reminded himself, remembering his goal in lieu of the command HQ that often relayed and reminded him and his squad of their tasks. With one rough yank he had taken up his field pack onto one arm, and he marched on as soldiers boys do.

The brush scraped at his skin and snagged his clothing despite his free arm fanning the foliage away. Green bombarded his vision that muddled with the dirt of the ground. Hundreds of years of accelerated and mutated growth had led to forests and rain forests like these to have been growing without bounds. Perhaps for better or worse, humanity has not had the effects it had once on the green Earth. He didn't study ecology or the environment extensively outside the typical tactical discussion on fighting in foreign landscapes, but he did know that once a long time ago, these types of forests were cut down by miles and miles for their resources. Even telling by the ruins of the old cities, they needed the wood and the steel and the rock to sustain them. Stalingrad, New York, Berlin, Tehran, the neutron bombs fell and the people withered away, the cities only falling because of a hundred years of neglect. Tokyo had survived due to the old nation of Japan intensively researching counter-measures to such attacks, that and little Western resources were on the island when the bombs and the ICBMs flew. Unfortunately the Japanese were among only a handful of states and nations to survive the fire, and they emerged the only ones left able pick up the pieces.

The NATO, the UN, the Soviet Union, the United States all disappeared in the fire. The last great alliances fell, and so a new one had to be made in its place. The United Nations Government was made to bind the survivors together with the island nation of Japan at the head, as survivors from the fallen nations came, the UNG grew bigger, and no wars continued as rebuilding took place only mere decade after the bombs fell.

Radiation from these attacks hampered these efforts around the stricken nations, many people died because of it, but none foresaw the mutations of the animals that survived the war and how much more deadlier they would be to humanity.

In 2080, the UNG Army was formed from the remains of the Japanese Self Defense Force, the American Pacific Fleet that was sailing during the war, the Russian and American arms caches in Siberia and the Koreas, and the Chinese army to combat the growing Pokémon threat. That threat was only ended after scientists were able to connect the dots between Pokémon and their connection to the particular nuclear ordnances, and the ability to break down matter.

Pokémon aside, there were mercenaries and pirates and terrorists, and they were the average fare today for the UNGA. It hadn't been long enough for the nostalgia of those enemies and his service to come back, but when it had reached that time it would've been an odd choice of memories.

Most people saw the UNGA now a days as a peace army, strictly one of tradition, but the news hardly ever reported on the pirates and the mercenaries throughout the world unless a passenger liner or an oil refinery had been hit with a particularly rating-rising outcome.

"God damn greenery!" He yelled at the forest, intent on the now.

As much as the forest grew, humans had been engulfed by it and lived in it. The Godfathers were these types of people, honed by their environment, coexisting with Pokémon as opposed to combatting them. With their exposure to radiation, perhaps their skin was rough like a Sandile's, evolving as Pokémon did. Perhaps it also explained the lack of eyes the lead tribal had. Of course he didn't have any contacts in the country to verify if his suspicions were true.

He really shouldn't have been saying anything, his home town was Fortree, the only houses that weren't on the outskirts of the town were in the trees, hundreds of feet up away from the local Pokémon.

The ruffles of the canopy above him made his head snap up multiple times, his gun pointed up in alert. As he made his way through the forest, perhaps he at least had someone to confirm his suspicions and at least gather more information than he had from Archer.

The Dragunov was unshouldered, slung over onto his back, and his dominant hand rested on his pistol holster just in case as he regarded the forest as he pushed through the vague dirt path.

He saw their eyes in the brightening night, the golden and red glows of those who watched the ex-soldier. It made him uneasy, cramp, a feeling he only felt when on patrol in hotly contested towns out in the Middle East.

"Anyone willing to talk?" Mikita joked to himself. There was hardly anything welcoming about his figure. The weapons that were on him, how his hand rested in an old and well-practiced form around the grip of a pistol, the medical mask that covered his mouth, the furrow of his eye brows and the cut of his hair was hardly the visage of a peaceful man. Then again the Pokémon that lived and had lived in those forests were used to them.

Maybe he'd accidently step on a Beedrill's nest, a Nidoking's lair, or maybe the tail of an Arbok, but there was never the intent of harming the peaceful locals if he was given the choice. That much the Pokémon that hid in plain sight knew that he was different than the Godfathers.

It was an unmistakable sound: The caw and cry of a Hoot-Hoot. Mikita found himself planted onto a tree's side in cover as he surveyed the area for the owl Pokémon, the creak of the branch above him and he looked up. The red eyes stared into his silver ones and in that moment he knew the owl had answered his half-serious, half-comical question.

Generally the tongue of avian species he knew well for his principal party member as a trainer had been a Staraptor among others.

'Talk'. It said in its language.

"Name's Micky. I need to find some people." Mikita said plainly.

'Clearly.'

"How do you know?" He asked.

'You walk the path of those who you seek. You wish them and their slaves harm, not that you just want to find them.' The twisted form of English the Hoot-Hoot said, intermingling with their own language.

"That may be true, but I do not have the full story of who they are."

