Skies As Grey As Battleships

- Side Story: Cipher -

N was sitting on his bed, propping up a book larger than his head on his knees. Zorua was half-dozing at his feet, moving occasionally only to stretch or yawn. Just as N was about to turn the page, he heard a knock at the door to his room. Shutting the book and placing it gently off to the side, he opened the door.

Standing in front of him was a somewhat frantic-looking woman who seemed surprised at N's prompt response to her knocking. He blinked up at her while he waited for her to start speaking; in the mean time, Zorua wandered over to sit by his feet.

"One of the computers in my department stopped working," she said, speaking quickly, "And our tech guy isn't here and Ghetsis is coming by soon for an evaluation and will you please try and fix it?"

N nodded. He was used to people asking him to do things, and he liked helping people. Besides, assuming that there wasn't anything severely wrong with the computer, he should be able to solve the problem within a few minutes.

He didn't have a special interest in computers, but he understood a great deal about them because, as machines, they made sense - cut one wire, one thing would happen; cut another wire, another thing would happen. Cause and effect, easy to follow and just as easy to predict.

But regardless of the problem, he was always happy whenever someone would ask for his help. Not because he liked people feeling indebted to him - in fact, it confused him when someone tried to pay him back for something he'd done simply because he'd wanted to - but because it meant that the person asking for help saw his knowledge as useful, not unnerving.

He couldn't always read people well, but he'd gotten good at being able to tell when someone found him odd.

He followed the woman up the stairs, Zorua hanging onto his shoulder. After two flights, she stopped and opened the stairwell door, walking until she reached a large room filled with desks and computers.

It was easy to tell which Team Plasma members were new and which had been around for at least a month by the way they reacted to N's entrance. The more experienced members looked relieved, while the new recruits just looked confused at the appearance of a nine-year-old.

"I got him," the woman declared proudly, her job evidently done. A man stood up from a nearby chair and gestured towards the computer, whose screen was currently black.

"This computer is what's having problems," the man explained. "It turns on for a second, but then turns right back off." He pressed the power button to demonstrate; the computer did exactly as he'd described. "I already checked that it's getting the right amount of power, and the power button isn't sticking or anything like that."

"Have you looked inside of the modem?" N asked, calmly moving closer to the computer. Zorua hopped off of his place on N's shoulder, parking himself by the modem.

The man shook his head. "No, we thought it was some kind of power issue."

"It could be," N conceded, "but more likely, it's an electrical short." He knelt down and crawled under the desk, carefully feeling around until he found where the computer was plugged into the wall. As he pulled out the plug and set it aside, he heard some of the people in the room begin talking about him.

"Who's the kid?" someone asked from a couple of metres away.

"He's Ghetsis' son," another person explained. "I mean, not really, but Ghetsis adopted him, so..."

N shook the modem. He heard a faint rattling from inside, which reinforced his suspicion that a short was the problem - in all likelihood, an internal screw had gotten loose, which had messed up the very delicate electrical connections within the case.

"He seems pretty smart," another newcomer remarked. "And nice, if he's willing to fix a computer."

"So, not like Ghetsis at all, you mean." The joke was met by a combination of hesitant laughter and quietly uttered 'keep it down!'s.

"He seems kind of weird, though. He wasn't even smiling, and his voice's just... flat. I mean, I don't think you can be that smart as a kid and not have something wrong with you, right?"

N crawled out from the desk and turned to the man who'd explained what was going on. He asked if there was a screwdriver nearby, and the man obligingly located one. N returned to his position under the desk and by the modem.

"He's not weird," someone said, and N recognized the voice as belonging to the woman who'd led him here. He knew intuitively that eavesdropping was rude, but what people said when they weren't aware that someone else could hear them was sometimes very interesting.

Though if N were being honest with himself, he'd also admit that it could be hurtful as well.

He wasn't sure why people talked about him even when he was in the room. He guessed that it might have something to do with his age. For some reason, even if an adult knew that a child was smart, sometimes something still didn't click and they talked as if he couldn't comprehend what they were saying.

He supposed that it could also be that they figured that he wasn't paying attention to what they were saying, seeing as he was currently occupied. But multitasking was always a strength of his; even if it weren't, what he was doing wasn't terribly complex, which left room for his attention to stray.

"Sure, he's not... normal, I guess," the woman continued, and N was a little confused because she had just contradicted herself, which he'd learned was not a very good tactic when trying to make a point. "But he's very sweet and just because he's smarter than you are doesn't mean you should call him weird."

