Pokemon Scarlet

Chapter 21: A Bad Habit

(Amaris Drake)

"What are you looking into the private databases for?"

Amaris was seriously starting to resent how many questions were being asked of him that left him utterly stumped. This was turning into a bad habit.

Gina was the one who jumped in with the response. "We're studying aggression. In wild Pokemon versus captured ones."

Amaris sighed, trying to play it off like he was too busy to be bothered by inane questions like this one. "Is there a problem with me reading my own uncle's research?" he asked Alana, his tone controlled and as polite as he could muster. She'd been among the researchers he'd had the best rapport with.

Alana looked perhaps a little unconvinced, but left it at that. "No, of course not. Read all you like. It's just, whenever someone logs into that database I get a notification on my PDA," she clarified. "But I'll set it up so I don't get notified whenever you use your passcode." She typed away at something. "If you think you'll be in the database a lot, that is."

"Yes, I imagine so. Some of uncle's work is quite relevant to our studies." Amaris wasn't looking at her any longer, but wasn't really paying attention to his notes, either. His attention was trained on Gina and Alana.

"Sorry," Gina said, sounding sheepish. "Hope it's not too much trouble."

That seemed to work better than Amaris' approach had, and Alana chuckled. "Of course not. Just let me know if you guys think you'll be going into any of the other locked databases, okay? Have fun, you guys."

Gina responded with some kind of comment about the definition of fun, but Amaris wasn't listening. This week had been decidedly horrendous to his nerves.

Beyond the discovery of the Alpha gene, Factor A, and the true chemical properties of the blue stuff; beyond returning to Pallet for the first time since his uncle's death; beyond getting sympathetic, nervous glances cast to him whenever he went out in public; beyond enduring the awkward condolences and even more awkward avoidance behavior of some of his fellow townsfolk; beyond all that, Amaris had been given one more thing to dread two days ago. Alana had approached him, uncertain, and whatever Amaris had been expecting, it wasn't what she said. There were some things of his uncle's, personal effects to go through. He was to select the things he wanted to keep and the things he would prefer donated. Amaris hadn't been able to respond right away, and had been on the receiving end of another one of those awkward, sympathetic looks. "I'll do it later," had been the automatic response, and he knew full well that "later" might turn into "not in a million years."

They'd been holed up in lab four for the better part of a week. Gina's mother was seeing very little of them, and when she'd finally expressed fretful concern that their stay in Pallet was half over, Gina had admitted that they could end up being in town for closer to a month. Contrary to what Amaris had expected, Gina's mother hadn't seemed necessarily overjoyed. She was happy, of course, but there was a lingering, unasked question that hung heavy in the air of the Ikeda household. She had to know her daughter was keeping something from her. Amaris found it fascinating that she didn't ask. His own uncle had always been dauntingly pushy when it came to discovering the things Amaris tried to keep hidden.

The Harrisons and Larsons were situated at the four computers, the Nakawas were searching through the catalogues of books in-house for anything relevant, Gina and Jason were cross-referencing the files they'd brought from Edith's for overlapping content, Amaris was glued to the chem station, and Orion had taken up reading through certain additional reports from the professor's collection. Orion had let the others know he was handling reports 19, 24 and 29, and when Amaris had looked those numbers up on the private database, they'd all been about the same subject. Orion was inundating himself in research about the adverse effects and issues that arose in alphas. It made sense that he'd want to know what dangers his father had gotten himself into. Perhaps it would even shed light onto the man's behavior in the past. Still, the niggling feeling that there was more to it than that continued to grow.

Amaris had no time to ponder Orion's interests and odd behavioral quirks. He was running the blue stuff through a series of much more delicate tests, attempting not to screw up too many times. Though the syringes held a considerable amount of liquid, they had a limited supply. He'd clamped down on curses and the urge to upturn a table when he'd ruined one test batch completely. It had been a close thing, though. Not for the first time, Amaris wished they could get the other Pallet scientists in on the process. He was straying farther and farther into the territory of "I don't know what the hell I'm doing."

