Morphic (PG-13, possibly offensive to some)

Hi, and welcome to my latest piece of Pokémon fanfiction I'm attempting to juggle with The Quest for the Legends, Morphic. It comes with a warning: it contains lots and lots of political references. They are not here to make a statement; they are humourous and meant to reflect some of the extremes of reality without preaching my opinion on anything. However, some people may still take offense to it and I suppose I can understand that. I apologize in advance if you are one of them and advise you to keep this in mind as you read or not read at all if you don't want to read something that involves touchy subjects. I just ask that you please, please, whatever else you may want to say, do not turn this thread into a debate about those issues. I repeat that I am not trying to make a statement with this. It's just a story whose world tries to imitate reality, all right?

The PG-13 is for swearing and as I don't consider language alone worthy of making it an R, I will not do so, although technically the MPAA would perhaps call it R-worthy if just for the number of four-letter words. In any case you have been warned.



Chapter 1

Calm down now. Be cool.

A dark-haired man in his thirties straightened his tie nervously in front of a large mirror. He ran his eyes yet again quickly up and down his reflection. His posture looked far too timid for such an important debate. He took a deep breath and tried to straighten himself, pushed the glasses a little further up on his nose and silently cursed himself for having shown up with them – they were too big and looked too dorky. Too stereotypical. He wished he'd gotten used to contacts sometime.

"Mr. Edwards, five minutes."

He nodded, seeing in the mirror as a short member of the TV crew stepped out of the room. He was alone now.

"Damn it," he swore under his breath, briefly taking his glasses off just to see how he looked. He depressingly assured himself that the blurry flesh-colored blob he could see in front of him definitely looked much better now than with the glasses on. Damn it all. Tomorrow he'd get himself some contacts and use them, no matter what. Who knew when he'd next have to appear on TV?

Why couldn't they just have sent Dave? he thought to himself. I'm terrible with words. He could convince that audience that black is white if he wanted.

It was a rhetorical question, of course. Dave and his girlfriend were now at some fancy restaurant celebrating their anniversary. He had been practically begged to go; Dave had given him a long speech about what his relationship meant to him. And in some moment of pity, he had agreed to it, figuring it would perhaps, maybe, if he looked optimistically at it, not be quite as bad as it sounded. Damn it all. It was even worse.

"Mr. Edwards?"

"Yes. I'm coming."

He took one last look at himself in the mirror – there were so many things that were still wrong! – but dragged himself through the door. A member of the TV crew ushered him into a chair. He felt his palms sweating at the sight of all the cameras; he quickly turned to his opponent in the chair opposite him. It was a well-built woman with long, black hair who would have been attractive if only her thick-rimmed purple glasses had been a little less extravagant and her expression not so awfully stern. She looked at him out of the corner of her eyes with the utmost contempt of one with the firm conviction that he could certainly be no less than a personal messenger of the devil. He shifted in his chair. She was no more comfortable to look at than the cameras. He desperately looked around for anything else to focus his attention on. With relief, he saw the host, a casual, stylishly-dressed man, come hurrying over to sit in a third chair and put up a shamelessly fake television smile.

"Good evening, and welcome to Friday Night with James Sullivan!" the host said suddenly, indicating that they were on air. "As most of you will already know, there has been much recent controversy around a team of scientists working for Heywood Labs! According to their spokesman and leader, David Ambrose, the group actually managed to create 'Pokémorphs', fetuses with spliced human and Pokémon DNA, which appear to be growing normally. In particular, the controversy is about this statement you will see here!"

A television screen behind them showed Dave, standing on the steps in front of the lab with a crowd of photographers below him: "Look," he said irritably, "we have absolutely no plans to actually raise those things. We just wanted to see if it was possible, and okay, it is. We're just going to watch them grow for a week or two to see how they're developing and then destroy them. There will be no 'freak children' or 'Pokémorph minority'. It's no big deal. End of discussion."

The screen turned off and James the host immediately began reading from the cue screens again: "As it turned out, it was quite the opposite: this comment, at least to a large and loud portion of the world's population, was a very big deal and began a heated discussion that we will see the pleasure of continuing tonight, live on this very show! Please welcome Hannah Mariani, spokesperson for the Stop Abortion Movement –" the woman nodded curtly towards the camera "– and Brian Edwards, one of the scientists involved."

Brian quickly realized he wasn't supposed to be staring wildly at the show host and jerked his head towards the camera, giving it a nervous smile.

"So, Brian, why don't you start?"

"Me?" slipped out of him before he could stop himself. "Oh, well… you see…"

He tried desperately to remember what he had been planning to say, flicking his gaze at his calm-faced opponent. Oh, yes, now he remembered. He cleared his throat loudly.

"Look," he said, failing miserably at removing the nervousness from his voice, "if these children – if they ever became children – what – I mean, would you really send a child like that to a public school? They'd get bullied for sure. These children would lead perfectly miserable lives – if they ever were to become children, that is, because they certainly aren't now…"

"I assume, then," Hannah said coolly, "that you are of the opinion that fat children with glasses ought to be systematically murdered because they'll probably be bullied at school?"

She looked at him with stinging blue eyes and Brian realized with dread that she had done her research: although it was impossible to tell now, he had been overweight as a kid and of course he had worn glasses.

Damn it. Why did she look so creepily calm?

"It's… it's not the same," he said quickly. "They can't feel anything. They don't 'want' to live. It's…"

"They will," Hannah just said.

"That… that isn't relevant," he stuttered, trying to remember what Dave had been telling him to say in this kind of situation.

"Well, since you seem so eager to speak," James said brightly, "why don't you tell us your position, Hannah?"

"As I see it," she said simply, "the case is dead already. It is even more dead than the general debate for or against abortion. What do those in favor always say? 'What about rape?' 'What about what the sexually liberal call "accidents"?' 'What about if the child turns out to be seriously disabled and the parents wouldn't be able to handle it?' We don't even need to complicate the matter with those here. This is not rape. It's not an accident. Nothing is 'turning out' to be anything it wasn't obviously to begin with. These men –" she pointed an accusing finger at Brian "– perfectly deliberately created children with perfectly deliberate qualities that could cause them problems in the future. You, Mr. Edwards, need to realize that if they get bullied, it is your fault. You have no excuse whatsoever."

Brian stared at her, dumbfounded. "Why are you always calling them children?" he muttered, only half-convinced, while trying to think of something else to say.

"Because that is what they are," she said shortly.

Brian took a deep breath, thinking of what the others had been talking to him about. "Okay, look. If we didn't destroy the fetuses, who would raise them?"

She gave him an odd look, raising an eyebrow. "You, of course," she said. "They're your children which you created by your own free will. I haven't known anybody who deliberately decided to have a child and then expected someone else to raise it."

He stared at her, the implications of this zooming through his head. "What? Us? But… what are you talking about, anyway?" he asked heatedly. "We didn't deliberately create children. We deliberately created fetuses we intended to destroy. We weren't planning to raise…"

"Well, you should have thought about that before creating them, shouldn't you?" Hannah remarked coldly.

There was some great way to respond to this, he was sure, and Dave would have said it in the blink of an eye, but his mind was being too numb and panicky at the moment to think of anything.

"It… it seemed like a much better idea at the time," he said stupidly. "We'd had a little to drink that night since it was Dave's birthday – he always gets weird ideas when he's drunk – and it was just so obvious, I mean, look at all those book series – and after getting the idea and figuring out how it was possible in the party, we just figured the next day, hey, why not…" What the hell was he saying?

Hannah gave him a disgusted frown and looked at the camera. "Drunk scientists who want to imitate bestseller book series in some sad attempt to get attention make genetic experiments with unborn human children, and now, to top it all, they're going to be murdering them. Clearly this is only another example of the godlessness of some of the men we call intellectuals today. We cannot let them do this."

"But…"

-------

Damn it.

Damn it all.

****ing hell.

Brian shivered as he started his car. In the rear-view mirror, he could see that he was pale and sweaty. And his glasses still looked so damn stupid. He had failed so miserably it wasn't funny. The public against them once and for all in one fell swoop. Why the hell had he been mentioning that they'd been drunk?

Those thoughts kept cycling through his head on the long journey to his house.

His cellphone started vibrating in his pocket just as he was pulling into the driveway. He slapped his hand over his face momentarily in some abstract hope that it would just stop ringing. It didn't.

He fished the phone out of his pocket, opened it and held it shakily to his ear. "Yes?"

"Well, now you've gone and done it."

Brian sighed heavily. "I told you, Dave. I suck at this kind of thing. You really should've…"

"I had no idea you sucked that much! I persuaded Jane to agree to go home a little early from the restaurant so we could watch you on the one-hour belated channel – I felt embarrassed for even knowing you!" the voice on the other end of the phone shouted angrily. There was a sigh followed by silence. "You've really ****ed us up, Brian."

"I know," Brian said miserably. "She was just making so much sense and being so calm that I just…"

"Making sense?" the phone shouted at him. "She was making exactly no sense at all! You didn't even say half of the stuff we talked about! And for Christ's sake – well, not his, specifically, but you know what I mean – babbling on about how I have weird ideas when I'm drunk? What the ****?"

"I don't know," Brian replied desperately. "I just… maybe she was right. I mean, it seems kinda cruel to create them at all if… maybe we should raise them…"

"Right? Right?" Dave repeated. "Of course there's not much at stake for you here, since you're single, but those of us whose home has a breast to spare – do you really expect Joe to go home to his kids and tell them, 'Hey, guys, you're going to have a brother and he's a freak!'? And me, personally, I like my private time with Jane. Kids would really ruin that, especially freak kids. Maybe they'll even be peeing all over the place to mark their territory or something! There's no way we can abort them after that went on air. There's no way we're getting any financial support now unless we raise those kids. You seriously ****ed us up, man. Remind me never to make you represent us again."

"I know," Brian muttered, but Dave had already hung up on the other end of the line. He sighed and closed the cellphone, pushing it back into his pocket. He stayed in the car for a few more minutes, staring at the garage door between burying his face in his hands. He had really messed things up. The others would never forgive him, ever.

Not much to do about that now.

He exited the car and thought for a moment before turning his cellphone off. Then he went in, made himself some instant noodles and went to bed.

The next day, Heywood Labs issued a public statement to apologize for their previous plans and state that the scientists involved would in fact themselves raise the Pokémorph children to the best of their ability.

Ahh...I can see why you saw fit to include a disclaimer. You know, I have this feeling that someone is going to look right past that and have a rant anyway, but don't worry; that won't be me. ^^

Anyway, it looks like a promising fic, although the asterisks from the censoring function are sort of annoying. Maybe switch to some sensor-friendly curses? The system is actually surprisingly lenient with some of them. But yeah, ****ing hell just wouldn't be quite the same, would it? Except if you go with something like effing. That aside, I like the way the narration takes up Brian's viewpoint and actually, I find myself relating to the dude (That debate is hauntingly similar to one we had in English class, minus the fact that I steered clear of talking about drunken behaviour. xD) and Hannah sounds just like some real life anti-abortionists I've heard. Dave is a bit of an ass, though, I mean he was the one who shoved that job on Brian in the first place yet he's whining about it. Mind you, it takes a very realistic character to make me think of him as an ass (or form any particular opinion of him) based on such a quick exchange, though. First chapter and I'm already feeling about the characters. Good job. n_n

Finally, I like the perspective you've taken to the subject of pokémorphs - quite different from the usual (angsty pokémorph waking up wherever and starting a bloody, angsty, and violent quest to find out what has happened/return to human) and definitely a refreshing change.