Silence reigned for a couple of seconds. N thought that maybe the other person was offended, but he didn't understand why. The statistical probability of N being smarter than the man who'd insulted him was very high, which meant that the woman's statement was likely true.

And truth was better than lies, because truth was based on facts, and facts made sense. And as far as N was concerned, making sense was one of the best things that anything could do.

Just as N was unscrewing the modem's cover, the silence was broken by laughter, though presumably not from the person whom the woman had been speaking to. There was no retort, though whether it was muttered so lowly that N couldn't hear it from his location or because one simply wasn't uttered, N didn't know.

Having since removed the outer casing, N slowly pushed the modem out from under the desk and into the light so that he could get a better look at it. Less than a minute later, he located the loose screw and tightened it. He reattached the casing and rattled the modem again - no sounds came from within.

Putting the power cable's plug back into the socket, he removed himself from beneath the desk and pressed the power button. The computer turned on and began the booting up process, and it became clear very quickly that the problem had been solved.

"Thanks!" The woman from before came over to him and patted him on the head. N understood it to be a gesture generally reserved for children, and it didn't bother him. "You're a life saver."

It took him a split second to realize that he wasn't a literal life saver, and that the woman was merely being metaphorical.

"You're welcome," he replied, gathering up Zorua in his arms in preparation to leave. He turned towards the door but heard a strained grunt from behind him, so he looked back. The woman had tackled the man N had been talking to earlier into a hug, and if N's guess was correct, she looked a combination of relieved and overjoyed.

As N was not well-versed in the intricacies of glomping, he stood there for a moment, watching with a vague if slightly perplexed feeling of interest. The two quickly separated, but then the woman took the man's hand.

And now N was confused. There wasn't a reason for her to have done that. The man was not being led anywhere, and there was nothing that the woman was saving him from.

Evidently, the woman noticed him staring. "What is it?" she asked.

N cocked his head to the side, as if the slightly altered vantage point would usher in a moment of clarity about what was going on. "Why are you holding his hand?" he asked eventually, slowly and in a manner that belied his confusion.

The woman blinked like she hadn't been expecting that particular question. Then, she smiled. "It's because we're dating," she informed N cheerfully. The man looked a little embarrassed, but he looked like he was trying to hide a smile. "I love him."

"You're holding hands because you love him," N reiterated, trying to understand.

"Right. Holding hands is a way that I can show him how much I love him." N noticed that the other people in the room seemed either amused or befuddled by the conversation that was occurring.

N considered her point, deciding that it made sense. Most humans were very tactile by nature, so showing affection by holding hands was something that he supposed was a natural extension of that. He didn't think that anyone would ever want to hold his hand, though.

He almost succeeded in convincing himself that the thought didn't bother him.

"Thank you for explaining," he said, very politely, before exiting through the nearby door and into the hallway. Instead of returning to his room, he decided to head to the library. Since it was located only a few floors up, he chose to take the stairs.

As he was passing by the door to one of the floor's, N stopped, listening. He thought he'd heard a sound, but he couldn't tell what it had been. The door had stuck open, and N wandered through the doorway to investigate.

He heard the noise again. This time, it sounded like a yelp or a growl. Immediately more alert than he had been before, he headed to where he thought the sound had come from. He stood in front of a door, and a quick check revealed it to be locked tight.

N took stock of his surroundings for the first time since he'd entered the floor, realizing that he was on the floor that Ghetsis used for work. His office, as well several file rooms - some locked, some open to all members - and one of many communication rooms, was located on this floor.

N was definitely curious and perhaps slightly worried about what could possibly be behind the door. He stuck around for a few minutes, alternating between jiggling the doorknob and listening for any further sounds.

None came, and so he gave up for the moment and continued his trek to the library.

The next morning, N grabbed a book, considered the length of time he'd be spending away from his room, and took another for good measure. Zorua quickly climbed onto his shoulder, and he set out into the hallway and up the stairs until he reached the floor with Ghetsis' office.

He located the locked door from yesterday and sat down in front of it. If someone were to open it, then he'd obviously be able to figure out what was inside just from that. But even if nobody came by to open it, he'd be able to ask people who were walking by. People who had business on this floor very likely had a higher chance of knowing what was behind the mysterious door.

Since the floor did contain several file rooms, it received a fair but not outrageous amount of traffic. As the time approached a slightly more reasonable hour of the morning, people started trickling in. Spotting someone about to walk past, N sprang up from his spot. The person stopped and turned to face him.