An unpleasant and unexpected side-effect of confiding the entire story to Gina was that he and she were barely speaking now. If anything he'd thought she would want to check in with him frequently, interested in any findings that would continue to disprove the disturbing idea that the gene was dormant in the Fremont brothers. At this rate, though, it looked like Gina was trying to put the entire matter from her mind completely, and apparently speaking to Amaris was an unwanted reminder that the possibility, however slim, was still there. He was surprised at how much this bothered him.

The one time she did speak up to him, she unintentionally blew his mind.

"Amaris," she said suddenly, looking up to him from where she was situated, cross-legged on one of the tables. They really had to request some chairs for this place. "When we were leaving… uh, Freddy's house." Amaris really was not a fan of some of their code words. "You said you thought the blue stuff reminded you of something, yeah? You were looking on your Dex?"

Amaris' brain stuttered and stopped. He knew for a fact that his face gave away the shock at the uncovered memory, and soon the entire room's attention was on him again. "Yes," he said simply, pulling out his Dex, slipping the goggles up onto his messy hair, and flipping through his files. He'd been searching through his Dex in vain for a while during their walk, but had become distracted. He'd bookmarked the file he'd stopped at, shoved his Dex out of sight, and had made a mental note to return to the search later, which he'd never done.

That was all irrelevant now, though. Amaris had evidently just needed to put the issue on the backburner for a few weeks, because now the memory he had been searching for emerged willingly to him, an image offered up on a silver platter. Amaris had called up the file in an instant, and Gina was at his elbow, peering into his screen a second later.

The picture wasn't too great since there had been very little light in that hidden area of Silph. The image was snapped quickly, an afterthought, and though it had been passingly interesting at the time it was understandable that the rest of the night's events had driven it out of his mind.

"Holy crap," Gina muttered, and the others gave up tact and moved in on all sides, straining to get a glimpse of the syringes full of blue liquid laid out on the table in one of Silph's labs.

Gav's question was immediate, and very similar to Victoria's.

"Did you grab any files from that place?"

"What else did you get from there?"

"Not much," Amaris admitted, bitterly regretting his halfhearted, nonchalant doc scanning while he meandered through the rooms. In a moment he had transferred the files to Gav's PDA.

"It's a little out of order," Gav admitted, flicking through pages. "It's a lot less jargon than your uncle's research, though. Easier to understand."

"Oh, good," Orion said, putting his pile of papers down. "Since I'm already halfway through these new reports, mind if I add that to my stack?" A few people shot him questioning looks, and he cracked his neck. "Obviously this stuff is relevant to dad, and I'm interested and all, but I need a break. Easier lingo sounds divine."

Gav hesitated for a fraction of a second. Amaris could only guess at the options he was weighing in his head, but in the end he seemed to decide that, of all people, Orion deserved to go through this information first. "Yeah, okay. I'll print this out."

Victoria exchanged a look with Gav, but said nothing. She moved off back to her computer and Gav followed to plug the printer's USB cable into the port on his PDA. She didn't sit down though, and drummed her fingers on the tabletop for a few moments while Gav sorted and sent the data through the machines.

"If this thing has something to do with Silph, we really will need the rest of our files." Gav glanced at her while the documents transferred. "We didn't bring everything with us, and there might be something we need back at Edith's."

"Good point," Beth said, sitting backwards in her computer chair so she could face the rest of the group. "Maybe we can send Jason or Amaris back to pick them up?"

"Jason," Amaris affirmed, turning back to the chemical analysis now that the matter was out of his hands. "I'm busy."

"Question, though," Blake asked from one of the bookshelves. "If we bring all the backup discs from Edith's place, what are we going to do? Load them up on these computers?"

"That's the idea," Kaylee said, sounding a little irate. The girl appeared to be in a perpetual bad mood these days.

"Okay, we're gonna load the data onto these computers knowing full well that the researchers are hooked up to the grid. Alana gets notifications whenever we access the restricted database, and who's to say they won't be able to read some of the stuff we stole?" Amaris gave up trying to focus on the blue stuff, slid his goggles back up onto his forehead, and turned to face Zahlia's brother. Blake's arms were crossed over one of the metal tables now, and he glanced at each face from behind a mop of dark bangs. "Just seems like an unnecessary safety risk."

