Chapter 3: David Emmons

Jermy couldn't help but notice the change in atmosphere between Kalmwa'er Resort at midday and Kalmwa'er Resort at early dawn. When the sun was bright and shining rays through the windows, the lobby looked bright and welcoming. Right now, however, dawn had yet to break, leaving the lobby in a dark shade. It was almost like a visage had broken, revealing the family-friendly hotel as some kind of monster trying to...eat them, or something.

Bah, it was exceptionally hard to form a cohesive thought this early in the morning. Jermy would think a decade's worth of early wake-up calls would change his sleep patterns enough to make it no issue for him, but unfortunately that was not the case. The pikachu, like always, was mind-numbingly sleepy — but still he plastered on that cheery smile and encouraging voice to get Mathew and Joey to roll out of bed with him. Aside from a cursory yawn, he knew he looked completely normal.

"H-hi guys!" Demurke exclaimed, awaiting the group in the lobby. She approached cheerily. "Good morning…! Did you sleep w-well?"

Next to him, Joey stretched, trying to get his body moving. "I reckon I've slept better. We're up earlier than a rooster mixed with an early bird, thanks to Jermy."

"Shooting the messenger will only get you shot back, Joey," ORB said, making his presence on the floor known. "I'm all for taking Jermy down a peg, but it has to be a fault of his own making."

"Yeah, I'm sure Demurke's pretty groggy too!" Jermy said, hoping it made sense. Give him an hour and he could produce something of sound logic, but times like this were what ORB was for. Robots don't get tired.

"Uh-huh. You g-get used to it eventually…" Demurke said. "How about you, Mathew? A-are you feeling—" Jermy followed her eyes towards a nearby beanbag chair. Mathew was already completely knocked out, snoring loudly. "...Oh no."

Jermy opened his mouth to wake Mathew up again, but as soon as he did, the cubone suddenly jumped awake. "Ah! Fuck…" he muttered.

"I-I know getting up this early is hard, Mathew," Demurke said as she sat down in a chair near him. "But...you gotta hold yourself up before—"

"Hey, wait!" Jermy plopped himself down as he interrupted. "I haven't told them who we're meeting up with for training. I wanted it to be a surprise."

"O-oh, got it," she said.

ORB rolled up to Jermy's chair, his claw nudging against the cheap fabric. "It's surprising how obvious this surprise is."

"Hey, shush!" Jermy exclaimed. "No spoilers!"

"Uh, anyway." Joey joined the rest of them. "Demurke, did you ever ask around about my mom and dad?"

Demurke nodded slowly. There was a clear guilt in her eyes. "No signs of them anywhere. I'm so sorry."

"Ah." Joey eyed Mathew. The cubone was staring off at the ceiling and taking discomfitingly long blinks. "That's okay. I reckon I'll piece it together myself. Thanks a bunch for trying, though."

"You...you're welcome."

Jermy listened to all this with a frown on his face. He and Demurke had obviously missed an argument of some kind, but it was evident that whatever they had gotten into a quarrel over wasn't very pretty. If they didn't clean their attitudes toward each other soon, who knew what could happen? That all being said, the pikachu had no idea where to begin, solving a dispute like this. Maybe today's exercises could help get their minds off of it?

Thinking about this was making him feel much better about letting Mathew and Joey live with Meowth instead of in the Resort. Jermy doubted that they would fare better if they slept in the same rooms.

Clack. Clack. Clack.

The mostly empty lobby was filled with the sound of talons raking against wood, ever-straightforward but hiding the slightest spring in each step. Jermy couldn't tell whether David was really loud enough to stir him or if he recognized that sound well enough to awake himself when it approached.

"Jermy! Demurke! Good morning!"

If there was one feeling Jermy could never adjust to in his many years on Solceus, it was looking and seeing his boss tower over him. Even as he rose out of the chair, the pikachu would have barely reached the bend in his tan-feathered knees if he stood on the tips of his toes. The height difference meant that the decidueye had to look down on him, which, combined with that leaf-hood of his, gave him an intimidating air. "Gooood morning," Jermy replied to him.

"Ah, David!" Demurke exclaimed. The rest of the group gathered around Jermy and his boss. "I-it's been a while, hasn't it…?"

"It sure has." David stopped the greetings to the familiar and turned to Mathew and Joey, who were looking at him in bewilderment.

"David?" Mathew repeated.

"The one and only!" David reached down with the — Fingertips? Feathertips? Jermy settled on wingtips — of his great brown wing. "You must be Mr. Walker, right?"

"Hell yeah, that's me!" Just like that, Mathew's tiredness was replaced with great excitement as he eagerly shook hands with his new owl-like superior.

"It's a pleasure! Feels like I've been waiting to meet you for years." David then offered it to Joey. "And you must be the little Mr. Johdaile! Welcome aboard."

