When the ringing phone woke Giovanni after midnight, he cursed two people: the person calling him and the operator who connected them to his private line. During business hours, it was the operator's duty to receive incoming calls at his business number, then direct them out to a phone at Giovanni's current location. These were not fucking business hours.
He threw back his blanket with a flourish that upset Persian at the foot of the bed. It hopped down and followed him as he stalked across the suite to an alcove near the doorway.
Giovanni snatched the clanging phone from its cradle on the wall. He held it up to a clenched jaw.
"What is this about?" His wasn't quite an Arcanine's growl yet, but no one would mistake him for a Growlithe pup.
"This is Ariana, sir. I'm at the lab. You said to contact you about reviewing the surviving data as soon as I was finished."
The woman that was with Miyamoto. She was still up working at her assignment. A glance at the clock hanging beside the phone told him it was nearly three in the morning. Had she gone straight to the laboratory from his office?
Some of Giovanni's rage seeped away as he contemplated Ariana's level of commitment.
"Well? What have you found? Anything beyond the list you showed me?" he asked. He pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead, then ran his fingers through his hair. It soothed him.
"Several promising developments, yes. There are more viable specimens on file than I anticipated. A cache of sequenced genomes with an initial index of expressed sequence tags..." The way she breathlessly delivered incomprehensible technical jargon reminded him of previous discussions with Rocket Labs scientists. Such intelligent people, so passionate about their tests and discoveries. Give them some food and a little place to live and they would happily make science for you all day long.
"I'll be there shortly to assess your progress." A patronizing smile thinned Giovanni's lips. He wondered if she could sense it through the phone.
Giovanni dressed quickly, but carefully. It would not do for the son of R-Style's Madame Boss to be seen schlepping about in mismatched pajamas, and furthermore he had no desire to.
He pulled on a fresh white button-down, red tie, and then a dry-cleaned blazer, side-eyeing Persian as he tore off the protective tissue paper it arrived in. Pressed pants. Polished shoes. The outfit was one he repeated often on-site at Rocket Corp locations for the sake of familiarity among the staff. Apparently, his strategy wasn't working seeing as Ariana hadn't recognized him on sight.
By the time he was ready to go, Persian was asleep again, curled in the warm spot Giovanni had abandoned.
"Lazy…" he muttered good-naturedly as he slipped out the door.
Pathways around the Mt. Moon campus were dimmed after sunset to minimize detectability from the air. Giovanni walked them confidently, even without his Persian slinking along beside him. The main building kept its lighting similarly low, but once Giovanni carded himself inside, motion detectors picked him up and lit the room around him. He made his way to the main laboratory, where Ariana worked and where they had first met.
She was inside. He could see her moving about beyond the rows of computer terminals and walls of plexiglass, her bright red hair flashing against the sterile white and steel. He pulled open the heavy door and walked in.
Ariana didn't look up immediately. He was certain she could hear the click of his steps on the tile - the sound echoed so loudly.
Giovanni continued toward her, clacking past a cluster of blackened hardware and tangled wires, past the glass barriers, until he stood only a meter behind her. She was leaning forward over the control panel, lost in its screen readouts. If not for the modesty afforded by her long white coat, he might have suspected the pose was intentionally provocative.
He was still considering how to best get her attention when she spun around.
"How much do you understand about the structure of DNA?" Ariana asked with no preamble. She sounded energetic, but there were dark bags forming under her eyes.
Her sudden intensity caught him by surprise, but did his best to disguise it as frustration. She had a way of putting him off his footing, and he didn't appreciate the lack of deference.
"I didn't meet you at this hour for a biology test. You had instructions. Make your report."
He sensed a spark of defiance from her. She held his gaze just a bit too long before turning her back to him and taking up her place in front of the machine.
On its giant screen, Ariana pulled up several program windows of multi-color models. Each one looked like clustered cartoon bubbles, laid out like notes upon notes along one long line of sheet music. He looked for labels. Patterns. Anything familiar. It was hopeless. He stayed silent.
When she was satisfied at the arrangement of the windows on-screen, Ariana turned to face Giovanni and began to explain.
She walked him through the basics of her earlier experiments with Dr. Moro. She told him about how they looked at genetic code, and how similar it was across species. She explained the correlation of success to genetic complexity in their cell clusters. And then she explained what she had found in the depths of Dr. Moro's files.
