A Pokémon tale by Caldazar “Cal” Atreides

Prologue: Rocket Reports

The soft touch of winter had descended upon the solitary cabin situated on the southern outskirts of Taohu. Outside, snowflakes danced across the night sky, performing a glistening escapade of shapes and forms. Accompanying like a great theatric orchestra, the wind howled its lonely tune, sending the floating ice crystals on their continuing quest toward the earth. These beautiful, fragile crystals were oblivious, of course, to the impending destruction which was not too far in the future. But the wind knew, and because it knew, it howled.

Inside the cabin, a man wearing a bathrobe lounged in an easy chair, feet up and hands cradling a volume of Descartes’ Discourse on Method. He considered himself a philosopher, albeit a married one, and one oddly in-tune with the events of the world he tried to escape from. That’s why he moved to the desolate mountain ranges of southern Taohu: to get away from it all. The urbanization has taken its toll on the world. Mankind has outgrown itself, its population expanding beyond the planet’s ability to support them. Food production was low, and pollution levels were constantly on the rise. He already knew this, yet he kept a tv at home to remind him every day of it. Of course, it also helped occupy the kids while he brushed up on a little reading. He could hear it now, from three rooms away. The noise of the television drifted into the kitchen, where they were accompanied by the sounds of splashing water.

A fine time for the dishwasher to break, reflected a tall, thirty-ish woman as she bent over the sink. She was scrubbing with intense vigor, though this was more due to her frustration at the lazy husband rather than a resilient piece of burned lasagna.

“What a work is man,” she said, quoting from one of the world’s greatest tragedies. “There are times when I wonder what my life has come to. Some days I can’t be sure if I’m dreaming.”

“Cogito ergo sum, honey, or have you forgotten?” her husband called out from the next room. She frowned, knowing what was about to happen next. A professor was never too far from college, and her husband was no exception. He could not abide ignorance. Yet, somehow, he was not helping her. If he thought that knowing but ignoring was better than being completely oblivious, he was about to have another thing coming.

“The four rules,” he stated, exasperated. “First, ‘never accept anything except clear and distinct ideas.’ I can think, and therefore I must exist. That is the cogito, or starting point, and is the foundation on which all other ideas are based– ”

“Fredrick, I really don’t want to hear another one of your lectures on the Cartesian Doubt System.” She stepped away from her work to stand in the doorway, hands on her hips. She stared him down as the rag soaked into her jeans. “I am not a housewife, okay? I know what I am. I am the assistant professor of Literature at the Celadon District Arts College.”

“Bravo,” Fredrick clapped sarcastically. “That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t solve the problem of getting the dishes clean. That’s rule number two: ‘divide each problem into as many parts as there are needed to solve it.’ Basically, don’t over complicate things. In this case, only one person is needed to wash, and since I cooked the meal, you get to clean up.”

All this got him was a face full of wet rag.

“How’s this: you have the rag, so you wash. I’ll dry, if you’re going to have such a hard time about it.” She turned back into the kitchen to dry her hands. “And since you’ve become so comfortable with that chair, you can sleep in it tonight.”

Ah, the life of a philosopher, Fredrick sighed as he removed the rag. I’ve always wondered why no husbands ever became great philosophers. Now I know why.

Fredrick returned the seat to an upright position. It was a recliner, and a fantastic one too. He probably wouldn’t mind sleeping in it at all. It was hardly a wonder – the chair was less complicated than his wife.

As he adjusted his robe, he heard a crash from the kitchen. Ceramic. His dear Frieda probably dropped a dish as she was drying it.

“Frieda, is everything all right?”

He came walking in to find his wife staring at the void out beyond the window. Pieces of pottery, from a porcelain dish, were scattered about the floor around her feet. Fredrick approached cautiously, glancing around the room. The tv hummed in the other room. He took a step closer to the window.

Then he saw them: two things. One was something no one would expect in the middle of a winter night and the othe was a homeowner’s worst fear. Light, and the person silhouetted in it.

