An empty beer bottle in one hand and a pack of cigarettes in the other, she slipped into an alley to have a quick smoke. As she slid into the shadows, a huddled bundle of grey fur caught her eye. Mildly intoxicated, she tottered over to have a look at it.
It was breathing, still, though slowly. It was hard to tell, in the poor light, but there seemed to be some sort of tail curled around, of a somewhat darker shade - purple, maybe. She prodded it gently.
"Hey there, pal. What's up? Not a fun place to lie around."
The ball didn't move much. A head raised slightly, and two large, dark purple eyes stared at her.
"Don't be afraid. I won't hurt ya." She continued, a tad uncertainly. The object of her attention closed its eyes again and shook softly. She thought something was wrong, but realised that it might be laughing.
Slowly, the morph uncurled itself and stood up. She gasped, stepped back and dropped her cigarette. He was slightly taller than he'd looked on the ground, and now that he wasn't curled up he looked distinctly threatening somehow. The thick tail swished slowly from side to side as she tried to place the silhouette to any pokemon, morphed or not, that she knew... and failed.
"Who... what ARE you?" she stammered. She faintly heard the bottle that had been in her hand smash on the concrete.
The morph made some kind of motion with three-fingered hands. For a moment she thought he was one of the mad ones, preparing some sort of attack... but then realised it was sign language, adapted to morphic hands. She knew rudimentary signing, however, it was too dark to interpret the guestures and the amount of alcohol in her system probably wasn't helping either.
"Can't speak, eh? That's a bummer." She put out a paw. "My name's Cella. What's yours?"
The strange creature looked around for a moment, then pointed at a faded poster on the wall - who knew what it was advertising, it was more rip and tear than anything. She looked at it carefully, then guessed.
"Paper? Poster? Wall?" She shrugged as he shook his head and pointed harder at one spot. "Ripper? Fade? I don't know..."
He seemed to sigh, collapse slightly, then looked her over carefully. Grabbing one arm, he pointed to the cuffs of the light jumper she wore. She looked at them carefully, then at the poster on the wall, tried to work out what was similar between them.
"Blue?" She guessed wildly. He nodded, relaxed. "So you're called Blue. Okay... Blue it is then. You're not from around here, are you?"
He shook his head sadly. Everything about him seemed to slump, eminating immense sadness, helplessness... She felt sorry for the guy.
"Tell you what, Blue. Do you want to come to my place? I'll let you stay there for a while."
He looked a little shocked at this generosity, but readily accepted. She shrugged and strode away... but didn't hear any footprints following. Looking back, she saw that he was coming... though he kept to the shadows a bit, as if he didn't want to be recognised. Doubt began to creep into her mind a bit, but it wasn't long before they got to her old apartment building.
He followed her silently until they reached her room, when he timidly looked around. "It's not much, but it's enough..." Cella offered as an excuse. "I'm hoping to move out one of these days, break these stupid habits of mine..." She sighed deeply.
Looking around a bit more, he walked as silently as a cat over to the television set in the main room. It looked older than the apartment itself. He put one three-digit hand on it and looked at her questioningly.
"Sorry, no, it don't work. Hasn't for ages. Haven't got the cash to call up someone to fix it." Blue looked at it with interest and shrugged.
"Anyway, make yourself at home. Don't suppose you've got any money?"
He shook his head, then looked at the TV, his face turning thoughtful. He mimed working, getting paid.
"You've got a job?" He shook his head, then nodded when she continued, "Or you'll get one?"
She watched him as he looked around a bit more, then continued. "You don't mind sleeping on the couch? It's all I've got apart from my room, and I don't quite feel I know you quite that well yet..."
Blue grinned and nodded, clearing a few discarded bottles and cigarettes packets off the couch with a slight expression of disgust, but then bounced up and down on it a couple of times and pulling up a soft cushion and lying down.
His legs stretched over the end of the couch by over a foot, well before his knees. She moved towards her room, but stopped at the door and turned back. It had been bugging her, she still hadn't clicked as to...
"What are you?"
He looked at her, his face upside down from where he lay. He made a very quick signing before collapsing back to rest. She tried to work out what he'd said under her breath.
"Mew... two?" She whispered as she moved into her room. Mewtwo?
~-~-~-~
Artic was slowly but surely going insane.
Trapped in her own mind. No free will. No control.
She couldn't do anything.
All she could think about was Damian.
She wanted to murder him. Freeze him solid, shatter
him into a thousand pieces. Tear his throat open. Gouge his eyes out. If
only the dream had been true...
There had to be something, some way... Hmm...
telepathy! Yes... Maura had said she'd told them the plan... she could
contact them psychically. Thinking quickly, she tried to formulate some
sort of plan... there had to be something they could do...
Can anyone hear me? She projected her voice
to Silver, hoping like hell it could get through...
There was a pause, too long... then a faint reply.
Just.