There were six more models hidden in similar text and image files, a total of seven unique, fully sequenced genetic codes. They were incredible, she said, more complex than any she had on file. They would work better than anything she and Dr. Moro had tried before.
Passion radiated from Ariana as she spoke. Once she began, it didn't matter how much she thought Giovanni knew on the topic. She explained in great detail the things that seemed to excite her most and hand-waved away the bits that might bog down her points. It wasn't the thoroughness you'd want in a teacher, but it was the persuasiveness of someone with a clear vision.
She pointed out a representation of her own DNA on the screen, indistinguishable from the other windows, and made several points punctuated by bringing her hands together at the fingertips again and again.
Giovanni did his best to follow along, and to appear to be following along. He affected a bored expression and started hard at the screen.
The window Ariana had pointed out as her own genetic sequence was labeled, he noticed, and so were a few others, now that he knew what to look for. But the windows stacked at the top of the screen, the ones she had been so excited to find, had only numbers in their filenames.
"Tell me," he spoke up, and Ariana trailed off. "What Pokémon do these sequences represent?" He pointed to the top of the screen.
"They represent exceptionally complex examples of Pokémon species, likely evolved forms, any of which would have a potential to demonstrate-"
Giovanni put a hand up and Ariana stopped speaking. She looked tired and annoyed by his questioning.
"You would like to run an experiment crossing a Pokémon with a human volunteer, and you don't intend to tell them which Pokémon?"
Ariana sputter. "It would be a powerful-"
"A powerful creature? And how are you certain of that? From the... greater number of genomes?" he asked, pulling the correct vocabulary from his short term memory with great effort.
"There is some related documentation." She turned and started tapping at the terminal again, calling up pages of text and grainy images. She faced Giovanni again and gestured to the screen with an open palm.
Giovanni was unamused. The hour was late and she was insinuating it was his job to pore over and piece together these vague clues. These sequences could be of immense value to him in certain circles in the future, honestly the most viable future product likely to come from this endeavor, but he needed to know what they were sequences for. He couldn't sell genetic information gatcha-style.
"This is useless."
Ariana whirled on him. Her delicate eyebrows pinched over her nose and her lips pulled into a scowl. "This is NOT useless. These are the building blocks of LIFE. All life." She threw her arm out to reference the monitor again. "We are at the threshold of a new understanding, and if we don't cross it, we'll be trampled by bolder minds.
"I may not make you a perfect little product (she sneered on the word, as if she'd plucked it straight from his earlier doubts) my first try and maybe not on my fiftieth. But I will put Rocket Labs at the forefront of genetic science with my research." Her chest rose and fell in quiet huffs, her aggression sapping the remainder of her energy.
Giovanni put his back to her. He wanted a moment to think.
Ariana had submitted a cost estimate with her proposal. She seemed to think it a modest request, outlining parts and labor that were easy to source and quick to install. What she had failed to consider were the transportation costs to their location in the northern mountain system, possible only in pieces by air and over several trips. The LCL fluid she was requesting too was already expensive by the liter, but she missed the import and authorization charges, as well as the expense of making all those records disappear after the fact. This would be a very, very resource-intensive endeavor to take on outside his mother's awareness.
Then again, nothing would impress Madame Boss more than her own son taking initiative and pioneering a product that would disrupt a whole new market in her favor.
Moreover, there was something to be said for retaining talent. The scientist Ariana was bound to do incredible things. Best she do them while under contract with Rocket Corp.
Giovanni tested these arguments out in an imaginary conversation with Madame Boss. He was her only son, but the business was her baby. Would she see his logic in funding this woman's mad science from her precious coffers?
He turned back around to face Ariana.
She was looking at the terminal again, leaning over it like she had when he'd first come in. He heard a quiet sniffle.
"Are you crying?"
There was a louder sniff. Ariana pawed at her face before she turned around.
"Maybe?! A little!? I've been at this for twelve hours… for six years, really! And then you come in and get confused after a few minutes and call it all useless!?"
Giovanni took a step back.
She advanced.
"I wonder… I wonder how many times humanity has missed out on something truly amazing. Some really incredible advancement… because some idiot holding the checkbook just didn't get the value."