Overall, there aren't really any faults I could point out here and I hardly see the point of reading through it with a magnifying glass in search of mispunctuation or typoes. It's an interesting fic and you've slipped your plot hook in very nicely. I for one will be following this fic, so keep it up. ^_~

Thanks for reviewing. The censoring is a little annoying, but normally there will be quite a bit less of it than in the first chapter, so it won't be quite as asterisk-riddled in the future.

All right, chapter two already. I was planning to actually introduce the morphs themselves years later in the second chapter, but then I realized that I kind of needed this chapter in between.



Chapter 2

"All right, guys and gals… I hope you all have at least some idea of what's going on here, but for the sake of any spouses who haven't been paying attention, I'll still go into the nitty-gritty details."

Dave looked over the table. He was sitting by the short side with his (beautiful as always) girlfriend Jane on his right side. The other nine were seated by the long sides, looking at him. He pressed a few keys on the laptop in front of him and turned the ceiling projector on by pressing a button on the remote.

"Well, as you almost definitely know, we decided a couple of months ago to attempt to create 'Pokémorphs', which means, in the unlikely case you haven't read all that pseudoscientific crap like 'The Life of a Morph' or the 'Sarah Hooter' series, a human being spliced with a Pokémon to create… well, something like this."

He pressed a key on his laptop. On the smooth, white wall behind him appeared the cover illustration of 'Sarah Hooter and the Rocket Experiment': a sexy teenage girl with Vulpix ears, a tuft of red hair that organized itself into unnaturally orderly curls on the top of her head, and six curly, reddish-brown tails fanning out behind her as she struck a pose. A couple of people snickered.

"Ridiculous, isn't it? Well, it's possible. We proved that here at Heywood Labs – of course the whole thing with Team Rocket suddenly turning an ordinary girl into half a Vulpix is bullshit and the real method is a lot different, but the end result is the same. We even specifically created a Vulpix morph who is likely to look very similar to Sarah Hooter here when she grows up. Of course," he added with emphasis, "we never intended for her ever to grow up. She'll be made fun of like all hell at school. But outside pressure and… some inside goofs have forced us to raise the Pokémorphs, and that's why we're here. We are all responsible, and thus we need to fairly distribute the morphs between us for rearing. Any questions?"

Apparently not.

"Good. Well, in the past weeks we have observed that the fetuses, which are currently growing in an artificial uterus in the lab, are developing at slightly different speeds, usually a little abnormal for humans. This was to be expected, as Pokémon grow a lot faster than humans, but it is different for each one how much influence the Pokémon is having and of course exactly how fast the Pokémon grows. We have also seen how they appear to be turning out and compared it with what we were going for when we created that morph to give the best idea possible of what you'll be getting yourselves into if you adopt each one. Any questions now?"

"Actually, yes."

It was Cheryl Jones, a woman in her thirties that Howard, a research assistant for Heywood Labs, had been seeing recently. She had also, according to Howard, always been passionately interested in the Pokémorph project. She was one of those intelligent blondes who wore glasses, liked to protest and did volunteer jobs.

"If the Pokémorphs are developing at abnormal speeds now, does that necessarily mean they keep developing like that after they're born?"

"We've been able to calculate fairly well how fast they'll age after birth and that's what we'll be telling you," Dave replied. "We compare how fast the fetus is growing with the normal fetus growth speed of humans and that Pokémon, and then assume their Pokémon half will influence their later growth to about the same extent. It may not be entirely accurate, but it should be accurate enough."

Cheryl nodded and Dave scanned the room for any signs that somebody else had a question.

"Okay, let's just get right to it, then," he sighed and pressed a key on his laptop to go to the next slide; Sarah Hooter disappeared from the wall and was replaced by information about the first morph to be discussed.

"First up, Meowth morph. Male. It is presumed that he'll be around twelve years old physically at ten human years of age. We're not sure exactly how much we influenced any instincts or what, but be warned that at worst he'll be marking his territory around the house by the time he's a teenager and you'll be morally restricted from getting him neutered."

A few of them laughed.

"I meant that," Dave said. "His appearance should be mostly human; it's mainly the head. He'll probably have fangs, and we're beginning to see the development of Meowth ears and tail… and although it hasn't started appearing yet in the fetus, he'll almost definitely have whiskers and a gold charm on his forehead like we planned. I won't guarantee he's not going to be any cattier than that, though, since sometimes it's a bit shady how those genes end up influencing one another. Any volunteers to take him?"

There was silence as the researchers looked nervously at one another. He saw Joe McKenzie's wife Pamela, a plump woman with curly brown hair, whisper something in his ear and he whispered something back. They waited for a few moments.

"Okay, we'll take him," Joe said finally.

"Great," Dave said, writing it down. "It's probably a good thing, since you've raised two kids already. If anybody can toilet train him, it's you."

Another round of nervous laughter. Joe nervously wiped his glasses with his sleeve and put them back on.

"Right," Dave sighed. "Now… that lovely Sarah Hooter-clone I mentioned. Damn, I must have been on crack when I thought of that."

Nobody said anything.

"Oh, yeah, forgot the details. Well, it's a female Vulpix morph, obviously, and basically she'll look almost exactly like that Sarah Hooter picture I showed you," he put that slide back up, "except I can't guarantee she'll look that hot. And I don't know if her hair will really curl like that. Like the Meowth, she'll be around twelve physically in ten years."

Jane leant in at him. "Maybe we should take her, honey."

He turned around. "Why?"

She shrugged, and Dave was momentarily captivated by the smooth movement of her wavy, red hair. "I always liked those books as a kid, and at least she's mixed with a cute Pokémon. We'll have to take one, won't we? At least it's better than some of the others you've been telling me about."

"Whatever you say, sweetheart," Dave replied and kissed her before writing that down. Man, he'd do anything for that woman, even if she read stuff like Sarah Hooter.

"Two down, six to go," he said. "Okay, this is one of the really fast-growing ones. Scyther morph, female. Likely to be physically around sixteen in ten years. Don't worry; she won't be a cripple with no hands who murders people every time she waves her arms. Her hands are already beginning to develop, but sometime after birth, the bone in her forearms will grow out of her skin in a sharp blade going from her wrist to her elbow which then transforms to be metallic if how the process works in actual Scyther is any indication. We don't know how far out it will go exactly, but I think it's safe to say you shouldn't hug her too much. She may have fangs and will almost certainly have wings, although she'd be way too heavy to actually fly on them. Her legs also look very weird right now, although I don't know what will become of them later, since this wasn't really planned. Any takers?"

"Let's take her, Howard," Cheryl said almost immediately. "I've always liked Scyther."

The slightly chubby, dark-haired man beside her winced. "Eh… are you sure we…"

"Oh, come on," she said and smiled. "We'll be fine."

"Anybody want to argue with that? No? Good. Then she's yours."

Howard still looked a little skeptical, but shrugged. "Well, nobody will be able to say I had an uninteresting life."

"Next up, Taillow morph," Dave said. "It's a male. Growing just a little faster than a human, might end up maybe one year ahead for every ten human years…"

"One other question," Cheryl interrupted. "Kids grow up at different speeds, start puberty at different ages and stuff like that, so…"

"This is just an approximation," Dave answered in the middle of her sentence. "The odds little Taillow guy here will have started puberty at ten will be the same as the odds of a normal boy having started puberty at eleven. That's all it means. Can I continue now?"

She nodded.

"Great. Well, I think this is the most human morph of them all. It's pretty much just that he might grow feathers instead of hair in some places, and he'll have a pair of wings too small to carry him, unless we missed something. We realized when we were making them that it would be too difficult to give him a beak as we were first planning. Of course I can't say anything about behavioral effects."

Daniel, a blond-haired man with glasses who Dave knew was the husband of lab researcher Martha Harrison, suddenly raised his hand. "Wait. Are they going to be like… able to use Pokémon attacks?"

Dave sighed. "Maybe. If at all, then only to a very limited extent. I think I could make out a fire sac beginning to form in the Vulpix, so I'm getting my hopes up that she'll at least be able to use Ember and stuff like that. For the others, I don't know. Maybe. Maybe not. Of course some things are just a given – everybody can tackle."

"What about the Pokémon language? Will they speak it?"

"No idea. Can I continue?"

Daniel sighed disappointedly and nodded.

"Where was I…" Dave muttered, going over the points on the slide that was up. "Right. Yeah, he's the most human of the bunch, but I can't promise you he won't demand a bowl of earthworms for breakfast every morning or something. Who wants him?"

Daniel shrugged, twisting a lock of his wife's curly black hair between his fingers. "Didn't you say you were mostly handling that one, Martha? Maybe we can take the kid…"

"Sure," she replied and smiled. "Unless somebody else wants him…?"

Most people just shrugged. Nobody protested, even though Dave could tell some of them would have wanted that boy. He had been kind of hoping for him himself, but if Jane wanted the Vulpix, that was it.

"All right, then," Dave said and wrote that down before switching slides. "So… Chinchou morph. Male. He'll be physically around thirteen after ten human years. The most noteworthy unhuman thing about him is that he's blue, and he's got those anglerfish antennae starting to develop too. His hands and feet are a little odd and may end up kind of halfway between fins and digits or something, I don't know. As in webbed with weak fingers. Otherwise he's pretty humanlike – he hasn't got Chinchou eyes or anything. Volunteers?"

"We'll take him," Bill Ray said. He had shoulder-length black hair and was sitting at the far end of the table with his red-haired fiancée Sharon. From the sound of it they had decided on the Chinchou together before they had come there. At twenty-five, Bill was the youngest person working in the lab, two years younger than Dave himself. Dave had always liked the guy, but couldn't help being a little surprised that he'd picked the Chinchou of all things. He'd thought Bill would be more of a Scyther person.

"Well, okay," Dave just said and wrote that down. "Now… after this there's a Pokémorph assigned to every home except Brian's, correct? Well, he can't breastfeed, so now some of you – us, I mean – will have to take another one. Only do it if you think you can handle two freak kids in your home in addition to whatever you might have already, okay?"

Nobody spoke.

"All right. Only three morphs left. Next," he pressed a key on his laptop to go to the next slide, "the only one who's actually growing slower than an ordinary human. Only take her if you really like young children, because she's going to be one for a while. Misdreavus morph, female, will probably grow at only about 80% the speed of a normal human after birth. She's unnaturally pitch-black – as in much blacker than an ordinary black person – but otherwise the fetus looks, well, entirely human at this stage, aside from growing slowly. She is going to have creepy hair and eyes when she grows up and will probably do some ghostly ****, though." He looked between the couples around the table. Cheryl looked excitedly at Howard.

"Well, we already took the Scyther," he said and sighed. "Won't get a lot more messed-up than that. We'll take her."

Cheryl leant in and kissed him. Howard seemed thoroughly puzzled at himself, but didn't say anything to indicate a change of mind, so Dave shrugged and wrote it down.

"Okay, great. Two left, and then we can all go home." He switched slides. "Roselia morph. Female. She's the fastest-growing of the bunch; she'll be physically around seventeen when she's ten. She is a little problematic, because we actually got stupid enough to give her roses instead of hands."

"Oh, dear," he heard Daniel Harrison mutter.

"Then she seems to grow faster in sunlight. That's pretty much it about her, although she may turn out to have some other Roselia or generally flowery traits in the end. She does grow rather ridiculously fast, though. Don't know what they'll do with her at school, although that applies to the Scyther as well. Who's up for it?"

"Let's take her, Daniel," Martha said to her husband. "I was largely in making her, too. The Taillow boy probably won't be too hard to deal with."

"But we do have Sarah…" Daniel muttered. Sarah was their baby daughter.