"Uh… Hi, mister." Hesitantly, Joey slowly gave David's wing-hand a single shake before letting go. "So you're the fella who gave Mathew those blueprints of his?"

"Oh, I wasn't the one who gave them out. That was...somebody else. But I did lead the team who made them!" He stated that last sentence with vigor. Somehow, the subject of his team's many projects never bored him, even when they were long in the past.

Mathew scoffed. "Your team's gotta do some more bug-fixing."

David's interest was piqued. "What? You've only been here for a day and already found a bug?"

"Yeah. Some weird shit happened with my stuff. I woke up on the ground and my backpack was up in a tree! We had to deal with some stupid birds to get it back."

"I almost broke my spine, I think," Joey added. "And that was the least crazy thing that's happened."

"Are you sure it wasn't some kind of error on your side?" David asked.

"It would have to be super slight for me not to find it," Mathew said confidently. "I followed those blueprints to the letter. I even used a program to cross-reference those files of code to make sure everything was perfect."

"Hmm." David put a wingtip to his beak. "Perhaps it was some other variable, then? Your method was quite unusual compared to most of our other recruiting endeavors. It's possible that an inevitable slightly different or malformed part here and there could have caused a displacement...but why only to the objects and not the carrier?" David seemed to realize he was going on a tangent and swapped gears. "Ah, well, whatever it was, we'll figure it out. Maybe after you're on the team, you can be the one to lead those bug-fixing projects!"

"Would you l-look at that, Mathew? We haven't even gotten started and you're already getting possible positions…!" Demurke exclaimed.

"Yes, yes." David shrugged her off, focused on something else. "Anyhow, what's this about the rest of your day? I'm curious."

"Nothing!" Jermy quickly exclaimed. If David found out about the housing arrangement, it wouldn't be pretty. "Nothing bad happened yesterday."

David ignored him. He wanted to hear it from the others.

"Well, we met Meowth while we were trying to mosey on out of the forest and he showed us where the rest of the Club was," Joey said.

Yes! Jermy wanted to cheer Joey on. He had totally skipped over the detail David was looking for! He was in the clear!

"And then he gave us a house!" Mathew eagerly told him. "It's pretty neat."

Aaaaaaaand he shouldn't have gotten his hopes up.

If David was angry, he did a good job at hiding it. "I see…" He said nothing else.

"So, yeah!" Jermy needed to assure David they were alright before he learned anything else. "Aside from that, they've been doing a great job getting settled in. Cooperating with Meowth's been a bit touch-and-go, but he's done more help than harm. I think it will be great for their personal development."

"...Can you three excuse us for a moment?" David asked the others. "I'd like to have a brief private chat with Jermy...outside." Jermy couldn't even get a word in before he was already being ushered towards the sliding doors.

As soon as Jermy felt his feet hit dirt instead of wood, he started talking. "Look, I know this doesn't look good, but I swear I can explain why we — waaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!"

If Jermy hadn't been awake before, he certainly was now. Lodged tightly in David's talons, the pikachu was abducted from the ground as the decidueye took flight. His heart thumped as he rose dozens of yards above Kalmwa'er. The early morning bathed them in a darkness where they wouldn't be seen. For extra measure, David also drifted away from the resort and held him above what looked like a small school campus.

"Jermy, you had one job!" David exclaimed, his voice loud enough to carry past his wingbeats but not reach anybody else. "Do I have to repeat what that job was?"

Jermy sighed. "Get Mathew into the ranks as smoothly and as quickly as possible."

"Yes. So what is he doing in some stranger's house?"

Jermy clutched David's talon as tightly as he could. He had never dropped him before, but that didn't make him feel any less nervous. "Okay, first, that's not a stranger. That's Mr. Persian's kid, and his house is OCEAN property anyhow. And second, the whole housing thing wasn't my fault. It was their idea!"

"By they, he means Mathew and Joey," a robotic voice said, "who he failed to reign in."

"ORB!" Jermy yelled at the captor of David's other talon. "I will turn you into scrap metal!"

"Maybe don't program me with an honest moral code next time," the robot suggested.

"That's enough from you, Jiminy Cricket," David remarked. "Jermy's nose is too long to not give himself away on his own." He carefully turned Jermy over so that he would make eye contact with him. "Bending the rules to make better conditions for a recruit is one thing. It's the fact that you're doing it now that's ruffling my feathers. This is Mathew Walker we're talking about."

"I know, I know, his situation is super precarious and we can't let a single hair get out of the place of the almighty handbook," Jermy remarked.

David scowled. "What is this tone for?"

"This recruiting stuff is not easy, David," he began to argue. "You know that handbook is not written by the guys who actually go out and recruit on a regular basis. There are a hundred different factors that the book expects one person to manage, most of which aren't even in their control in the first place. It's just not feasible to have this much of a stranglehold on them!"

The decidueye lengthily sighed, but before he could say anything, ORB piped up. "The both of you, visitors at three o' clock."

