11
A Haunted Apartment... Mina Scores Two Points... The Demise of Clarence J. Fork
Akala Island was not off the hook yet. Not only was the catastrophic combo of Youngster Joey and Officer Jenny en route to the port city of Heahea, but Lt. Surge/Clarence J. Fork had, for a full day and night, led pretty Mina on a low-speed chase through the island's various locales. Nothing could stop the chase. The local police had set up spike strips, but the golf carts did not have air tires—only rough plastic wheels that crunched over gravel and broken glass and nails without complaint. Even worse, Clarence J. Fork's cart was still trailing the old man's walker from one of its back wheels, and the spike strip had become tangled in the walker as he passed over it. The spike strip soon began to catch other things, and pretty soon Clarence J. Fork's golf cart had a swishing mechanical tail that had grown to an absurd length of twenty-five feet. Then there came a point where Mina lost track of him somewhere in the bustling downtown district, so she had taken the opportunity to visit one of her friends who sold marijuana out of a local apartment. The two girls got ridiculously high, became terrified that the apartment might be haunted, and ran screaming from the building. The screaming was horribly disturbing to the various Akalans who had gone mad thanks to Tapu Lele's capture. A man on the sidewalk began to scream along with them, and then a trio of old women joined him and started shrieking as well. Soon hundreds of people across the city were screaming in chorus.
"Aaaaaahhhhh," screamed a Nurse Joy, running naked through the street with a pen clenched in one fist like a dagger. Her magnificent breasts sloshed about her bare chest.
"Nooooo!" howled an office worker who had gone on lunch at exactly the wrong time.
"Oh my goooooooddd," a hiker bellowed. He fell to the ground and began to thrash.
"Aaaaaaaaaggghghhghgh," a little boy gurgled.
"Ghoooosts," Mina screamed.
"Aaaaahhhh," Nurse Joy confirmed, stabbing at the air wildly with her pen.
"Eeeeeek!" screamed an old woman. She could not bear the sight of the nude female body.
"Ohhhhhh," moaned an old man who had seen the old woman screaming.
"Ooooohhhhhhh," someone else added helpfully.
"Aahhhhhhhh," Nurse Joy cried.
"Shiiiiiit, Raichu! Dere she is again!" Clarence J. Fork announced as he came back down the street in the other direction and saw Mina. Mina also saw him, and screamed aloud. She dodged the swinging tail of items his golf cart had accumulated, climbed back into her cart, and resumed the chase. From Heahea, Clarence J. Fork led them along Route 4 toward Paniola Town and the famed Paniola Sex Ranch, where breeders across Alola flock to have their Pokémon titillated by the staff and goaded into bizarre cross-species reproduction rituals. The staff of the Sex Ranch had gone crazy and had loaded two Metapods into a tiny cage with an Electabuzz, hoping to spark an amorous three-way encounter that would produce God knows what. Clarence J. Fork banged his mechanical tail against the Ranch's power line and cut power to the whole installation. At once, the Pokémon were plunged into darkness and their handlers went into convulsions of crazed, superstitious fear.
"Metapod," one of the Metapods cried in an odd voice.
Mina nearly cut off Clarence J. Fork at a bend in the road, but her cart skidded in the mud at the last second and he got away again. From Paniola Ranch they rocketed along perilous volcanic ridges up toward Royal Avenue, where cruel Battle Royals, in which any of the four participating Pokémon can be killed at any time by any of the three others, were staged by vicious underground gambling addicts. Clarence J. Fork rambled inside, took his cart up the escalator, and entered the Battle Royal dome.
"Oh sweet merciless Jesus," cried the announcer's booming voice over the speakers, "what's this? Could it be? Ladies and gentlemen, it's Lt. Surge with a steel chair!"
The chugging metal guitars of Lt. Surge's theme song began to blast triumphantly throughout the stadium as his cart sailed over the ropes and into the ring, where it landed on and fatally crushed a battling Venomoth. The old man's smashed-up walker caught the Venomoth's corpse and added it to the swinging tail.
"No!" screamed Koga, whose Venomoth it had been. His face crumpled in ripping psychic pain and he clutched at his mouth with both hands. "I've had that Venomoth since I was two years old! Why! Why, God, why?"
Lt. Surge exited the arena, and Mina came in. The song switched from Surge's Theme to Mina's Theme, which was some kind of surf-inspired 90's noise pop wall-of-sound thing with hazy female vocals way down in the mix. The crowd erupted. Mina's cart bounced up into the ring and smashed a Machoke to death.
"Machoooke," bellowed its trainer as he fell to his meaty knees and began to sob.
"Ladies and gentlemen," said the announcer's voice, sounding sweaty and feverish, "we've never seen anything like this. The carnage! The flying blood and bones! Captain Mina has just won the Battle Royal!" The bell dinged and the crowd exploded as Mina zoomed down the ramp and exited the arena. On her way out, the attendant awarded her 2 BP.
From that awful scene they raced into Wela Volcano Park and did an absurd amount of damage to the various endangered plants which can only grow in Wela by carelessly taking the chase off-road. Surge's tail was now an unbelievable sixty feet long, and its added weight had slowed his cart to a crawl. Mina pulled over and watched in morbid awe as Surge tried desperately to navigate a sheer cliff face that overlooked the park's active volcano. The tail tumbled over the side, into the lava. Lt. Surge howled in fear. His cart wobbled precariously, slid back, jetted forward, drifted to the side, and rode a crumbling avalanche of brittle rock down into the mouth of the volcano. He perished instantly. Mina drove back to Heahea City feeling as though she were trapped in some kind of hellish nightmare world where nothing made even a polite amount of sense.
Akala Island was ruined. The chase had soured the entire world on Akalan tourism for decades to come, and the numerous people who had begun to scream when Mina and her friend saw the imaginary ghosts were never quite the same again. The Nurse Joy who had gone streaking, especially. She was transferred to a distant Pokémon Center in Hoenn and erased from the memory of Heahea. Her family became pariahs and were eventually driven into the Wela wilderness, where they remained, subsisting on uncooked roughage and speaking in tongues for the rest of their strange lives.