Missingno and Chatot

I was first called into a stone room, lit by torches. There was a great howling wind and constant patter of raindrops on a glass window. Every now and then, the air was broken by a clamorous burst of thunder. There were many computers around us, me and the one who had brought me to life.

He was a strange man; somehow I knew that even before I knew anyone else. He had gray and white hair that was all bushy and disorganized. Wearing black rimmed glasses, he did not seem old, but the dark circles under his eyes showed that he worked long. His pale skin showed that he worked long without seeing the sun. And he was looking over me with a wide toothy grin.

As for me… I'm still not sure what I am. I'm almost twice the height of my creator and I didn't fit into the room with the nine foot ceiling well. I've never really had much of a substantial look. I'm a sort of black and white speckled mess kind of shaped like a lowercase 'd', if that makes any sense. And at certain parts, you can see right through me.

My creator finally spoke by saying, "Igor, do you see this? We've done it!"

There was a squawk from somewhere, followed by a "Yes Master!"

"We have created an entirely new Pokemon simply by manipulating the Pokeball!" He then broke into this maniacal crazed laughter that did startle me at first.

I backed off and looked around. "Igor?"

Off to the side, I finally spotted Igor. He was a small bird Pokemon at one foot high, with black and blue plumage. His head was topped off with a crest shaped like a musical note. Whistling, he replied, "What?"

"Is, um, this normal?"

The bird nodded. "Yup. Give it eight… seven… six…" I noticed that his black tail was twitching out in time with his counting backwards.

On the twitch after one, the door burst open. There was a large woman there wearing a baggy blue dress. "Craig!"

He stopped laughing. "Mrs. Pedrow, what is it now?"

"Would you cut out that stormy soundtrack and that idiotic laughter? You're disrupting the band upstairs."

"But it's for atmosphere…" he complained.

"No buts. And what's with that silly wig you've got on?"

Sighing, he took off the gray hair, revealing that he actually was a dark blond guy. "I'm just getting into character. Fine." He went over to one of the computers and shut off the music program. At that point, I could hear a mariachi band playing upstairs. Now I have nothing against mariachi music, but I will agree with Craig that it wasn't exactly appropriate to the occasion.

Over on his perch, Igor cawed softly. "Mrs. Pedrow never fails to interrupt our coolest moments. But what can we do? She's the landlady."

"And what, pray tell, is that?" the landlady asked, giving me a suspicious look. "I don't mind your Chatot, but that is… is that a Pokemon?"

"Yes it is!" Craig said, spinning around and standing up straighter. A proud gleam was in his eyes. "This is the result of my latest experiment. Now the Pokeball stores Pokemon as electronic data, right? And people have made Porygon with purely electronic data. So I hacked into the Pokeball's programming and figured out how it categorizes the Pokemon it captures. By manipulating those numbers, I have managed to fool the Pokeball into think it held an entirely new Pokemon. And when I released it, I got one! Isn't it magnificent?"

She didn't look as impressed. "What is it?"

"Uhhh…" he stalled out for a moment. "To be frank, I don't know. But I aim to study it."

"What's he mean by he wants to study me?" I asked Igor.

"Oh, it's no big deal," he reassured me. "He'll want to see what you can do and what you're like. He might have a few screws loose, but he's a pretty cool guy."

"I see."

"He'll take good care of you, like me. He teaches me stuff, like things to say. Wanna hear my favorite?" He fluttered his wings and said, "I want your brains!" After he settled down, he added, "Cool, huh?"

Mrs. Pedrow was leaning on the doorframe now. "So what are you going to call it, Mr. Big Shot Scientist? You're going to have to use something for your papers, if you even write those."

"I will!" Craig insisted, his ears turning red in embarrassment. "I'm calling it the missing numbers experiment, so I'll just call it Missingno."

"Well it'd better not be destructive," the landlady said, then left us alone.

On seeing that, I knew I wanted to help Craig. He did create me from nothing, after all. As it turned out, I didn't have to do much for the actual study. Craig did most of the work, examining what I was doing and what the Pokeball said about me. Igor fluttered about with us. Apparently he's Craig's assistant, but he doesn't do much beyond saying 'Yes Master' and occasionally fetching some small item when the scientist is busy. But he seems proud of his position, so I never really tease him about it.

Early on, he brought me out to a place by the main highway. It weighed large trucks, but Craig talked them into weighing me in an off moment. "The Pokeball says that she's thirty-five hundred pounds," he told the station manager. "But she's a Normal and Flying type, so I can't easily confirm this."