"The Roselia girl is going to grow fast. She'll be an adult in no time at all. We're both parents and breeders, so we're the best-equipped here. Dave and Jane and Bill and Sharon are so young and have never raised kids before. They shouldn't need to have two Pokémorphs to worry about. And the McKenzies have two kids to deal with in addition to their morph."

Her husband finally agreed to it, and then that was settled. Dave breathed in relief to himself; he had been worrying that he and Jane would have to take another one.

"Well," he said. "The last one. The Slugma boy. The bad part is that he's pretty much a total failure; it's lucky – or unlucky, depending on how you look at it – that he's survived at all to this point. For one thing, his skin is looking to be liquid – as in some kind of thick ooze. This ooze appears to slowly harden at room temperature, which would make him immobile unless his skin is rubbed or heated or something. In addition to that, his blood is far too hot, so he's really just begging for some sort of organ failure at some point. The organs do seem to be developing some resistance to it, and we'll have to hope that's enough. Oh, and we had to take him out of the artificial uterus and put him in a heated glass cage. Somehow he's already self-sustaining, although if something attacked him at this stage he'd obviously be completely helpless. We don't even know if we should consider him already born or what, and we have no idea how his physical age is going to change. Basically we've got some sort of a human blob and we have no idea what is going to happen to it next."

The spouses stared at him in horror.

"Yeah, his life is going to suck," he agreed. "If for any reason you are ever going to try to mix a human being with a blob of lava in the future, don't. But regardless, we can't kill him, so somebody needs to take care of him if he survives."

Nobody volunteered. Dave took a deep breath. He hadn't expected anybody to.

"I think Brian should take him."

The man to his left stared at him. "What? Me? But…"

"This is the only one that's not actually a mammal and won't need to be breastfed," Dave said, sighing. "Look, Brian, you were the one who messed up the talk show. It would be very unfair if you could avoid raising one of the stupid things just because you're single. No easily accessible breast milk? This one doesn't need any. From what I've heard about Slugma, they eat nothing but rocks throughout their lives. Feeding him sand has worked for a couple of months, so that appears to be it. You can raise him."

Brian looked wildly around for some supporters, but found only the others' looks of pity. Of course they wouldn't switch with him if they were paid for it.

"Fine," he sighed hopelessly and sank back in his chair.

"All settled, then," Dave said, closing his laptop and turning the projector off. He had assigned the Slugma kid to Brian before they had even sat down at the meeting.

"Vulpix morph," he muttered to himself. "This will be interesting."

Readers of The Quest for the Legends probably feel like murdering me right now for churning out chapters of this instead of writing chapter 35 of that, but hey, I can't control inspiration...

There are parts I like and don't like about this chapter, but the ones I like I really like. I ended up not skipping ten years into the future right away after all (but that will happen in chapter four). As always, I'd appreciate any input on possible edits, etc.


Chapter 3

"I can't stand this, Dave!" Jane said desperately. Her smooth face was tearstruck and her beautiful blue eyes were red and puffy. "I hate that freak!"

"Please, Jane, be reasonable…" Dave began in the most soothing voice he could manage, but was cut off.

"Reasonable! It's all you think about, isn't it?" She sniffed. "Your precious science and career! Keeping a journal of every little thing that little ***** does! You write happily about how she's teething, and meanwhile I'm getting hormone injections every day and her fangs are digging into my nipples, just because you still insist on her being fed 'naturally' for your stupid research! Everything was so much better before the freak came along and we could spend our time together without the stupid howls waking us up at night!"

"I'd do anything for you, Jane!" Dave pleaded, trying to approach her. "Just please, don't drop her…"

"You're too caught up in your job now to do anything for me!" she screamed, still waving the Pokémorph baby threateningly over the balcony handrail. The Vulpix morph screamed as loudly as she could. "We haven't even had the time to sit down and give her a proper name…"

Jane started crying again. Dave hated situations like this. He'd never been able to handle them properly.

"Please, Jane, I love you," he muttered, taking a few steps nearer to her. "Why can't her name just be Jane too as I've been saying?"

"I'm not sure I love you anymore," she said quietly and continued to sob. He felt his heart sting.

"Don't say that," he said, laying a hand on her shoulder and moving her other hand that threatened to drop the Pokémorph safely within the balcony. "We'll sit down together and talk. Everything will be better…"

"No, it won't," she sobbed. "You said that last time, too, and it just stayed the same."

"No, it didn't, until you started complaining about nothing again! Why do you keep having these ridiculous hysteria fits about everything?" slipped out of Dave in frustration. He regretted it immediately; Jane pushed his hand off her shoulder and turned away.

"Sorry, I didn't mean that…"

Jane threw the baby into his hands and stormed back into the apartment.

"Wait, Jane!" Dave called desperately, running in after her with the morph squirming in his hands. "I really didn't mean it! I haven't slept for days! I was just…"

"Goodbye, Dave," she called over her shoulder.

"No, please, don't leave…"

The door slammed. Dave stared at it.

He bit his lip and blinked a few times to clear his eyes out. "****," he muttered.

The baby still howled. Momentarily, he felt that maybe Jane had had the right idea and felt an urge to throw it at the wall or out of the window as hard as he could, but had the sense to stop himself. He tried for a couple of seconds to keep it in and then gave up.

"****!" he screamed at the clothing rack. Then at the bawling Vulpix morph in his hands, "I hope you're happy, you little freak!"

She continued to howl for food. He looked at her for a few seconds and didn't have the energy to be angry anymore. He quickly splashed some infant formula milk from the refrigerator into a baby bottle and fed her absent-mindedly; after a moment he opened the refrigerator again and got out a few cans of beer that he put onto the table before closing the fridge with his foot.

He suddenly realized that the little Vulpix girl was already asleep. Everything seemed so unreal that he hadn't noticed.

"****," he muttered again, carried her into the bedroom and put her down on the bed before taking out his cellphone and entering Jane's number. He slumped down on one of the couches in the living room, still staring at the number on the screen.

"Later," he muttered to himself. "When she's gotten over it." Then he added, as if to reassure himself, "She always does."

Admittedly she had never before gone quite as far as to walk out of the apartment on him. She had locked herself in the bathroom and refused to come out, and she had verbally told him she was going to leave, but she had never actually left.

"She always gets over it," he repeated, retrieved a can of beer from the kitchen table and opened it. "She loves me…"

And he took a good, long sip.

-------

He awoke to the muffled crying of the morph from the bedroom and found himself lying in an awkward position on the couch with a couple of empty cans on the table. He could only really remember one of them. He'd been too sleep-deprived to notice exactly how much he was drinking.

Dave groaned and stood up, rubbing his eyes. He checked his watch; it was one in the morning. He walked sleepily towards the bedroom and pushed the half-open door ajar. The Vulpix morph was flailing her arms and legs and screaming at the top of her lungs.

"What is it you want this time?" he said disdainfully. "Need your diaper changed? More food, you greedy little *****? Or are you just screaming for your mommy because your daddy isn't good enough for you?"

He left the room, got his cellphone out and dialed Jane's number again.

"Hello?" he heard her voice.

"Jane?"

There was a long sigh on the other end of the line.

"Look, Jane, I'm sorry," Dave said. "I slept a little… please tell me you're coming back."

"Not while the freak is there," he heard her say.

"I can ask one of the others to take her."

There was a long silence.

"I don't love you anymore, Dave," she said softly. He gripped the phone tighter, squeezing it like he could make it tell him Jane was saying something else. "You get so stupid when you drink…"

"I'll stop drinking," he said immediately.

"…and you seem to be married to your job…"

"I'll quit my job."

"…like on our anniversary, when you begged like a child to get to watch that horrible debate…"

"I'll never watch TV again."

"…and those few times we do get to be alone together, all you think about is sex."

"I'll…"

He stopped. No, he wouldn't.

"Look, Jane," he said instead, "maybe there are some things where you're the one who needs to come towards my needs…"

She sighed again on the other end. "Goodbye, Dave. Don't call me."

And she hung up.

The *****.

He closed the cellphone and threw it at the couch. "****ing *****!" he shouted at the phone.

He hurried over to the refrigerator and opened it, but didn't find any alcohol. He closed it again and wasn't sure what he'd do. Finally he went into the bedroom to the still-crying Pokémorph baby and collapsed onto the bed next to her.

"Jane…" he moaned. He was silent for a long while, listening obliviously to the cries of the little Vulpix girl.

"It's just you and me now, isn't it, little Jane?" he muttered, turning to the child. "Jane…"

He winced. "No, I really can't call you Jane. Not quite that, anyway. Too much painful association."

Dave looked at his adoptive daughter. Her tiny fangs were visible in her open mouth and whitish hair was already growing on her head and organizing itself into unnatural curls. He sat up and stroked her face carefully, scratching behind her triangular ear; her mouth latched on to his finger and instinctively started to suck on it. He smiled briefly and stroked her one soft, white tail that would one day split into six and gain color.

"How about something more like… Jean?"

The baby was quiet, still sucking on his finger in an attempt to get milk out of it. He decided to take that as a yes.

"God, I'm unoriginal when I'm halfway sober," he muttered to himself as he went into the kitchen to make some more formula milk.

-------

"Hello?" Dave grumpily answered the telephone. "I'm kind of going out the door, if you don't mind…"

"You're the guardian of Jean Ambrose, the Vulpix Pokémorph, correct?" said the voice on the phone.

"Uh, yes…?"

"Good afternoon. I'm from Rayquaza Studios, and we have just bought the rights to filming the Sarah Hooter books. We would be ready to pay very handsomely if you would agree to signing a contract for your daughter to be in the main role – in a few years when the script is ready and everything, of course…"

Dave chuckled. "Isn't this a little early to start making contracts? Or did your Xatu foresee that she'll be a great actress when she's a teenager?"

"Publicity, you know," the person on the other end said. "Putting some girl in a costume is both more of a bother and much less intriguing for the fans, you know. Nobody expects kid actors to actually be any good. What matters is that the kids will love to know that Sarah Hooter in the movie is actually real! They'll be able to go meet her! Of course, there is always the problem of how to do the scenes before she's transformed – we'd either need an actress who looks a lot like her or to digitally remove her Vulpix features…"

"Look, I'm busy, and I really think you should speak with her about this sometime when she's ready, okay?" Dave sighed and hung up. "Stupid media. Who in their right mind would want to film that crap?"

"Daddy?" asked Jean. "Are we going yet?"

"Yes, sweetheart," he replied and took her tiny hand.

-------

"I'm here to see Mr. Rogers."

The lady behind the desk took one glance at Jean, who was standing on tiptoe, peeking up past the edge and looking at her with big, round, chestnut-brown eyes.

"Go right in, Mr. Ambrose. He's been expecting you."

"Come on, Jean."

He led her to a door on the left, adorned with large black letters.

"P-R-I-N-C-I-P-A-L," Jean spelled as Dave hesitantly turned the doorknob.

"That's right, sweetie," he said as he opened the door, ruffling the curls of her now-red hair. "You're so smart."

She beamed up at him as they walked into the office. A balding, elderly man was writing something by a desk straight ahead; the wall behind it was covered completely in intimidating bookshelves. Jean looked curiously around the room, perking her ears.

The man looked up. "Sit down, Mr. Ambrose."

Dave sat down on one of the small chairs in front of the desk and motioned to Jean to take the other.

"So," the principal said. "Your daughter. You applied for schooling for her, correct?"

Dave just nodded, watching the man carefully. "A problem with the paperwork?"

"No, no," Mr. Rogers said, waving his hand casually. "But…" He looked at Jean's curious face and then back at Dave. "You must understand that your daughter is quite unusual."

"Oh, I get it," Dave said coldly. "You don't want her in your school, do you?"

The principal peered at him through electric blue eyes. "My personal opinion is hardly a matter worth discussing, Mr. Ambrose," he replied, "as this is a public school."

