Chapter 31 – Seeds
Time flies when you're having fun, or so the saying goes. Tempus fugit and all that good shit. But for me, time seemed to go by faster once I decided to put my past actions behind me, and just go on with life at port control. Maybe the past is the equivalent of that cartoonish boot to your behind that sends you flying over the horizon. You know, just like those spring-loaded ass kickers people hide in sofa sets.
General Harding wasn't a bad man once I forced myself to ignore the fact that I'd more or less attempted to get him on trial for murder. Granted, he had tried to kill me when he found out initially, but thanks to a certain gardevoir, that was quite literally a thing of the past. Presently, he seemed to be back to his usual antics, which included – but were not limited to – strip video gaming during lunch hour with his two good friends, trips to the Underground for illegal pokemon battles, sparring with Don down at the training rooms, and sleeping around like a wanton harlot.
Seriously, how he managed to avoid all the sexually-transmitted diseases there were out there remained a mystery to me - the man never did seem to carry any rubbers around.
As for Silas and I, we seemed to be getting along better than we used to.
The two of us had been spending more time together, and there were even days when I found myself forgetting to take his pokeball to the office with me. Silas now tended to get a ride to work on my head, thanks to one of the dock's more inventive mechanics and a discarded hard hat. Of course, it did take a little getting used to, having people staring at you for having a shellder strapped to the top of your head.
Port control's exercise facilities also ended up as one of our frequent hangouts. When we found out that the pool at the water pokemon vault down in the basement had a set of motors that could induce an artificial current, we started exercising together on a near-daily basis. It was fun, trying to keep pace against gradually strengthening water currents.
For the record, I am the faster swimmer because I can actually swim, and not merely because I have legs. Silas is just having a bad case of sour grapes when he claims otherwise.
xxx
"That was some tasty soup, Trainer," Bruiser said, even as he used a slice of bread to wipe up the last of the soup from his bowl. "I swear, it gets better every time I taste it."
Mom just smiled and picked up his empty bowl as she headed to the sink. "You're too kind, dear. Although since the other two men in the house say nothing at all, I suppose it balances things out."
"I say plenty!" protested Allan from his hiding place in the shadows under the kitchen sink.
"You're just about past the middle of your teenage years," Dad pointed out, as he contemplated a crossword puzzle.
"Are you questioning my masculinity? I'll have you know that for a mismagius, I am considered to be very manly indeed!"
Silas and I watched them go about their daily routine with some amusement; Friday night dinners at home with my folks had become part of our weekly timetable since we had that little holiday courtesy of General Harding. After work on Fridays, we'd hop on the train, get to Jubilife by eighty thirty, have dinner, have some time with the family, and head back to Canalave on the eleven o' clock train.
Watching the night lights go by as the train moved back to Canalave never seemed to grow dull.
xxx
When Arukenimon, Mummymon, and their counterparts had arrived on Earth in the wake of those terrorist attacks just about eighteen months ago, the first thing they'd done was to throw up massive energy fields that suppressed teleportation across long distances. Add in the fact that considerable battalions of digimon troops had also shipped in with them, and there you had it – no one could go travelling over long distances without getting inspected thoroughly by a team of digimon agents.
However, that wasn't to say that short-range teleportation wasn't functional. And of course, when the majority of Earth's digimon population vanished into their sleeping facilities for the night – thanks to them needing periodic exposure to that radiation which our sun seemed to lack – the energy fields which jammed teleportation curiously ended up becoming rather easy to slip through. It was almost as if the fields were set to open up little pores in the middle of the night, really.
If you asked the group of nocturnal digimon – phantomon, darkrizamon, witchmon, and vilemon - why this happened, though, they would blame it all on the fields being solar-powered.
And that is how Silas and I managed to bypass all those night patrols on the streets.
Why would we be teleporting about at night, you might ask? Well, putting it politely, we were getting pretty damn drunk about thrice a week thanks to a combination of teleporting and alcohol. Diz's place was practically our second home some nights and Silas eventually got so good at teleporting that he could get us back to my bed without a hitch.
That incident with the exploding toilet was a freak accident, really. Who would've known that the teleportation-jamming field could misdirect people and pokemon in transit, really?
And if you happen to see that video of me crawling about like a demented slug on the floor outside my room sans my shirt, kindly delete it.
xxx
"Remind me why we enjoy doing this, again?" Silas groaned, as we woke up to the ringing of my alarm clock. It might have been set to ring every morning at six, but on the mornings after we'd gone drinking, it always seemed to ring way too early for comfort. "I feel like a thousand farts are trapped inside my shell."
