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Chap. 41: Duty

"Alpha- and Beta-wave activity is negligible, sir. She's basically on fully autonomous operations," the Rocket Scientist said, pointing her finger at some arcane part of the information displayed on her swarm of screens. "The Delta-wave activity is normal, her body is quite healthy aside from the sedatives, but her mind just... isn't active, much like she's in an extremely deep coma."

"That was my first assumption," Morley replied for the benefit of both the scientis, and Proton, who had arrived at Ariana's base of operations in Cerulean City fifteen minutes ago.

"A weakness. They... wait. Wait a fucking second," the muscular Admin growled, then lifted his heavily modified, and just as heavily illegal Pokégear to his mouth, "Priority message: Rock P to Rock Mask, Rock Spider, Rock Matori, Rock Hunter. Message as follows: Invader weakness found. Sudden coma-like state, intermittent, confirmed. Time stamp..."

He waited a moment while Morley looked back at his own notes from the report he had already filed, then repeated the numbers, "Twenty-Three-Thirty-Six hours, duration nine hours and counting. Alpha- and Beta-wave mental activity near zero, autonomous functions and Delta activity are normal for sedation, we can also confirm the sedative mix R-SS-35 works as needed. No harmful side effects noted in Subject Chuke, A.

"Recommend all Rocket Agents and higher monitor their assigned Invader targets for similar activity. If this is happening to just one of them at a time, it's probably nothing, but it happened to all of them, or even a group, we can exploit it if we can find commonality. End message."

"Compiling... sending... message delivered," the cool voice of Proton's Pokégear answered back a moment later. The Admin wasted no time in turning back to Morley, "Get her things ready. We don't know when she'll wake up. I like your cover story of this being a medical test, so feed her that- even tell her the truth, as far as you can, keep it believable."

"Yes, sir," Morley agreed, "I had been planning on leading with the angle of her blacking out mid-orgasm, and I panicked, brought her here for medical tests, which would explain everything else if she wakes up still in the tube."

"Exactly. Alright, I've got to go talk to Arianna's second while I'm in town anyway. Once the subject is conscious again- assuming she does regain it- we'll keep her on observation for a few days then put her back in the field. Keep her entertained and quiet until then, we don't want her to think we're suspicious of something going on. Only tell her medical concerns, and keep her out of the rest of the base for now."

"Understood. If... she doesn't wake up?"

Proton frowned at the question, then looked to the scientist again, "If the situation doesn't change after seven days, dissect her. Find every bit of difference between their own physiology and ours, down to the molecular level if you have to."

"Sir," Morley protested, but his superior raised a finger and leveled a severe look his way.

"Vaan, I know. I get it. She's a good fuck, fine, and a good Trainer who's useful on our side. But we haven't been able to get a single unmutilated corpse aside from that old man in Viridian Forest, but he was too chewed up and decayed to be useful. We need information, and as valuable as she might be, nothing is more important than stopping these... things, from taking over and erasing our species. Understand? This is Rocket's highest priority, from the mouth of the Boss himself. Matori and Archer have both made it very clear, this is not something we can pass up on. So... just hope she wakes up." Then he turned back to the scientist, "and while you're at it, get a good DNA sample. Blood, Saliva, skin, all of it. We can start there without doing too much. Hell, harvest a few thousand eggs."

"Yes, sir," the scientist smiled, eager to have so much to work with and a set of orders from someone who was interested in more than just making money by selling holes to fuck. Not that she minded working under Ariana, but the woman was a bit obsessed with her work. Proton, at least, had other priorities than just money and sex.

"Alright, Officer Vaan, you've done well so far. Get it done, and prove to the others that you're worthy of the promotion we just gave you. Let me know when you get everything set up, and have checked in with Carol. I need a sitrep on the Bridge team today, too."

