Chapter 40 – Commandos
"Seriously?" I asked, although with a bag over my head, it came out sounding more like 'eeh-ah-ee?'.
The accented voice I'd heard spoke up again, and the pistol muzzle pressed between my shoulder blades moved up to the base of my neck. "Bleedin' Jesus, they just had to send another towerin' giant over, din they?"
"You're just short, Ginger," snorted a second voice.
Sounding a little more distant, a third voice made itself heard. "Could you guys take the questioning inside? You're blocking the doorway."
Nudge went the pistol at my neck. "Ya heard the man, lad. Move yer arse!"
I slowly moved my feet and made my way forward, only to receive a rough shove to the small of my back that sent me tripping over my own feet and falling face-first to the ground. One of the three – at least, I figured it was three – commandos that had had me cornered managed to grab me by my collar, though, and so I ended up being halfway garroted instead of smashing my nose on the concrete floor.
"Up, ya lout! We've got questions, and you're going to answer 'em!" Mr. Accent again, it seemed.
"Shall we take this to the head?"
"Whatever. I've got reeds to carve, so you two can enjoy him."
"Foeckin' Hell, Mozart! Tisn't every day we get a newbie to question, innit?"
Mozart cleared his throat. "Kindly don't call me that. He died broke and alone."
"You guys suck!" I wheezed, feeling my collar digging into my windpipe.
Knee, meet back. "Shut ya bleedin' pie hole, ya sodden cunt!"
The arguing between the three of them – I was very certain by this point that there were just the three of them - went on as they dragged me to the head, and the lone bulb flickering to life was visible to me despite my current headgear.
"Alright, new guy!" said Neither-Ginger-Nor-Mozart cheerfully. "What brings you to our humble quarters? Not an explosives thief, I hope."
"Answer the man, fool!" Ginger followed up on his snappish words by cuffing me across my head.
Somewhere else behind me, I could hear a soft scraping sound. Wonder what that could be? "I got assigned here. Nice to meet you too, by the way."
"SILENCE!" boomed Ginger. "We are the only ones who will be sarcastic here, ye understand? So, tell me why we shouldn't kill ya right here and now, eh, laddie."
I reached up and yanked the bag off my head, dislodging my glasses as I did so. The safety catch on the pistol poking me in the back was clicked off, and I found myself glaring at a lean guy with dishwater blonde hair and what seemed to be faintly shimmering eyes. Or at least, I found myself glaring at a slightly blurred humanoid, given that I wasn't exactly looking through my glasses.
"What's with the shades, Slick?" Blondie asked me with an amused grin.
I straightened out my glasses, and settled for glaring at him over the lenses. "I got assigned to your unit. Do I really need to explain the glasses?"
"Da first and last words outta ya stinkin' gob'll be 'sir', ya hear me?" snarled Ginger, as he pistol-whipped me across the back of my head.
Reflexively, I spun about and took a swipe at his gun-hand, even as my head started throbbing with a dull, aching sensation. He took a step back and brought his other arm up, palm opened and aimed straight for my abdomen. I barely managed to block that strike, and before I could even blink, he had swept my feet out from under me with his right leg.
Falling backwards, I felt myself hitting something moderately firm, and the stifled curse I heard confirmed that I'd apparently crashed into Blondie. The two of us fell to the ground in a heap, and Ginger advanced towards us, finally able to physically look down on me.
His hair was, as his call-sign suggested, as orange as a carrot. He wasn't very tall, that was for sure, but did have startlingly prominent cheekbones as well as a stocky, powerful-looking appearance. Scars crisscrossed his forearms, and his face was marked by a long, thin scar that traced a smooth curve from his left temple to the corner of his jawbone.
Surprisingly enough, he didn't look that furious, despite his earlier words. He just looked… resigned, I suppose.
"Why are ya here, really?" he asked, as he took aim at my forehead.
I set my jaw and offered him the most bored expression I could muster. "I got reassigned. Something to do with the recent chaos, I think. Didn't you get the memo?"
Under me, Blondie let out a pained groan, "This guy's got more bones to him than a bascaulin… hurry up and get on with it, will you?"
Ginger squatted down, and tried to look me in the eye. "Alright, mate. Three questions, and I decide if we oughta kill ya. No right or wrong answers, just those we don't like. Deal?"