"Then what is the problem? Trying to find some other excuse not to take her?"

"How old did you say she was again?" Mr. Rogers asked, ignoring Dave's comment.

"Five," Dave replied, "but her development happens a little faster than that of an ordinary human being, so she is capable of all the mental tasks of a six-year-old. I've taught her the alphabet, too, and plan to have her able to read fluently by the time she starts school."

"I see," the principal replied ambiguously, collecting some papers from his desk into a stack and placing it aside. "Well, the law for public schools says that potential students are only to be denied admission or expelled from the school if they seem to be repeated troublemakers or of insufficient intellect to keep up with others in their grade…"

"Get to the point."

"Well," Mr. Rogers said, not without a hint of annoyance, "does she… light things on fire, intentionally or unintentionally? Does she bite people? Does she use the toilet as one would expect of other students?"

Dave looked at him for a second and then laughed. "You know, I know exactly what you're thinking. It's what I was thinking before I got to know those kids. Now that I do know them, I can testify that they're more pleasant company than half of the morons you let into your school just because they happen to be fully human. And for the record, she may learn Fire attacks in the future, but doesn't know any yet, and if she did, she wouldn't use them."

The principal cleared his throat. "Mr. Ambrose, I do hope you can understand why we don't allow children to bring weapons to school."

"Well, yeah, but the fact the morphs can't remove their 'weapons' is a very crucial point," Dave argued. "Both the obvious fact that either they're going to school with them or not at all, and that the reason you have something to worry about when a normal child brings a weapon to school is that they wouldn't be bringing a weapon if they didn't intend to use it. I mean, true, the morphs would be easily able to smuggle a 'weapon' in if they felt like doing somebody harm, but how often does a well-raised kid really feel that way? Feel free to expel them if they try to use them, but my daughter has a right to professional education as long as she isn't hurting anyone."

Mr. Rogers did not look convinced. "Anything that is that easily able to attack the other children should not be in a public school."

"I told you, she can't use fire yet. You can reconsider when she learns it if you absolutely have to, sure, but according to our calculations that is not likely to be until she's a teenager from the way her fire sac is maturing…"

The principal sighed. "Fine, but what about biting? Or any other… what to call it, 'Pokémonlike' behavior?"

"She'll bite under exactly the circumstances an ordinary kid would bite and no more often than that," Dave replied irritably. "She behaves like a human in all but very insignificant ways. I mean, she snarls and bares her fangs when she's provoked sometimes, but I'd laugh if you tried to use that as an excuse not to accept her into your school."

"I'm bored," Jean whispered from Dave's side, looking up from the paperclips she'd been playing with. "When can we go?"

"Not yet, honey," he replied, his voice dripping with subtle sarcasm. "The nice man doesn't want you to go to school, see."

She looked up at him with an innocent expression of puzzlement. "Why not?"

"I don't know, sweetheart. Why don't you try asking him?"

She turned to Mr. Rogers and looked adorably up at him.

Just try to tell those puppy eyes that she's a danger to the other students! Dave thought triumphantly to himself, trying to hide the amusement in his expression. Just try!

The principal didn't try.

"Well, Mr. Ambrose," he finally mumbled, "I suppose if she is really incapable of using fire as you say, there can't be much harm in having her, but for her sake, I must beg you to consider the social issues…"

"I have considered them," Dave replied, "and I came to the conclusion that she would be a great deal better off socially by mingling with some kids of roughly her mental age than if isolated from them."

Mr. Rogers waved his hand hopelessly. "Fine. We'll register her. But I assure you that we will reconsider if she starts burning things. You may leave."

Dave smiled victoriously. "Thank you, Mr. Rogers," he said, took Jean's hand and walked with her out of the room.

"You are a genius," he muttered on the way out with a fond grin. "Classic. Truly masterful timing."

She giggled innocently. "You're always saying weird things."

My apologies for not commenting earlier; I've had university entrance exams to prepare for and attend, not to mention that my parents went on a little excursion out of the country so I've had to look after the family dog too. That means very little time for sitting down and reading, let alone reviewing. .__. Anyway, I'm here to remedy that. ^^

Chapter two...well, I have a bit of mixed feelings about that one. I mean, on one hand I love the writing and it does introduce the central characters, but at the same time...you still don't get to see what the morphs are like, so it sort of feels like having a cliffhanger on top of a cliffhanger if you get my meaning. Could just be that I'm being impatient, though. Poor Brian...not to mention the Slugma morph. .__.

Also, I must say that I like the way the morphs aren't like superheroes of some sort. It makes sense that a mix of human and pokemon would be weaker than pure pokemon, no? Dave is being an ass again, though; rearing indeed. xP Mind you, there is quite a bunch of characters being introduced in one go here; I must admit that I still can't remember most of the husband and wife duos or what appearance fit whom properly. Still, I really can't see any way to avoid introducing them all in this occasion.


Chapter three...Plenty of asterisks here, and oh my, I'm actually sympathizing with Dave now. But...um, does a Vulpix really howl? Or is that a figure of speech? o_O Oh, wait, apparently the fox equivalent of crying does sound like a howl...never mind. -.- Anyway, it's pretty ironic that Jane is the first to want to dispose of the kid even though she insisted on taking it in the first place. Just goes to show that people don't know what they want. xD But yes, regular babies are stressing enough, I'd imagine that something with a louder voice and sharp fangs isn't easy to handle.

That aside, the third part of the chapter left me wondering for a moment. I mean, there's no clear indication of a change in time, so...well, I was going 'Wait, they want to sign a contract for the freakin' baby?'. Some kind of indication of how much time has passed in-between would be nice. I mean, sure it's very much like a greedy corporation to want to seal a deal as early as possible, but...that young? o.O

Dragonfree said:

"…and those few times we do get to be alone together, all you think about is sex."

"I'll…"

He stopped. No, he wouldn't.

"Look, Jane," he said instead, "maybe there are some things where you're the one who needs to come towards my needs…"

Click to expand...

This part made me laugh so hard. A man has his limits, eh? xD


Personally, I liked the discussion with the principal best. I mean, he's being all proper and authorative yet at the same time he's so obviously biggoted. I'm also liking what I've seen of Jean's personality thus far and Dave also seems more likable here. ^^

Overall, I'm still liking it, although I hope Jean and Dave won't be hogging the spotlight this much in the future? I'd like to see how the other morphs are developing too. :3

Anyway, hope some of that rambling made sense. I'm still looking forward to future chapters. ^-^ Seriously, though, why isn't anyone else commenting? Does a fanfic need to be rife with typoes, faulty grammar, and base errors in order to get reviews these days? o.O

Jean and Dave were the focus of this chapter because it worked out better to show an example of only one of the morph families, and this one happens to be the one that most needs to be shown during those ten years before the actual story begins. This is just for this particular chapter; I may make chapters in the future that specifically focus on the other morphs, but in most of the fic the morphs will all (or at least many) appear together in each chapter.

No, it doesn't need typoes, AE, it just needs everyone's favorite novice critic to get off his lazy butt and write a review.

Yeah, not sure how much the asterisks actually add to all this. Usually, I'm against swearing in fanfic, but that's mostly because I think swearing in the conventional sense is just unneeded and overused by the media. You know, I'm really enjoying this story so far. I was pretty impressed with the whole "anti-abortion" speech- it reminded me slightly of one of the ladies at my church. Of course, Dave being a jerk for most of the story, and Brian being an idiot, really made me laugh. That and the whole "We were drunk when we came up with this" shtick. XD

Lessee... I can't wait to meet the Scyther morph, just to see if you're as good at writing half-Scyther as you are with writing about full ones. (Scyther's Story is still my personal favorite thing you've done outside QFTL).

I was impressed with the whole "Sarah Hooter" thing. I mean, where did that name come from?

The morphs are quite different from the actual Pokémon, so don't expect the Scyther morph to be very much like the wild Scyther in The Quest for the Legends and Scyther's Story.

The name "Sarah Hooter" didn't come from anything in particular, but that book series obviously parallels Harry Potter.

Anyway, chapter four.



Chapter 4

Author's Note: Remember that warning before the first chapter about how the fic is going to include sensitive subjects and may offend people? Yeah, that wasn't referring to that little abortion debate. It was referring to what you'll see in this chapter and later.

So again, I will emphasize that this fic is not trying to rant or preach about anything. All there is to it is characters with opinions. You have been warned.

-------

"We are gathered here today to discuss a desecration of life and of God's Creation. We are here to discuss a most brutal violation of the laws handed down to us from the Holy Spirit when our ancestors fled to the Pokémon world. We are here to discuss abominations against nature and the natural hierarchy where humans rule over Pokémon. I am referring, of course, to the Pokémorphs."

Isaac Daniels looked around the room. It was just the church cellar, mostly used for Sunday school, but religion was always steadily losing its popularity among the young and a few months ago they had canceled Sunday school and instead started to hold meetings for the few attending children in each other's own homes, while the parents had weekly meetings here after having convinced the priest to lend them the room for the purpose. That, incidentally, was why no one had bothered to change all the light bulbs in the room that had gone out. There was only one that still worked and that one only barely: it flickered on and off every now and then, leaving the room in momentary darkness.

It was truly pathetic, he thought, for an institute of such former greatness as the church, that not only were all the influential bishops starting to preach liberalism, hypocrisy and loose interpretations of God's word: the few true believers, when they needed to meet and discuss matters of true spiritual importance, had to do so in secrecy thanks to those appalling free speech-violating hate crime laws, and not only in secrecy, but in a dark, messy church cellar with nonfunctional lights.

"The Pokémorphs," he repeated. "Humans, though created in His image, should not play God, but those propagators of science and evolution of course disregard this as fantasy. I need only cite the very fourteenth Commandment: 'The creatures shall be the humble servants and the men shall be their kind masters: they are distinct by their nature.' It tells us that the Pokémonly and the humanly are to be separate. And we are again warned in the Book of Visions, 21.5: 'And there will be no more distinction between the men and the monsters: the Machoke shall pose as man and lie with the woman as the man.' By creating the Pokémorphs, they have blurred the natural border between humans and Pokémon, and thus brought us one step closer to the looming apocalypse prophesized in the Book of Visions."

He looked over the small group again as they nodded in agreement. "Ten years ago, a semi-religious movement chose to fight for the unborn Pokémorphs' lives. They chose to do this because they valued the sacredness of life above the clear laws condemning the creation of those creatures. But this was based on a misunderstanding. It is, after all, the Lord's creation and the miracle of natural conception that are things of sacredness; lives created by Man, as the Pokémorphs have, only violate His laws by their very existence. He must be frowning upon us now for having let them live and poison their surroundings for ten years, having let them go to school with our children…"

"One of them was in my daughter's class," a woman commented. "I had to have her moved to a different class. Apparently many other parents were doing the same, so they were having difficulties keeping the class together. It's good to know there are still sensible parents around."

Isaac nodded. "That does not, however, justify their existence, and the Lord has given us some signs to emphasize this. Mia Kerringan the Scyther Pokémorph, in particular, has shown herself to be a creature of evil, as she has now twice attempted to attack innocent religious children at the school they go to when they tried to expose her to the Word of God. I believe our very own Monica Sellers is the mother of one of the children." He nodded towards a plump woman with curly red hair.

"She threatened him with her blades…" she sobbed in response as the gathering looked quietly at her.

"The liberal media and the brainwashed public have already accepted the existence of the Pokémorphs. Already, large companies have offered Jean Ambrose the Vulpix Pokémorph the title role in the upcoming films based on the 'Sarah Hooter' books, which have already been established to be spreading Pokémon-superiority propaganda and messages of hate towards the righteous. Additionally, some of the scientists responsible for the experiments have expressed that they do not regret creating the Pokémorphs and shown enthusiasm towards the idea of future genetic experiments. First and foremost, it is David Ambrose, the leader of the original Pokémorph project."