"Well..." I shut off the alarm clock and groped about for the tube of eye drops that I kept for mornings such as this one. "Probably because we enjoy giving our livers a workout? Damn it, where are those drops?"
Silas whistled. "I'm now wondering if I even have a liver to begin with. And you last kept the drops in your footlocker, I think."
"Thanks, Silas," I threw open my footlocker, and sure enough, there lay the little bottle of eye drops. Five seconds and four drops later saw my eyes getting a tad wetter, as well as a little less bloodshot.
"Let's not go drinking again, Trainer. My head hurts," muttered my starter, as he stuck his tongue out dejectedly on the bed.
"The liver thing, I wasn't sure about, but you definitely lack a head," I said, as I put on my uniform.
He blew a raspberry at me. "I lack a specifically defined head, but you get the point! I never want to see that much rum ever again!"
All I could do was smirk, knowing how he'd respond to my next words. "I take it you won't be joining me for a couple of Screwdrivers tomorrow night?"
"You're paying."
Gotcha, Silas.
xxx
"- and there she goes!" screamed the commentator, as the electivire just about beat the living daylights out of General Maine's aggron. "Sweet Arceus, that must hurt like a bitch... for the electivire's fists, that is!"
The aggron roared in agony as the electivire pummelled it with fists that appeared to be glowing with a hot red light. Smoke was coming off the dents left in its metal-rich scales by the furious electric-type's relentless assault, and it seemed that the electivire's Fire Punches were making some serious headway. The audience was going absolutely crazy, since everyone knew that something would eventually give way.
Finally, there was a deafening sound not unlike a gong being struck, and the arena was temporarily obscured by a terrific explosion. Sand from the arena floor was stirred up into a surging sandstorm within the ring, and the overhead lights swayed about dangerously at the end of their cables. The transparisteel safety barriers rattled in the frames as the Metal Burst reflected the stored energy from the electivire's attacks against it, and the fuzzy yellow pokemon in question was thrown bodily against the barriers by the sheer force of the attack. It fell to the ground in a heap, and didn't get up.
"Holy shit, that Metal Burst was some heavy stuff!" exclaimed our friend the commentator, even as Moira Hew's friend recalled her unconscious electivire and General Maine hugged his aggron on the battlefield. "Learn a lesson, people – always knock out an aggron with one hit, since a wounded one kicks ass that much harder!"
"Place your bets for the next round, gentles!" boomed the chief bookkeeper once the commentator was done. "We have Chris Connor coming right up, and you know what he can do!"
And that was an account of the pokemon battle, as much as Silas recalls it. I wasn't there, since I had been... distracted during the match. Suffice to say that my pokemon enjoyed the battling ring, while I enjoyed an entirely different sort of ring altogether.
Nights spent at the Underground were always fun, yes they were.
xxx
After a few inevitable delays, the big day finally came. Certainly, the inevitability of the delays was questionable at best, but things managed to come together, nonetheless. And this big day was none other than the day when pokemon training was officially reinstated.
General Harding and I were responsible for processing the training applicants from Canalave, and so we found ourselves being given a temporary office on the ground floor of port control, where the processing was to occur. Several other staff members involved in the processing were also there such as Dr. Esther and two of her subordinates - from pathology, of all departments – one of Babamon's assistants from the vaults, and Castor the whimsicott.
The processing 'office' itself consisted of little more than a large conference room which had been divided into several sections by collapsible screens. All applicants would first be sent through registration, which was handled by a human soldier, several digimon grunts, and Castor. They would then be put through the medical section where the doctors got to examine them; no one would tell them that part of the examination procedure involved using a mild anaesthetic to knock them out for three minutes and quietly implanting a subcutaneous tracking chip in their forearms, though.
Once the doctors were done with them, they would be sent to General Harding and yours truly. We were tasked with running the affinity tests, and so Babamon's assistant was placed with us to summon whichever pokemon suited the applicant up from the vaults. A temporary system of vacuum tubes had been set up along the stairwell to transport archive files and pokeballs, so we were set.
That was what we thought, but of course, something had to go wrong. Namely, things went wrong as soon as the first newbie trainer walked in through the front doors.
New government policies on pokemon training dictated that the first batch of trainers was to consist of former trainers and newbies in a three-to-one ratio. So, while we had little problems with regard to the old hands who wanted to have a second try at travelling and training, some of the newer ones were problematic.
