Sorry, Wrong Channel!
A Crossover fanfic by A J
Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters, but the plot is all mine.
Prequel Chapter 2
Just after Cruise Control:
The massive energy wave flashed over Salem Center like a forest fire, burning away all that was before.
"I cannot belief zis is happening!" Kurt muttered as he followed the hyper pink cat into the sublevels that were the headquarters of the X-Men. Kitty giggled as his accent worsened with stress.
"Believe it, Elf," a gruff voice said from a side tunnel as they passed. "How else're ya gonna explain the fact that Chuck's got our worst enemies down in Hank's lab, tryin' ta figure out where it started."
"Our vorst … zhe Brozzerhood ist here?"
"In Professor McCoy's lab?" Kitty added.
"Yep," a blue-and-black doglike creature said, coming out of the shadows. He stood upright, unlike Kitty in her new pink form, and eyed the two. "Figures you'd latch onta yer best friend, Elf. You should go check on yer sister next. She's awake, but I don't think she's takin' this well."
"Mein sister, Logan?" Kurt uttered, placing the voice finally, instead of trying to work out the kind of creature he was looking at. He noticed the surly Canadian had foregone the nametag idea, like Kitty. "Oh, Rogue … Ja, we will head zere next, instead. If ze Brozzerhood is in Doctor McCoy's lab, it's best we stay out from underfoot." He cast another look in tiny Kitty's direction, and she pricked up her ears, thinking it over as well.
"Yeah, you're probably right, Kurt. I saw them all when they came in, and none of 'em were exactly what I could call lightweights." She waved her tail agitatedly, and Logan sighed.
"Alright, git, you two. I've gotta go check on the defenses to make sure this … whatever … didn't scramble anythin' else up." He started to stomp away, when he turned back to look at Kitty again. "Hey, Cat-scratch. "What'd ya say I was again?"
"A Lucario," she giggled, preening. "It's a steel and fighting type, which is like so obviously you, ya know?" She scampered down the hall, Kurt following resignedly in her wake.
"Whatever," Logan rumbled, shaking his head and continuing on his errand.
Wrong Channel!
"You're sure about this, Eric?" Charles Xavier said, turning his chair in the direction of the floating electromagnet beside him.
"As certain as I can be with these instruments and my own senses, Charles," Magneto said to the yellow foxlike being in the chair. "Cerebro was certain this isn't just a telepathic implantation, making people think they're these different creatures, and we've both already seen that it has affected everyone worldwide …"
"With a few exceptions," Charles interrupted, "such as extraterrestrial visitors, and our few multidimensional citizens."
"Den dis t'ing be entirely Eart'bound," Gambit said. The others turned to look at the Cajun. He was currently a small, tan koala-like creature, with swirled patterns in his fur and a cloudy, disconcerting filmy cover over his glowing crimson eyes. The stone behemoth next to him stomped a foot, making the room shake.
"Who'd want to turn the whole world into Pokemon?" he grumbled. "Don't we have enough problems?"
"This may be someone's misguided attempt to play equalizer actually, Lance," Xavier said softly. He sounded surprised himself by the idea, and wondered why it hadn't occurred to him before. "Raven, could you give Moira McTaggert a call, and see if she knows how her son is?"
"Surely you don't think ..?" the blue bloblike being asked, bending her form from something approximating a humanoid to an avian shape and back.
"This does seem like the work of a younger mind," Magneto hummed, letting his EM field manipulate a couple controls on a nearby monitor. The lawn of the White House came onscreen, and they were relieved to see that no obvious riots were taking place … yet. "But Kevin McTaggert has been in a suspension module since his last power outburst, much like your stepbrother, Charles."
The sudden reminder made Xavier look up worriedly, and he activated yet another monitor, this one a dedicated closed-circuit that showed Juggernaut's unique prison. Cain (at least he assumed the gigantic floating shape in the tank restraints was Cain Marko,) was safely asleep still, and the facility was undamaged, as would most surely NOT have been the case if he'd gotten loose. Xavier sighed. He heard a muted chuckle behind him. "Yes Mister Vanders?" he asked.