"Yes, Sir," Morley nodded, then gave their traditional salute to Proton as he headed toward the door. They had a lot to do, and an unknown amount of time to do it in, but the scientist was already pulling on a pair of blue latex gloves with a sample-gathering kit open on the table next to her. They would have to partially drain the tube Adisa was floating in, but that was fine for now, it wasn't like the saline fluid was hard to replace. Samples like they were about to get were almost impossible to get, and she was happy to have the chance to learn more about the mysterious invaders that had the Rocket Admins in such a tizzy.

"You're sure it's stable?"

Maline nodded at her superior's question, "As stable as it's ever been. We did spot some strange neutrino radiation a few seconds before the Portal went down- radiation coming out of the portal. It's... I mean, it sounds crazy, but it's almost as if the portal was shut down, on purpose, from the other side."

"What could do that?" Jones mused thoughtfully. He, Maline, and Lt. Colonel Phillips were back in the control room overlooking the wide portal in the bowels of the GameFreak complex, "I know there are a few Legendary Pokémon that can create space-time distortions of course, and there's a very specific shape and design to the Portal itself, but we haven't seen any evidence Hoopa was involved, have we?"

"None," Maline replied, shaking her head. "In fact, we have some confirmation that little bastard's busy wreaking havoc in their version of the Arabian peninsula. Probably entertained, and not of a mind to interfere with us. And I know the portal looks like one of his, but we still haven't got any direct evidence that it is. For one thing, his all seem to be temporary."

Phillips nodded, "The longest we've recorded a Hoopa Portal staying open is twenty minutes, and that was during a prolonged battle. It was highly unstable past the first ten of those minutes. This one hadn't fluctuated in decades aside from what we did to interfere with it, until the other day."

"I don't like it," Robert Jones muttered, "but we don't really have a choice, do we? If it's stable, put them back in."

"I'll make the announcement over dinner tonight," Maline agreed at once, "I'm sure they'll be thrilled. Most of them were antsy to get back into the 'game' within just a couple of hours."
"Good, it means the system's working as we designed it," Jones chuckled, "What about the Combinant results?"

"Still getting good data," Phillips replied, checking his datapad, "Maline's pets are among the highest performers still, but we have a few catching up. A man named Chris... he's gotten his otherworld girlfriend, a Riina Merryweather, pregnant... along with her Espeon. That might've been his Umbreon, but we suspect it was him, though it's possible the child could carry traits of both, given Eevee's genetic mutability. There's a few other things of note."

"Go on," Jones prompted.

The military man smiled, "One of the older men who died? Uh... Sugimoto, K? His daughter was recorded in the lavatories grumbling about how we- GameFreak- got her father killed, and she was going to take it out on us by breaking our system... on her back. Something about sleeping her way to the Championship, though the microphone didn't pick it up very well. She's got a fairly high Sync rate, so... even if we lost some good Combinant data in her father, we can probably expect more from her. We know she's already expressed interest in several other Trainers, including our own, and some Pokémon. Her brother contributes to his Bellsprout multiple times per day, as well. They're far from the only ones."

"Excellent. Keep me updated about any changes... and get them back in. We need to get enough Combinants bred to keep the line going no matter what those bastards on the other side try to do to our people."

Maline and Phillips both nodded. They were all on the same page there: survival of their species (with themselves at the forefront, of course, as the ones doing the work necessary) came first. Even if that cost the other version of humanity the chance to live free of their influence.
It wasn't personal, it was survival. And that imperative ran absolute.

Robin DeVerl, Specimen RDV, scowled at the doctor. He wasn't her normal doctor, Phillips, nor was he one she was familiar with, which explained her annoyance. Being ripped out of her body had not been a pleasant experience, even if it wasn't actually her own. Spending a day and a half in the 'real world' was horrible. Everything was just so... bland. It looked fake compared to the world she had been pulled out of. And she wanted back in, even if the body there couldn't sustain the type of things her own body could do.