"He's right," Gav said, sounding extremely exhausted all of the sudden. "If we can avoid using these computers for our sensitive material, and avoid leaving anything of that nature out in the open, we need to."

"So… what are we going to do, then?" Beth asked, frowning. "Have some of us go back to Pallet and do half the research there?"

"Yes," Victoria said decisively. "We'll send some people back with the Kadabras tomorrow. For today I think we've got more than enough to work on."

"Right," Gav agreed, giving Orion a stack of roughly fifty printed sheets. To Orion, he said, "tell me the second you see anything I can start searching for in the files on my PDA."

"Yeah," Orion said, but his eyes were already glued to the top page, scanning over the text. Amaris got the feeling Gav could have asked him to put on a drag show and the perfunctory answer would have been "yeah."

His interest piqued anew, Amaris turned back to the lab station, but pulled his Dex closer to him across the narrow table. It was hard to read the scanned images on the small screen, but he enlarged the words and flicked the documents back and forth like a type-writer.

The information he'd grabbed seemed to be useless at first. It contained a long disclaimer about how the drug was still in its prototype phase—something that did not bode well for Nathan Fremont, Amaris thought. Frustrated with the long-winded request for more time to perfect it, Amaris flicked through page after page until another phrase jumped out at him.

Though healthy test subjects exist, this is not a signal that 12.3FA0845 is safe for human use. A number of severe, adverse reactions have been documented—see Henderson report, sections 1-12.

Amaris had a feeling he knew the answer already, but he flipped frantically across his screen anyway, hunting for the Henderson report. From somewhere behind him he could hear Orion shuffling through the print-outs, probably doing the exact same thing. Amaris discovered he didn't have the Henderson report about half a minute before Orion realized it too. Frustrated, he subtly slid his Dex back in his pocket and stared at the blue stuff, needing a mental break.

Severe, adverse reactions. Healthy test subjects "exist." Like trying to assure someone Santa Claus was real. The wording was nothing if not bleak. How many test subjects had been afflicted with these unknown side-effects? What was the proportion of healthy subjects to unhealthy ones?

"Nothing much," Orion spoke up behind him. Amaris didn't turn around to look, but shifting sounds told him most of the others had. "Disclaimers mostly about how this stuff, obviously, shouldn't be marketed."

"Frustrating," Kaylee said, sighing. "That's it?"

"Essentially, yeah," Orion said. "Be right back."

Amaris' eyes followed the older Fremont brother's progress as he passed by and out the door. After a second, Amaris tossed his gloves, rested his goggles on the table, and turned to follow. He couldn't make any decisions without knowing what the hell Orion was in on.

He almost ran into Zahlia at the door, not realizing she apparently had the same idea. They locked eyes for a second, assessing one another, and Amaris stopped, letting her go first. She probably thought he was conceding to let her speak with Orion alone, but she was mistaken.

When they were both out in the hallway, he said, "So, you're not buying his act, either?"

Zahlia stopped and turned to face him, looking a little irritated. It was not an expression he normally saw on her—he usually never saw expressions on her at all. "What are you doing out here, then?"

"Same as you," he said, cutting to the chase. "Do you know something about this?"

"No," she said at once. "But I'm worried about him. No offense, but have you ever actually spoken two words to Orion before?"

Amaris crossed his arms and tilted his head to the side. "I fail to see how this is relevant."

"He won't tell you anything," she said, blunt as a right cross. "He probably won't tell me anything, either, but I have much better odds."

He said it before he could stop himself. "Oh, you think so? Given your history of being completely trustworthy?"

For a second there was undisguised anger in her dark eyes, and Amaris was peripherally surprised she didn't sic Haunter on him. Evidently she decided not to grace that with a response, or figured she was losing time to catch up to Orion. She turned heel and dashed off down the hall, and Amaris remained in place. The twisting sensation in his stomach was probably guilt, and he was utterly unacquainted with it and decidedly not a fan.