He yelled, screaming at his wife to get down, when a concussive force caused him to stagger backward. Glass shattered. Frieda screamed. The sound of the television continued in the other room. Pain spread across his body. His head resounded with a loud “thunk” as it made contact with the floor. His hands, caressing his stomach, came up bloodied.

His wife continued to scream, even as more windows shattered, announcing the arrival of figures dressed in black. One of them, a stout fellow with a face covered by a ski mask and infrared goggles, wrapped his arms around his wife, a hand muffling her wail. With the other, a quick slash of a knife silenced her.

More men in black poured in, automatic weapons held at the ready. Their ski masks hid their identities, but Fredrick didn’t need the prominent crimson R patched on their shoulders to know who they worked for.

His wife sagged to the floor, a dead weight. Her lifeless eyes stared at him, not accusingly, but with confusion. He had not told her.

A taller man in black pushed the robust murder aside so he had room to stand over the man lying on the floor. Fredrick could only stare back. With a simple hand signal, someone outside the dying man’s field of vision started to drag him outside. Fredrick could only think of the mess he was leaving in the kitchen.

The cold hit him like a thousand needles, but with the excruciating amount of pain he was already experiencing, he barely noticed. His legs dropped as whoever dragged him outside released them. Searchlights illuminated the doorway. A shadow descended on him. It was the strike leader.

“Congratulation, Professor Ford, for evading detection for so long.” He crouched down to get closer the Fredrick’s ear. “It was strange to find you holed up here, practically in the middle of nowhere, but did you seriously think you could hide from us, especially in this world of modern technology?”

Fredrick tried to find words. A metallic taste formed in his mouth.

“I . . . I thought. . . .”

The large man whom he saw out the window earlier stood over him, the object of his death cradled lightly against his side. He contributed only three words, plus a toe to Fredrick’s ribs.

“Don’t think. Listen.”

Fredrick wanted to laugh, and he actually managed a strained chuckle before it turned into a fit of coughing. The ability to think – to question – was his job, his career, his life. But then, he thought he had outwitted them, out-thought their greatest minds, but in reality he had only deceived himself, covered himself in a false shroud of security. He thought he was looking at the real world when he was really only seeing shadows cast by a fire behind him. He wanted to believe that they were safe so much that he actually believed it. Now they have found him . . . as they will surely find it. Maybe it was better if he didn’t think at all.

Deceived. . . . Oh yes, I was a fool. . . .

Fredrick gasped in the snow, numbness spreading from his chest and his extremities. The bleeding wound in his chest would kill him first, but it was still an interesting comparison.

The strike leader grabbed his arm, stretching it out, though not with the intent to cause pain. Something pressed against the skin on the inside of his elbow joint: a jet injector – a device which delivers medications through a small orifice up to seven times smaller than the smallest syringe needle.

“Stay with me, professor. I want you alive long enough to know that your carefully laid plans to hide yourself, your family, and your secret were futile.” He held up the jet injector. “What I injected you with was merely a stimulant, designed to keep you conscious long enough to witness your failure.”

A stimulant. . . . It was working too. Fredrick could feel himself becoming more aware of his surroundings, but he knew something about bio-chemistry too. This drug was making him more aware, but by doing so it sped up his metabolic rate. They were not prolonging his life, but rather shortening it to make sure he was alert enough to realize his failure.

He could clearly hear the hum of an ornithopter, a flying machine which out-classed the antique helicopter in both speed & maneuverability. It was designed along the lines of a yanma, with four wings that could move independently of each other to allow greater evasion in a tight spot.

A short grunt, dressed like all the others, rushed back out from the house to stand next to the strike leader.

“Sir, we found it!”

Beyond him, two of the black-clad men emerged, carrying a large crate to the waiting ornithopter. The flying craft’s long, thin wings hummed in anticipation of its cargo. Two more were dragging a squealing eight-year-old girl and her struggling thirteen-year-old brother behind the crate. The father, blinded with pain, could barely hear their cries.

“Sir, we caught these hiding inside. What should we do with them?”

The leader smirked, then turned to the father dying in the snow.

“Shall I kill them, too?”

Fredrick managed a groan, but nothing coherent. Still, the strike leader managed to get what he was trying to say.