"I'm sorry, Miss," the man said for the dozenth time, "there was nothing we could do. As I've said, the portal closed on its own, we didn't close it. I don't think we even know how. But it's open again now, and the team leadership deems it safe enough to go back in. But you'll need to wait a couple of days more."

"Why, though?" she repeated too, "That's what I want to know! If there's a good reason, I'll accept it, but if there isn't, I see no reason to delay!"

The door slid open, and a harassed-looking Dr. Phillips entered the room, "The reason is simple, Robin: Your real body is almost ready to go in. If you can stand to wait about sixteen, maybe eighteen more hours, we have a final battery of physical tests to do, and we'll put you back in... send you through the Portal yourself, in your real body."

"You haven't let me use my real body in fifteen years," the young woman growled, then cursed internally. She hadn't meant to let that slip out!

Phillips raised an eyebrow, "So, you know, then."

Well... it was too late now, she guessed. Robin nodded, "I've always known. Something was always off. I didn't put it together until- well, when the portal closed, and I saw how... janky, how messed up, everything looks in here compared to what's real on the other side. That's why I was isolated at the end, wasn't it? To keep me from realizing?"

"No," Phillips shook his head, deciding now was the time for truth. They needed Robin on their side, and she was already suspicious. He didn't think she could refuse the imperatives conditioned into her to breed everything she could, but it would be better if she cooperated willingly. "We kept you isolated because out of your group of Combinants, only you survived. The others died, Robin, all of them."

He let that sink in for more than ten minutes as the girl's face went from confusion, to disbelief, through fury, and into grudging acceptance. "What's different, then?"

Phillips shrugged, the slight grain of his pixelized form, small as they were, just visible compared to the world she had been pulled from so abruptly a day ago. "We aren't really sure. We've done innumerable tests, and we think we have an idea. There's a sub-gene variant that runs in your family, a fairly rare subtype of a cancer-related gene that the Ditto DNA seems to latch onto fairly easily, and it uses that to build a stronger bridge to the rest of you. At least, that's what we think happens. It's hard to be certain with a sample size of one."

She nodded, understanding quickly. Her voice was soft and quiet when she said, "That's why you want me to breed everything. To pass that trait on as much as I can."

He nodded too, "Exactly. It's a heavy burden, but... someone must carry it."

"Were you ever going to tell me?"

This time, he actually smiled, "Soon, actually. It's always been in the plan to tell you when you were able to go through the portal in your actual body. You were created to do this, and we felt it best if you knew your purpose going in. That's actually part of the reason for your substitute body. Yes, we built it to house your mind just like the Combinants for the other 'players', to test the link for you specifically. But its secondary and almost as important purpose was to let you experience what it would be like without having the consequences of a pregnancy you weren't ready for, or if you happened to get that far, a child growing up without the other parent, if you chose to be involved."

"I... see," Robin murmured. And she did. The whole thing was horrific, but GameFreak had never hidden what was at stake from her, or the other candidates. Anyone who made it past stage one, which was well over eighty percent of the initial group when they were young children, knew that humanity's survival depended on them, even if it had to radically mutate and adapt to survive.

They were just accelerating nature's course, in some ways.

"So if I wait until what, tomorrow around noon, I'll be able to walk through the Portal myself?"

"Yes," Phillips agreed, leaning forward a little, his hands clasped together, "That's the plan. You will be the first Combinant to go through after development. At least, the first one who is going through in a mature body, many of the earlier batches were sent through as young as six weeks to prevent them from remembering it, and raised in a lab we've built in secret over there. Everyone else- every living creature, at least- has either been a Pokémon or a human who suffers significant but rarely fatal injuries. It will hurt... but it won't damage you. It hasn't even with far more diluted Combinants than your own fifty-fifty mix."

"So what're the target numbers, then?" the pink-haired girl asked, her own avatar more obvious to herself now that she knew what to look for, "How many children will I have to birth? How many to father?"