Jermy and David both looked to their right. Sure enough, a party of five was slowly passing by, illuminated by the lightbulb inside of the gondola car. In such low visibility, David hadn't noticed that he had drifted so close to the cable. Now, all of them had front row seats to the aerial argument. Jermy had no idea if they had been able to hear them past that glass.

"Jermy, circus maneuver," David muttered.

Oh, barnacles. Jermy hated the circus maneuver, but it was the best way to distract attention from business in the case of an emergency. Reluctantly, Jermy scuttled up David's body. The decidueye reared his head back, allowing Jermy to balance precariously on the tip of his beak. David turned himself clockwise mid-flight, while Jermy turned counterclockwise. The group still seemed highly bewildered, but it earned them some slow claps.

"Yeaaaaah. Yeaaaaaah! Yeaaaaaaaaaaaah…" Jermy badly hollered while waving to them. The technique wasn't really that hard — David was more than capable of such precision, and Jermy had practiced his balance plenty in the past. What mattered was that it was eye-catching, performative, and bound to make anybody remember it over anything they may have overheard.

They kept going until the gondola safely passed by. David grabbed Jermy by the tail with his beak, threw him into the air, and caught him with his talon again. He drifted away from the cable and back towards the resort.

"D-David, sir!"

"Demurke?" David's head swung in every direction. Even in motion, her wings blended right into the night, making her hard to see. She was only able to prove her existence by revealing the reds of her wings to the decidueye. "Where are Mathew and Joey?"

"I told them to w-wait," she said. "Please, don't be so harsh on Jermy… I-it's not really his fault. I was the one who told Mr. Persian to l-let it be."

"You did?" David sounded surprised. "But you've done recruitments for years now."

"Yeah. I...knew it broke protocol. I-I just thought it would be better for everyone. M-Mathew and Joey would sleep a lot better separate from each other because t-they've gotten on each other's nerves before. Plus, t-they could get a lot of exercise walking to and from the resort. And...Meowth needs the company, too."

"So that's it…" David's tone was neutral. "Does that mean—"

"I think we should wait...as long as possible to tell Mathew. Getting him out of the resort would m-make that easy."

"Yes! Demurke has some sense!" Jermy exclaimed.

"And she's a decade younger than you without any kind of scientific background," ORB observed. "That reflects more on you than it does on her." Jermy sent ORB a glare but said nothing.

"Well, I can't deny that you two make sensible points," David said. "I suppose we can make this arrangement work to our favor. But like I said, we have to make sure everything else is perfectly in place. If Mathew takes this the wrong way, who knows what the consequences will be?"

"Here's a suggestion," Jermy piped up. "If it'll make you worry less about their progress, why don't you take the lead in today's basics training instead of me and Demurke?"

"Good idea!" she said. "That w-way you can make sure everything besides the housing goes nicely."

"Hmm. I like the sound of that." David nodded. "Alright. You two will have to handle the machinery in my stead. Can I count on you for that?"

"Absotutely," Jermy answered. "Now can you please put me and ORB down?"

"It's 'ORB and me,'" ORB said. "I can't believe that you would put yourself first."

"Hey, you're the one that's fixable if you splatter all over the lower class! I have bones!"

"Good lord, you two…" David mumbled. "Don't make me test that theory."

David and Demurke slowly landed at the side of the Resort. Jermy leapt from David's talon, then pried ORB from the other. Once they were all settled, they waltzed back into the resort like nothing had happened. Jermy was sure Mathew and Joey would be none the wiser — there was no evidence aside from the fact that the pikachu was more awake now.

The two of them were both half-awake on the chairs, looking bored out of their minds. "I spy...with my little eye...something tired," Mathew mumbled.

"Mathew, that's the third time you spied yourself," Joey said.

"Yes…"

"Rise and shine, you two!" David clapped, hoping that would do something to change their demeanor. "Everything is all sorted out now. Follow me!"

"Hooray," Joey halfheartedly exclaimed as the two tumbled out of the chairs and joined them.

Once again they passed under the chandelier in the resort's interior, but this time the group hung an early left, entering the Kalmwa'er Resort Fitness Room. Weights, barbells, exercise balls, and sweat towels were hung from displays and left on the floor against the sky blue walls. A line of treadmills met with the glass wall facing the main hall. They were grouped in pairs: one fit for a biped and one fit for a quadruped. Each pair was larger than the last, the first sized for the majority of the group and the last large enough to accomodate a beartic.

Mathew gawked at the treadmills, the setup eye-catching enough for the groggy cubone to take note. "Holy shit, that couldn't look more inefficient," he remarked.

"Mr. Persian i-isn't all too thrilled by the asymmetry, too...but how else can you a-accomodate everyone?" Demurke said. "There's a l-lot of different pokémon out there. Some of them still might not be able to use any of these…"

"Hmmmmm. I wonder if there could be an industry for personally resizable assets?" David dramatically wondered aloud.