Isaac looked around the room. A couple of people shuddered at the mention of the name.

"You have all noticed him in the media. Atheist and staunch supporter of the scientific worldview. Some of the other scientists were religious as children but then lost their faith (and in fact a couple claim to be liberal believers), but he never believed. He has ridiculed people of faith in public on multiple occasions, is known to drink excessively at times although not as often as he used to, and is a good enough debater to have weaseled every single one of the Pokémorphs into our public schools. He has also proclaimed the manmade Pokémorph children to be superior to naturally conceived children and wants to legalize genetic experiments with human embryos. It is clear that his anger towards God has grown extremely violent, and he seems prepared to do just about anything to get his revenge on the creation. He is more dangerous than all the morphs, simply because he is an adult and can create more of them. Now that he has defended Mia Kerrigan the Scyther Pokémorph after her vicious attacks on the other children twice and managed to force the school to keep her, it has become clear that he must be stopped at all costs. The safety of our children, and of the future world, is at stake."

A few of the men nodded in agreement, but Isaac noticed a woman looking doubtfully up at him.

"I hope you understand what kind of action I am suggesting we take here. Ladies, what remains is a discussion for the men. You may leave early today."

There was a short silence as the women looked around at their husbands, but none objected. The sound of chairs scraping the floor echoed off the walls as they stood up to leave. Isaac even held the door open for them. He was a gentleman at heart.

There was no doubt in his mind that he was going to do the right thing, no fear of being caught and sent to prison. He wouldn't have budged even if those darned liberals hadn't gotten the death penalty abolished a couple of centuries ago. The Lord had visited him in his dream and told him to do it. It was his ultimate purpose in life.

David Ambrose had to die.

-------

Katherine Harrison dropped her pencil.

She hissed at her hand. Even now, when she had been practicing it for seven years, it was still happening at least around once a week at school.

She pushed her hand down on top of the pencil that was now lying on her desk and tried to get her flaplike fingers to grab hold of it properly. The rustling gave it away altogether too loudly, but the teacher had gotten so used to it that she only glanced briefly at Katherine, rolled her eyes quickly and continued talking. The other students briefly looked over at her. It was only because it was autumn. By Christmas, this year's classmates would all be so used to it that the sound wouldn't register in their brains anymore.

She finally managed to fish the pencil up with the petals of her blue rose and awkwardly positioned it so that she would be able to write with it before resuming taking down notes. Scritch scritch. Sometimes she really hated her mother and her coworkers. She wasn't only a Roselia Pokémorph with fingers that were more like weak petal-like flaps she couldn't do much with and attracted rather a lot of attention along with the large green thorns sticking out of her head: she also grew so fast that she had been forced to go through twelve years' worth of schooling in only seven years. Just how difficult was it possible to make school for one's potential daughter before her birth? And to boot, she was left-handed. That just really took the cake, although her mother had sworn many times that the left-handedness had not been intentional.

Well, it was not like it wasn't technically the Stop Abortion Movement's fault, anyway, in an ironic way, although out of her mother's coworkers, only Dave had ever gotten tasteless enough to actually mention that in his defense. Theirs and Brian's. Katherine snorted. Oh, yes, Dave. Of course everything is always everybody's fault but yours. It's not like the person who thought of doing illegal genetic experiments in the first place is to blame for anything at all. No way. He just provided the genius behind the first ever successful gene-splicing in complex species. No relation at all to the consequences.

Of course she had to admit she was sometimes grateful for Dave. He was the most enthusiastic fighter trying to allow the Pokémorphs to lead a semi-normal life of the bunch and he had managed to talk all of the morphs' way into public schools despite their obvious difficulties, whether in the form of their physical and mental capabilities developing at supernatural speed, their hands being roses or their arms having blades on them. That, she had to admit, was definitely something. There was no way anybody but Dave could have convinced the schools to let Mia in and to keep her after she very nearly slashed her schoolmates to shreds. Twice. Hell, she was a Pokémorph herself and still wouldn't hesitate to conclude that Mia had simply shown herself to be extremely dangerous to whoever came within a two-meter radius of her. Sometimes she seriously wondered if Dave was using hypnosis or something.

She realized she'd been letting her mind wander way too much; she had stopped taking down notes long ago and was now just staring emptily out the window that she had to be seated by for her thorns to photosynthesize. She had difficulty concentrating when she didn't have sunlight shining on her.

She was pretty messed up and would have a very difficult life compared to everybody else, she had long ago realized. But really, she couldn't do anything about it, and couldn't help thinking she'd rather be there and have some difficulties picking up pencils than have been aborted as a fetus or even never have existed at all. And heck, even though most people at school must have gotten the impression that having roses for hands was hell, it only really got annoying when it came to holding and controlling small objects like pencils. At least she could move the petals with some force when she used them right. She was still practising to be able to play the violin, and was starting to see a little success.

At least, she thought to herself when she turned back to the teacher to continue taking down notes, she was not Gabriel.

-------

"Hey, uh…"

Gabriel turned around, looking at a little brown-haired kid he hadn't seen before who seemed, from the looks of it, to be extremely nervous. A few other kids around his age were standing a short distance away, watching.

"Your… you know…" The kid pointed at Gabriel's hair.

"Let me guess, it's on fire?" Gabriel asked dully, blindly slapping the front of his spiky red hair with his hand as the kid nodded timidly. He tried his best to stroke his hair back so it wouldn't get too close to the flames above his eyebrows again. Not that he expected it to be successful for any considerably stretch of time. He had, after all, been trying to keep his hair out of those flames for ten years now, and it always managed to get back into the fire after a while.

"Thanks," he said to the kid and turned to leave.

"And… um…"

"What? My hands dripping again?" Gabriel sighed as he turned his head.

"Yeah."

He looked down at his left hand, which was dripping warm orangeish goo onto the ground.

"Oh. Sorry. It happens." He hurriedly smeared the slime up his arm with his other hand and then looked at the kid and the group that was still goggling at him. "Let me guess, just finished your first day of school here?"

The kid nodded, still looking at him with wide, terrified eyes.

"Well, I suggest you get used to it," Gabriel told him and prepared to leave again.

"So are you the… the…"

"Yes, I'm the Slugma Pokémorph," Gabriel replied with a sigh. "Please try not to make me angry at any point in the future, because if my body temperature gets any higher than it is, I happen to have a very uncomfortably high risk of major organ failure."

The kid ran for it. Gabriel smiled grimly after him.

"My life sucks," he sighed as he headed towards his home.

Ehm... I don't know what you've been reading (or who's been talking to you) where you got such a dim view of Christianity, but this is neither the time nor the place for me to start a debate on the subject. (By the way, those made-up Bible verses were really kinda... out there. 0_o)

Anyway, liked the writing style... as usual, great grammar, characterization and all that. Obviously I can't really get as enthusiastic as I normally do, since I feel a little like my entire religion is getting bashed, but otherwise from a literary perspective there's nothing wrong with this chapter, and I'm kinda glad you aren't trying desperately to be politically correct.

Did you read the warnings at the top of this chapter and the beginning of the thread? Nothing in this fic has any relation whatsoever to my opinion on anything. It's not the Bible, it's not Christianity, and I don't have a "dim view" on it. Obviously it is rather obvious where the primary inspiration for the technical details of this made-up religion comes from, but the technical details really have nothing to do with anything and especially not with the fact Isaac is planning to murder Dave.

Isaac Daniels is a lunatic who happens to consider himself a religious fundamentalist and uses that to justify his lunacy with a group of confused followers who buy what he says because he claims it's the will of God and backs it up with random out-of-context passages of his particular ancient religious scripture that happen to seem to support whatever sick cause he is fighting for. There are people like this out there, whether you like it or not, and they happen to be the main antagonists of this fic. As I can't stop repeating, the fic contains characters with opinions, and those opinions have no relation whatsoever to my own. I even managed to sneak in the fact that some of the protagonists are religious too. The difference between them and Isaac is that they are not lunatics.

Damn. Why did I know this was going to happen no matter how often I tried to clarify my meaning? Isaac and his little group of churchgoers do not represent the bulk of any religious believers. They represent, respectively, a lunatic and confused people who will buy whatever their current idea of authority tells them. Religion just happens to be the perfect excuse for lunatics to pretend they're in the right and convince other people that they are.

There are Christian lunatics, Muslim lunatics, Hindu lunatics, atheist lunatics, agnostic lunatics and generally lunatics of any religion. I don't know if there are relatively more such lunatics among any one group, but if there are it is not relevant. Isaac Daniels is a lunatic of a nonexistent religion, but one which, like all religions, when the right quotes are picked from it and interpreted in the right way, can be made to seem to approve of his intention to murder the Pokémorphs and their creators.

Why did I make the main antagonist a religious lunatic? Because he needed a motive, and religion is truly a motive among motives in the hands of crazy people.


And believe me, if somebody in this thread stood up to tell me "Oh, I agree with you! Christians are lunatics, aren't they? Atheism forever!" I'd be the first person to tell him he missed my point and is a narrow-minded idiot.

Umm...yeah, ACC: never make the mistake of equating the narrator with the author when dealing with a work fiction (especially when the author has written two big, honking disclaimers saying that this isn't the case). Free indirect discourse (the narrator temporarily taking on the views of a character) is a quite common stylistic device and I believe that's what's going on here? Do remember that the general decline of religion as a whole could just be in Daniels' head (probably caused by a decline in this small cult); nowhere does it say that Christianity as we know it is in trouble.

And...I was right! :3 *Happy dance* I figured that it smelled like a fundamentalist cult (I mean, having to hold your meetings in a dark cellar with dim lighting? That's a bit of a giveaway.) Yeah, I read through this last evening but didn't have the time to comment. Flammable stuff, definitely (as has already been proven here) but also scarily realistic. o.o There are people exactly like Daniels in the real world (And no, I'm not saying "all Christians are crazy murderers and book burners!" so people had better not even try to go there <.<). It's the same phenomenon as the 'regular' rioters who join up in every protest they find (no matter what cause they represent or oppose) just to break things and hurt others. For people like that, religion is just an excuse among many others. :\

Anyways, back to the fic: your style is impressive as always, especially the way you presented Isaac Daniels' - seriously disturbed - world view. As for the faked verses...I dunno, from where I'm standing those emulate the biblical style very well, but yeah; I'm no expert. At any rate, I loved Katherine's musings (particularly on Dave); she's now my official favorite character of the moment. n_n

Keep up the good work, and good on you for having the courage not to self-censor the potentially offensive part and compromise the story. :3

Yeah... sorry 'bout that. I guess I was just kind of... put out. I mean, I see a lot of anti-Christian material out there today, but I don't find enough on store shelves that is 1)really and truly good and 2)written from a Christian perspective. Plus, people that think Christianity is some kind of fundamentalist, discriminating religion that destroys culture- well, that's kind of a pet peeve. So I guess I overreacted a bit. Anyway.... as I said before, I'm still enjoying the story, so yeah, I'm not saying that "OMG THIS IS EVIL", I was just trying to get out my whole "Why on earth does everyone pick on Christianity as evile (intentionally misspelled) when they write about multiculturalism/science? Waaaaaah!" type feelings. So please, don't hold my earlier comments against me.

Anyway, I must say that I'm still trying to figure out how Sally Hooter is supposed to be drawing on Harry Potter.... and if the name was just random, it might be a good idea to change it, since Hooters is the name of a restaraunt here in America known for waitresses who just got off the pages of some naughty magazine. I'm not sure if there are any in Iceland, but the connotation with that name isn't exactly one I'm sure you wanted to imply. (Unless you did mean to imply it, in which case you may call me an idiot and do scary things to me.)