Is that you, Artic?
Yes! I've got an idea... listen, there's six
of us and four of you... There's no way you'll beat us by yourselves. You
have to get help. No matter how many legendaries he may have, if you can
call the whole city to help you then you'll be able to take him out!
There was another pause, as if Laura was
considering something, then What about you? Are you-
Listen, there's no point in worrying about us.
The only way to do it is to take out that Charizard, once and for all.
If I get in your way, do what you have to. It's the only way.
Okay, gotcha.
Artic sighed with relief in her mind. That
wasn't a bad idea. It might just stand a chance of working...
She realised something was wrong. Her body felt
strange. Her first thought was that she was changing to become more pokemon,
but as the rather angry-looking face of Damian floated into her vision,
she realised what it was.
She couldn't breathe.
Her throat was clogged up. Her mind was going into
a panic. Damian was holding it back, refusing to let her have any oxygen.
So... you asked the Lugia to bring reinforcements?
Came the Charizard's voice, hovering somewhere between amusement and annoyance.
I
don't like it when people give help to my enemy...
Artic was in agony now... she couldn't make
her body take a breath... her vision was beginning to cloud over...
I could easily kill you. If your friends captured
you, I could make you kill yourself. Simple. You could get rescued... only
to die... and no-one could stop it...
He laughed and released his psychic hold.
Artic collapsed on the floor, tears streaming from her eyes, gasping wildly
for the air she had been deprived of.
Never you mind, I've got my own ways to counter
such a move...
She didn't see him stalk away, stare at the
others. He wasn't in the mood for training right now, so he was letting
them lounge about a bit. But he had noticed the change in them. The wings
were longer, the fingers less... the shape of their bodies were changing...
the legs shrinking slightly... they were all becoming more birdlike. Sammy
seemed about stable at present, hanging on the brink of the final drop.
Chadran was changing a little slower than the girls, but it was still quite
noticable. He hadn't noticed any change in himself. Yet.
I don't understand what could be causing this...
He thought carefully. I wonder if the pokeballs will work if they go
fully pokemon?
~-~-~-~
Inside their laboratory, the scientists Jack and
David had been becoming increasingly frustrated over the time they'd been
working on finding either a cure or a cause for the transformation from
comparitively stable anthro pokemon to insane bloodthirsty full pokemon.
Their team had gradually dwindled one by one, and
an air of fear hung heavy in the air, everyone dreading that they would
be the next to drop into insanity. The two fiery canines knew that the
changes had begun to take place in them, but they were still two of the
most stable.
"This just isn't fair!" Jack slammed his fist down
on the table, unbalancing the careful alignment of the powerful microscope
that he'd been staring into, and angering him further.
"For once, I agree with you." David said from the
chair he sat in. He wasn't examining anything at present, just thinking.
"Calm down. We need to think about this... let's run through what we know...
"There's no real physical reason this should happen.
It would make sense if the pokemon cells were attacking or absorbing the
human ones... but they're not. The changes aren't continual, they happen
in bursts of varying lengths."
"That sounds about right."
"Right... from what we've seen, the changes aren't
caused by something physical within the body. So what choices does that
leave us?"
"It may be mental, emotional..."
"...or caused by some outside force."
"An outside force?" Jack groaned. "That would be
nearly impossible to prove."
"So let's have a look at the other two first." David
paused for a moment while he considered. "First idea - acting, thinking,
or reacting like the pokemon."
"You know that can't be it. We've already checked
- though it is true in many cases, there are a lot of cases where they
weren't acting like a pokemon."
"I know, I'm just running through our ideas. Bear
with me..."
"Wait... I think I've got something..."
"Hmm?"
"Maybe we're looking at this the wrong way... Maybe
we should stop looking for reasons we're becoming more pokemon and start
looking for reasons we're becoming less human?"
"So... you think it's not acting more like the pokemon
that does it... but less like yourself?"
He shrugged. "It's worth a try, isn't it?"
"That's not actually a bad idea." David grinned.
"Alright. Spread the word and see if we can't prove this one right..."
~-~-~-~
Damian gathered the five legendaries with him. "So...
any ideas on how we can get the others? Any idea of where they'll be?"
He stared at Artic, who was still choking slightly
from his punishment for her message. She shook her head. "I didn't specify
a location."
"Blue has left." Holly intoned suddenly.
"What?"
"Blue teleported out shortly after your conversation
with the others. He's now beyond my ability to detect him."
Damian cursed and hit the wall, then massaged his
fist. "Oh well... one more inconvenience to deal with." He growled. "But
it'll make capturing the other three much easier... Hmmm..."
Picking two pokeballs from his deep pocket, he threw
them on the floor. A Raichu and an Ivysaur morph emerged, and waited for
instructions; the legendaries looked curiously, they hadn't seen these
two before. He spoke to the Raichu first.