"That's a bit of a grandiose way to put it…" Jermy said.

Joey seemed both intrigued and concerned by the prospect. "I reckon a lot of things could happen if Earth stuff got on Solceus."

David gave the totodile's head a pat. "Now you're thinking like a real SEAS employee, Joey!"

"SEAS employees can think?" ORB said. "We have Jermy right here."

"Is that a compliment or an insult?" Jermy asked.

"Point proven."

In the meantime, Demurke approached a door in the corner of the room. A sign saying 'Authorized personnel only' was plastered on it. She reached back towards the red band at the base of her tail and removed a key ring hung from it. Demurke used one to open the door, revealing a bland, tight staircase area.

"W-welcome to the secret central staircase!" she exclaimed as she led them inside, then closed the door. "It's...pretty lonely in here. The emergency exits are a-all at the corners, so this one is just for us." Her voice reverberated across the walls, giving it a slight echo.

"We'll be going in here!" Jermy gestured to the pair of elevator doors on their left.

"Ah, right, that reminds me." David gave Mathew and Joey a serious look for the first time. Jermy suspected it was the first of many. "Just FYI, you aren't to tell a soul what's past this elevator. Not Meowth, not any of your other Club buddies, nobody. Are we on the same page with that?"

"You got it, David!" Joey ran his fingers across his maw in a zipping motion. Mathew just nodded, completely unfazed by David's tone. Jermy went ahead and opened the elevator.

The cab was wide enough to fit all of them inside, but just barely tall enough to let David stand straight up. The decidueye bent down and pressed the lowest button. The doors shut, and the cab began to descend quietly and smoothly.

"Only three buttons?" Joey said. There indeed were only three: floor six, floor one, and floor W. "Ain't there six floors?"

"Actually, there are s-seven," Demurke explained. "The six floors everyone knows about and the basement. W-well, I call it a basement, but...it's not, really. This elevator is the only way th-that you can get there on your own. It's just for SEAS, so it only goes to p-places SEAS employees need to go: floor six opens up close to Mr. Persian's room, floor one is close to the exit, and...you're about to find out what the 'b-basement' is for."

Not long after she said this, the doors slid open once again. Mathew and Joey both gawked at the sight. Had Demurke not called it such, the idea of referring to the area as a 'basement' would have never crossed their minds. Jermy liked to see it more as a mix between a warehouse and a jungle gym — the tall ceilings, bland walls, and clear rectangular shape of the floor plan of a warehouse, and the loose supplies strewn about, open space, and side rooms clearly leading to athletic activities of a jungle gym. The business division must have felt the same, as they had aptly titled it the Waregle.

"Boy, howdy! This is where we're gonna work?" Joey exclaimed as he hurried down the stairway leading away from the elevator platform.

Mathew's awe was borne more from confusion than impression. "This was not the small office I was expecting…"

"Much better, isn't it?" David said. "Don't run off too far, Joey!" he then called out. "I have to get you two signed in before we can do anything!"

"I hear ya, I hear ya!" The totodile stopped at the bottom of the staircase. Jermy picked up ORB and carried him as the others followed him.

Once they were at the bottom, they passed through a small open hallway similar to the interior of the Resort in shape but opposite in presentation. The gray, concrete walls at their sides opened up to a pair of small side rooms. Now Mathew was actually in awe — surrounding them were a multitude of portals, deactivated but fully built.

Jermy put ORB down, deciding he could at least take this explanation off of David's hands. "All these portals go to different facilities owned by the organization. David and I both came through that one over there." He pointed to one whose frame was labeled 'Emmons Labs' at the top.

"I-I came here from that one." Demurke gestured to an older-looking portal labeled 'Fascamile Town Hall — NO ENTRY WITHOUT PERMISSION. ENDPOINT GUARDED 24/7.'

"Every part of our workspace is a hop, skip, and a jump away!" Jermy continued. "It's one of the few conveniences we have…"

"So y'all just hop from world to world all day when you work?" Joey asked.

"The portals we use can be mapped between two points in the same world, not only from one to the other," David explained. "It's quite convenient, too, since doing so doesn't render you unconscious the same way… Oh, would you look who it is!"

David guided the group towards a wide desk at the point where the facility opened up. An orange pokemon resembling a sea otter with a yellow flotation sac for a collar and a pair of cream-tipped tails looked up from his writings on a sheet of paper. Judging by the format, Jermy could tell it was some kind of play script. "Wassup, David?" he said, twiddling his pen idly.

"Zack!" David's expression was bright and earnest. "I had no idea you'd be manning the sign-in station today."

"Yeah. Dad told me he got some ideas from Dit, so now I'm taking on lil jobs when I'm not busy training or studying. I'll get you marked down!" The buizel set his current paper aside and scribbled down David, Jermy, and Demurke's full names on a different one. Jermy noticed he even went as far as to write Demurke as "Demurke, Murkrow IV of Fascamile".

