The Year of Rocket's Revenge
Session August, Part 2 (08.22.05/07.25.06)


I am cursed...

I am cursed with a disease that threatens to take my life. It threatens to take the lives of many people around me. But, oh no, not just in the literal sense. For you see, I am the only child of the mayor of Chiva. I am loved and respected by many of the populace. Many of them care for what happens to me... past, present, and future.

They were there for me when our family moved here when I was only two. We were unfamiliar with life in a barren wasteland such as this. We had no idea how hard things would be. But we persevered... and look where we are now!

My dad became mayor two years ago, and instantly everyone knew our names. Not that it was hard to learn a name in a place with a population just under 350. Still, it was nice to feel special when there's not much special here to begin with.

So granted, everyone was distressed when they learned what had happened to me. After I had disappeared for more than a week. And was found in horrible shape. A lot of people thought I was about to die right there and then.

Remarkably, I'm still alive and kicking. For how much longer, I don't know, but I'm not going out without a fight...


The entire gang was stunned with disbelief. They couldn't believe what they had just heard... that Marina was found in such a horrid condition.

"Wha... what did they do to her?" Misty cried.

Brock clenched his fists in anger. "Those fiends... how dare they hurt an innocent girl like that!"

Ash growled. "How come no one made those guys pay for what they did?"

Mayor Lionel sighed. "Well... the reason for that is... well..."


"Marina... what in tarnation did those dastardly blokes do to you?" her father asked, wrapping his arms around his injured daughter.

"Where are they?" the townspeople yelled in defiance, prepared to dish out revenge for this act of wrongdoing on her behalf.

"Say something, dear!" the Mayor shouted, releasing his grip on Marina.

Marina opened her mouth as if to speak... but no sound parted from her lips.

Lionel gasped. "No... is it that unspeakable?"

One of the townspeople placed a hand on his shoulder. "Sir... she needs medical attention. I think you should take her to see Dr. Credi. We'll accompany you back."

"But... what about those guys responsible for doing... whatever they did to her?"

"Don't worry, sir! A small group of us will forge ahead and try to find that band's cave. We'll teach 'em not to mess with one of our own!"

As some of the men continued onward to find the Rapid Dashery's hideout, others helped carry the mute, yet otherwise alert Marina back to town.


"Once we got back to Chiva," narrated the Mayor, "Dr. Credi immediately checked her out. But the results were far from what we expected..."

Mayor Lionel and the men that had carried Marina back to town were sitting in the waiting quarters of Chiva's small clinic when Dr. Credi stepped out of the operation room.

"Well?" Lionel asked, immediately jumping out of his seat.

"The good news is that she's got no broken bones and there's no evidence that they did anything morally apprehensive to her... so to speak."

Some of the men seemed overjoyed by that diagnosis. Not the mayor, though...

"But wait... all of that caked blood on her! You can't tell me that doesn't mean anything!"

Dr. Credi looked down at the ground for a few seconds, then redirected his gaze back at the Mayor. Instantly, those aforementioned cries of joys had ceased.

"What... what is it, doc?"

"I'm not 100 percent sure, as I don't have the knowledge or the tools to make an appropriate diagnosis, but..."

"But? But what?"

"Somehow, over the past ten days, she picked up a very rare and powerful disease. I cannot tell whether she's had the disease for some time or she picked it up recently, possibly from those kidnappers. But all the signs I'm seeing point to the Grechola Virus."

The Mayor was afraid to ask, but... "Just... just how powerful?"

"To the point where there's no known cure. And this disease is fatal. If Marina's lucky... she's got six months to live."

All of the faces in the room turned blue with doom and distraught.

"You've gotta be kidding me, doc! No way, no how... and you said you're not sure, right?"

"I'm sure enough, Mayor. Though there's a chance I may be wrong... as much as it pains me to say it, sir, we must assume the worst-case scenario."

"I couldn't believe what he had told me," Mayor Lionel stated, narrating again. "All I knew is that these ruffians would pay for that unspeakable act. I had no idea what they had done to my Marina, but I was going to make sure I would reciprocate their actions tenfold!

"But never did I expect to get retribution so quickly afterwards, in an unforeseen twist of fate..."