Ariana stalked past him to server racks near the computers. She grabbed a fistful of the wires and yanked them all at once from the soot-stained tower. Some came free of the ports, some resisted, and one tore clean away from its jack-head. She reached for another handful, tugged, and gave up. She straightened up and swung around to the other side of the desk, and started wrestling a large portable harddrive into her bag.
"What are you doing?" Giovanni asked, watching her struggle.
"There's no reason for me to stay here if you cut my funding."
"You know you can't take anything from the lab if you leave."
"Fine!" She released the drive from both hands and let it crash back onto the desk.
"And I did not say that I was cutting your funding."
Ariana's face went as red as her hair. He expected her to feel some embarrassment after that little tantrum. He didn't expect her to start crying again, much harder than before.
Dismayed, Giovanni looked about. Usually when he made an employee cry, there was another employee around to take care of it. He thought about slipping out, but Ariana was directly in his path. A woman he had dated once had cried often, so he knew to pass on several of the ideas that initially occurred to him, such as saying, "Calm down," or asking her to do it elsewhere later.
Ariana was sniffling and dabbing at her eyes, trying to stanch the flood.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry..." She took a few breaths to compose herself. "I'm just exhausted, I'm sorry."
Belatedly, Giovanni thought to give her a handkerchief. He patted the breast of his jacket, then reached inside. Unfortunately, he hadn't stowed one in his hurry to get dressed.
She saw him searching his pockets. She hiccuped a laugh and her crying slowed. "Oh, no. That's okay. I'm okay."
Ariana shrugged out of her lab jacket and used the inside to dab at her face, avoiding make-up streaks on any visible parts. She bundled the coat over her arm and ran a hand through her hair, then faced him again. Her face was red and splotchy, but she was smiling. He kept silent, a favorite tactic when he was at a complete loss what to do.
"Thank you," she said, and tilted forward at the waist in a quick bow.
For what? He wondered, handkerchief-less. Then he remembered all the money he'd agreed to spend. Ah yes. Her outburst had momentarily unmoored him from the context of their rendezvous.
"We'll discuss next steps in the morning. Go rest."
She nodded then turned and started to re-plug in the server wires, more carefully than she'd handled them before.
"Leave it for the custodians," he said as he walked past her, eyes intent on the double door he had entered through. She dropped the cables, took up her bag, and hurried after him.
In silence, she followed him down the hallways toward the main exit. He held the door for her at each juncture. She would walk through each time, then stand aside and wait for him to pass, falling in behind him again. On one of the last doors he held, he gave a little flourish like a valet as she passed, and they shared a brief chuckle.
Giovanni opened the final exit and stepped through into the dark courtyard, then held the door again for Ariana. As she stepped through, a stiff breeze kicked up and flapped the coat in Ariana's arms. Above them, a startled group of Zubat scattered, screeching and clicking, into the air. Ariana screeched too, throwing her arms up over her head and cowering in place.
Following a defensive impulse, Giovanni put an arm around Ariana's shoulders and guided her further down the path, away from the flapping and clicking. He wasn't in the habit of touching employees, but the woman was in distress, and this was a distress he could solve.
Ariana leaned into him, a brief, unexpected warmth against his chest. She was soft.
He could smell her shampoo.
Once the noise died down behind them, Giovanni turned to look back, smoothly moving his protective hand to his brow as if to shield his eyes from a nonexistent sun.
"They're gone now." He lowered his arm to a neutral position. "I'll walk you back, to be sure they don't bother you further."
Ariana nodded distractedly, likely still recovering from the startle.
"I'm in Mauve Hall." She tipped her chin towards one of the squat dorm buildings.
The two walked the rest of the way in silence. The late night was catching up to Giovanni. He stifled his yawns until he parted ways with Ariana, watching until she keyed inside her building and then turning away and covering his mouth to indulge.
Back in his own room, back in his pajamas, he pulled the blinds shut against a lightening sky.
Persian grunted at the noise, but didn't seem to wake up. The feline had stretched itself horizontally across the bed. Giovanni stood over it a few seconds, staring down at audacity incarnate. He picked up a corner of the blanket and, careful not to disturb Persian, slid onto a free sliver of mattress.