"Could you tell me what this room contains?" N asked, gesturing towards the door. The man he'd stopped looked thoughtful.

"Sorry," he said after a moment, "I'm not really sure. It's always locked, isn't it?" N nodded. "Well, good luck finding out what's behind there."

As the man wandered off to do whatever he'd come to the floor to accomplish, N thought about how it was interesting that people always wished each other good luck when there wasn't anything they could do about a situation. Even assuming that such an illogical concept as luck - things could certainly be predisposed to achieving certain outcomes, but this was based on physical attributes, not luck - existed, just saying 'good luck' wouldn't change a person's luck.

Words had power, but the laws of the universe were set in stone, and sounds produced by a very physical voice box, which was itself subject to universal rules, could not alter them. Anything that appeared to violate these laws simply appeared to do so because humans hadn't yet reached the point where they could understand what they were seeing.

Many more people walked by, and N politely asked them each time whether they could tell him what the door was hiding. The results were all the same - no one knew. Or no one was telling him. N could rarely discern if someone was lying unless they directly contradicted known facts. He was terrible at lying, but it seemed to come naturally to most people, which confused him.

He understood intuitively that it was advantageous to be able to lie in order to avoid conflict, but wouldn't a society based on trust be better? If everyone knew that others could only speak the truth, then everyone would trust each other.

... Though perhaps that was too naîve. Other than Zorua, N didn't have anyone to bounce his ideas off of, so he sometimes couldn't tell if he was being too idealistic.

The hallway's activity had died down somewhat, leaving the silence to be punctuated only by N turning his book's pages. He'd underestimated the amount of time he'd be spending in front of the door; with the low level of success he was having, he'd probably be there for the rest of the day. He didn't mind, though - he could read in front of a door just as easily as he could in his room.

A few minutes later and he'd finished the second book he'd grabbed. Just as he was about to stand up to run and get a few more, he heard a noise. Zorua's ears perked up, and N pressed an ear to the door, listening carefully.

He heard what sounded like a groan. It continued for three more seconds before cutting off. Though machinery could make odd noises, N felt confident that he could rule out a machine, as he thought that at least someone would have noticed machines being moved into the room.

But by ruling out machines, he left himself with very few other options. Could it be something alive?

It wouldn't make sense for it to be a person. Even though N wasn't allowed to go down to the bottom floor - a basement floor buried under several stories of dirt and concrete - he knew that that was where prisoners were kept. It didn't get much use, because most members objected to it and there weren't many occasions to capture people.

So if the cause of the noise was alive, that left only one possibility. A Pokemon. But N couldn't think of a reason why a Pokemon would be locked in a room.

He looked down at Zorua. "Do you have an idea of who could be beyond the door?" he asked. Zorua had better hearing than he did, so it was definitely possible for him to have picked up something that N couldn't detect.

"Ru zoru." No, but I'm worried.

N took another look at the door.

"So am I."

After hearing the noise, N had checked to see if Ghetsis was in the building - and he was. N had come up with a plan, and as that plan involved searching Ghetsis' office, it required Ghetsis to be out of the building.

N didn't like the idea of going through Ghetsis' things, but he needed to find out what was behind the door. It was no longer a simple case of curiosity. With the possibility that something living could be locked in the room, the stakes had gotten much higher.

N had been sitting in the lobby with the door open so that he could look outside. It wasn't unusual for him to spend time people-watching - people could be very interesting, after all - so his presence wouldn't raise any eyebrows. The reason he'd chosen the spot, however, was because if Ghetsis left the building, he'd have to pass through these doors, and so it would be impossible for N to miss him leaving.

Three hours and two books later, and one of the elevators began to open. N's head snapped up, though he was afraid that it was yet another false alarm. His fear, however, proved quickly to be unfounded, as Ghetsis, followed by two attendants, stepped out of the elevator, his Zweilous walking at his side. N gathered up his books, and he and Zorua scrambled out of the way.

Preoccupied with what looked to be reprimanding one of his assistants, Ghetsis didn't even spare N a passing glance as he exited through the double doors. This would usually bother N, but today it was for the best. The less suspicion N arose, the better.

He waited fifteen minutes to be sure that Ghetsis hadn't forgotten anything that he'd be returning for before calling an elevator and ascending to the floor with Ghetsis' office. It didn't take long, and he soon stepped out, much closer to his destination.