The first newcomer decided to start wailing and bawling as soon as she'd stepped through the main doors, for some strange reason. This certainly kept us all busy for a while, since well... the rulebook hadn't accounted for that. We had raised the starting age to thirteen years of age, and yet there we were, with a girl who was either possessed or a cry-baby.
Fortunately, one of the pathologists working with Dr. Esther dealt with her quickly and quietly. The doctor merely strolled right up to the screaming trainer, and fired a tranquiliser dart into her upper arm. Within seconds, she was little more than a drooling heap on the floor, and the pathologist returned to his station.
I barely managed to suppress a shudder as the pathologist walked by my station. He or she certainly wasn't anywhere like those forensics experts you saw on the television, no sir. The government pathologists all dressed completely in black, from their helmets to their gown-like coats and boots. A reflective faceplate concealed their identities from everyone around them, and a compact breathing apparatus provided them with their own air supply, to prevent them from contaminating any samples they collected. It was said that their helmets contained goggles that could see through different wavelengths, and that they also had earpieces that could detect ambient signals. All in all, the pathology crews sounded more like mechanical beings than humans.
Once again, I wondered just why the higher-ups had decided to assign people from pathology to assist Dr. Esther in the processing. And not one, but two of them, at that.
"Is everything all right here?" tittered a former trainer nervously, as the unconscious girl was hauled-off to the sickbay. "Is she going to be alright?"
I shrugged, and continued to go through her file, while Silas eyeballed him for me. "No idea, sir. It says here that you own two pokemon – is that true?"
"Yes, I do," he nodded, sounding a little less nervous now that we were discussing a familiar topic, "a croconaw and a hoothoot."
"Are both of them still alive and well currently?" I continued, progressing down the form. Nearly halfway done, given that he was a former trainer and not a newcomer who needed something assigned to him.
"Yes, both are still with me. Just as pets, though."
"Planning to take them along on your travels?"
"Well, yes."
Filling in the required blanks, I then gestured to Babamon's assistant. "No need to get a partner for this one – give him a pass to the vets."
The trainer looked startled. "The vets? My pokemon aren't sick!"
"Oh, just for a preliminary health screening and paperwork, really. And not just any vets, but the government vets," I told him, as I stapled his application forms together and ran them through a scanning machine that would complete the registration process. Naturally, I didn't mention that our crew of veterinarians would do to his pokemon what the doctors had done to him not fifteen minutes ago – he and his two partners would be traceable on our scanners as long as they did not leave the continent.
"Ah, I see..." he said, sounding only slightly convinced. "Are we done, then?"
"Indeed we are," I nodded, handing him a copy of his registration papers. "Keep these, and show them to the vets when you drop by. Once you drop by, they'll do their thing and you'll be good to go within three hours of the appointment."
"Three hours?" he asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Processing time," I said with a smile – yet another little white lie, since two hours was the minimum time taken for the satellites to lock on to a new entry in the network. "If you have no questions, have a nice day."
As he walked away from my desk, I saw General Harding giving me a smirk and a thumbs-up gesture. Adrienne was standing behind him, doing something to a new trainer – for the trainer's sake I really hoped that it was the affinity test.
With a blink and a smile, I returned the wave, ignoring the nervousness that emerged upon me seeing that smirk on my superior's face.
xxx
"Long day, wasn't it, Silas?" I sighed, as I sank into my mattress, plopping him down next to me as I did so. "One hundred new trainers, and that's just from our side."
He squeaked out a reply, sounding just as tired as I was. "Madness, that's what it is. How many did they register on the continent, again?"
I paused for a moment, my mind barely thinking straight enough to recall the right figure. "Five thousand, maybe? Or was it six? Either way, most of Sinnoh's major cities had a hundred, and the smaller ones had fifty at most. Lots of eager folk out there."
"No wonder the satellite tracking system crashed just now," Silas laughed. "Tracing five thousand humans and their travelling companions all at the same time? Bet you that General Reardon is still sorting out that mess back at the office."
I couldn't help but smirk at that. Indeed, the satellite network had frozen up and crashed as soon as all the trainers' tracking implants had gone active. Apparently, the programmers who set the system up hadn't anticipated that nearly all the trainers would attempt to head out on day one, and so their tracking programs had all gone absolutely apeshit on them. General Reardon from our electric department had cursed up a storm in the comptroller offices, it seems.