“I thought not.” He turned to the grunts holding the two children. “Carry them to the ornithopter, where they will be taken into processing.”

The grunts huffed and began carrying the two kids off. The two kicked and screamed, but it didn’t appear to hinder the grunts in the least. Fredrick raised a hand weakly, reaching out as if to snatch them back, but no matter how hard he wished nothing seemed to happen. But then, reality never indulged wishes.

The strike leader looked down at him. A smile was evident even though he was wearing a ski mask.

“Don’t worry about them. They’ll be safe – safe in Team Rocket custody.” He laughed at the contradiction. Fredrick raised his head enough to glare, but that only made the man laugh all the harder.

“You? What can you do? You can barely lift a finger, let alone defy us!” He gestured to several grunts standing behind him. When they came forward, he pointed to the cabin.

“Torch it.”

Pulling pins from some 20-ounce grenades, the grunts strode forward to hurdle their highly-explosive handhelds into the vandalized building. First, nothing happened, and the only sounds were the clinks of the canisters, but they were suddenly interrupted by the shock waves of the powerful explosives. Flames burst from the windows, and smoke rose high into the dark sky, mingling with the falling snow. It was a beacon of destruction, a blight upon the clean winter landscape.

The ornithopter rose into the night, its soft hum increasing as it picked up speed. South it headed, to Kanto and warmer climates, carrying its cargo of Rocket soldiers, children, and something else. The strike leader raised a digital analyzer/recorder to capture the scene in picture form.

All the while, the wind roared.

><><EA><><

The Rocket executive laid the melancholic picture back on the pile, picking up a paper packet that lay beneath it. It was a report filed by the operation leader detailing the raid on the mountain cabin. He flipped through the pages, two of them, stapled at a single point in the upper left-hand corner. Kinda short. He glanced at the date.

December 7, 191 NA. Seven years ago.

The sound of the door opening brought his attention away from the old document. The executive placed it to the side of his desk, and calmly steepled his hands in a calculating manner. The man who came in slowly closed the door, then waited to be spoken to.

“Has there been any progress?”

The agent walked up to the desk and once there laid several photographs of a young girl, age fifteen or so, with long, dark hair and almond eyes. The images were sketchy, a side effect of the agency’s new micro scout- and surveillance drones.

The executive studied them intently, comparing each to each other. “She matches the profile, but is she the target?” he asked, his interest mildly aroused.

The agent pulled out a graph, one plotted with lines that peaked & troughed. There were staggered vertical lines along the x-axis, the side that measured time. The executive took it earnestly.

“This is a chart of the girl’s EM field, measured while the photos were being taken. The vertical lines correspond to certain pictures we took, specifically these right here,” the agent explained as he gestured towards those strewn about the desk.

The executive continued to examine at the graph. Finally, he laid it flat on the table & pointed to an abnormally high peak. “Do you have one for this?”

“Yes sir,” the agent said as he rummaged through the pile, eventually pulling up a picture with numbers corresponding to the point on the graph. The executive yanked it out of his grasp and began to scrutinize it. Several minutes passed in awkward silence for the agent, who didn’t know if he was supposed to guide the man. He was an executive, after all.

The executive glanced back and forth between the picture and the graph. Finally, after finding nothing comparable, he gave up and shifted focus to the agent. “Well, are you going to tell me what this means?”

“Yes sir,” the agent responded, hopping to help his confused superior. “We suspect that the spikes are the result of outside influences reacting in her field. I marked this one because there is a clear visual representation.”

“Clear?!”

The agent gulped under the executive’s glare, his faux pas not having gone unnoticed.

“Well, I . . . uh–”

“Just, get on with it,” came the response through gritted teeth.

“Uh, here.”

The agent pointed to a point on the photo, where the girl’s hand was. The executive leaned in closer as the finger traced a line to a nearby tv. The appendage went back and forth, slowly, always following roughly the same route. The executive’s inquisitive eyes followed, searching along the trail.

Then he saw it: a faint, jagged blue line.

“Electrical discharge.”

The agent nodded, confirming the executive’s conclusion.

“We found her.”