He walked to the door to the office and jiggled the doorknob; as expected, the door opened without a problem. N had never understood why Ghetsis left his office unlocked. He was a very private individual, and he always valued security. Files that were even remotely sensitive were kept under lock and key, so for him not to lock his office was very strange. In N's experience, people often followed a specific behavioural pattern. Breaking this pattern was rare.

That was what N was worried about - that this security flaw wasn't a flaw at all; not a breach of pattern, but another manifestation of it.

Reaching the desk, N pulled out the first drawer he came to and started carefully but quickly sorting through it. Though he came across a multitude of papers and files, he'd skimmed them all and determined that they weren't what he was looking for. The other drawers were much the same.

He moved on to the file cabinets. Searching these took a great deal longer, and after he was done, he was beginning to feel like he'd been in the office too long. The file cabinets had contained nothing even remotely suspicious, and all that was left was Ghetsis' laptop lying on his desk.

N was about to lift up the top before Zorua yipped to get his attention. Kneeling down, he asked what the matter was.

"Zo zoru!" Someone's coming! N sprung into action, closing the file cabinets and tidying up the files within. He did a quick once-over of the room to make sure that everything was as it should be.

He turned around to leave and froze in his tracks.

Ghetsis entered the room slowly and confidently, Zweilous trailing close behind him.

"You're a fool." Zorua pressed up against N's leg, and N fought the urge to shrink against the desk. "Didn't you find it strange that the office wasn't locked?"

"I did," N admitted quietly, "but I thought -"

"You thought what?" Ghetsis interrupted, stepping further into the room. "That I left it unlocked because I had nothing to hide? Because I trust my subordinates? How naïve." By the way he said it, the last phrase was clearly an insult. "The room is alarmed whenever I'm not in it. The unlocked door tempts only those who are disloyal, and the alarm allows me to catch them and weed them out."

So the lack of a lock had been bait, and the room, a trap. A continuation of the pattern.

"Come with me." The command left no room for argument.

N followed Ghetsis out of the room and to one of the locked file rooms. Taking a set of keys out of his pocket, Ghetsis unlocked the file room and shoved N inside. He grabbed Zorua by his mane and pointed towards the single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. As Zorua flailed about wildly, Zweilous let out an ear-piercing screech, and the bulb shattered.

Ears still ringing, N didn't even have time to react before Ghetsis slammed the door shut, locked the door, and left, taking Zorua with him. The crack under the door barely let in any light, making the tiny room almost pitch black.

N picked a spot that he judged to be far enough away from the broken glass to be safe and sat down. The darkness made him anxious, and at the first flutterings of fear he felt panic begin to set in.

This wasn't the first time he'd been locked in a lightless room as punishment, though it didn't happen often - N rarely disobeyed Ghetsis' rules, and this particular punishment was Ghetsis' most severe. N knew it could be worse, but that didn't make the situation any more bearable.

Instead of becoming more accustomed to the dark, he'd grown more afraid of it.

He wished that Zorua was with him, but, as Ghetsis usually did, he had taken Zorua away. Not to punish Zorua, but to further punish N - there wasn't a point to punishing Zorua, so Ghetsis usually just left him to be watched over by a random Team Plasma member.

N closed his eyes. He preferred being able to see nothing at all to being able to make out indistinct and vaguely menacing shapes in the darkness of the room.

He brought his knees to his chest and pressed himself against the wall. Even though he risked this very thing happening again, he couldn't give up. He had to find out what was going on.

Five days had passed since his temporary confinement, and N had spent the time planning and lying low, making sure to go about his normal routine and avoid rousing any sort of suspicion.

Ghetsis had left the building once again. Which wasn't particularly surprising, as it happened quite often, but it was what N had been waiting for. He waited half an hour before entering Ghetsis' office.

He'd presumably tripped the alarm, but he'd taken that into account. He had been able to search the room for about twenty minutes last time; while not as long as he would have liked, it was certainly a reasonable window within which he could conduct a search of the computer.

Unlike his last attempt, he'd come prepared to tackle the computer. Turning it on, he wasn't at all surprised to learn that it was password protected - it was what he'd been anticipating, after all.

N plugged the USB he'd brought with him into one of the ports and ran the program he'd been working on. It began cycling through potential passwords. Launching a brute force attack wasn't exactly an elegant solution - it was the cracking equivalent of plugging in numbers into an equation until the correct answer was achieved - but with a computer program, N didn't expect it to take long.

