20.
Pissing in the Wind
"Human evolution?" Professor Laventon said, a nervous wrinkle forming in the center of his forehead as he poured out two hot cups of tea. It was too late in the day for these questions, and while he appreciated the intrigue, his polite Galarian rearing would never have him uttering the truth of the moment.
Which was that the Guildmaster smelled like he'd been "pissing in the wind" and potentially had a splendiferous amount of infection somewhere under his breeches.
Not even daring to mention his curdled breath.
"Is it that odd a concept?" Ginter asked. He looked around Eiffel's library with a quiet curiosity.
With last night's broken camera and all the papers on the floor, it was a mess that would have Cyllene smacking him, or at the very least eyeing him morosely. The woman was looking far too morose lately. Perhaps it was her new lack of eyebrows. He wished she would let herself relax for a single moment, even if the sky was literally falling.
After all, there was a Poké Dex to complete!
And pushed to the ends of the earth or not, he would not be made a fool in front of Nani again.
"Tea?" he urged the Guildmaster.
"I don't like tea," Ginter replied. "Do you have any black coffee?"
Eiffel silenced the hum in his throat before it could betray him. "Have you any to sell me?"
"I don't."
"Well, then tea is all I can offer. It's chamomile. Quite good."
"No thank you."
Now that wrinkle in the naturalist's forehead was a concentrated divot. Eiffel sat himself down behind his desk, tucked the stray curls up into his hat again, and tried to look the old man in the eyes while also reading the fresh draft of Piplup's entry sitting unfinished on his typewriter.
"Well, I suppose I'm simply not understanding your question. What, Guildmaster, may my research into Pokémon evolution offer you?" he asked as politely as he could. "What answers are you seeking?"
"I want to know if humans can also evolve," the old man repeated.
"And evolve into what specifically? Forgive my inquisitiveness. This is but the scientific method. We must exact our scope and examine precedent before executing procedure."
Ginter looked alarmed. He shuddered and coughed twice into his elbow, leaving behind a thick sheen of phlegm.
"You would do well to soothe your congestion with a spot of tea. I've plenty of honey."
"I said no, Professor."
"Well, do you even understand what evolution is?"
Ginter nodded. "When a Pokémon is ready, it transforms into a more mature species and gets more powerful."
"Indeed. And that word 'mature' is our keystone for analysis. You see, Pokémon may gain wisdom and experience from age, but without crossing over the singularity of maturation they cannot reach their full potential. Piplup isn't Empoleon. It doesn't carry the Steel type in its blood. But that singularity doesn't exist for humans, you see. Or, at least, if it does, we don't have the energy required within ourselves to reach it. There's no need for us to gain new powers or transform."
Ginter scratched at his beard, pondering the right way to respond. Eiffel began to light a few candles. The lights were flickering again. One popped off entirely, leaving the room half in darkness, except for where Cyndaquil's flames glowed where it dozed in the empty hearth.
"What's wrong with the power?" Ginter asked, blue eyes lingering on the faded bulb above.
"Oh, it's nothing. Our old chief engineer just made a few mistakes with the wiring. She was quite bright, but not when it came to bulbs and switches."
"Where's the fuse box? I could probably tinker and fix it."
Eiffel gave him a strange, humored look. "That won't be necessary, Ginter. We don't need the head of the Ginkgo Guild receiving any nasty shocks from Captain Kiku's blundering."
"Don't test me," Ginter said, then, the hint of a grin tugging at his scarred-up lips. "I may be old and smell like piss, but I'm bright in all kinds of ways, including with bulbs and switches."
He coughed again then, not helping his case. Eiffel sat back down and sipped his tea. The merchant still had not left. He was intent on discussing human evolution and stinking up the library.
"Our closest comparison, perhaps, would be puberty," the professor suggested, inspired by the stench.
But Ginter said, "I don't mean puberty. I mean turning old."
"How do you mean?"
Ginter placed his hands on the desk before him, seeming to scrutinize the raised veins and knobby knuckles under loose, weathered skin.
"I had a dream that I turned old," he said softly. "Let's call it evolution. I had a dream that I was my younger self… twenty-seven, almost twenty-eight… and then… suddenly I felt strange, and my body started aging rapidly. In less than five minutes, I became fifty years older. Then it stopped. I don't know why it stopped. The whole time I felt like either the pain or the aging would kill me. I asked adamaN if he'd ever heard of a young man suddenly turning into an old one, but the way he speaks, trying to be as verbose as possible, I couldn't understand a damn thing, and it was all useless anyway. So I came to you. Thought you might know."