"Demurke? David? Dit? Dad? There are more 'D' names going around than idiots trying to screw in a light bulb," Joey remarked.

"Hey, if you don't count 'Dad', we have just as many 'M' names," Mathew said. "Me, Meowth, Minichino…"

"Now hold up!" Zack said, a curious air in his voice. "I don't think I've seen you two here before."

"They're our new recruits!" David said. "Zackary, meet Mathew and Joey. Mathew and Joey, meet Zackary."

"Mathew, huh…" Zack stared at the cubone for longer than he probably should have. "Well, pretty sick to meet you two! I'll get you penned and everything. Go on ahead!" He scribbled down both of their names.

"Thanks, Zack! Good luck with the job!" David said as they passed by the sign-in desk. "He's a good kid," the decidueye quietly noted to the recruits. "You'll see a lot more of him when you pass basic training."

The group entered the central area of the Waregle, where the open space branched off into six sided-rooms. In the center was a machine with two arms, one on top and one branching off from the side. Jermy watched as the machine he was so familiar with dispense water from the lower hand's pointer finger into one of several red buckets surrounding it. There was a dampness in the floor all around the buckets.

"What in tarnation is that for?" Joey asked, bewildered by the obtuse design.

"Why don't you stand on the indicators and find out?" The coy decidueye suggested. Surrounding the machine were circles pasted on the floor, large enough for both Mathew and Joey to stand on one.

Mathew shrugged. "Sure. Why not?"

The two planted themselves at a circle. A few seconds later, the lower hand reached down and grabbed the bottom of one of the water buckets, filled to the brim. It was followed by the upper hand, grasping the handle. Together, the hands raised the bucket and tilted it towards Mathew and Joey. Some of the water spilled onto the floor.

"Wow, that's cool!" Joey exclaimed. "It's offering us a drink—"

Splash! The hands thrusted forward and dumped all of the water on Mathew and Joey.

"Agh!" Mathew yelled, stumbling away from the machine. "Jesus! That's so cold!"

"You could say that again!" Joey said, doing the same.

Jermy nodded along, making the most of the entertainment. It was always a blast to watch new employees learn this machine's purpose for the first time. Demurke seemed to think the same, as she was struggling to stifle a laugh. "What? It's k-kinda funny," she said when she noticed him giving her a side-eye.

"Funny and functional," David said in approval. "That's the power of Wet Willy!"

Mathew, shivering and soaked all over, snapped his head to face David. Droplets of water flung off of him in the motion, and more dripped off of the ends of his skull mask. "Okay, first off, why the...fuck would you name it that? Second, what was that even for?!"

David put up his wing-finger. "It was important this machine had an eye-catching name." He added his other wing-finger. "Now you're wide awake and ready for proper training." He curled his first. "Funny." Then he curled his second. "Functional."

"Y'all have some wicked sense of humor…" Joey grumbled, trying to shake the water off of his hands.

"That's right." David started moving out of the center area, gesturing for Mathew and Joey to follow. "With that out of the way, we can start Lesson 1.1: Movement Fundamentals! You two are still getting adjusted to your new bodies, which means it's our job to get you accustomed." He stopped between two of the large entryways. At this distance, Jermy could see the entrance to their right was labeled 'Obstacle Course Entrance' and the one to their left was labeled 'Obstacle Course Exit'. "For your first assignment, I'd like you two to run this obstacle course. We'll time you, but no pressure! You're expected to have a bad time right now. Give it your best, and—"

"Wait, wait, waitwaitwait," Mathew interrupted. "I've been trying to articulate for a minute...what's all this stuff even for?"

David blinked. "The...job?"

"I thought I was coming down to prepare for a science job and Joey for a business job. Why are we doing something like an army drill?" the cubone asked.

Demurke clutched her wings close to the white on her chest. "Y-yeah...about that…"

"Ah, you haven't told them the full work requirement yet." David's tone was surprisingly patient. At least for this, he seemed to understand the weight of the matter. He took a breath. "You two are here to try and apply for positions in those divisions, yes. But you have to earn those positions. Perform well enough at this stage, and you'll get the job. But shirk your duties and perform badly, and...we'll have to put you on the front lines."

"Front lines…" Joey needed a moment for the realization to fully dawn on him. "Y'all have a standing army."

"Wh...what…" Mathew was flabbergasted, but it wasn't long until that became anger. "Small favor my ass! I spent eight months building a portal to sign up for a war?! I don't even know what you're fighting!"

"Now hang on!" David exclaimed, rushing to do damage control. "You absolutely can still get the better jobs! I have full confidence in your abilities, Mathew. And you too, Joey," he added, hastily covering his mistake. "Take this as an incentive to give it your best. Do great, and you likely won't have to spend a day on the battlefield. Then, once the war's over, you can wipe your hands clean and relax!"