He'd meant to lock up the labs, find a box to make carrying the endless files easier, and head back to the Ikeda's broom-closet-slash-guest-room. He managed the first two things, and now, looking down at box after box labeled "Andrew Drake – personal" he deeply regretted not jumping straight to the third item and getting the hell out of here.

Somehow he felt compelled to stay now that he was here. Amaris had never been a spiritual person, which was a common side-effect of one who was raised around a bunch of empirically-minded scientists, but for the first time he could see what people meant when they spoke of a "presence." The combination of memories assaulting his senses and the preternatural quiet in the Drake's tiny living room had an effect that was simultaneously unsettling and oddly comforting. It truly felt like his uncle would appear at the door to the bedroom at any moment, Amaris' Gameboy in hand, halfway through beating the final level of a game he'd bought "for his nephew."

Someone had really done a number on the tiny, narrow living quarters at the back of the research center where Amaris had grown up. They'd never really had a whole lot of personal effects between the two of them, so he wasn't more perturbed than usual to see kitchen chairs broken on the ground, or more of the stupid cardboard taped over the small window at the back. They'd spent a remarkably small percent of their lives in this space, often returning only to sleep. Their real "home" was the rest of the center. Everything from the unbearably awkward "birds and the bees" talk to serious heart-to-hearts happened out in the tiny greenhouse. Holidays were spent around the sulfurous glow of computer monitors, sharing cups of apple cider, checking up on scrolling lines of data. Birthdays took place crowded around one of the long, surgically-clean metal tables, cake cut and served on flimsy paper plates. Everyone always ate standing up.

Someone had cut through the yellow caution tape that had been stretched over the kicked-in door. Whatever criminal evidence had been there almost six months ago was definitely gone now. Countless people had been tromping in and out of the living space, but in spite of that, he could still smell his uncle's aftershave.

The boxes piled in the middle of the living room might as well have been the Indigo Plateau. He could feel their weight, contents, and implication settle in his stomach like lead. Amaris put down his box of files and sat on the ground, staring at the six cardboard boxes. They weren't specifically labeled beyond what was necessary. No one had rifled through these things and sorted them into clothing, books, movies, trinkets, miscellaneous. That was his job.

Getting to his feet, Amaris let out a slow breath and tossed one of the cardboard lids aside before he could chicken out.

Prescription pill bottles—his uncle had suffered from migraines and Amaris had frequently been sent to the bathroom to rifle around in their sparse medicine cabinet for these, his uncle lying in bed with his head stuffed under a pillow. Tiny little speakers still hooked up to a small sub-woofer—as a former punk rock drummer, Andrew Drake had of course been a music snob. Songs played out of anything less were not acceptable. A remote control—for all his scientific and technical know-how, his uncle had been remarkably lazy in certain areas of his life. The remote was broken; Amaris had to lower the volume in order to change the channel and vice versa. It would have been an easy fix, but it was always put off. They barely ever watched television, and anyway, they had all the time in the world to tinker with things like that.

There was absolutely no way he could do this right now. Feeling strangled and unbearably hot all of the sudden, Amaris groped on the ground for the box lid. It was poised above the treacherous contents of the first box when something caught his eye. Nestled between his uncle's hideous spare glasses and one of his deteriorating belts was a little flash-drive on a lanyard necklace. It wasn't anything remarkable, but the paper tag hooked to it read "Nidoranarchy."

On impulse, he reached out, detangled it from the mess within, and pocketed it. Maybe someday, perhaps years from now, he'd be able to open the thing and laugh at pictures of a younger Andrew Drake with black nail polish and a rust-colored Mohawk.

At the doorway he paused, the box of Factor A files under his arm feeling much heavier. For a second he wondered if his uncle would have been disappointed in him, running away from the things that they had shared together. The thought was pushed from his mind quickly, but the nauseated shame remained. His uncle wouldn't have been disappointed, of course not. Amaris' own criticism was much harsher.

His Dex buzzed in his pocket and he yanked it out, desperate for a distraction. It was from Gina. where are you? mom made grilled cheese and jason almost set my house on fire.

He huffed out a laugh and blinked his stinging eyes. Feeling shaky and raw, he forced his legs to carry him away from the small apartment, through the dark labs, and out into the night. Grilled cheese and attempted arson sounded divine right now.

