5
Team Skull Tries To Stop the Inevitable... Dwayne's Prosthetic Nightmare... Mina Gets an Acid Flash
When Moon Child went blasting over the Ruins of Life on Charizard's back, she observed that there was a gang of tough-as-nails ex-members of Team Skull guarding the entrance, watching her through binoculars. She circled around the ruins twice, came in low, and and then leapt from Charizard, who was not expecting to be suddenly dismounted and lost his equilibrium. Charizard tumbled the last few yards to the ground like a mushroomed bullet, roaring and thrashing.
"Friend! Please be more careful with Charizard," Rotom cried from Moon Child's hand as she elegantly stuck her landing on the grass in front of the Ruins of Life.
"Get back in the bag, Rotom!" Moon Child jammed the Rotom Dex into her watermelon bag and zipped it closed. The Ex-Skulls came forward, drawing around her in a loose semicircle.
"Yo! Are you the punk ass bitch what caught Tapu Koko and messed up Melemele Island so bad?" demanded one of the gangsters closest to Moon Child. He made emphatic arm gestures with one of his arms as he spoke. He had to make extra gestures with that arm because the other one could do no gesturing at all; it was artificial, carved from wood, and stood rigidly away from his shoulder like a length of pipe. "I got a sister on Melemele!"
"My name is Moon Child, not 'Yo.' Now stand aside, Arm Boy. I'm on a Pokémon adventure."
The one-armed Ex-Skull scowled and shoved little Moon Child as hard as he could. Her head whipped forward so sharply her chin nearly struck her breastbone, and she lost her footing. Moon Child crashed to the ground. She also landed on her watermelon bag with her hip, which brought an angry crack from inside. She knew at once that it had been Rotom's screen. As if in confirmation, Rotom made a muffled electronic sound of pain.
"Oh man, that's it," Moon Child said. She climbed to her feet and plucked one of the Poké Balls attached to her belt.
"Yo, she want to battle!" one of the other gangsters said.
"Go, Scizor! Get that wooden arm!"
Moon Child hurled her Poké Ball. It broke open in midair and her Scizor came out. Scizor was a ferocious six-foot-tall cyborg insect man with fluttering wasp wings, lobster pinchers for hands, three spikes for a head, and a chainsaw for a soul. He was Moon Child's most frightening Pokémon friend by far.
"Get it! Rip it off!"
"Sciiiizor!"
The Ex-Skull tried to move away in time, but Moon Child's Scizor was much too fast. It easily grabbed the man's wooden hand in one of its pinchers and gave a terrific yank. The wood cracked and splintered and broke free at the elbow.
"Yo!" the gangster shouted, staggering backward. "Yo, time out! That's my prescription arm!"
"It's my arm now," Moon Child corrected. "Scizor: throw my arm off the island."
The Ex-Skull member wailed, helpless to do anything but watch as Scizor flung his prosthetic arm over the side of the cliff. A few seconds later, it could be heard crashing on the rocks below.
"Yo, she got Dwayne's arm!" one of the gangsters in the back screamed. "That's where he kept all his power!"
"Run, dawg!" another shouted.
The Ex-Skulls broke and scattered. Some of them called insults over their shoulders at Moon Child, but it was clear that Scizor's show of dominance over the one-armed Dwayne was to be the final word on the matter.
"This ain't over," Dwayne informed Moon Child in a hoarse, teary voice. "I'm gonna get you back for this, dawg." Then he scurried away with the rest.
"She got my arm, man," he told one of the other Skull grunts a few minutes later, when they had all fled to a presumably safe distance.
"I know," the other grunt said. He reached out and touched the jagged remains of Dwayne's wooden arm. "I ain't never having kids, man. Look what kinda evil deeds they capable of."
Inside the mouth of the ruins, Moon Child unzipped her watermelon bag and carefully removed Rotom. A crazed spiderweb of cracks had drawn itself from the top left corner of his screen down to the bottom.
"Are you okay," Moon Child asked.
"Bzzzzt," Rotom replied. His face flickered to life behind the cracks. "Of course, friend! Now we're even cooler! Having a cracked Dex screen just means you lead an exciting enough life to have cracked it zzzzomewhere along the line. I still work!"
Moon Child hugged Rotom to her chest and then put him back in the bag. What an optimistic and wise little guy he was. She was also glad he was still operational, because her Dex insurance did not cover accidental damage.
Back on Melemele Island, Captain Mina was still hiding from the police inside the Pokémon Center when she received a terrifying psychic flash. She gasped, went to a table, and sat down. Mina was lightly telepathic, as are all proponents of better living through psychedelic chemistry, and her third eye had just looked upon a dreadful future in which Tapu Lele had already been captured and stuffed into the PC with Tapu Koko and Nebby and all of Moon Child's other Pokémon. Tapu Lele had nothing to do with the weather, so Akala Island did not have to worry about monsoons or tidal waves, but she was in charge of everyone's mental health. In the future Mina had just witnessed, Lt. Surge, one of Kanto's gym leaders, who happened to be visiting Akala on gym business, had lost his mind without Tapu Lele's stabilizing influence and gone completely apeshit in downtown Heahea City. Surge was tearing down the avenue in a stolen golf cart, fishtailing wildly and throwing nine-volt batteries at pedestrians. Surge's Raichu was using its electricity to supercharge the golf cart's tiny motor, so the police could neither catch nor stop him.
If there was one thing Mina hated worse than a jealous police officer, it was a Mobile Infantry meathead like Lt. Surge. She leapt to her feet and dashed through the sliding double doors of the Pokémon center. She paged her own Charizard, jumped onto its back without even slowing down, and blasted up into the eastern sky, toward Akala, with fury in her eyes and a blazing trail of cinders in her wake.
"And stay out!" Officer Jenny screamed indignantly from the beach, where she was still having difficulty detangling herself from the tent.