I'll shut up now. XD

It's not meant to be picking on Christianity or portraying those poor people as a representation of Christians, as I said. I just borrowed the general terminology.

Why everybody picks on Christianity? Because it's the religion that most atheists (me included) are most familiar with, so if anybody wants to give an example of a religion, it is easiest for them to use Christianity. That's all there is to it, really. People don't want to pick on Islam or Hinduism or whatever because they're afraid they don't know what they're talking about, while all Westerners are brought up either in Christian faith themselves or around Christians and know the religion decently.

Sarah Hooter is a book series about a very unique teenager whose titles are in the form "[main character name] and the [something]" which is mind-bogglingly popular, especially among children, has a load of people who can't possibly see why everybody likes it so much, and which has movies made out of it. It is also called evil by some religious organizations. That is the extent of the similarity, however, and I didn't intend for the similarity to be very close, just... there. Let's just say I used the Harry Potter books as a template for the Sarah Hooter books in the same way as I used Christianity as a template for the unnamed religion of the Pokémon world. And of course, it doesn't reflect any of my personal opinion about Harry Potter (I like the Harry Potter books, but the main characters of the story are all snickering at the pseudoscientificness of Sarah Hooter).

Sarah Hooter herself is an ironically sexualized character despite being the star of a children's book - out of all fanart and fanfiction featuring Pokémorphs, I'd guess that more than half of it is hentai, and I can easily imagine this would apply to the Pokémon world as well. Dave's narration even hinted at this in chapter two ("...the cover illustration of 'Sarah Hooter and the Rocket Experiment': a sexy teenage girl..." and "Basically she'll look almost exactly like that Sarah Hooter picture I showed you, except I can't guarantee she'll look that hot"). This, of course, has nothing to do with Harry Potter and is just a slight stab at the sexualization of modern society.

So her name having sexual connotations is only appropriate. :P

Awesome storyA! I'm loving how you did that! I was hoping for Gardenvoir morph but there're none. I can imagine Vulpix! I can't wait to see more.

Actually, I would kind of like to beg to differ a bit on the "why", there, Dragonfree. I'm sorry again for jumping the gun, I'm fairly paranoid, and for good reason too. Anyway, I've thought about what you said about people using Christianity 'cause that's what they know about, and it made me laugh a bit, since in Japan when Christianity or Christian symbols show up in an anime, it's probably because the Japanese don't know about it. Seriously, I did some studying and it turns out that in Japan, most people grow up without a concept of special creation, unlike here in the west, so they can't really understand the religion a hundred percent. They do borrow its trappings, though.

My point here isn't "Ahahaha, Dragonfree's wrong, score one for the non-atheist mwahahaha!", I just wanted to share the interesting fact that this particular religion is used on both sides of the globe as a mess-up, on one side because they think they know about it completely, on the other because they know very little. Weird, eh?

Anyway, on to my actual reviewing. I've wanted to do a real, in-depth review of at least one chapter of the story at least once, so in light of the fact that we're now seeing the Pokemorphs from the title, I believe it is time that I do my little "What I'm liking" stage.

She finally managed to fish the pencil up with the petals of her blue rose and awkwardly positioned it so that she would be able to write with it before resuming taking down notes. Scritch scritch. Sometimes she really hated her mother and her coworkers. She wasn't only a Roselia Pokémorph with fingers that were more like weak petal-like flaps she couldn't do much with and attracted rather a lot of attention along with the large green thorns sticking out of her head: she also grew so fast that she had been forced to go through twelve years' worth of schooling in only seven years. Just how difficult was it possible to make school for one's potential daughter before her birth? And to boot, she was left-handed. That just really took the cake, although her mother had sworn many times that the left-handedness had not been intentional.

Click to expand...

Alright, Katherine's officially my favorite character for some reason. She reminds me a bit of what I used to feel like after gym class: "I'm short, I have no hand-eye coordination worth speaking of, and on top of that I'm the weakest guy in my class!". The whole "Woe is me" thing doesn't really catch my attention unless it's done in such a way that it doesn't look like the character is morbidly depressed, and this little section pulled it off quite nicely.

"Hey, uh…"

Gabriel turned around, looking at a little brown-haired kid he hadn't seen before who seemed, from the looks of it, to be extremely nervous. A few other kids around his age were standing a short distance away, watching.

"Your… you know…" The kid pointed at Gabriel's hair.

"Let me guess, it's on fire?" Gabriel asked dully, blindly slapping the front of his spiky red hair with his hand as the kid nodded timidly. He tried his best to stroke his hair back so it wouldn't get too close to the flames above his eyebrows again. Not that he expected it to be successful for any considerably stretch of time. He had, after all, been trying to keep his hair out of those flames for ten years now, and it always managed to get back into the fire after a while.

Click to expand...

I couldn't stop laughing. That was just unbelievably funny for some reason. I mean, I could see the whole thing playing out in my head. It was like "for once, a moment where I can see a comedic side to Dragonfree!"

"Good afternoon. I'm from Rayquaza Studios, and we have just bought the rights to filming the Sarah Hooter books. We would be ready to pay very handsomely if you would agree to signing a contract for your daughter to be in the main role – in a few years when the script is ready and everything, of course…"

Dave chuckled. "Isn't this a little early to start making contracts? Or did your Xatu foresee that she'll be a great actress when she's a teenager?"

"Publicity, you know," the person on the other end said. "Putting some girl in a costume is both more of a bother and much less intriguing for the fans, you know. Nobody expects kid actors to actually be any good. What matters is that the kids will love to know that Sarah Hooter in the movie is actually real! They'll be able to go meet her! Of course, there is always the problem of how to do the scenes before she's transformed – we'd either need an actress who looks a lot like her or to digitally remove her Vulpix features…"

Click to expand...

And... cue the capitalistic bigwigs.

Okay, enough there. Anyway, I guess now that I've got egg on my face, I'd better skedaddle until the next chapter is written, but when it is, I'm hoping to see what the religious fundamentalist's plan is.

(By the way, in a totally unrelated subject, I think the real reason I wigged out about the cult was that the way the leader talks is almost exactly like how my assistant pastor does when he's preaching. Obviously, my pastor does it without the whole "we must kill X" or "This is evil and must be destroyed" thing, but you get the idea. 0_o)

I don't see how the Japanese are relevant. I was just saying that most Western atheists (i.e. the most we hear about the most) will be most familiar with Christianity and have the easiest time picking on that (not to mention more annoyed at it since it's the religion people most commonly try to convert them to).

What, you haven't seen any of my humourous side yet? :P You're missing out on a lot, then.

Anyway, thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy chapter five as much as I enjoyed writing it (which is, for reasons of which you will soon be aware, quite a lot).



Chapter 5

Mia Kerrigan sat on a bench at the edge of the school grounds. For most kids, free periods were their favourite time of the school day. And so had they been for her the first couple of years.

Then her scythes had started to grow, and the other kids had grown deathly afraid of her, something she could not really relate to personally but could, in a limited sense, understand.

On its own that was perhaps not too bad, since she had never been a particularly social person and initially it had been very satisfying to see all the gawking eyes averted as soon as she glanced in their general direction. The bad part was that it wasn't until they became afraid of her that the Nutjobs had begun to feel some sense of martyrdom (an idea which they, for some reason she could not quite grasp either, seemed to feel oddly attracted to) in trying to explain to her why she was a vile creature of Hell.

And that was why she felt her glossy yellow insect wings begin to twitch that day when she realized that the Nutjobs were approaching her.

The boy she had attacked the last time was absent from the group, and she felt a hint of dark pride in herself. The oldest of them, a sixteen-year-old girl with square-rimmed glasses and long brown hair tied into a ponytail, was still there, however, and this year she had gathered a few new followers.

Mia said nothing as they came within a few feet of the bench.

"Still here?" the girl asked with contempt in her voice. Mia noticed a small blond-haired boy with large blue eyes standing in the group and looking at her with an expression almost of pity.

"Frank left because of you, you know," the girl went on. "He didn't want to come back. His mom put him into a different school. I hope you're happy."

Mia looked at the little boy, who looked back at her. He bit his lip, but didn't show any other sign of being afraid.

She liked him.

"He was my friend."

The little boy blinked his large blue eyes slowly, surveying her, his expression still a strange blend of interest and sad pity.

"What's wrong with you? Why don't you ever answer when people talk to you?"

Mia's eyes darted up at her and her head slowly followed. She could see the muscles under the skin in the girl's exposed neck tensing in anger, her posture stiffening slightly. The little boy glanced up at her and then back at Mia.

"You can talk!" the girl shouted. Her fingers curled into fists, her knuckles whitened. "Say something!"

"What?" Mia replied, her attention now focusing on the sinews in the girl's neck shifting as she swallowed.

"I know you aren't one of God's creations," the girl replied with a slight jerk of her head, her voice shaking slightly. Her ponytail swished around behind her for a second but quickly came to a stop. "But if you turn to him, he will accept you like any of his children. You can be good and you will be forgiven. How you were created doesn't matter. Everybody is the same before God. I don't know why you do the… things you do. Maybe you… you've got demons inside of you or… something."

The way the girl's gaze shifted as she said the last sentence betrayed undeniable scepticism. She didn't really believe there were any demons. Mia could tell. That girl was confused and bitter, and had never gotten to Mia much, not even last year when she had been a lot more violent and actually punched her or the times when she had screamed about the eternal fires of Hell. It was the boy that bothered her more, that boy who wasn't like the other cronies. The way he looked at her, sad, pitying.

"There is no God," Mia just replied, watching both the girl and the boy. The girl flinched at the words, as if she had just been stung. The boy closed his eyes for a moment, ever-so-slightly shaking his head, knowingly, like it was Mia who was the one with the empty faith in imaginary friends in the sky. Something about it irritated her. Why was she to be pitied? She liked that boy. He wasn't supposed to irritate her.

"Leave me alone," she said, looking straight at him. He looked back at her and then stepped slowly forward. Mia's arms automatically twitched into a defensive position, ready to slash, despite the wooden sheath bound around her forearms that covered her small blades from wrist to elbow and rendered them harmless. The boy didn't blink. His eyes looked straight at hers, searched them, flicking now and then to the bony horns sticking out of her green hair and the sheathed blades on her arms.

"Get away from me," she growled, her arm twitching. She would have hit him, except that she still liked him and didn't want to.

"I feel sorry for you," he told her, unblinking. Mia saw the brown-haired girl jerk her head down toward the boy, her bitter expression blending with surprise.

The boy took another step.

Mia jerked her arm towards him, but another girl from the group with the same blond hair and slightly smaller blue eyes, most likely his sister, pulled him back and jumped in front of him so that the sheath covering Mia's scythe hit the side of her arm instead. There wasn't much force in the blow and the girl wasn't hurt, but she gave Mia just the expression that she had found most typical of the Nutjobs in her time dealing with them.

"Listen, you freak," she said as she threw Mia's arm away, standing so close to her that Mia could smell the blood rushing to her face, "I know you can't hurt anyone with that on your scythes, but we're going to get you out of this school, no matter what. You contaminate it with evil. You should be locked up somewhere away from real people where you can't hurt them, and…"

Without thinking, Mia bared her teeth and snarled, a reaction that to her felt more natural than she knew it ought to. The girl recoiled slightly, clenching her jaws. "You can't hurt us," she repeated under her breath, more to herself than to Mia. "You can't hurt us. They put that on your arms so you couldn't."