The Mayor and the men in the waiting room were still getting over the shock over Dr. Credi's briefing of Marina's situation that they had yet to notice one of the guys who had continued on to the cave had just busted in, panting with shortness of breath.

"Huh?" Dr. Credi spoke up. "Mr. Anderson... is there a problem?"

"We..." he started, "we... found those guys' hideout! But..."

"What's wrong? Speak up, man!"

"They all look just like Marina! And even worse... they're all dead!"


Running as fast as we possibly could, all of us including the good doctor returned to the area where we had found my daughter. Less than a quarter of a mile away was the cave in question, and the rest of the group that had gone there was standing outside. All of their faces were a pale white, and it was evident some of them had been puking for some reason. Amongst them, lying on the ground, was Anthony, gasping for air and his face and clothes covered with splattered fresh and dry blood.

"What happened here?" the Mayor asked.

Mr. Anderson answered, pointing at Anthony. "There's seven or eight of them, just like this guy here. He's... he's the only one still alive."

Mayor Lionel went to grab Anthony, but...

"Wait!" exclaimed Dr. Credi. "If this is the Grechola Virus, then in his state he may be highly contagious!"

The men who had been at the cave began murmuring amongst themselves with worry and panic.

"Oh God... we're going to die!" one of them yelled, having already seen the deceased in the cave.

"Quiet down!" Mayor Lionel exclaimed, quickly establishing order. "How many of you went inside?"

The group glanced at each other, then slowly... all six of them, including Mr. Anderson, raised their hands.

"We might have ourselves an epidemic here," Dr. Credi noted, reaching into his pocket to pull out a surgeon's paper mask.

He then turned to one of the unaffected men. "Mr. Rasheed... go back to my office and search my rolodex for a doctor named Mirabelle Watson. She's the only person I know within 200 miles of here who has dealt with this virus before. Implore her that she needs to come here at once, with whatever help she can bring us. Hurry... we're on borrowed time here!"

Mr. Rasheed nodded, then ran back to Chiva. Dr. Credi then turned towards the cave entrance and started to walk in.

"Nobody follow me in for whatever reason! This virus may be airborne, and we must minimize any further risk of infecting the town!"

As the good doctor walked inside, the worried men started pounding the Mayor with questions.

"Mayor Lionel... we aren't all really infected with a deadly virus... are we?"

The Mayor sighed. "There's a very good chance you are. That we all are. Including myself, if this thing is airborne, if Dr. Credi's assumptions are correct."

"I tried to hope for the best, but until we could get a full prognosis on the situation, we really had no idea how good... or bad off we were."


"So what did you end up doing next?" Misty asked.

"Well from there, we had to get that lone survivor... Anthony, I think his name was, to the clinic. Then we had to figure out a way to bury the dead. Though we still didn't have a clue why they had kidnapped Marina in the first place or how they came to get the disease in their systems, we couldn't just leave them there to rot. We had to give them a proper burial. Which was hard considering the circumstances, but we had to wait a few days to make sure the disease wasn't still spreading from them after death.

"Meanwhile, both my daughter Marina and that lowlife Anthony were alert the whole time while staying in the clinic. For some reason, neither of them were willing to talk at all. Dr. Credi suspected that whatever had happened in that cave was too traumatic for either of them to want to relive again. It would be a few days before either Marina or Anthony wanted to talk about anything, much less how they ended up in the conditions they did.

"It was Anthony who finally gathered up the courage to talk, about a week after we had found him..."


Anthony was sitting upright in his clinic bed, with Mayor Lionel and Dr. Credi standing to his left, curious as to what had happened that day.

"Well, from what I can remember..." began the young boy, "it kinda started shortly after Marina arrived at our home base. You see, we didn't kidnap her... we were trying to help her."

"Help her?" the Mayor yelled in an uproar. "By holding her hostage for a week and a half?"

"We didn't hold her hostage! She was sick, sir!"

"Sick?"

Anthony nodded. "You see... when Patrick and the boys found her by that Pecha Berry patch, she was unconscious. When they had seen her lying on the ground with a partially-eaten Pecha Berry beside her, they knew something was wrong. So, they brought her to the cave.

"Naturally, one or two of our guys began to get the wrong idea. But Dominic, the leader... and my older brother, was having none of that. He said that 'We have a duty to nurse this poor girl back to health. That, and it's unfair to take advantage of people who are in dire straights.'