"That depends on what they are, really. The more the better, of course. Management, primarily Dr. Jones and his team, would prefer a minimum of birthing ten human-type Combinants, as we're reasonably sure the trait breeds true. Fathering? Thirty, forty, or fifty is the goal. For Pokémon, any number at all is better than none, because it increases the sample size for our testing purposes. Obviously that might be impractical, we don't know for sure what your life expectancy is, or how long you will remain viable as a mother, but we've more or less settled on a bare-bones minimum of five human-Combinant children. At least one must be male, and we would prefer the others are female, but any additional would only secure the gene pool that much more. If you can father twenty, that should be sufficient for a low-ball number. Twenty-five to thirty offspring is the bare minimum we think we need for survival. As many as possible should be with other Trainers, of course, simply to ensure strength... but the more that can be with other Beta Testers, the stronger our own strain of human DNA will be, as their Combinants are les than twenty-percent Ditto on average."

Robin nodded, the math and biology she had been force-fed as she matured quickly filling in the gaps that Dr. Phillips wasn't saying outright. "Alright. I'll do it... but if I hate birthing or carrying children, I'm gonna have to veto that after one or two."

"That's fair," Phillips agreed, "I'll let everyone on the team know your decision. Until then, enjoy your time here in the 'fake world'. I'm sorry we can't just let you out and roam a bit, but the world's not quite ready for you I think."

"And you're worried I'll knock someone up, or get pregnant," Robin added.

Phillips only smiled. What Robin didn't know wouldn't hurt her. She didn't need to know that the vast majority of Combinants in the other world were at least distantly related, and a good portion were her direct offspring through fertilization from her own harvested materials. After all, it wasn't like a Combinant took eighteen years to mature physically. Even a ten-percent unit took a few months at most to reach full maturity. Robin's spare body had taken six days. They could not make infinite numbers of them, but that didn't mean they wanted more Pokémon DNA running around the real world, either. At least, not when they couldn't track it as efficiently.

Then again, he thought as her VR Avatar walked out the door of his 'office', it would provide another source of at least low-grade Combinants. I wonder why we haven't already encouraged that...? Perhaps it's time to socialize her among the rest of the group. If nothing else, it'll help her make friends in the other world, wouldn't it? Hm... I'll bring that up to Maline at the staff meeting later. I'm sure she at least would agree, and if she does Jones will.

Elle's lips were soft and moist against his, and her hands roamed Alex's back as eagerly as his moved against hers or in her hair. "We should stop," he murmured, though his tongue continued to dance with his girl's. "They're waiting for us."

"Let them," she whined, "I don't want to stop."

Somehow, perhaps horniness, though it might have been counter-intuitive, Alex tore himself away from the girl's mouth, "Elle... they're letting us back in, remember? We can keep saying goodbyes like this... or in half an hour or so, we can be doing more. Remember that part?"

"Yes," she whined, pretending to pout even though he watched the girl's eyes light up with renewed excitement, "Fine, fine... I just wanted to keep kissing you, that's all."

"You still can, just be patient," he reminded her, "This is all for you, after all."

"Yeah, yeah. See you in a bit, stud."

"I'll see you too," he smiled, and turned for the door, only to jump when he felt the sting of Elle's small hand on his butt. "Jerk..."

"Don't pretend you didn't like it."

He only smirked before stepping out the door and turning right. The next door was his, and techs were already flooding the hall as they hurried to get the monitoring systems set up to take care of the playtester's bodies while they were unconscious. The training material he and Elle had spent some time reading over the last day out of sheer boredom had explained a bit of the process, if they'd bothered to learn it before. Nanites took care of most bodily functions, including waste removal, but the energy provided by food had to come from somewhere, and thus an IV drip was necessary too. That was the only annoying part. By now, most of the Trainers had a small device semi-permanently attached subdermally under the left armpit for the IV to hook up, but it still took a tech to make sure the lines were properly installed.