"Just get it over with," I deadpanned, rolling my eyes. Given how I'd been held at gunpoint while being immobilized by a psychic before, along with all the other mishaps during my rather colourful days back at Canalave, Ginger got points for trying, but his death threats really didn't seem all that scary.
He nodded. "Where do your loyalties lie?"
A loaded question right off the bat, then. I held up a hand to let him know I was thinking it over, and he merely grunted in response, the pistol's aim never going too far away from my forehead.
Where did my loyalties lie? The easy one would be to say it was with the government, naturally. But then again, there were those from Canalave's underground crowd who I considered friends, as well as some decidedly anti-establishment folks I still maintained contact with. And, of course, I'd tried to get my commanding officer stripped of his rank and locked away for murder. Couldn't forget that one, now, could I?
I shrugged, and gave Ginger my answer. "My first loyalty is to myself, and my team."
He mulled over it for a bit, and spoke up again, "Next question, then. Earth as it is, or as it was?"
"Be specific."
"Are ya with or agains' the digimon being part of our world?" he clarified.
Babamon, Persiamon. Sean, Mum, Bruiser, Amy, Dad. General Harding. Aunty Moira. People I'd never have met if not for the Revolution.
"There are some I'd call my friends, but for the most part…," I trailed off, giving the question a final think-over, "I miss the way things used to be."
Blondie squirmed a little. "Could you let me out?"
"The ginger nut here might shoot me, so tough luck, bro," I said, looking back at Ginger. "Last question?"
His facial expression changed to one which looked… defeated. "What do you have to lose?"
The question, spoken softly, took a second to hit home. When it did so, it felt like an onix was giving me a loving squeeze to tenderize me. Somehow, my mind just went blank right there and then.
Did I really have nothing left to lose?
Out of nowhere, a memory surfaced in the emptiness that was me trying to answer Ginger's last question. In my mind's eye, I saw a shellder sitting on a telephone directory, nervously sticking out his tongue and draping it over the shoulder of the sobbing human sitting next to him. Like a bursting dam, images started flashing through my mind.
Sharing ice cream with that same shellder during a heat wave.
Laughing as I did the backstroke and let him experience the view you could only get while swimming backwards.
Beer in a saucer, a shellder on a tray, a small mountain of crushed peanut shells, and a weary-looking Zachary Harding on the same table at Diz's.
A volcarona hissing furiously at the comparatively puny shellder that was firing jets of water at it.
Bubbles trailing to the surface of a bucket of water where a shellder was having a nap.
Going to sleep with the familiar weight of my starter on my chest.
For a second, Silas' usual wide-eyed expression seemed to fix itself in front of me despite him being in his pokeball, and I felt a tightness in my chest that wasn't too dissimilar to how it felt when he slept on me.
I looked at Ginger, and answered him so quietly that I could barely hear myself. "Silas."
After what felt like hours, he nodded, and holstered the pistol. Offering me a hand, he helped me up, causing Blondie to let out a relieved moan.
"Welcome to the Inkblots, then," he said, offering me a small smile, "The one unit where all we have to lose is… each other."
Somewhere back in the barracks, a low, mournful sound made itself heard. Long-buried memories of frets, chords, tabs, and meter flickered within my mind, and I couldn't help but smile when I recognized the clarinet's voice for what it was.
I no longer wondered why they'd given him the nickname Mozart.
xxx
The night lights started not long after I got to Coronet base. Some compared them to the beauty of aurora borealis, some said they were a bad omen, some said it was a sign of the Legendaries being awakened, and for the most part, no one knew what the heck was going on.
Most of us hoped it wasn't the Legendaries, though. Given that the lights all originated from the peak of Mount Coronet, and that the Spear Pillar was where Giratina's realm of distortion was anchored to our dimension… suffice to say that all travel up the mountain was strictly forbidden, leading to even more rumours about how the lights could have come about.
"Pretty lights," I said to no one in particular, as I looked out of the barracks window. "Wonder what they're doing up there?"
Lizard stopped playing his clarinet long enough to offer me a soft-spoken reply. "Whatever it is, it's radioactive to some extent."
I turned to regard him with a curious expression. "Oh?"
Among the four of us, he was the only one who wasn't merely vision-impaired. It so happened that his affinity with insects had given him a limited ability to see beyond the usual spectrum of visible light, and so he could sometimes see things like ultraviolet rays and other energy emissions.