"That thing weighs over a ton?" the manager said, looking at me. "She doesn't look like much."

"That's what the data says. I'm not sure what it means, so I just want a confirmation."

The manager thought, then added, "Well the weighing plate does use electrical currents to help with accuracy. Won't that hurt her?"

Craig shook his head. "No. Even accounting for the fact that we'll be using Roost, her weakness chart comes up identical to a straight Normal Pokemon. I'm not sure why, unless it's some unknown ability that I haven't identified yet."

"Lucky you," Igor said sarcastically. "You don't get hurt as bad by stuff that really hurts me." He paused, then yelled down at a passing worker, "I want your brains!"

The worker jumped at that, then stared at the Chatot. He was chuckling to himself while hopping along a wire.

"We don't have any trucks in at the moment, so let's give it a go," the manager said. "Have her land over in the marked area."

Nodding, Craig came over to me. "Okay Missingno, you heard that. Go into that marked off area and use Roost."

"We're ready," the manager called.

Now I don't have a normal body like they do, being without a definable head. And for some reason, I've never managed to make an audible sound. I can communicate with other Pokemon just fine with some form of telepathy, but not humans. So I floated over to the marked area and used the resting skill to land on the ground.

My form condensed then so instead of a scattered mess, I became a concentrated mass. The weighing plate reacted to that. "Your data's right!" the manager called out. "3501.4 pounds."

"Yowch," Igor said, flying over near me. "I hope you're not sensitive about your weight like most chicks."

"Should I be?" I asked him.

"If you want. Just tell me so I don't make any fat jokes around you."

"Well we decided that I'm only female because the data says so," I told him as I floated back off the weighing plate. "If the data says that I should weigh that much, it is no problem."

But then what am I? Craig tried getting a tissue sample off me once. That was quite the ordeal. All the little black and white bits that make up my body, more or less, keep moving around constantly. They seem to pick up speed and randomness when I'm nervous or agitated. And having heard that he meant to take a scraping of the material making up my body, I had been quite nervous. Then Igor has squawked something about being calm and I fainted.

That is a problem I've been having. Apparently most Pokemon fight each other to get stronger. Craig has tried to battle me against other novice Pokemon. But every time he brings me out in battle, I get so nervous that my body becomes a blur and I faint before either me or my opponent can do anything. We thought maybe I should try taking Contest classes to build up my courage. But no, those make me faint too.

I was worried for a while that this meant that I was unnatural and that Craig should have never made me. But he seemed to notice my worry and told me it was okay. As I was alive and it was obvious that I was thinking and communicating with others, I deserved a chance to live like any other. He just wants to know what I am and what about the Pokeball's technology made me this way.

On the other hand, Igor joked about everything, teasing me that someday the townsfolk would come for us with torches and pitchforks, like every other mad scientist, mad assistant, and mad scientist's experiment ever. But I know that he's my friend too. If other Pokemon ever tried to hassle me, he would intervene before I got worked up enough to faint again. He just says to make sure that I'm still floating before I faint, or else I'll collapse onto somebody and crush them to death. I hope he's just exaggerating about that.

Well they never came after us with torches and pitchforks. But one day, the police came to Craig's apartment. The guy who lives above us, the one in the mariachi band, he complained that we were a public nuisance. They eventually decided that Craig's experiments were dangerous, immoral, and illegal. With that, they arrested him and confiscated both me and Igor.

So here I am in a prison cell of my own. They don't know what I can do or what I am, so they decided to be safe and hold me here. Still, I miss Craig and Igor. I want to protect them, even if I'm not very good at it. But on looking around, I think I can break the bars holding me in. If I hold onto them and use Roost, I'm pretty sure I can crush them. I won't be able to fight the guard Pokemon, but if I can locate Igor, we might be able to get out and figure out where they're holding Craig. I'm sure the Chatot is around. I hear him taunting the guards every now and then from down the hall.

I'm not too sure this will work, though. If I make a mistake, I'll just faint and be recaptured. But I want to try, for my friends… family, sort of. I got worried that I might be destroyed if I fail, so I wrote down this short record. That way, I've left something of me behind to prove that I existed.

I'm going to try breaking out of jail now. Wish me luck.

...

Missingno/(ten question marks) Emerald entry: This is a newly discovered Pokemon. It is currently under investigation. No detailed information is available at this time.

Chatot Pearl entry: It keeps rhythm by flicking its tail feathers like a metronome. It imitates human speech.

I got the info on the Emerald glitch Pokemon from Bulbapedia, including all the details like the gender, weight, and tendency to faint at the start of battles (that particular version has 0 HP).