"Juggernaut's a … Hariyama ..!" Lance blurted, his gigantic four-armed rocky body curling over as he laughed. The black and orange frog next to him laughed as well.
"Can we send your kids back upstairs with the rest?" the giant orange and white mongoose growled down at Mystique, who was now in the shape of a floorlamp, clearly enjoying her new freedom of form.
"Hush, Victor. This is an unprecedented learning experience for them. Don't spoil it." She changed her upright body into an ornate curlicue, fluttering her eyes back up at him. She was having fun. Normally restricted to a vertebrate body with her mutation, she was reveling in the ability to turn herself into anything that she'd been granted.
"Well, there's no sign that this is harmful," Hank McCoy's voice said from behind them all. They turned to see his blue hands and one foot all rearranging a set of test tubes on the counter he was hanging above by his other foot, his pig-like nose scrunched up in concentration. "All I can find is a lingering trace of anaphasic particles, not unlike what we found when Piotr's sister Illianna disappeared."
"Anaphasic … you mean … this was … magic?" The giant steel statue at the doorway cried, his angular features betraying nothing of the pain in his voice.
"I would hate to hazard a guess like that without consulting with Doctor Strange or somebody else as learned, but … I think so," Beast sighed, dropping down to floor level with the rest of them.
"I could see if Mizz Harkness could get me an appointment to see him," the fuzzy pink fairy sitting on top of the green dog next to Magneto said. The green dog looked up in annoyance.
"Doyoumind,Wanda?" it asked in a rush.
"Why no, Pietro, not at all," Wanda replied with a smirk, getting comfortable on his lightning-striped back. He sighed.
"Well, it sounds like we have some places to start with, at least," Xavier said, looking around at the others. He settled his gaze on Lance again. "You say this … game … originates from Japan?" Lance nodded, still chuckling intermittently whenever he looked too closely at what each of his friends and teammates had become. He had to get together with Kitty, and compare notes soon. "Then we should send a team there, as well, and see what we can learn, if anything."
"Make sure to include Wolverine," Mystique said, her body now wrapped around the bulky frame of Fred Dukes, giving him the illusion of pinstriping. Of them all, he was the least physically changed. His already-oversized form had merely grown a fuzzy pelt, dark grey on his backside, and his ears were now two little triangles on top of his head. He tended to yawn a lot more often, but otherwise, he didn't even feel all that different. He giggled girlishly as Mystique's movements tickled his wide belly. "He know's the country and the language best of all of us," Raven continued, giving Blob a sharp poke.
"Agreed," Magneto and Xavier both sighed, and fell to deciding who to send along with the taciturn ruffian. Lance gave the frog a jog with a random elbow. The extra limbs were going to take some getting used to.
"C'mon, Toad. Let's go see what the X-midgets have all been turned into." Toad grinned his overwide smile, and the pair went back to the main levels of the mansion. After a cautionary word from his father, Pietro reluctantly followed them, Wanda still riding on him. He grumbled the whole way.
Wrong Channel!
"Oh, this won't end well," Scott said quietly, looking at the rest of the younger X-Men and students gathered in the baseball diamond. If mutant kickball had been a bad idea, how weird was pokemon kickball going to be? His gloomy outlook and misleading team name had apparently been used against him in this transformation. Kitty ('Skitty, now,' he reminded himself,) had told him he was a ghost-type named Dusklops. He turned his shadowy form to glance at the glory that was now Jean. She was a flamboyantly marked green and purple bird known as a Xatu, a flying psychic being of wonder. 'Speaking of Skitty …' his thought-train continued. "Where're our last two troublemakers? The rest are all out here."
"Skitty and MediKurt are downstairs cheering up SmeaRogue," Jean answered absently, watching the kids argue themselves into two teams. How were half of them even going to play? Not everyone had even kept a semblance of limbs. Their umpire wasn't much better off, either. Storm, never the intellectual that Professor Xavier or McCoy were, had opted to stay with the younger mutants, just in case. She was little better than a wispy cloud now, though, something Skitty had called a Castform, or Weather Pokemon. The whole thing just made Jean's head spin.