He shrugged. "The moon's been giving off some strange energy waves on the nights when we see them."
Looking out of the window once again, I squinted at the moon, which was somewhat hidden behind a cloud bank. True, it was slightly brighter than it usually was, but I couldn't see the same wavelengths Lizard could, and so after a while, I gave up and hopped into my bunk.
In the privacy – I hoped – of my own mind, I wondered if the mysterious cargo I'd accompanied just a few weeks ago on that train had anything to do with the bizarre night lights from the Spear Pillar.
xxx
"Wakey wakey, sleepy head!" I sang, grabbing Balrog by his shoulder and shaking him. "P.T. is in thirty minutes!"
He cracked open an eye, weakly flipped me off, and rolled over, curling up like a sandshrew, muttering, "Fuck off, Nice Guy."
I sighed, and stepped back. "Courtney, do you mind, dear?"
The gabite stepped towards her sleeping trainer with a growl, and proceeded to shove him out of his bunk. He fell to the ground with a muted thudding sound, and she stomped over to his prone form, nudging him in the ribs with her claws.
Amazingly, he just rolled over onto his side and snored, followed by a little bit of drool trickling out of his mouth.
So, this was Balrog, who I'd referred to as Blondie during my first day as an Inkblot. Ground-attuned, incredible pain threshold, practically blind in bright environments, much-loved by the mess hall cooks since he could stomach even semi-expired foodstuffs, and a very, very deep sleeper.
Courtney let out a disgusted grunt, and gestured to the piloswine next to her. He shuffled forward, and exhaled a chilling mist that enveloped his trainer. It took a few minutes, but the Icy Wind did the trick, and Balrog eventually woke up.
"Did you really have to ask Gandalf to do that?" he yawned, shaking his head and sending droplets of condensed water flying everywhere, "Bastard."
I gave him a jaunty salute, and spun about on my heel. Grabbing my towel, I headed for the head. "Twenty minutes to P.T."
"Fuck."
We weren't the closest among the four Inkblots, but his team got along well enough with me. Courtney the gabite seemed to be rather fond of Newton, and Gandalf the piloswine was always pestering me to scratch him behind his ears. I had yet to meet Balrog's gliscor, Drake, but he assured me that if the other two were cool with me, Drake was unlikely to make a fuss about it.
Silas did enjoy being in Gandalf's company, too. The two ice-types spent most nights discussing ice moves, and we ended up having to sleep in damp bunks when Gandalf tried to teach Silas how to use Icy Wind, and the whole barracks ended up being chilled to near-winter temperatures. It was pleasant enough for me, what with my predominant water adaptation and partial ice adaptation, but Lizard as well as Ginger weren't so happy about the whole situation.
The Inkblots had a duty roster for waking up Balrog to avoid punishment for tardiness, and so my addition to the unit freed up two extra mornings per week for Lizard and Ginger to get an extra ten minutes of sleep each.
"So, which course are we supposed to be running today?" Balrog asked me as we grabbed a quick shower before heading out to the physical training grounds.
Rinsing off, I answered him, "Swamp."
He finished his shower with angry murmuring about muddy gear and the sacrilegious timing of the drills, just as Ginger and Lizard staggered drowsily into the head.
"Top o' the mornin' to ya two buggers," Ginger said sleepily, sounding as though he was speaking around a mouthful of marbles.
Lizard remained silent, as he tended to be.
Not ten minutes later, we were all bogged down in knee-deep brackish water, and trying to subdue a rather aggressive krokorok that had ambushed us on the obstacle course.
xxx
General Harding waved at me and I waved back, since the video call's voice component seemed to be lagging a little. He badly needed a haircut as well as a shave, there were bags under his eyes, and he looked a little paler than I'd ever seen him being during the time I spent working as his assistant.
"- looking good," he said, his voice sounding all scratchy and distorted by static. "I see- -commando training- -workout."
I shrugged. "You're one who looks like death warmed over. Hard times back at port control?"
He sighed, and leaned back in his seat. "Not easy, the paper- -kenimon and Mummymon aren't making things easier, either. And we've got rio- -things over there?"
Through the speakers, I heard a faint rumble, which I'd been told was usually the sound of an explosion as heard via a video call. "Looks like you've got work to do. Good luck."