The next day everything went to hell. It happened in stages.

At first the group simply had some trouble deciding who to send back to Edith's to start looking through the rest of the Silph files. Beth and Kaylee had naturally assumed they would be the ones to go, but Orion and Zahlia also volunteered. This odd mix caused a few uncomfortable questions, a little one-sided verbal scuffle between Zahlia and Kaylee, and culminated in Victoria venomously declaring she would be accompanying all of them, and they would get along or so help her god she'd make them. Amaris felt a bit sorry for Beth, caught in the middle of the drama as usual, and rubbed the bridge of his nose as the Kadabras took the five back to Viridian. It was obnoxious, but rather typical of their group as of late.

He turned back to the lab station and checked on the more delicate machinery that had been running an analysis of the toxicity of the blue stuff. That was when the second issue emerged, initially curious but with the promise of mounting complications. Amaris read the new results, then read them again. Somewhere behind him the Kadabras returned. He pushed his goggles back up on his head for the umpteenth time that day, leaned close to the screen, and tried to see if he was mistaken.

"This can not be right," he muttered to himself, turning to look into the open metal case behind him. They had run out of fluid in one syringe already, and had started on the second one. Amaris lifted the other two that remained untouched, and compared them side-by-side with the two he had on the lab table. All four were identical. Amaris knew it wouldn't be as simple as finding that one syringe in particular had "EXTREMELY DEADLY POISON" scrawled on it in sharpie, but it made his job harder.

The chem lab analysis had just told him that the blue stuff, against all logic and reason, was more akin to arsenic than any kind of stimulant, performance-enhancing, Pokemon-manipulating substance. Amaris frowned over the two machines, comparing the notes side-by-side. Though the blue stuff had come from the same case, and empirically identical syringes, they could not be more different on a chemical level. The only overlapping property he spotted was the strange, phosphorous agent that made both samples glow blue. It made utterly no sense.

He heard shoes clacking down the hall before he realized that this was a bad thing. The next stage was underway. Deep in scientific detective mode, Amaris drummed his fingers on the tabletop and searched for some explanation to the jarringly different findings. He was just contemplating wiping the system clean and starting from scratch when the door to lab four opened.

Alana typically did not bother them in here. The only time she had come by was to ask about the restricted database, and Amaris knew that unless it was important, she'd stay away. It was sort of the first commandment of the research center: thou shalt not interrupt the work of thy fellow researchers. Amaris glanced up at her quickly, then back down at the findings, and then glanced up again, frowning. The look on her face was indecipherable, but decidedly bad.

"Gina, Amaris?" she asked quietly, drawing the attention of some, but not all of their group. The two of them exchanged a look, then turned back to Alana. She made a gesture with her head to get them to follow her outside, and after a moment of hesitation, they did.

Alana motioned for them to close the door, and Amaris hesitated for even longer before doing so. Then he crossed his arms and stood taller, scrutinizing Alana, while Gina seemed to be struggling not to shrink down beside him like a bad student.

"Our system… was just flagged again," Alana said, very carefully, the words sounding difficult and censored. "I've been leaving you all alone until now, but this is serious. Why in the world do you have such a deadly substance with you? Where did you even get it?"

Gina moved back slightly in surprise and made half a sound of confused protest beside him. Amaris attempted to telepathically will her to try just a little harder to have any kind of poker face. To Alana, he said, "is there a problem?" Gina seemed ready to argue, since she obviously did not yet know that one of their syringes inexplicably held a fast-acting, vicious toxin, and Amaris cut her off. "I assure you, it was nothing illegal, if that's what you're getting at." Though he was a convincing liar, Amaris liked to avoid using this skill whenever possible.

"Then why can't you just tell me?" Alana said, casting a glance past his shoulder into lab four again. "This is serious. I've never, ever seen anything so chemically potent in my life. This stuff, if introduced into your system in even the smallest of cuts, would kill you in minutes. Not even going into why you have it in the first place, it is insanely dangerous. None of you are anywhere near qualified to handle a chemical like this."