"I want you to go out and find an Abra or Kadabra
morph, something capable of teleportation. Give him or her a thunderwave
to prevent them from escaping,
knock them around a bit, then capture them and bring them back here."
He handed the morph an empty pokeball. "And you can go and find me a Electrode
or a Voltorb morph." He handed another to the Ivysaur. "Make sure you're
not seen - use the teleporter to get home if you have to. Meanwhile...
I've got some preparing to do. It's going to be a big battle soon..." And
with that, he recalled all the legendaries. He had someone he had to meet...
~-~-~-~
"So... what are we supposed to do now?" Silver asked.
"Hmm?" Eric looked up.
"We're up against an enemy who has six of our friends
enslaved and thus a two-to-one advantage over us in numbers. So we should
recruit a few friends..."
"Right."
"So where do we start?"
"Well, I suppose we could go door-to-door knocking..."
There was a pause as they considered this. "If we
get desperate, maybe. But I'd prefer to avoid that for now."
"Go to the media, maybe?"
"Hey, that's not a bad idea... get 'em to put it
over the TV... What are you doing, Thunder?" She looked to Richie, who
hadn't been participating so far, just checking all his pockets.
"Looking for something... I think I had my other
pair of pants on..." He ran into the next room and came back not long afterwards,
holding a card. "Remember when we first found out about the pokeballs,
that Jolteon guy gave us his number?"
"Oh yeah... do you think we should give him a call?"
"We're gonna need all the help we can get." Eric
jumped up. "And if he can tell us how to break the pokeballs, I'm all for
it."
"Right. We'll go talk to him, then see if we can
get hold of the media..."
~-~-~-~
"Do you even remember being human?" Derek asked the
Persian on the couch, from where he lay on his stomach on the floor. She
just looked at him blankly, yawned and stretched as cats will do.
Derek sighed. The elegant cat which had once been
his mother had showed no signs of insanity, of destruction, that many fully-transformed
morphs displayed... but no real signs that she had ever been human, either.
She stayed at the house - if they were willing to give her free room and
board, she wasn't going to complain. Persians were fairly docile beings,
only attacking if attacked, challenged, or hungry. The two others in the
house, Charmeleon and Rhydon, weren't exactly prey material for the latter,
and neither had done the former. They kept her fed, gave her free roam
of the house and the entire couch to herself. (Derek couldn't use it without
risk of igniting it, and there was little chance of it holding up his father's
weight)
Derek's friend, Ray, a Cyndaquil, had also decided
to move in. His single mother had been one of the first to go full-pokemon,
and as a Marowak she had the advantage over him in type - not to mention
that he couldn't bring himself to attack his mother, no matter what she
looked like. So he'd been driven out by the territorial pokemon, and had
come running to Derek for a home.
Both of them had taken to sleeping in one of the
bathrooms, as they were the least flammable part of the house - both had
to face it, bed sheets were extremely combustible. The tiled floor was
rather cold, but a quick wash of a low-level flame fixed that, and once
they were lying down their high body heat would keep it that way.
Derek sighed as his mother fell into a doze. He'd
actually caught himself hoping he'd be the next to go... Maybe then he
could understand his mother. Besides, his father's Rhydon rock-type hide
could stand up to anything he could dish out if he went insane... although
if his father went mad, this would spell trouble for the two of them...
He'd almost gone all the way to pokemon, in a single
day. It had been shortly after his mother had lost her humanity, he'd just
gone mad and tried to burn the house down. His father had managed to restrain
him and put the fires out, and Ray talked him out of it in the end, but
it had been costly to his humanity. He looked more like a slightly taller-than-usual
charmeleon with clothes on than a human with Charmeleon parts. He couldn't
remember much of what had happened that day, but it made him afraid...
Ray was still mostly unchanged, as was his father.
He knew that if Ray went full Cyndaquil, then he might be considered prey
for the Persian, but for now he was safe...
Derek sighed as he watched his mother sleep, reaching
out with one hand and stroking her fur, careful not to let his claws damage
her. It was confusing. His mother's mind obviously wasn't in there, or
if it was it was incapable of response. So what had happened to it? Where
was she?
~-~-~-~
A casual observer in the forest that night would
have seen a very dark and shady meeting between two figures. But a casual
observer would have been torn to pieces by the many, many guards surrounding
the place before he got close.
"You'll let us take the city? Why?" One nearly-black
figure asked suspisciously.
"Motives are not the question here. This benefits
us both. You do not want the interference of the legendaries. I do not
want the interference of the general populace. If we both do our part,
we can easily take out this town. Agreed?"
In the dark, a pair of red eyes narrowed as their
owner considered. "Agreed. But... do not try to double-cross us. We will
find you. And it will not be pleasant."
"I wouldn't dream of it. I will tell you when I
am ready..." The other said, and took off into the night. The other stared
after him. Why did he want to fight the legend-birds? And how on earth
would he do it?