He'd tested it on his own computer, and it appeared to work. He'd had to code it himself, and since computer science wasn't something he was particularly interested in and he couldn't exactly do a search for 'how to write a brute force program', he'd had to make some of it up as he went along. But as it wasn't a very complex program, he'd managed.

Even though the program seemed to be capable of doing its job, that didn't mean that it would be able to crack the password in time. Depending on the strength of the password, it could take anywhere from less than a second to more than a billion years, and only time would tell whether it leant towards the former or the latter length.

Fifty-two seconds later, and the program had successfully found the password. It was a jumble of letters that was effectively human-proof, but one that fell easily to a program that had speed on its side.

Knowing that he wouldn't have enough time to look through everything, he went ahead and started copying the entirety of the computer's contents onto the USB. After ten minutes, he had roughly seventy gigabytes worth of material sitting on the drive.

He ejected the USB, pulled it out, and shut down the laptop, returning it to its former position. It was now time to go.

Once he'd returned to his room, N had spent ten hours straight going through all of the folders. He was tired and his eyes were protesting against staring at a computer for so long, but he didn't want to take a break.

He clicked on the next folder, which happened to contain all of the programs. He didn't think that he'd find anything in there, but it would bother him if he skipped a folder. Quickly scanning the list of programs, he didn't find anything unfamiliar. Just to be thorough, he started checking the program's properties.

When he came to the chess program, he noticed something odd. He had the exact same program on his computer - it came standard - and his was only five megabytes in size. This program, despite the fact that it should have been exactly the same, was more than a gigabyte large. Suspicious, N opened up the chess program's contents.

It immediately became clear that he'd at least found something. Dozens of documents, along with folders set aside for pictures and videos, had been hidden within the program. It took him a good half hour to go over everything, and by the end of it, he knew exactly what Ghetsis was doing.

One of the documents had described where the trafficked Pokemon were being held throughout the building. Due to how aggressive the training made them, they could only be kept with the Pokemon they'd been trained with - even limiters couldn't prevent a Pokemon from using its claws or fangs, and cages could be broken out of.

N shut down his computer and wandered over to sit on his bed. When Zorua hopped into his lap, he hugged him to his chest. He felt tears pricking at the edges of his eyes, and he quickly wiped them away - crying wasn't going to fix the problem. Emotions weren't going to fix problem.

But he didn't know what to do, and that scared him. Plans and ideas came easily to him, and in the absence of an immediate solution, he felt frustrated - like it was his fault that he couldn't come up with a solution right away.

It wasn't as simple as grabbing the key to the rooms and freeing the Pokemon. From the videos he'd seen, the Pokemon were extremely aggressive, only listening to the person who'd worked with them. If let out onto the streets, they could harm people and other Pokemon, and they'd be quickly caught and killed by the city police, and N entirely lacked the resources to bring them out of the city. And even if he had them, releasing them might do more harm than good, as the wild Pokemon would be in danger. Even if he could somehow release them and guarantee that they wouldn't pose a threat to the existing Pokemon, Ghetsis would just replace them with new Pokemon, and the process would begin again.

Any feasible solution would need to be far-reaching and permanent. He ran through ideas. The source of the problem was Ghetsis and anyone who was contributing to the project, which led to two possibilities.

He discarded the first one outright, as he knew that Ghetsis would not willingly stop was he was doing. Making a moral appeal to someone like Ghetsis, an incredibly stubborn and strong-willed person so interested in power and money, was something with a very low, if not nonexistent, success rate.

Which left the other potential solution - oust Ghetsis from his position as Team Plasma leader, and flush out all of the members who worked with him on the trafficking. It wasn't guaranteed to work, and it was neither fast nor easy.

But N was determined to make it happen.

A/N: Ghetsis has a Zweilous and not a Hydreigon because he's never served in battle and Hydreigon cannot be caught in the wild (whereas Zweilous can) - so if he let his Zweilous evolve, then it'd be obvious that the limiter wasn't working.

I made up a password that I thought Ghetsis would use and plugged it into a password safety tester to get the time required for a brute force attack to crack it. His password was axfjmpvt. See if you can guess where it comes from (I'll explain it in the notes for the next chapter).

Ghetsis' room does not have a camera in it because he doesn't want to be observed. Of course it's possible for him to say that the camera should be off when he's in it, but he's too paranoid to believe that people wouldn't be tempted to spy on him against his orders.