"Anyway, Dominic did the best he could, trying to think of remedies that he could try. Though he didn't know what exactly that girl had. He wasn't exactly a doctor, to be sure. And then... something horrific happened!"

"What? What?"

"Well, you see, on the third day, he was watching her all alone. At the time, we were debating if we really should take her to town to see a real doctor. But then, out of the blue, she woke up. I remember being outside the room, hearing my brother screaming with joy. Then, suddenly, I heard a harsh coughing sound. In fact, several harsh coughs in a row. Curious, I decided to enter the room.

"And that's when I saw it...

"She had coughed up blood. There was some dripping from her mouth, with a puddle slowly forming in her lap as she sat upright. Next to her was my brother, who had some blood on his face and his shirt sleeves. I asked him what happened, and he said he thought she might have anemia. He tried to ask her if she was on medication, but she suddenly fainted again."

"Did you try to get a doctor at that point?" Dr. Credi asked.

"Yes. My brother ordered a few of our guys to go get one. But for some reason... they didn't come back. My guess is what happened to them is the same thing that happened to us."

"You mean the cave?"

Anthony nodded once more. "Yes. You see, soon after those guys left, Dominic started to show the same symptoms as she did. Coughing up blood, frequent fainting spells... in hours he could barely move. It didn't take long for the rest of us to be doomed to the same fate. Some of us started thinking that she was some witch, that she had cast a spell on us. A fatal one, one that would kill us all if we didn't kill her first.

"But by the time anyone gathered the courage to actually try to kill her, we were all immobilized, too sick to even keep ourselves upright. It... it was less than 24 hours after my brother Dominic started showing symptoms that he... passed on. I remember crawling over to him and giving him one last hug before he left me... forever.

"It didn't take long before the rest of the gang also started perishing. Some died that very same day. Others persevered in agony for days. For some reason, though, after getting all the early symptoms like them, I didn't get any worse. Nor any better. I couldn't figure out why, out of all people, I was suffering the most, stuck in limbo between life and death. And though I was too weak to check on Marina and thought that she had passed away too, for some reason I felt she was in the same position as me... just laying there, wondering when the suffering would stop. If it would ever... stop.

"Soon after, I passed out. Next thing I knew, I was here. I thought for sure I was done for."

"My word!" Dr. Credi exclaimed.

"That's preposterous!" Mayor Lionel added.

"Believe whatever you want... but as for me, I believe that your daughter is responsible for the death of my comrades. And I swear, if I ever fully recover from this, I will get my revenge!"

"Responsible? You brought this upon yourselves, you and your ruffians!"

Anthony was about to object to that remark, but he started feeling woozy and promptly lied back down on his bed, wheezing with shortness of breath. Dr. Credi went to work trying to hook up a defibrillator. But Mayor Lionel stuck his hand out to try and stop her. Suddenly, Dr. Mirabelle Watson bolted into the room and took observation of the situation.

"I suggest you let Dr. Credi do his job, Mayor!" she ordered.

"But why?" he objected. "This guy is a criminal! And he's accusing my daughter of being responsible for the deaths of his gang, even though they brought it upon themselves to kidnap her! Why do you insist on continuing to treat him?"

"Because," Dr. Watson answered. "we have to find out why he and Marina didn't die immediately like the others. If they can help us find a cure for this darn ol' disease, then the whole world will benefit as a result. Besides, regardless of whether this hombre's telling the truth or not, it's not a doctor's job to judge people."

"What?"

"Our job is to help those that need medical assistance, regardless of what they might have done to get into that situation. We leave all that judgment junk to the courts and stuff, like it should be!"

Mayor Lionel accepted Dr. Watson's statement, though regrettably.

"But there better not be any preferential treatment!" he added. "I want my daughter to receive the exact same care as him, at the very least!"

"Don't worry, Mayor," reassured Dr. Watson. "Your girl's in good hands with me!"

The mayor then marched out of the room, slamming the door behind him. The two doctors winced, then smiled nervously at each other before getting back to work.


"I didn't want to believe him," the Mayor told Ash and the gang. "No one did after I told everyone else his story. But two days later, Marina conveyed the exact same, horrific tale..."