"O...kay." Mathew was clearly not okay, but refused to say more.

Jermy shook his head. He had seen enough. "Hey Demurke, we should get to the control room."

Demurke nodded. "Yeah, l-let's do that."

As David began to explain some of the details about the obstacle course, Jermy and Demurke opened a small inconspicuous door placed between the entrance and the exit. Inside was the control room, a small, cramped space with a number of monitors and a table with two chairs. Each monitor was tied to a camera inside of the course. The back of the left chair read 'environment' and the back of the right chair read 'traps'. Silently, the two agreed that Demurke would take the left and Jermy the right. The pikachu set ORB atop the back of the table glass-up, safely away from the numerous possible settings to trigger.

The two got to work testing the equipment. With each button, knob, and switch, Jermy activated different components of the course. A plume of flame burst from the ground in one room. A wave of noxious gas wafted into another. A floor started sparking with an electric charge. Jermy nodded along, not seeing any issues in his short test. All the while, the hue and brightness of the rooms changed as Demurke modified them. In one room, she set the level of the water and opened up the ladder slots in the wall to their largest settings. An otherwise blank monitor came to life with a digital stopwatch. After the rest of her tests were in order, Jermy watched her press a button that automatically sealed off most of the rooms, creating the route intended for new recruits.

ORB was the first of them to say anything. "You missed a few," he told Jermy.

Jermy pointed to the switch he skipped, fully aware of it. "These aren't in the area Mathew and Joey are running through. No need to test them!"

"Yeah, we'll see what you say when the next guy uses the traps and one of them explodes."

Jermy scoffed. "You think you're a real funny guy, huh? Maybe I should get you some clown shoes!"

"I don't have feet, you red-cheeked menace." ORB revved his dangling wheel. "Besides, this is a health hazard, not a joke. In case you didn't know, comedians are supposed to be witty. It's hard enough for your dry humor to get an audience. The least you could do is not splatter them."

Jermy gave a sigh. Once more he had lost the argument. He tested the remaining traps. No problems.

After he deactivated it, he noticed Demurke giggling at them. "You two are just the c-cutest. I forget ORB's...not real sometimes."

"Wit-based dialogues are a powerful thing. I cannot be stopped," ORB said without a beat.

Jermy nodded. "He really can't be."

"Alright, are you two ready in there?" David's voice, muffled from outside, called out.

Demurke reached over and brought a microphone protruding from the table to her beak. "Everything...seems ready on m-my end!"

Jermy did the same for the other mic. "Yep! We got it!"

"Perfect." Jermy heard David turn his attention back to Mathew and Joey. "You two! On your marks...get set...go get 'em!"

Demurke started the stopwatch right as he finished. The two watched as Mathew and Joey ran into view of the camera in the first room: the poison one Jermy had tested earlier. "What the hell?!" Mathew, picked up by the camera's mic, exclaimed as they ran into the purple masses. "Why are there poisonous fumes in an obstacle course?!"

"Because you two are bulky!" David yelled back. "Just look at those thunder thighs. It'll take more than a simple punch to make you keel over!"

"Talk about my — cough! cough! — legs like that again and I'll — cough! hack! — bring you some thunder — wheeze!"

David chuckled to himself. "Better hold your breath, Mathew!" he said quietly, seemingly more for his own amusement than as actual advice.

Mathew and Joey continued their way into the next rooms, stumbling into obstacle after obstacle. Jermy was against them every step of the way, activating trap after trap. It was a repetitive cycle, one that the pikachu didn't have to actively think about much. Rather, his mind was still on what Demurke had said about ORB earlier. The Observational Recreation Buddy was always meant as a project to replicate empathy and feeling — the humor and levity was the entire point of giving him any kind of dialogue outside of what was functional.

How long had it been since he had created this iteration of the project? Four years? It felt longer. He had really needed something to make him smile and laugh back then. That was especially true thanks to the fact that David no longer played that role in his life. They hadn't been that close in almost a decade now.

Mathew and Joey arrived at a room around the middle of the course. The ground was heated with a toggle from Demurke, along with pyrotechnics Jermy could activate at the press of buttons. He did so without much thought, working on autopilot.

"How do you reckon we get through all this fire, Mathew?" Joey asked, his voice full of panic. They had been pressed to pause and develop a strategy.

"Uh, you go first!" Mathew suggested, just as much in a hurry. "You're a water type. You have Water Gun!"

Joey gave him a glare. "Does it look like I'm carrying a gun?!"

"Shit, you don't know how to use that yet," he muttered. "Just...go ahead! Maybe you'll like, defuse the flames with your feet or something."

Joey took the lead for the pair as they dashed through the heated room. "Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow!" he exclaimed with each step, leaping narrowly out of the way of Jermy's flame trails.

"Not working, not working!" Mathew screamed. "Waaaaugh!"