Mia knew it was a bad idea, but she growled, jerked her left hand up to the leather straps tying the sheath to her right hand and began to tear wildly at them. The Nutjobs took only a fraction of a second to realize what she was doing and immediately turned around to speed up to the school building. The blond-haired girl had to practically drag her brother with them.

She ripped the sheath fully off and felt the cool air around her exposed scythe. It felt good. The blade itched for something to cut, but the Nutjobs were already gone.

She looked around, straight into the eyes of the teacher currently on watch who was standing by the wall a few meters away, his face pale and sweaty as he picked up his cellphone and dialled what she knew to be Dave's number.

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes to calm down, shaking her head to clear it, but it was already too late.

-------

"Mr. Ambrose, surely you can understand that this is unacceptable."

"I don't see why this is any worse than what happened before."

The principal's office was not very big, and the crammed bookshelves that always threatened to collapse and the deathly still, heavy, red curtains in front of the firmly shut windows gave it a distinctly claustrophobic atmosphere that had made her despise the room the moment she had first set foot into it. She was sitting on one of the chairs in the corner with her bare, clawed feet up on the other, examining the blades that poked out through her skin just below her wrists while the men talked it over. She heard the principal sigh.

"Mr. Ambrose, this is the third time this has happened. The first time you assured us it was a one-time occurrence and would never happen again. The second, you told us that for safety we could put on that sheath which would protect any students from potential unconscious outbursts. But now this, too, has proven futile. We have multiple eyewitnesses who will readily swear that she simply took the sheaths off and all that saved her fellow students was that while she was doing so they had time to flee. Surely you cannot expect us to keep her at this school even after this. It is clearly only a matter of time before she murders someone. Frankly I'm afraid of her." He lowered his voice, apparently having deluded himself into thinking her hearing wasn't that much better than an ordinary human being's. "I wouldn't dare take her into this office if you weren't here too, to be honest. The teachers are afraid of teaching her classes. More than one student has come in and expressed great concern or even wish to leave the school." Not that it mattered that she heard it. She had noticed all of that already.

She poked the sharp corner of the scythe right at the elbow where it was widest, just before it sharply turned back into her arm and rejoined the bone. A trickle of crimson blood from her fingertip travelled down the blade and started to glide off her elbow. She wiped it carefully off with the finger it had come from and licked it off from there. She'd always enjoyed the heavy, metallic taste of it.

"You're not getting it," Dave's irritated voice replied. "They provoked her. Nobody in their right mind would provoke a half-Scyther. It's their own damned fault, if you ask me."

"All the more reason not to allow half-Scyther into this school, don't you think?"

"She has a right to education."

"Of course she does, but if she can't function among other students, her education may have to be carried out in her private home where she can be kept under control."

A fly buzzed close to her and landed on the wall. Mia's eyes automatically followed it as it crawled upwards in vain hopes of finding open air. She raised her arm slowly.

WHAM.

Dave and the principal jerked their heads around in surprise, abruptly ceasing their conversation. She pulled the short blade out of the wall it had sunk slightly into, letting the two halves of the fly fall down on either side of the resulting crack as a subconscious smile flickered across her face.

It took only a moment for her mind to snap back into human manners, her eyes flicking back to the crack and then to the elderly man in the blue suit standing pale-faced behind the desk. "I didn't like it," she just said.

Dave looked at her for an awkward second and then turned quickly back to the principal. "Eh."

"We are not going to have her at this school anymore, Mr. Ambrose," Mr. Rogers said, watching Mia. He had always been a man who had contained his fear relatively well. He may have been gripping the edge of the desk so tightly that his knuckles whitened, and a bead of sweat was trickling down the side of his forehead, perhaps or perhaps not just because the room was awfully hot for at least her liking, but his voice remained steady and his expression determined. "Please leave. This decision is final. She cannot function at a public school, and you know it as well as I do, Mr. Ambrose."

Dave licked his lips nervously for a second, his gaze travelling a few times from her to the principal and back to her.

"Let's just go," he finally said, offering his hand to Mia. She had always liked it, the way he offered his hand. He did it sincerely and fearlessly, the muscles in his fingers occasionally twitching in protest but his mind inevitably successful in forcing them under control and maintaining the gesture. There was something intrinsically trustworthy in it, more so than in most other people, whose revulsion at the idea of touching her was generally far more obvious. She took his hand and stood up, letting him lead her out of the office and slam the door stubbornly at their backs.

Oh, yes, she liked Dave.

They walked out of the school building to his shiny white car and he walked over to the driver's seat while she silently opened the door on the passenger side and got in.

"Watch the seat, Mia, watch the seat…" Dave muttered as he closed the door on his side.

She looked on either side of her elbows, where the sharp points at the end of her scythes had created a pattern of small holes and tears in the leather through the years, making sure the blades didn't touch it as she buckled the seat belt.

Dave started the engine and drove off the sidewalk where he had carelessly parked the car. He sighed, looking briefly at her with his blue eyes.

"It was the Nutjobs again," she said.

Dave snorted. "It's always them, isn't it? ****ing *******s, constantly shoving their religion down people's throats. I've known too many people like that in my life. Complete retards, all of them."

Mia nodded dully.

"So what was their latest theory about your origins? Have they done demonic possession yet?"

She didn't answer. He looked at her again.

"There was a boy," she said. "I liked him."

Dave raised his eyebrows. "What, did he think you were just a lesser imp and not Satan himself?"

She shook her head absent-mindedly. Dave was peering through the windshield as he turned round a corner and didn't notice.

"Don't listen to them. I've told you, they're bat**** insane. You'd get more sense out of Babelfishing a Kadabra on crack. Just don't even try."

She didn't understand them. Religious faith just didn't make any sense. She couldn't feel angry at them, like Dave did. Just baffled at their existence. Why they would want to believe in something they had no evidence for. It was just something she couldn't wrap her head around.

"Goddamn kids," Dave swore under his breath as a group of children scattered from the street in front of them.

"I don't get it," she muttered.

"What?"

"Religion."

"That's because unlike those nutsos you've got some sense in your head."

"My parents believe in God too."

Dave pretended not to have heard her for a few seconds. She watched a fly sit down on the back of his neck. If she slashed at it she could accidentally cut his head off. Haha. Oops.

But she liked him, so she didn't actually do it. And even if she hadn't liked him, there would have been complications. Too obvious who did it. No good Pokémorph sympathizers left to defend her in court. Somebody would point out her mental age of sixteen and say she was responsible for her actions. Everybody else would agree because they wanted to get rid of her. 'That fly was getting on my nerves' had never worked well for her. Jail. Tiny cell with stale air. Nothing decent to eat. It just wouldn't pay.

He turned back to her. The fly took off and instead settled on the car window on his side. "Well, at least your parents don't take it so damned seriously."

She nodded and looked out the window.

"Hey, uh, want a hotdog?"

She shrugged.

"Great," Dave replied and turned round the next corner.

-------

Howard Kerrigan was doing the dishes when he got the feeling that Lucy was standing behind him. She had a wonderful knack for being quiet and sneaking up on people, but she hadn't yet tamed her abilities enough to stop a faint psychic signal from pushing gently at those she approached, alerting them of her presence.

He turned around, glanced at her and smiled. "Something bothering you?"

She looked up at him with wide, innocent eyes.

"Daddy, am I an abomination?"

He turned around and stared at her, pushing away the trace of hypnotic power in her eyes. "What? No. Who told you that?"

She pointed at the window above the kitchen sink. "There's a guy with a sign outside in front of the door."

Howard looked back at the window, and indeed, there was a man standing on the sidewalk outside the front door holding a sign that said simply 'VISIONS 21.5'.

He ripped off his rubber gloves and ran to the front door. "Hey!" he shouted heatedly as he opened it, running towards the man. "Don't you dare stand here giving my daughter ideas! Get away from my house right now!"

The protestor looked at him. It was a young man with pale skin and dark hair that would have been handsome if not for the icy coldness in his light blue eyes. Howard fleetingly recognized him as one of the scariest fundamentalists from church, somebody Daniels. He shivered.

"Get away from my house," he repeated sternly. "You are not welcome here."

"Realize what you have done and repent," Daniels said in a quiet, cold voice. "The Pokémorphs are abominations before the Lord. He will make you pay for their creation, sooner or later. You will regret that He ever let you be born."

"Get off my property now."

A crazy glint appeared in the man's piercing eyes. "He has already chosen His instruments. Those of true faith have received their calling. You will be punished."

"I told you to leave."

A smiled flickered across Daniels' features. "The rabbit who refuses to hear of the fox," he said, "will regret it only when she wanders into his lair."

Howard returned his icy stare for a second. He felt cold.

"Very well, Howard," Daniels said quietly. "I see you cannot be persuaded."

"Not by you. Go away."

Daniels opened his mouth, but then flicked his eyes to the side. Howard looked to see Dave's white car pull into their driveway. Both doors opened, and Dave and Mia stepped out. Mia glanced dully at Daniels while Dave pointed at the door to indicate that they needed to talk inside.

"Excuse me," Howard said coldly to Daniels and walked to the door to meet them.

He took a last glance over his shoulder as he turned the key. Daniels looked at Dave with the creepiest grin Howard had ever seen, and then turned slowly around to walk down the street, still holding the daunting sign above his head.

Wow, it's been even longer since chapter five than I thought. <<;

I can't say I like this chapter that much. It's mostly just finishing off some morph introductions before the actual story can get going (which it will in chapter seven). But I like parts of it too. See what you think.




Chapter 6

"So who was that creep?" Dave asked as Howard closed the door behind them. Howard invited Dave and Mia to sit down at the kitchen table and collapsed into his own chair. Lucy the Misdreavus morph waved to Dave from a few meters away and he waved absent-mindedly back to her.

"It's somebody from church," Howard sighed. "Something Daniels. His beliefs are rather… extreme, from what I've seen of them."

"So in other words, he's a nut," Dave said cheerfully. "What did he want?"

"He was trying to scare Lucy, apparently," Howard replied with contempt. "Calling her an abomination. When I came out, he started making threats about the Wrath of God." He shuddered. "I'm not sure whether to take him seriously."

"Don't," Dave just said. "They feed on fear. Don't give them the pleasure of seeing you get worried. What do you think is going to happen, anyway? Is he going to sit somewhere and pray for a meteor to strike you or what? Newsflash: it won't work. Even if God existed, do you think he'd listen to a guy like that?"

"I don't know. He scares me sometimes. He likes to make speeches about how he will rejoice in Heaven at the thought of the infidels burning forever in Hell…"

Dave snorted.

"…but I suppose it would be stupid to worry about him too much," Howard finished with a sigh. "So. What did she do this time?"

"She got kicked out," Dave replied in a tired voice, rubbing his forehead. "For good. She took off the sheaths and they went ballistic. And then chopped up a fly in the principal's office. I think that took the cake."

"Oh, Mia," Howard sighed, looking wearily at his older daughter. "Why do you always get yourself into trouble like that?"

"It was a stupid fly," she answered defensively. "It was too dumb to get out of the way. It deserved it."

"What are we going to do with you now?" her father asked in frustration. "You can't keep doing that all the time, Mia! You need to start learning how to function among normal people, or I'm going to go crazy. I mean it. How are you going to get schooling now? I have three other children to take care of and Cheryl is always…"

"I'll just teach her at home, okay?" Dave interrupted. "There's no need to make a big deal about it and start blaming her. Uh, Mia, why don't you go play with Lucy or something?"

The Pokémorph stood up wordlessly, glanced at the smaller girl and went through a door on the other side of the hall and shut it behind her. Her sister walked after her, disappearing through the closed door as if nothing were more natural.