Eiffel blinked. He took a long draft of tea, and then a sip from Ginter's untouched cup, just for good measure. A curious kind of dream, but surely nothing but an old man's depression upon realizing he was no longer handsome and dignified.
And living in Hisui, he added.
"It came out of nowhere," Ginter continued, whether the professor cared or not. "I just felt really strange. My stomach was growling. Like I was sick. And then I actually started feeling sick. My whole gut was gurgling and squirming. Then I started throwing up. And when I bent over to clutch my stomach my spine cracked and hurt. The skin of my stomach didn't feel right either. It was… rippling."
The professor's eyes widened at that.
"Your hands. What was happening to your hands? Or your feet? Do you remember?"
"Shaking uncontrollably. Making bad cracking sounds."
"Bubbling?"
"Bubbling?"
"The back of your hand, just below the knuckles. Did it lurch and puff up?"
"It was definitely puffing up. It was inflamed. The flesh looked like it was melting, almost. That was happening all over my body. The skin was writhing. My bones were wrenched around. My muscles were on fire. My stomach was shrinking and aching like I hadn't eaten in years. I couldn't even breathe. Every time I took a breath, the air turned stale in my lungs and choked me. My blood couldn't get any oxygen. I thought my fingers would die and my arms would fall off."
He held one hand to his temples as he said this, the other softly trailing down his apron to his belted stomach, pressing in delicately until a faint gurgle emerged and he winced.
"I was transforming so quickly, and still, at the same time, I felt the age. It was like time was going both fast and slow at once. I was crying out and thrashing on the ground for five minutes, but when it stopped, my head was crammed in with fifty years of thrashing. I felt… so old, and very, very alone."
"What a horribly vivid dream," the professor said. He stood up from the desk and flitted to his chalkboard, beginning to scribble. "Evolution isn't known to be unpleasant the way you're describing. It's a natural process. Beneficial and pleasurable in every way. And yet, your transformation does fit the pattern. Augmented peristalsis as the first signal of change, tremors and pulsations localized in the extremities… Did you glow like a Pokémon would?"
Ginter eyed him suspiciously. His shoulders were hunched, and he was thumbing the brim of his cap, almost like he'd shared too much.
"Come now, you needn't be embarrassed. This is our procedure — it's a mere thought experiment, perfectly harmless. Was your body glowing in any capacity?"
"Somewhat," Ginter said.
"What color?"
"Red."
"Red? Now, that's our first deviation. And here I'll use Piplup as our control. Usually Pokémon glow bluish, somewhat—"
"I was glowing red. But this is getting too personal. I just wanted to know if… If this happened in real life, then why would it happen? And would there a way to reverse it and change a person back to his real age?"
The chalk scraping slowed. Eiffel's nose wrinkled, and he put the stick down, squinting to see if he'd spelled borborygmus correctly over his little "thought experiment" of a capped and aproned stick figure.
"You're suggesting the reversion of entropy, Ginter. Time only moves in one direction, as adamaN will have told you. Once it's tangled and broken within a singularity there is no return. Empoleon doesn't become Piplup again. Old men don't become children. And if you really did transform into an old man so suddenly, then your 'real age' would be irrelevant."
"That's not true, though. Pokémon can de-evolve," the old man argued. "I just need to know if humans can, and why they would spontaneously evolve in the first place."
"Pokémon don't de-evolve. That's oneiric nonsense, and not the intuitive kind."
"But the same power that can make humans age rapidly can also make Pokémon revert! I've seen it! Won't you take me seriously at all!?"
Ginter had stood up from his seat, a hand on his chest as he fought to steady his breath. He refused to look at the professor now. Just gave a small sigh and picked up his pack again, heading for the door back out into Galaxy Hall's glass-encrusted foyer.
"I'm sorry I disturbed your work, Dr. Bloom," he grumbled. "I'm just a curious coot, I suppose. I'll be napping in my caravan if you'd like to purchase any of my wares."
With that, he had stomped away and was gone. Rowlet fluttered down to Eiffel's shoulder from its perch on the chalkboard, cooing for food. It cocked its head completely sideways at the drawings. Eiffel shook his head and scrubbed them away with the sleeve of his smock, berating himself for having such a short temper with a guest. Punishment would be a long night of research and a bout of mental torment on that question of why humans couldn't evolve if they wanted to.
(Unless Cyllene wanted to visit him again. She'd been doing that a lot lately. It was getting annoying.)
But his arm froze suddenly. He looked at Rowlet. Rowlet stared back.
"Did he call me… Bloom?"
~N~
Next chapter is Cyllene's reaction to the pack, I promise. ^^'
Published by Syntax-N on FanFiction. net and by scrivenernoodz on Ao3 September 18th, 2023.