Jermy winced from Mathew's painful scream. A sinking feeling came to his chest, not unlike the one Mathew demonstrated when David tried to ease his concerns. Yesterday had been one of the better days of his recent life. Reminding himself what all this was for sucked the joy out of it.

"They're m-making good time."

Jermy snapped back into attention. "Whuh?"

"They're pretty fast," Demurke repeated. "Not the best time I've seen...but very good for a b-blind run. They commit to seeing things through, even...even when it hurts. Most of them don't d-do that."

Jermy gave a halfhearted smile in agreement before returning to the operation. He shook his head. Doing this exercise was so easy that he was starting to lose focus. It was hard to pay attention to what Mathew and Joey were doing besides what room they were in.

Agh, but he was so dang tired again. All of the wariness he gained from David abducting him was gone now. He wanted to wish he had joined Mathew and Joey when they had gotten splashed, but he knew the truth. Water couldn't wash away this feeling.

When was the last time he had gotten a good night's rest?

Oh. He remembered now. That night, he hadn't gotten any more sleep than he usually did — in fact, he had gotten less, since he had been interrupted. But he hadn't forgotten what had made him sleep so well in spite of that. He hadn't forgotten his older sister.

"Jermy. Dude."

He remembered being shaken awake by her. His eyes had been harder to lift than weights, but when he finally succeeded, he could see the worried look on his sister's face. "Jane?" he had said groggily. "What time is it…?"

"About two AM, I think?" Her ears had drooped in an apologetic expression. At the time, she had been a pikachu just like him. With the more professional-looking goggles and large white scarf both wrapped loosely around her neck, it had been hard to get the two mixed up — as if the heart-shape at the end of the tail didn't give it away. "Sorry, I know you've always gotta get up early, but I don't have much time."

"Much time…?" Jermy had been confused. He remembered not being able to discern if this was a dream. "Are you going somewhere?"

"I'm sneaking out of here and running as far as I possibly can," Jane had said. "I...found something out. Something I bet ya knew? But now that I know, I can't stay. They'll come after me if they find out I snooped. I don't really want to stay, either."

What she said then caused the intensity of the situation to finally hit him. "But—"

"It'll be dangerous, uh huh. I wanted to say bye, in case I don't make it out. So…" She reached for him and pulled him just out of bed enough to give him a warm embrace. "See ya, dude. Stay safe. And, even if they beg on their knees, don't get caught up on the recruitment jobs here."

Jermy knew what she had meant now, but at the time, he had been entirely lost. All he had understood then was that this might be the last time he would see his sister. Her hug had felt so nice then. He didn't even recall feeling himself falling back into his bed. He had just…

Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! "Jermy, you dolt! Wake up!"

"Ah!" Jermy flung his body off of the control panel and back into his seat at the behest of the alarm-sounding robot. A quick glance at the monitors showed a spooked Mathew and Joey navigating through the last room, a watery space with launching geysers. Evidently, his sleeping body had activated all of the geysers at once...as well as almost every single trap in the course! The pikachu hurriedly reached for the settings and —

Slam.

The door to the control room swung open and smacked the back wall. Jermy turned his head around slowly. It was too late.

The decidueye was clearly in seething agitation, barely held back by his own sense of goodwill. Tiny lines of sparking electricity jumped around the sides of his wings. "Jermy," he said flatly. "Go get yourself splashed. Right now."

Jermy glanced at Demurke, who seemed just as intimidated as him. The pikachu reluctantly followed the order, taking ORB down from the table and slowly walking away. He left the control room just as Mathew and Joey left the obstacle course. He gave the pair the best reassuring smile he could muster in this state as he passed by.

The moment they were past him, Jermy took a long, slow breath. It had been six years since Jane had vanished, and five years since she had been declared dead by his superiors. Jermy still felt just as tired.

"Alright. Mathew, Joey, it looks like your time was two minutes, fifty seven seconds," David told them as he and Demurke vacated the control room behind him. Demurke grabbed a myriad of berries — orans, pechas, cherris — from a box next to the exit and offered them to the recruits, healing any wounds they took from the obstacle course. As always, David was acting like nothing had happened. "For comparison, the all-time record is forty two seconds, and the average for proper employees is about a minute twenty."

"Aww…" Joey groaned.

"Ah, but don't feel too bad! That low time is the whole point of this assignment. As you may have observed while in the thick of it, there were challenges you didn't know how to overcome. This is why it's important to become accustomed with your new bodies and…"

Splash! Jermy let himself get doused by Wet Willy. His ears and fur drooped depressingly from the added weight. It did nothing else. Jermy walked back and sat against the wall next to the box of berries, watching them. ORB laid next to him, not saying a word.

"Now, time for a change of pace." The decidueye eyed the soaked pikachu for a moment. "Demurke!" David called, turning to her instead. "It's Lesson 1.2. You know what to grab."

