Taking a steadying breath, the unfortunate soul approaches the encasement of acceptance.
In the two days since the initial results came in, Evan had long since cycled through the five stages of grief. Waiting an extra day for Skyler's Omanyte to be reborn gave the poor lad time to stew. But the choice was finally settled. The only thing left to do was pull up the aquamarine cover pulsing with a pale green light.
He had promised; and now it was time to meet his partner.
"Is it ready, sir? Can I open the machine?" The boy errs on the side of politeness with the promise of a first Pokémon so close, wary that Eugene might kick him out again. Besides, the lad has to make sure he doesn't hurt his new friend if it isn't done….baking? Building? Reviving? Whatever the process is called, the child surely doesn't want to harm it.
"Not quite yet, Kiddo," Professor Granite informs, ruffling the charge's hair. "Meeting your first Pokémon may be one of the best life experiences, but we can't rush the process. We want to make sure she's healthy down to the last scale!"
"She? My new Pokémon will be female?" Curiosity briefly replaces the kid's nerves as his head tilts.
"Did you even read the documentation we sent you with? Of course she's female! What else would two X chromosomes mean?" The black-haired scientist cuts in sharply from a desk across the lab room, shaking a disgusted head. Sighing, the agitated man leans forward again. A hand scribbles notes while Eugene observes microscopic squiggles squished between small glass plates.
The boy's blue eyes shift away, embarrassed. His thin frame turns back to the professor, opting to continue speaking with the more civil teacher.
"You said she—" Evan glances over at a snort from the figure slouched over the microscope, "might not be healthy? How come?" A hint of anxiety bleeds back into the kid's tone.
Nodding and crossing his arms astutely, the squinty-eyed geologist answers, "Even after the body is finished rebuilding, we like to double check that the DNA didn't present incorrectly. It is a very complex set of blueprints, after all." Granite taps a monitor nearby, waking it from a temporary screen saver.
"Once we have verified the integrity of her anatomy, then we will rouse her mind. I would never let a Pokémon awaken half-formed, so we save that crucial part until the end. Evolution can be a cruel master, and sometimes there is a good reason the poor thing died. With advances in CRISPR, though, the game has totally changed for genetic defects." At this a ding echoes out with the ironic pitch of a kitchen timer.
"Welp, let's see what we got." The antagonistic man gets up from a seated slouch and leans back, arching. Arms cradle above his hips as the motion is shortly followed by a few compounded pops. Stretching back the other way, fingers thread and dip toward his toes.
The soon-to-be Trainer's foot starts to tap, watching.
Eugene grabs a mug from the table next to him, walking the empty ceramic over to the far wall. Filling it halfway with a black liquid, the procrastinator yawns, then proceeds to plop open little plastic cups. One by one the creamy substance splashes into the mixture until it is a pale tan.
Rolling eyes, the professor presses a few keys on the touchscreen, the larger display mounted on the wall lighting up for the first time.
"Hey! You're no fun!" Eugene sulks.
The full-size television shows a 3D rendering, "Possible Subject Appearance" captioning the top. To the side of the CGI lies a long list of four letters, repeated in various combinations. Occasionally, certain groupings are highlighted in red or yellow.
"Hmmm….interesting." The professor strokes a stubbled chin in thought, turning to the other geologist for confirmation.
"Well, that's definitely something; but I really only see one thing that actually needs work." A pointer moves across the screen, opening a new tab with a similar genome, already fully mapped. With a click, the mouse switches back to the previous tab, then hovers over the third sequence highlighted in red.
"Position 204." A click. "Ah, here we go." With another hover, the dropdown indicates the correct correlation, leading to a quick ctrl + C combo on the keyboard. Going back to the crimson two hundred and fourth position, the line is deleted, only to be replaced with a simple paste. The other red permutations quickly alter to shades of daffodil from this single fix.
"What does the yellow mean?" Evan asks, flabbergasted by an expansive lack of knowledge, but glad the universal color of danger is gone.
"Oh, nothing to worry about. Your little girl will be right as rain! Yellow just means a deviation. The computer does it automatically for things that are of note in studying a genome. For instance, blue eyes versus brown." The curly haired man points to the child's face, and then his own, in tandem with the words.
Ding.
"Okie-dokie. Looks like the changes are done." The image above shifts to include slightly longer fins.
"Ha! Would you look at that? The fin length appears to be linked to the Pou3f3 gene. Fascinating. They must be close on the chromosome. " Glancing over, Granite notices Eugene already jotting the discovery down on a piece of paper. Satisfied, the male's attention shifts back toward the youth.