This time around, Mayor Lionel was comforting his daughter, Marina, stroking her right hand with his own. Dr. Credi was also present, and this time Dr. Watson was also available to hear it first-hand. Marina began to tell her tale.

"Well, I remember going out to pick Pecha Berries when I suddenly began feeling ill. I recall feeling faint after taking a bite out of one, and then nothing..."

"Nothing?" Dr. Watson repeated, as if to help jog Marina's memory.

"Uh... I do remember feeling being carried off somewhere, though at the time I didn't know it was by that gang. I was out for a pretty long time, and though I was too weak to open my eyes, I was awake at times. And I could hear many of the conversations around me in regards to what to do with me.

"There was this one guy... I think they called him Dominic... who insisted that I be left in his care, as he thought that I was gravely ill and that he wanted to do anything to keep me alive. He did many things to soothe and reassure me that I would be alright, but I couldn't give him my thanks. I just didn't have the strength.

"Then, suddenly, after what had seemed like weeks, I managed to not open my eyes, but gather enough strength to sit up. It was then I realized that I wasn't any place familiar. There was a guy sitting in a chair next to my bed, asleep... though he had been woken up by the creaking of the bed I was lying in. Needless to say, he was overjoyed to see me awake. I was happy to see the guy who helped me out, though I had no idea who he was. Then, something happened."

"You started coughing up blood?" guessed Dr. Watson.

"Yes," Marina nodded in affirmation. "I couldn't control myself, as I started to cough blood. Onto myself, onto him. Suddenly, some guy burst in the room. The guy who had been taking care of me called him his brother, and told him to get a doctor. Next thing I knew, I fainted, as my burst of strength had left me just as quickly as it had come.

"I... was in and out for the next week. Shortly thereafter, the man that was watching over me disappeared. Every day, I heard somebody new coming to feed me, to try and keep me alive. One day I managed to get enough strength to try and ask one what was going on. But for some reason, he didn't respond. I had no idea if he didn't hear me or if he was ignoring me.

"Eventually, the food stopped coming. I figured something was wrong, that something had happened to them. And it had to do with whatever my condition was. At that point, I deduced that if this disease didn't kill me, well, I was going to die of starvation. I though... well, daddy, I thought I was never going to see you again..."

"And suddenly this morning you're awake, almost fully recovered, as if you never contracted the disease in the first place!" Dr. Watson said, reading over the charts on the clipboard she was holding.

"But they didn't harm you in a way?" Marina's father asked.

"No. Other than being starved for the last few days... speaking of which, my stomach's hurting real bad. Can I get something to eat?"

"I'll get something from the cafeteria, dear. I'm just glad I still have you."

He leaned over and gave Marina a hug. He then exited the room with Dr. Watson, leaving Dr. Credi to watch over her.

"How can she be almost back to normal?" the Mayor asked Dr. Watson. "Just a few hours ago, we weren't even sure she would survive through the night!"

"Well, apparently she has a rare sub-condition of the disease. She has a partial immunity against it in her system."

"A partial immunity? What does that mean?"

"It means that although she contracted and showed severe symptoms of the Grechola Virus, her body was able to gain control of it before it overran her immune system. Very few cases turn out this way... this is the first time I've experienced it myself. Well, I guess first two times, since that boy in the other room seems to be in the same boat."

"So does that mean she... uh, they, will be alright?"

"For awhile, yes. But this is a powerful disease. Remember when I told you before that she had six months to live at most? That's where this comes in. Normally, this disease kills anywhere within 24 to 72 hours after initial infection. That's proven by most of the victims we saw back in thar cave, as well as the guys of our town that went in there. One or two got lucky and lasted another day or two.

"But Marina and the other guy, Anthony? Well, their antibodies were able to fight off the rest of the virus and put it at bay. There's no proof as to why only a select few are able to do so. Unfortunately, it seems that their immune systems cannot destroy the Grechola strains... only hold them off. Over time, those two's white blood cells will be consumed by the viruses' cells, which will slowly multiply with time. Once they break through, they'll pick up right where they started."

"You mean?"

"Yes," Dr. Watson nodded. "In less than six months... both of them will start showing symptoms again... and then they will both die!"

To be continued next week in Part 3!