'They are Les Padrinos. Our Godfathers.' The Hoot-Hoot didn't lie to itself, believed what it was saying because to it was true to it.

"Uh huh." Mikita grunted in the affirmative as he shuffled away, the Hoot-Hoot following him in a slow glide, unhampered by its habitat as it had Mikita.

'Those who came from the Well. Those who gave life to this land from its place of destruction. They are gods, and they are our fathers.'

"Godfathers..." The word floated on his tongue as he punched through the bushes that seemed to keep replacing themselves in front of him. "They don't seem too fatherly."

'It is their great judgment that dictates what happens to us.'

"And you allow such judgment?"

'Some more than others.'

"Opredelenno..." Definitely.

Native American tribes brought to the brink and driven insane by the radiation were no doubt what the Godfathers were originally. Mikita mentioned the word: Native American, to the Hoot-Hoot that followed him in the Guyanese morning. It was a word deeply rooted in the ears of the locals, human and Pokémon alike, but the meaning of the word lost meaning and what it had originally had meant was meaningless in the new world. The Hoot-Hoot didn't understand the word, when Mikita tried to explain as best he could he found his words coming up short. To describe a secluded people from before the war would've been a stressful affair, one filled with speculations and hows and whys, but what he could formulate only seemed to praise the Godfathers:

They had originally owned this land. Its fruits, its harvest, its animals had all been the Godfathers before it was torn away from them by pale-skinned people from across the sea.

"That's going to sound real familiar." Perhaps it already had as Mikita talked to himself underneath his breath. Of all the dependencies the UNG's nations had to knock, oil remained. The dependence wasn't as suicidal as it had been in the 1980's, but with the development of renewable and clean energy which was profitable to the surviving business companies of the world, the world learned to not really regard oil as an end to a means. The Middle East was still hotly contested for oil, as was the Boreal region, his ancestral homeland, but the acquisition of those resources wouldn't have herald the collapse of those society. There existed several renegade nations and bands that had come to hold over these resources; the most prominent a family going by the name of bin Laden in what was the country of Afghanistan. They made profit from selling the oil in their territory legally, but the UNG dealt an absolute when they refused to join them.

Whether or not Dreamstone was just as important to the Godfathers as the oil was to the bin Ladens was something he was going to find out.

"These Godfathers were once simple and peaceful people I presume."

'Lesser men have forced them out of that state.'

"Did the Godfathers teach you all this personally?"

'It is universally known.'

Mikita laughed to himself in the early Guyanese morning, "Well then I guess no one has let me into the cosmic perspective." The PokéNav read as six in the morning in the coming light. He had only woken up two hours ago and spent that time shuffling through the forest, though he doubted he was able to move much distance in that time.

"Do you support the Godfathers?" Mikita asked, his hand tightening around his 220.

'You find it is better to be with them then against them.'

"Well they want to kill me."

'Then you will die.'

"Then why are you not attacking me?"

'You are already coming to them no? Why should I bother?' The Hoot-Hoot cackled in its owly way before it took off into the canopy. The bird hadn't heard Mikita's frustrated growl, but it would've been preferable to the Hoot-Hoot than a bullet he was contemplating sending its way. If he hadn't asked the Hoot-Hoot that he was going the correct direction to the Torre de Radio he probably would've killed the bird, it possibly relaying his location to the Godfathers, but it was hard to track anyone in a rainforest.

Not to say he gave out mercy to enemies, his former career was one of both giving mercy and withholding it when appropriate, but he had saved a bullet he intended for someone else.

He came across one patrol a few hours priors to the one he was currently stalking. The difference between this one and the one he had taken out with a few consecutive shots from his .45 was that this one had lacked a Pokémon with the heightened sense to detect him.

The first patrol had served to wake him fully up at around eight o' clock, he bumping into the Godfather and a very angry Linoone after falling through a bush that had come into his way.

The Godfather was disposed of after he placed a few rounds into his lungs, the Linoone taking one in its body before it finally stopped its biting at his arm and its neck promptly broken in an impromptu wrestling session with the much larger Mikita.

Linoone were easy to take down as Professor Oak, one of his mentors at Vermillion, had taught him inadvertently. The man didn't want his knowledge to be used for war, but knowing the exact amount of pressure to put on the Linoone's windpipe and at what points of its body would need to be held to immobilize it was actionable intel.

As with all Army recruits, and if he remembered most roaming trainers, he had his rabies shot. With the life he lived however, it wasn't going to be disease that killed him.

The Dragunov was near useless with the ever present branches and leaves, the length of the rifle much too cumbersome in that environment so his pistol was instead aimed at the lone individual that had been proceeding the same way he had.

The white dots that had been its sights aimed at the head the tribal upon his first glimpse at the near naked man, pressing into the forest with only a brown leather skirt decorated with red and blue. His finger floated off the trigger though, backing away and ghosting the tribal's movements. The ambiance of the forest hid the ex-soldier's movements, the opportunity of being led to a shared destination too great to pass up.

The prospect was familiar in that, stalking targets for days in order to be led to an encampment, something that he was sure he could do, something to occupy him for the rest of the day.