Amaris listened to her calmly—on the surface, anyway. Beside him Gina seemed to be growing more and more uncomfortable, and Amaris' mind was whirling through possibilities. Amaris figured Alana hadn't shared any of this with the other researchers yet, wanting to come and ask questions first. The odds of talking her down from her concerns were slim to none, and from the way it was looking, she was angling to confiscate the blue stuff. If this place hadn't changed too much in the past year and a half, he knew they would save the data they uncovered and destroy the chemical substance immediately. That, obviously, was not acceptable. This was their single biggest clue, a piece of hard, irrefutable evidence that something incredibly illegal and incriminating was going on at Silph.

Gina seemed to reach the same conclusion around the same time. "So, what do you want us to do?" she asked, and Amaris listened patiently for the answer, a little surprised. It wouldn't have occurred to him to ask Alana outright for what she was thinking.

Alana paused, then confirmed his exact suspicions. "I don't know what kind of research project you have going on, but that stuff is way too dangerous to be studied here. We don't have the tools or the means… it's about as far away from our specialty as it gets. And I don't think you should keep it. Take your data, but give me the toxin. It really needs to be disposed of." There was a pause, and Alana added, "and if there's someone who's… I don't know, selling this stuff, we need to figure out who they are immediately. Please, talk to me."

Amaris kept his expression stony and unreadable, but he had made up his mind the second she had started speaking. Now it was time for a new approach, and a quick solution; time was of the essence. Who knew how many other researchers would go to check in on the system flag? The final stage of this abject ruin of a day was in motion.

"Alana, would you ever turn me over to the authorities?"

The question was so out of the left field that both Gina and Alana did a double-take to him, breaking their uncomfortable staring contest with each other. Amaris did not blink, keeping his gaze level and his tone light. Alana mouthed for a second, then frowned deeply.

"Amaris, what does this have to—"

"If you would please answer the question. If you did not have irrefutable evidence that this substance was obtained illegally, which I might remind you, you don't… would you turn me over to the authorities and have them start an investigation?"

Alana's face turned slightly red, and Amaris knew it was out of rare, offended anger. He had heard her talking in a passionate whisper to one of her colleagues in those painful days after his uncle's death. Her poisonous disdain for the police response, their inane conclusion of suicide, and their absolute inability to see any other possibility almost rivaled that of Amaris' own. After a second she let out a slow breath and said, with more than an edge of hurt, "I can't believe you'd even ask me that question. For the record, of course not. We deal with issues in-house."

"Good," Amaris said, and grabbed Gina's wrist. He yanked the door to lab four open, shoved her inside, and slammed it shut behind them, engaging the lock.

Gav only had time to utter, "what—" before Amaris launched into the instructions.

"We need to get out of here, now," he said, tearing off the coat, goggles, and gloves. On complete autopilot he dropped the discarded gloves into the biohazard trash can rather than tossing them to the floor. "We need to take everything with us, and leave no evidence we were ever here behind. We're not coming back."

Amaris had expected protests and questions, but the elder Harrison fell into Fearless Leader mode instantly, delegating tasks left and right. "Gina, print out all the new findings from the lab station. Amaris, wipe that system when you're done. You know how?"

"Yes," Amaris said, and turned to head over to the wall, knowing his job. Gina scrambled to the small computer screen beside the chemical analysis machines, the sounds of Alana pounding on the door and yelling something at them interspersing Gav's next orders.

"Blake, start gathering all our hard files and other things. Get them in a pile." Blake moved off with quick, controlled purpose, not scrambling or running. "Jason, get the blue stuff, carefully. Don't leave any empty syringes or microscope slides behind." Jason dashed off to obey the orders and Gav headed straight to the four computers, firing up all the ones that were turned off and tapping keys like a frenzied pianist. Amaris knew he would be wiping the system of their recent searches in minutes. He wondered if they had minutes. Alana had left the door, and he knew it was to get the master key for all the labs, and most likely a lot of backup.