"Take care, Nice- -a drink some- -eet again," he said, before signing off.
xxx
Ginger was our leader of sorts, and kept things running in an orderly fashion. He was the one who had drawn up the roster for waking Balrog, cleaning the barracks as well as head, and also the laundry list. Frankly, without him, I think the three of us would've been dishonorably discharged from the commandos for being complete slobs who exploited the rarity of police calls in our corner of the training camp.
He and I weren't exactly close, honestly speaking. I was the unwanted replacement they had never asked for, and I guess I could understand where he was coming from on that. We only spoke to each other as and when our duty called for it, really – this typically happened during explosives training, since he was partially colour blind and couldn't identify the different types of wires in bombs.
If anything, we only seemed to respect each other's competence on the field and our mutual lack of family.
Orphaned in Glasgow during his teenage years thanks to the Revolution, Ginger had made his way to Sinnoh and wound up in the army. Save for his starter, Slappy the banette, he only had two other pokemon, a lecherous haunter named Mac and a stoic drapion named Stryker.
Here, I feel it should be noted that Mac was more than very notorious for using his disembodied hands to molest the inhabitants of our base at his whims and fancies.
"It's all a little fuzzy given how long it's been," Mac had once told me with a saucy wink, "but I distinctly recall havin' been a registered sexual offender when I was alive, y'know? And who wouldn't love hands like these? Bleedin' waste of time evolving into a gengar, if ya ask me"
On those times when Mac wasn't busy training or outraging people's modesty and I happened to be free, I would sit down with him, and just listen to his stories of life in the olden days, almost two centuries ago.
He would regale Silas, Newton, and yours truly with tales of children no older than ten years of age going on training journeys. He spoke of how the criminal underworld back then was not very different from the way it was today. He told us fantastic things, wondrous things, and according to him, Ginger had no real interest in hearing him out, for the most part.
Slappy and Stryker were polar opposites of Mac's outgoing nature. Slappy never failed to creep me out with his zipper-mouthed grin and offers of free acupuncture, and Stryker was not too happy that I consistently mistook her for a male of her species.
Hey, it wasn't my fault that she had pincers that would have made a scizor develop the claw-related equivalent of penis envy.
Funnily enough, it was Mac who I found myself talking to the most aside from my own pokemon whenever my unit mates were occupied or not in a conversational mood. Despite him being a crass, incorrigible pervert, he usually had some sound advice on hand for most situations, and even offered to Shadow Sneak me back to Canalave for visits on special occasions.
One day, after a particularly tiring set of weapons drills and obstacle courses, Mac had perched at the foot of my bunk, nudging my foot until he woke me up in the middle of the night.
"You're an old soul, child," he had said, his rasping voice sounding wistful. "It's been a while since I've had a listenin' ear, so… ya have my gratitude."
I stared at him with a mixture of disbelief and grogginess. "You woke me up to say that?"
He spread his hands. "Better late than never. And as far as I'm concerned, you're one of us now, so don't ya mind that human of mine or what anyone says, ya hear?"
A few days later, when I passed him a blue magazine I'd managed to get my hands on, I could've sworn his tongue lolled at least a meter out of his mouth.
xxx
I saw a digimon guard not dropping dead despite having spent less than the usual five hours required in their specialized sleeping chambers.
Ginger, Balrog, and Lizard saw it, too.
So did the rest of camp.
And guess what else we saw that day? If your guess was the Coronet lights, you would have been correct.
Something big was happening, but what was it?
xxx
Our patrol group stopped at the limit of Coronet base's boundaries somewhere about three in the morning, and we waited. It didn't take thirty seconds for a shedinja and its trainer to literally emerge from the shadows, and we kept an eye out for anyone that might have been around to witness what was about to take place.
"Password?" Ginger asked softly, as the elderly man and his undead husk of a pokemon stayed put where they'd stepped out of the Shadow Sneak.
"Candy canes," replied our visitor, as he dug around in his pockets. "Yours?"
Ginger nodded. "Peppermint."
"Good," the old trainer came closer, and nodded in the direction of the crate we had at our feet. "What've you got for me tonight?"
Balrog unsealed the crate, took a confirmatory glance at its contents, and resealed it. "Antibiotics, some ammo, and as much grub as Mama could spare us without it being suspicious. I'd say maybe a week's eating for the average person living on their own. Oh, and duct tape for Kathy"
"Much appreciated, and I think soon we won't need as much duct tape, since I've found her a new body," said our guest, as he unclipped a pokeball from his belt. "I'll let Muriel out to give us a hand, if you don't mind?"