The official SoNinten system had a smaller-grade version of nanites with a shorter lifespan that would require refilling every few months of constant use- another way for the company to make money, he was sure, even if the relative profit was small- that monitored health and safety with a link-up that could eject a player from whatever they were involved with at the time. They were also set up to allow a maximum of twelve hours out of twenty-four of usage, so no one starved to death or died of dehydration. Alex was thankful he didn't have to worry about that, however. At least, not while the theoretically indefinite playtest continued.
He changed into his hospital-style scrubs quickly in the bathroom, and found one of the cuter, female techs waiting for him with the IV tube in her hand as he came back into the main room. "Ready, sir?"

"Yeah, just let me lay down," he replied. A few seconds later, he heard and felt the soft click as the IV junction's locks set it in place. Almost at once, he felt the drowsiness of the first wave of sedative chemicals enter his bloodstream, while the tech helped him settle the rest of the system around his head.

A strange thought occurred, and he asked, "Hey, uh... were you here doing interviews the other day? Did you happen to interview the girl in room two?"

The tech paused for a moment, surprised, then nodded, "I sure was."

He grinned. That meant she was the one... "Her pussy tastes great, doesn't it?"

The girl's blush was all the answer he needed. A few seconds later, whatever words she was saying faded into the background and then hazy, indistinct chaos of a brain forced into effective slumber, before everything went dark again.

"Adisa! Adisa, relax! Stop! You're fine! Hey- it's me, Morley! You're fine. Just breathe- breathe, Adisa!"

Her dark eyes were wild as they roved around the lab, but eventually they settled on Morley, and her panicked movements slowed quickly.

She was still moving jerkily, clearly upset by the situation she had woken in, but he and the science team at Ariana's Cerulean City base had been prepared for six hours for that very scenario. "I know you can hear me," he told her, tapping the side of his ear, a headset clearly visible. "Nod once."

She did, her dark face screwed up in obvious confusion around the breathing apparatus that hid most of her mouth and nose.

"Alright, don't try to talk for now. That's just saline solution you're swimming in, it's not harmful. Something happened when- when we were doing it. I panicked, and took you to this hospital facility. That's all, we were trying to find out why you wouldn't wake up. But now that you have, we're gonna get you out, okay? Nod if you understand."

Again, she nodded, and he watched as she visibly calmed herself with several long, deep breaths that made one of the alarms on the respirator ping an alert.
"Alright, good. Just two or three minutes and we'll have the tank drained. See, if you look up, you'll notice it dropping already. Don't take the respirator out until we open the door, okay? I know it's uncomfortable, but we'll get it out of your mouth as soon as we can. Don't worry, it's not down in your lungs or anything. The air is just really moist in there until the door opens, and we don't want to risk pneumonia."

She nodded again.

"Alright, baby, just hold on... our doctors are the best you can find. Trust me."

A few minutes later, he was helping Adisa towel off as she shivered in the cool medical examination room next door. She hadn't asked why she was nude inside the tube, and Morley was hopeful she wouldn't think about it. At least, he hoped the easiest, most obvious answer was what she assumed. Salt water wasn't great for clothing, after all.

Once she was dry, he took care to hold her close, trying to ignore her chest against his for a moment as he faked being a comfort as best he could. "Do you know what happened? You just... well, I mean we were in bed. I thought everything was fine, then... well, right when I came, and you were about to, it seemed like you just... went still. I kind of panicked."

"I... I'm not sure," she lied, not well enough to hide from him.

He nodded anyway, "Alright. Has- Has anything like that happened before?"

"No," she replied, this time mostly truthfully, "At least, not like that. I've had a few black-outs... how long was I out?"

"Almost two full days," he told her.

Adisa nodded and rubbed a hand over her face, "I... I feel like I have a huge headache. I shouldn't, but I do."

"That might be the drugs they were trying to treat you with," Morley reminded her, "They should wear off in a bit. Come on, I'm sure the doctors will have a lot of questions.: And so do I.