"So, Trainer," Silas whistled. "How are they going to make sure that there aren't any uprisings, or whatever? If the other four continents registered as many as Sinnoh did, that's nearly forty or even fifty thousand people on the loose with pokemon. And we're talking about trained pokemon, too."
"Well, they've got the tracking system, or will have, once they fix it and the traffic flows smoothly," I replied, lying down and shutting my eyes. "Then there are the pokemon and digimon troops they released into the wilderness. Frankly, I don't think there are any areas around the world which aren't being monitored in some way or another, now."
After a brief pause, Silas asked a question that completely threw me. "How could they do that? Don't their digimon troops need to sleep in their special chambers or something?"
I opened my eyes with a start and sat up in bed, looking at him incredulously. "Wait a minute. None of us thought of that..."
"It's highly unusual," Silas quipped, "unless of course they've started beaming their special radiation all over the planet."
"General Harding would know about something that big, wouldn't he?" I shrugged, rubbing my eyes. Damn it, I was tired. "I'll ask him about it tomorrow, so can we go to sleep now? I'm about tired enough to enter a coma."
He merely blew a raspberry at that, though he was apparently tired enough such that he couldn't even retract his tongue after that. "I somehow get the feeling that you'll be eating those words someday."
"... Goodnight, you little bastard."
"Goodnight, retard."
The two of us had barely gotten a few minutes' sleep, it seemed, when the alarm sounded. I jumped out of bed and grabbed my pistol, even as Silas reflexively took out my window with an Ice Shard. Outside the window, the sky seemed to pulsing with a glowing blue light.
"What the fuck?" I snapped, as I pulled a pair of trousers on. "Is that what I think it is?"
"Trainer, I think the teleportation fields are going down," Silas said, sounding awestruck.
"How would you know?" I asked, as I hurriedly threw on a shirt and buttoned it up. "Anyway, we need to get to the nearest muster area, and fast!"
He whistled. "Whenever we teleport, I can see a blue energy grid pulsing all over the city, which blocks our teleportation pathways. It's really like a big dome over us. And now the sky is showing a blue light with the same colour."
I frowned. What Silas had said made perfect sense, and yet sounded completely illogical. The teleportation fields were weaker at night, and theoretically could be overwhelmed by enough pokemon attempting to break through it at the same time. But we hadn't registered that many psychics, had we?
"Hold on tight, Silas," I muttered, as I strapped him onto my modified hard hat. "We'll find out what's going on, soon enough."
Slinging the hard hat with my starter strapped to it onto my head, I grabbed my keys and rushed out of our room, just as the second alarm sounded.
Thirty seconds had passed since the first alarm, apparently.
xxx
As I ran down the stairs, I saw that many the military hostels' residents were also heading out to the muster point. We all rushed down the stairwells, keeping to the left of the stairs as we had been drilled to do in the event of an emergency. Every ten seconds or so, we'd see a demidevimon or some other small creature zooming past us on the right of the stairs, presumably heading upwards to get everyone out of their rooms. Whatever this was, it was something big.
By the time we had gotten down to the muster area at the hostel compound, the heavy artillery had already arrived. Several lampent were hovering above the compound, their flickering flames illuminating the area with a dim yellow light. Hulking swalot oozed about the perimeter, seemingly ensuring that no one got out. A few soulmon and bakemon were also floating about like rags in the wind, baring their colossal teeth at whoever that was daring enough to look them in the eyes.
"Attention, all personnel!" boomed a voice on the compound's loudspeakers. "The teleportation fields are going down! I repeat; the teleportation fields are going down! Proceed with herding operations immediately!"
There were several shocked gasps and bewildered facial expressions as the announcement was made, but our training had been thorough – we headed out to our respective stations, as we had been instructed to all those months ago when the fields had first been erected.
The streets were devoid of any wandering civilians, as befitted the time of day. However, worried people were curiously watching us as we fanned out through the streets along with pokemon and digimon troops. Up above us, the blue pulses in the sky were thinning out and becoming increasingly sporadic, indicating that the teleportation fields were probably on the verge of complete collapse.
"Check in!" called a woman with a divermon, at the street corner I was heading towards. "Station BH, oh-oh-five, secure!"
"Confirm that!" I said, as I arrived at the corner. "Any herds yet?"
She shook her head, and let out a sigh of relief. "Not yet, but you know what we'll have to do if the civilians start acting up."