Amaris wiped the analysis machines clear of data and Gina ran to the printers, adding the new piles of paper to Blake's stash. The youngest member of their group had finished gathering everything shockingly fast, as Amaris could hear Gav say, "Jason, have Kadabra take Blake and our things back to Edith's, and return here." They were a well-oiled machine, a flawless, illegal orchestra and everyone knew their harmonies and melodies.

Amaris ran into a snag in the analysis machine that was hooked up to the toxic blue stuff. Alana was apparently quick enough on her feet to punch in a freeze to the system. The screen was still now, a dialogue box staring him in the face that bore the very cliche text "access denied." His Dex buzzed in his pocket, and Amaris felt a nerve tick in his temple as he looked down and saw it was the center's phones calling him. He let it go to voicemail and grimaced. He didn't want to, but he had no choice; he tapped a few keys to call up a new code field and filled in his uncle's 25-character master override key. It was possible it had changed, but he doubted it. Sure enough, it went through, the freeze window vanished, and Amaris wasted no time cleaning out all the data they had accumulated. He had a feeling none of the other researchers had known that his uncle had entrusted him with that password. Well—they knew now.

Kadabra was back, and Jason was sent with the case of blue stuff over to Gina's place. Amaris was sure it would have been an extremely awkward scene had her mother not been working at Mulligan's that day. It would take him a while to pack their things and get back to Edith's, and that meant that one Kadabra was out of commission while they waited. His Dex was buzzing again and he rejected the incoming call early.

Gav cast Gina and Amaris an uncertain look. "I need to get our things from the inn," he said, glancing at the computers. "This is still going, though." Amaris looked past him at the last computer that remained on, and he could see countless files flying into the trash bin in an unnecessarily flamboyant animation. Though it was a common and childish graphic, Amaris knew Gav was actually sending the files to the darkest pits of cyber hell from which they would never return. "I'll send Kadabra right back to you guys, okay? And I'll call you when I'm packed and ready for him to get me at the inn."

"Sounds like a plan," Amaris said with a strained sigh, scrubbing his hand through his hair. "How many more minutes on that thing?" He motioned vaguely to the computers.

"Maybe two," Gav said, and Amaris motioned for Kadabra to go over to him. "Call me the second you two are out of here and safe," he added, and Gina nodded to him. A second later Gav was gone, and the sound of people running through the halls came to their ears almost immediately.

"Well crap, we don't get two minutes," Gina grumbled, removing a Pokeball from her belt and sending out Charmeleon. For a crazy second Amaris thought she was going to fight the unarmed researchers, but then she sent him over to push his hands against the door. He was her biggest Pokemon, and Amaris sent out Wartortle as well to help. None of their teams were particularly intimidating when it came to brute strength or bulk.

The traditional key rattled in the lock and the the green light near the door flashed to show that the card key had been accepted. The door handle jiggled, then jiggled harder. A different researcher's face appeared in the small window at the door—more shouts from outside. Even with what looked like the entire research staff outside the door to lab four, someone must have stayed behind—his Dex was ringing for a third time even though many people could plainly see him standing there, refusing to let them in. Amaris stared hard at the little files leaping into the trash bin, willing them to go faster. Kadabra returned and Amaris called him over, motioning for him to keep one hand on Gina's arm and one on his own. Someone shoved the door, and then more hands appeared on the glass windowpane. Charmeleon and Wartortle dug their claws against the treacherously slippery tiles, pushing back hard.

"Come on," Gina said to the machine. Apparently someone had decided to take a running charge at the door, because there was a crash, a harsh rattle of door against frame, and a sound of pain from outside. Abandoning that approach, the hands returned.

Amaris decided that the words "stand back!" from outside were definitely not a great sign. Gina and he exchanged a look, and in one motion recalled Charmeleon and Wartortle, not wanting their starters to be near whatever was about to happen. Sure enough, a second later a chair leg was thrust through the safety glass of the small window, cracks leaping to life in the surface and holding together as the entire square plate fell to the ground with a plastic crunch. Arms reached wildly inside before one of them realized the way was unobstructed now.

The computer gave a soft ding that Amaris almost missed completely, the door burst open, and he was witness to one brief flash of shocked, uncomprehending faces before Gina and he vanished.