Recognizing an increasingly lost look, the professor clarifies, "That red gene was oddly arranged, which could have led to structural problems in her gills. So, we altered it to that of a healthy specimen. But unpredictably, the fins got longer!" A massive grin accompanies the revelation. The Pewterite motions to the table housing the new Pokémon, still obscured by no-longer-pulsing glass.
The man's coworker walks over and presses his thumb to a pad while simultaneously smacking a green button on the side of the apparatus. A whoosh of pressurized air decompresses, and the concealing light snuffs out. The cover pops open with an anticlimactic shlick, and Eugene raises the lid without flourish.
Evan steps forward as the fog generated by the mechanism clears, regripping a white and red ball he refused to relinquish for the past half hour.
The first feature to greet the young boy from the mist is unexpected. Lips that could belong on a Weepinbell purse at him. Covering his own mouth in mortification at the incredibly derpy pucker, the previously resigned kid sags as if dealt a heavy blow. Bright orange emerges next; then new, increasingly confusing details surface from the vaporous veil.
Longer fins are one thing, but this is just ridiculous! She looks so weird!
The barbells sticking from her face like a set of whiskers are short. At least a third their normal length. Her main color is mostly normal, but her fins seem…off. Pretty sure the color's wrong. Her scale pattern also lacks the telltale half-hexagonal shape, instead adding in a few extra sides, and a second row. Even the top fin is strange, three clearly separate triangles jutting from her back. But most notable, and most disturbing, is the extremely muscular body, flexed at the ready.
"I thought you said she was normal?!" Evan turns, exclaiming in horror to Professor Granite.
"I said she was healthy." The jovial man's eyebrows scrunch together as he examines his pupil reproachfully. The child, too wrapped up in misery, misses the tension and makes increasingly distressed expressions.
"But, she…..she's not…." The lad trails off, at a loss for words.
"Normal?" Finger quotes surround the word as the mentor's look darkens. "The 'normal' of several thousand years ago just doesn't match your 'normal' of today. Her DNA is absolutely robust." Granite shakes his head, disappointed.
"You're a right git, you know that?" cuts through the room. Black eyes glare javelins at the ungrateful twit from behind prescription glasses. "You don't deserve that girl. She just woke up from a very long nap, to a very confusing place, surrounded by strangers, on land, and you find her distressing?! You knew you were reanimating a Magikarp, and yet you haven't even greeted her because of her looks." The final nail in the coffin, truly chastising the new Trainer, "Even I was nicer when I first met Plant and he wasn't everything I ever wanted."
Head hanging, the panicking kid takes a deep breath. Then several more. Peeking up, Evan's eyes meet a pair of lapis irises. The guarded expression burns more than the shame. Despite immobile brows, the disdain the small fish manages to convey through narrowed eyelids is blatant, even splayed out on her side as she is.
"H-Hi. I'm Evan," the boy soothes. "Sorry for losing it, there. I just got…overwhelmed."
"Well, that's better," Eugene sniffs. "But I'll tell you a secret, Boy. In the future, you'll want to keep your voice even. None of that shaky crap. She's never seen or heard a human before in her entire life. It will take time for her to learn our language."
The chastising adult casts a critical eye over the junior's posture. "You'll also want to make sure you don't look threatening when you approach. Do it in her time, not yours."
Watching the carp defiantly glower from beneath the aquamarine overhang, Evan mentally resigns to a day of groveling.
Chapter Notes:
-In the Pokémon world, it takes a "full day" for a fossil to revive (despite the game being weird about it)
-This scene is actually set in the interior of the anime building's lab.
-CRISPR is a real gene editing technique that is quite fascinating. Look it up. XD It's how they make the luminescent fish using jellyfish DNA for the pet stores.
-The plastic cups Eugene puts in his coffee is just creamer. lol
-CGI: Computer Generated Image
-The four letters are the combination of guanine(G), cytosine(C), adenine(A) and thymine(T), the building blocks of DNA
-ctrl + c is copy, ctrl + v is paste for most computer's hotkey combinations. ctrl + f searches a page or document for a word, and in most writing software allows you to replace a word or phrase with another word or phrase on a case by case basis across the whole document. For instance Pokemon with Pokémon. You're welcome.
-The Pou3f3 gene is related to a gill defect for fish.
-Genes that are close on a chromosome can get "paired" to each other for lack of a better term. If you breed for one, you often get the other by default. Basically, like in dogs and foxes, the "spotted coat" and "curly tail" gene is often seen with the "domesticated" related genes, which is why those are such common features in domesticated canidae (canines).
-The three triangles of the fossil were the top fins on his new Pokémon, for those who didn't catch it.