I nodded, feeling slightly apprehensive. The 'herding operation' was intended to keep civilians out of the armed forces' way during emergencies, by deploying all administrative personnel to keep them in their homes or guide them to shelters while the big guns were rolled out. In this case, however, the entire teleportation field over Canalave seemed to be disintegrating, which was definitely not a scenario we had planned for.
"What time is it?" I asked my station partner, realising something.
She squinted at her watch, which was barely visible in the near-darkness. "Just about one in the morning... Why?"
Realisation struck me about then. "The trainers' curfew! That's why the fields are going down."
"What do you..." Silas began, going silent as comprehension dawned. "Just how many of them are headed here, anyway?"
The divermon was the first among us to figure it out, croaking his answer out. "About a hundred of them would be adequate to send wobbles through the energy field. If maybe ten more hit it at the right spots, the field would be rendered unstable."
"You can't be serious," the woman groaned. "We set the city check-in curfew at one a.m. for goodness knows what purpose, and they end up collapsing the energy fields? This training business is really too much."
"There they are!" gasped Silas, causing all of us to whip about and look towards the edge of the city.
Sure enough, trainers were popping into existence all over the place. Even as the energy dome broke down completely with a bright flash of blue light, more started appearing on the streets, well within the former energy field's radius. Almost immediately, swarms of lampent, bakemon, and soulmon began converging towards them, flying through the air like a stream of the undead.
"Back off, the lot of you!" shouted my female partner, as she drew her pistol and fired a warning shot. "Don't you dare touch those trainers!"
"Silas, hose them!" I ordered, catching on – the nocturnal creatures were very obviously about to carry out their bloodier orders without any second thoughts. "Icicles, too!"
Silas gladly obeyed my orders, firing a round of icicles at the hovering pokemon and digimon. When the lampent decided to come down on us for that, he switched to using water jets instead, which did a decent job of holding them back.
Just then, the first of the trainers reached us. When we got a good look at them, though, we just stood there, stunned for a moment.
Some of them had limbs that were very obviously broken, and some were covered in bloodstains. For the most part, they seemed fine, but it seemed that the teleportation field itself had done a number on them.
"Get us the medics, now!" I barked at the divermon, who nodded, and let out a piercing whistle. Within seconds, sirens could be heard in the distance as our medical units began heading towards the groups of trainers that had been trying to make it into the city before the nightly lockdown.
It was going to be a long night.
xxx
The morning after the great curfew incident was nothing less than chaotic. Dozens of trainers were injured thanks to wild pokemon attacks, battles that had gone out of control, or collisions with the energy field. Almost all of Canalave's medical personnel were occupied with treating a myriad of injuries ranging from severe bruising to broken bones, and one trainer even believed that he was a kumquat, if the rumours were true.
Naturally, Arukenimon and Mummymon were furious. Not only had their anti-teleportation field collapsed, but they had hordes of wounded trainers to deal with. The local gym leader, a retired water specialist, was also being swamped with challenges, and his team was about ready to collapse out of pure fatigue.
"This wasn't supposed to happen!" Arukenimon screeched, thumping her fist down on the dais of port control's auditorium, as she addressed us. "They weren't supposed to teleport back, the idiots! All they had to do was to check in before one a.m., and they even managed to screw that up!"
"Ma'am," said General Williams from the ground department, "Registration of known teleporters was not done as part of our processing. As I recall, you and Mummymon approved it since the fields were deemed to be strong enough to repel them."
Mummymon made a rumbling noise somewhere in his dried-out throat. "That we did, but we didn't anticipate one hundred and thirty two simultaneous teleportation attempts. So, we are now seeking your opinion on the matter."
"The curfew is reasonable," said General Fen, as he sipped his coffee. "Perhaps you'll just need to lower the field until the curfew passes?"
"Unacceptable," Arukenimon hissed. "The terrorists could go anywhere they pleased between six a.m. to one a.m., then. The fields stay up, or will stay up once we get them up again."
General Reardon spoke up grumpily. "Then issue a ban on teleporting into the city. Really, the training launch was rushed, if you ask me."
"Good point," conceded Arukenimon, "though now that you've reminded me; is the tracking system back up for our trainers, at least?"
She nodded, running a hand through her hair. "Yes, in an hour, or two at most. We'll be tracking them by nightfall, that's for sure."
"One less problem to worry about," Mummymon said, as he scrutinised a printed report. "So, onto the next item on the agenda..."
Outside the auditorium's window, the morning sky briefly glowed a brighter shade of blue, as the energy field flickered back into existence.