Even stranger were the few normal humans she could sense in her admittedly limited range outside the grounds. The people she'd mentally peeked at were totally oblivious of anything being wrong. They were certain that this was the way the world had always been. The young couple who lived nearest to Xavier's school were now a young couple of fire-breathing foxes, and their nearest neighbor was an elderly fisherman who had become a walrus. Skitty had identified them as a pair of Vulpixes and a Walrein. She noticed the strange look Scott was giving her with his single see-through eye. "What?"
"Just … What's you call them?" he blurted, a frown forming in his ghostly mummy-wrappings. Jean chuckled.
"It's how Skitty's identifying all of us, now," she chirped. "She's adding our poke-type to our names so we'll all know who's what."
"Why would she bother?"
"Apparently, there're almost five hundred kinds of pokemon," Jean replied, turning back to the ball field, where Roberto was floating up to kick for his team. "SolRoberto's a Solrock, for example, a fire and rock type, and JubElekidee's an Elekid, a juvenile form of one of the more-powerful electric pokemon," she continued, pointing with one wing at the other team's pitcher.
"Forget nametags," Scott sighed. "We're all gonna be wearing five-by-sevens, telling each other what we are and what to watch out for," he continued, recalling what Skitty had told them that morning about type-trumping over breakfast. The only other kid it had made any sense to had been Amara, who admitted to playing the early games when she was younger, but she hadn't been able to check out the newer ones since she'd grown into her burning magma touch. It had made playing with handheld plastic-encased electronics difficult to say the least, she'd sighed.
Wrong Channel!
"Aw, geez," Marie whined, looking forlornly at her brother and his BFF. "Would ya'all knock that crap aout already? Lookit me! Ah'm a monkey, fer God's sake! This cain't be happenin'," she continued, muttering. Her tail waved behind her, stiff and shaking with her irritation.
"No, you're a Smeargle, Rogue," Kitty countered, patting her paw on top of Marie's comfortingly through the latter's blanket. Rogue hadn't had a chance to pull her gloves back on from their resting place on her nightstand.
"Aind what the H E double-kickstainds is a Smear-gull?" Rogue bit out, ticked. Kitty (who kept insisting Marie call her Skitty, for no good reason,) just grinned, and turned to Kurt (who she'd only recognized by his grey-gold eyes, and his Gallic sigh.) Which he let loose another of, and held out the handheld device he'd 'ported up to the two girl's room to get.
Rogue looked at the small screen of the machine for a minute, taking in the scant information Kitty's copy of Pokemon Diamond said about the pokemon in question. "Alraight, so … Ah'm a monkey who cain paint? Go on," she added, borrowing a line she remembered from when she'd touched Rahne, "pull the othah one."
"No, no, you're not getting it," Skitty said, carefully taking her Gameboy back. "We've all become the pokemon we have because of our abilities, or something that makes us more like that pokemon than anything else." She cycled the pokedex screen up a few entries (she preferred to keep hers alphabetical,) to the Skitty info. "I'm a normally bubbly, playful person, named for a cat, so that's what I became. Kurt here is a better-than-average fighter who can also teleport, so he became a Meditite, which is one of the few who can do both, and your ability, which lets you take other people's talents, is closest to the Smeargle, who can learn other pokemons' moves with a touch of its tail."
"Yuh mean it maight be only in mah tail,now?" Marie asked, hurriedly pulling her tail in under the blanket as well. It had been swishing dangerously close to Kurt a second before.
"Ah, maybe ve should find zomeone zafe to test zhat on," her brother said worriedly.
"Well, thait only lets in one person," Rogue frowned, and nabbed up the nearby intercom. Clicking it on, she cleared her throat. "Would Mister Logan please report ta the infirmary, please?"
"You zaid please tvice," Kurt told her, chuckling.
"Look who we're aiskin'," Marie countered. They waited in worried silence.