Ginger nodded. "Go ahead, Mister Hew."
Dull red light poured out of the customized pokeball as his victreebel materialized, and we instinctively took a step back – she was infamous for spewing profanities and acid at those she disliked.
Really, their pokemon seemed to be polar opposites. Aloysius and Moira Hew made such a sweet, loving couple, but their teams were unruly, violent, and most definitely unsuited for interaction with anything below the age of eighteen, plants included.
Well, perhaps Kathy the shedinja was the exception to that rule. She would just float around behind Mr. Hew, and would only stir up a fuss if she needed him to reinforce her exoskeleton with more duct tape.
Once she had gotten her bearings, Muriel gave us her usual look of disdain and huffed, "Well, if it isn't the faggot patrol again. Hello, you wasted sperms."
"The crate, dear," Mr. Hew said gently, nudging her in the side. "We need to get back fast."
With a haughty gurgle, Muriel picked up the crate with her vine, and Mr. Hew held on to the base of said appendage. Silently, as always, Kathy the shedinja floated up to them, bits of her exoskeleton flaking off and dropping to the ground like papery snowflakes.
She pushed them into a shadow, and the three of them disappeared, leaving no signs of their presence there save for the pieces of Kathy's flaking husk that were scattered about the ground.
xxx
We didn't know each other's names – orders from above, to ensure that we wouldn't get emotionally attached to each other, in the event that anything untoward should happen to any of us. So as far as we were concerned, the Inkblots consisted of Ginger, Balrog, Lizard, and Nice Guy.
Yes, they gave me my call-sign thanks to the little smiley face General Harding had fixed onto the tank top I wore when we were in the barracks. Unanimously, we'd bestowed him with the honorary call-sign of Porn Star, which he had accepted with great pride and amusement by means of a video call.
I did find myself wondering about Lizard's name the most, though. His real name, that is; the origin of 'Lizard' was straightforward enough given his favourite snack of live crickets dipped in honey.
No, I am not joking. The tank containing the cricket colony outside the barracks was his, and he had two jars under his bunk which he ate out of. One contained some choice crickets, and the other contained honey to dip them in. In his words, 'it simply isn't healthy or appetizing to marinate crickets in honey and store them as snacks for prolonged periods of time'.
Choice of snack aside, what made me wonder about his name was his music.
Lizard was most definitely more than just competent with a clarinet, and his inclination towards music was reflected in his team: Rostropovich the kricketune, Ludwig the wigglytuff, and Evelyn the masquerain. His kricketune, which he affectionately referred to as Rusty, was named for one of the great cellists of the past, his wigglytuff named after the legendary composer Beethoven, and his masquerain named after a renowned percussionist who played at a concert level despite being hearing-impaired.
On an almost daily basis, the four of them would play their music, and the three of us would just sit and listen, amazed that they could still have energy for that after a long day of training.
Every time I saw and heard Lizard playing music alongside his team, I wondered if he would have been famous if not for the Revolution. It was so simple, really. One clarinet in B-flat, a kricketune that mimicked a cello beautifully, a masquerain who produced numerous percussive sounds by channeling air through her abdomen, and a male wigglytuff that sang bass notes. But the music they played was beautiful, nonetheless.
Sometimes, he would continue playing even after Ginger and Balrog had gone to sleep. On those nights where I wasn't due to wake Balrog up the next morning, I would stay up and listen to him. Initially, he was a little nervous being watched, but after a while, he admitted that it was nice to have someone who appreciated his efforts around.
Even Newton and Silas enjoyed the music, really. The two of them would sit by my sides, leaning against me, and watch as our resident musicians did their thing. On the odd occasion that Lizard wanted solo practice, Ludwig almost invariably would curl up on my lap and ask to get a backrub, whereas Rusty and Evelyn would take a jaunt outside and grab some supper. And that was how I spent more than a few nights in relative happiness despite the world changing around us.
Those nights were eventually taken from us, though. Had I know how things were going to spiral out of control, and how rapidly they were about to do so, I probably would have allowed Silas and Newton to cuddle with Ludwig the night Lizard played one of his usual, haunting solos.
The moon was full, glowing, and somehow sinister, that night.