"O-on it, sir!" Demurke ran over to three other boxes laid against the walls of the Waregle. When she turned around, she was carrying a bright green stone, a piece of chalk, and a bugle horn. The stone glistened under the flood lights hanging from the ceiling. The murkrow passed the stone and the horn to David and started dragging the chalk across the floor.

"What are you drawing?" Joey asked her.

"You'll s-see…"

Mathew, Joey, and David watched as Demurke slowly drew a circle around them. From outside of it, Jermy could observe that the circle was very smoothly drawn. After that, she drew two arcs running parallel to the circle. She connected the arcs using four lines protruding from the circle in an X shape. She stepped back, satisfied.

"That, Mathew and Joey, is a Gate," David said as Demurke finished. "It allows Solceans to tap into the energy of their planet to perform certain functions." The decidueye held up the green stone. "And this is a type stone. It's a powerful mineral formed here on Solceus that holds the power of one of the eighteen types and, when cracked open, triggers evolution — uh, you'll learn about both of those next. This one seems to be a grass type stone."

"Oh! So they're like the evolution stones from the games?" Mathew said.

"Close! But these are much more versatile than anything you could do in a video game. Step back, watch, and learn!"

Obeying his order, Mathew and Joey stepped out of the circle. David walked to the outer edge, then squatted down and put his wings on the chalk outline. Suddenly, the gate, the type stone, and the bugle horn began to give off a pure white glow. Streams of green energy flowed off of the stone towards the bugle horn. When the glowing came to an end, the stone was now dull and gray.

Joey approached the stone curiously. "What did it do…?"

"See for yourself!" David picked up the bugle horn and turned the inside towards the recruits. Jermy could only see the outside from where he was sitting, but he had seen this demonstration before; the inside was growing leaves. Before the awestruck Mathew and Joey could get a word in, David turned the horn away from everyone and blew into it. A torrent of sharp leaves fired halfway across the room, narrowly missing the type-disadvantaged Wet Willy.

"Woah!" Mathew exclaimed. "You can make random objects magical, just like that?"

David smiled, reveling in Mathew's child-like wonder. "That's right! As you can see, with so many types and so many objects to imbue them with, there are endless ways to enhance items. Combine that with our technology, and the possibilities are beyond the imaginable…" That last part seemed to put a glint in the cubone's eye — the birth of an idea. Jermy took no surprise in Mathew's speed in showing such inspiration. That's what he knew him for.

"David!"

David looked up from Mathew and the gate. "Zack?" The buizel was running right towards him, carrying a walkie-talkie-like device. "I'm kind of in the middle of something right now."

"It's Selena." Zack offered him the object. "She says it's urgent."

David sighed. "Okay. Hand me the Phony." The decidueye paced away from the group and raised the Phony to the side of his face. "Selena, it's me. I'm with the other recruits right now, so make this qui—" David was cut off. "Huh? What on Earth did you do?" David's look of confusion slowly turned into a mixture of fear and frustration. "Selena… Whyyyyy would you say that?" He wingpalmed, then tightened his tone. "Okay. Do you think I can still get over there and calm things down? ...Alright. Tell me where." David nodded to himself. "I'll be there. Hold down the fort until then, got it?"

"What's all that about?" Joey asked.

"Uh, nothing major." David hung up the Phony and gave it back to Zack, who promptly returned to his position. "Something's just popped up and I need to go handle it, is all. Unfortunately, I'll have to stop training here. Can I trust you to catch them up on types and evolution?" he asked Demurke, not even looking at Jermy this time.

"You g-got it, sir…" she said.

"Great! Best of luck to you all during your workday!" David spread his wings and leapt forward, gliding beak-first as fast as he could. He disappeared behind the wall of the one of the side rooms containing the portals.

As soon as he was gone, Demurke approached Jermy and offered a wing. "Are you d-doing okay?" she asked warmly.

"I'm used to it…" Jermy said. He took her wing and rose to his feet.

She struggled to look him in the eye. "I...know."

Joey came up to them, a confused expression on his face. "What even happened there?"

Jermy perked up as much as possible. "Nothing!" he exclaimed. "Just a slip of the hand, is all. David had to help me put things back, ahaha."

Demurke was quick to cover for him. "W-we've got about half an hour before shift starts and two more quick lessons to go through. We sh-should hurry!"

Mathew groaned. "God, I forgot we still have a whole workday after this. I'm tuckered out already. Can't wait to secure that tech job…"

Jermy just nodded. "Yeah."

"C'mon!" Demurke exclaimed, gesturing for the group to follow them. "Th-there's a board we can write on in this room over here. It'll help for demonstration."

The humans followed Demurke wordlessly. Jermy and ORB caught up with the murkrow, taking the lead far behind Mathew and Joey, who were idly chatting with one another.

"I'm sorry…" Jermy whispered to her. "I'm just so tired…"

Demurke patted his shoulder with her wing. "It's okay. I'm t-tired too. We...we all are."