"Look," Dave said after making sure they were gone, looking back at Howard. "We've been through this. She's basically a biologically defined sociopath. Telling her she needs to learn how to function will at most just irritate her and make her hurt somebody. Please don't push her limits."

"It can get pretty frustrating," Howard answered quietly, glancing back at the door to the girls' room, through which faint giggles could now be heard. "When you have children, you want them to be able to understand how you feel. Think in approximately the same terms… She's so different from the other morphs. Lucy actually feels like a human being, but Mia is just so painfully nonhuman in the way she talks, thinks, acts…" He rubbed his eyes briefly and then blinked a few times. "I mean, I love her. I really do. But… God…" He shook his head. "Somehow I can't give up the idea that I can change her. She looks like she's supposed to be able to function like a human being. My brain likes to think that means she can."

"Well, she can't, and you'll have to live with that," Dave responded and looked around the house. "Is Cheryl around?"

Howard shook his head. "She's out by the town hall protesting the lack of formal action against increased carbon emissions from the city's cars."

Dave rolled his eyes briefly. "Well, I'll get in touch about the homeschooling thing, I suppose. Have to get going now so I'll be in time to get Jean from school."

Howard nodded and stood up, shaking Dave's hand. "Thanks for visiting. And driving her. You know, you do so much for those kids, it's unbelievable."

Dave smiled slightly. "I made them. Least I could do. I'll see you around."

"Goodbye."

And with that, Dave left the house and closed the door behind him. Howard saw him through the window straightening his jacket as he walked back over to his car. "You made them. Right," he muttered to himself.

He sighed and knocked on the door to the girls' room. He waited for a couple of seconds as the laughter quieted before opening it carefully.

Mia, her unsheathed scythe raised, had seemingly stopped mid-motion when he knocked; she stood deathly still, only her eyes pointed towards him. Her sister was standing below her, still grinning childishly.

The father shuddered at the sight. "Dave is gone. He's going to be homeschooling you from now on, Mia."

She didn't answer, but he had grown to expect it. He looked between the two for a second and then said, "You know I don't like this game at all."

With a careless, sweeping motion, without looking away from her father, Mia swung her raised scythe straight through her sister's currently insubstantial forehead. Howard felt his paternal instinct twitch in horror, but Lucy only continued to giggle, grinning happily at her father as if having a blade repeatedly driven through one's head was every sane person's idea of fun.

"I'll leave you to it, I suppose," Howard said, shaking his head. "Lucy, you remember to always stay insubstantial while she's there with you, all right? And the moment you get the least bit tired, you stop before you become unable to keep it up. Is that clear? Let me see you go invisible."

"Yes, Daddy," the small girl answered, her pitch-black form briefly fading to a smoky sort of transparent and then becoming entirely invisible. Invisibility was more taxing for her than insubstantiality; if she could still make herself entirely invisible, it meant she had plenty enough energy to keep up her insubstantial form, and they had agreed on using it as a test. He nodded as she came back into view.

"Please be careful," he said quietly before closing the door to the room again. He heard a high-pitched shriek that made him jump but quickly dissolved into another fit of giggles.

While Mia was generally not very social, she had always been a little closer to her sister than to anyone else, and they got along surprisingly well. Nonetheless, Howard didn't doubt that she could easily end up hurting Lucy in the heat of the moment, and their typical games were just far too violent for comfort: Mia chasing Lucy and trying to slash her; Lucy covering something worthless and easily destructible in the folds of the thin, dress-like extra skin that covered most of her body and running around while Mia would try to slash the object apart; Lucy charging up a primitive Shadow Ball that Mia would slash away before it got to her…

It was all pretty creepy, and while nothing very serious had happened yet, there had been accidents. One time Lucy had gotten hurt when slashed in a semisubstantial state; she had been unable to feel her arm properly for a few days. Another time Mia had slashed her when she hadn't been ready, but thankfully realized it and managed to stop her scythe before it made more than a shallow cut. Mia had lost her balance in mid-slash and hit her head on the floor or walls numerous times. Howard would have forbidden them to do it long ago, but Dave had convinced him that if Mia couldn't let out her hunting instinct (he shuddered to think of it) in some relatively harmless way, she would practically be a ticking bomb, and it would be a good way for the sisters to bond a little more, and for Mia to feel freer and have an easier time forming relationships in general, to let them play these dangerous games together.

Howard couldn't deny that Mia's self-control and Lucy's Misdreavus powers had greatly improved since this had been given the green light, but he still didn't like it. Cheryl took it more lightly, usually brushing it off with some vague kids-can-kill-each-other-in-all-sorts-of-ways-if-they-aren't-careful-but-the-girls-can-handle-this-responsibly-Howard-and-we-should-listen-to-Dave.

"Yeah, you made them, Dave," he muttered to himself as he turned back towards the kitchen sink. "All the way until it's getting inconvenient. Then it's all Brian's fault."

-------

Incidentally, Brian was also doing the dishes and was currently picking up the last plate from beside the sink. He quickly scrubbed the remains of yesterday's spaghetti off the surface and turned the plate a few times over under the faucet just as he heard the front door open and slam shut again. He put the wet plate down to dry, turned the knob to reduce the stream of water to a trickle and eventually nothing, and pulled the pink rubber gloves off his fingers to lay them down on the edge of the sink. "Gabriel?"

"Hi, Dad," came the weary reply.

"How was school?"

"Decent." Brian heard Gabriel sigh from the entrance as the boy took off his shoes. "Kids are still staring."

"They'll get used to it in a week or two," Brian said as he walked out of the kitchen to meet his son in the doorway. "Oh, your hair…"

Gabriel reached blindly to the top of his head to extinguish the small flame that had gotten into a loose strand of hair. "Gone."

"Yes, gone." Brian looked the boy up and down and sighed with parental pride. "I'm really proud of you, Gabriel," he said for the umpteenth time. Gabriel rolled his eyes, but not without the corners of his mouth curling into a small smile. "When you'd just been made we didn't really think you'd survive, but you've just done so well and been so strong and grown into such a wonderful person." He beamed down at the short boy and was overwhelmed, as so often, by the strange feeling of knowing he'd been raising that kid for the past ten years. It didn't feel like that long, and all the headaches and complications of keeping him alive for the first few years had blurred into a hazy dark period in his memory. He'd been very stressed out then and several times begged Dave to make somebody else raise the Slugma.

Now he was infinitely glad that Dave had steadfastly refused.

"You're the greatest kid in the world, Gabriel."

"You've told me already, Dad," Gabriel said with a weary smile.

"Pizza and a good movie?" Brian asked him with a grin.

"Sounds good," the Pokémorph replied smugly, "but I think my skin is starting to harden, so if you'll excuse me."

Brian smiled and stepped out of the doorway. Gabriel walked into his room and closed the door.

The kid was still high-maintenance, of course. Being what he was, his gooey skin hardened slowly over the day and to counter this he had to massage some heat into the entirety of it at least once a day. When he stood still for too long and wasn't thinking about rubbing his hands together every now and then, they would leave little orange globs of slime where he was standing, such as now in the doorway from the entrance hall (Brian was getting a mop to clean it up now), and he had to wear specifically made clothes that were coated with plastic on the inside. But one got used to it.

Brian still felt sorry for what Gabriel had to endure. He'd been bullied at school for being chubby with glasses himself; although Gabriel didn't like to talk about it much and the teachers tended to try their best to make the parent-teacher meetings as short and sparse as possible, he could only imagine how much staring and snickering he'd face every weekday, not to mention general disgust. It had taken Brian himself years to get fully used to the idea that his son had slimy skin that left puddles in his bed every morning. Out of all eight Pokémorph children, Gabriel was the one that looked the most like, well, a freak. But he had an entirely human personality, which was more than could be said about someone like Mia Kerrigan.

In a way, Brian felt that in the end was the luckiest of them all.

-------

"Will?"

William McKenzie looked up at his father. Joe McKenzie was a dark-haired, brown-eyed man with glasses and an invariably friendly expression on his face, the kind of man it was impossible not to feel predisposed to like at the sight of him, and knowing him didn't disappoint. Both he and his wife Pamela had always been wonderful parents to Will. And still he couldn't help partially hating them, in as much as he was capable of it, not for what they did but for what they didn't do. And the other part of him hated himself for having that part which hated them, because he had no right to hate them and they hadn't done anything wrong beyond loving all their kids.

"I'm going to shop for a bit. Your mom is still at work, but I've told James to watch you, all right? I won't be long."

"Okay," Will said, although he felt everything but okay at the news. His father smiled, closed the door to his room while pulling on the last sleeve of his jacket, and seconds later the front door slammed.

Without really thinking about it, Will raised his hand to his mouth and began to bite his nails and slowly lick the fingertips in between. His parents had told him to stop it. He didn't really care. It calmed him down. He stroked his fingers across his cheek, feeling the saliva cool his skin, ran them through his brown hair to find the soft, furred back of his triangular ear, and crumpled its floppy shape together with his fingers, scratching it, before releasing it, sliding his hand forward to his forehead as the ear returned to its natural perked shape, and finally returning the hand down to his mouth. He repeated the motion, a little faster this time. There was some intrinsic, satisfying perfection in it. Cleansing. Comfortable. Something reassuring about the way the ear invariably returned to its former shape no matter how he crumpled it. He did it a few more times, first with one hand and then the other. It was almost ritualistic. Trance-like. And, he reminded himself grimly, extremely strange. Freaky. Nobody else did it. People stared at him. So he just did it in his room. It was never as comforting to attempt to achieve the same effect in public, anyway. There would be sounds distracting him, things moving that his eyes would automatically follow, besides of course the uncomfortable stares and his siblings looking at him with disgust. He'd given that up years ago.

Remembering that his siblings were still in the house and could walk in on him, he stopped, stood up, locked his door and sat back down on his bed, licking his fingers briefly again. Then he guiltily dried them on his jeans. He couldn't continue for too long, or the wetness in his hair would give away that he was still doing it.

Will felt very much like a freak, but also a little like an addict. He felt a bit stupid about not having grown out of it, but it was too nice to give it up. There was no harm in it, after all, unlike all the pills and stuff that they taught you to avoid at school. The normal people around him had just decided it was freaky and gross, so they shouldn't have to see it, but there was nothing wrong with doing it, per se.

He wasn't quite sure whether he really felt the same way about the fact that he still loved to play with yarn. He was honestly making an effort to grow out of that. As for the shiny things… well, his parents had more or less gotten him to stop that.

Aw, what the heck. The room was locked.

Will reached under his bed, took out a white ball of yarn that he'd nicked from his grandmother's knitting set a while ago, put it on his floor and spent a few minutes batting it around the room with his hands and catching it. It had no right to be this fun.

He wrapped the yarn back together as well as he could, feeling slightly embarrassed as always, replaced it under his bed, and decided to get something to eat.

Nicky was in the kitchen, eating a bowl of cornflakes while reading 'Sarah Hooter and the Ultimate Fire Stone'. She gave him a dull glare before returning firmly to the book. When he attempted to tell his parents that his siblings hated him, they always spoke of sibling rivalry, of how the two-year-old Nicky and to a lesser extent her brother James had just gotten jealous when he was suddenly brought into the family and received all the attention, and how it was just the same as when James was two and Nicky had been born, and how they didn't really mean anything by it. Of course, what they never really seemed to want to think about was that James and Nicky had, at least as far back as Will could remember, abandoned all of their own rivalry once they'd found a common enemy in him. Their parents had of course told the older siblings to be nice to Will, and that it wasn't his fault he was different, and that he'd soon stop behaving like a cat, and that he was a kid just like them and shouldn't be treated any differently, but that just meant James and Nicky kept their hatred towards him mostly to themselves and to the way they looked at him and to the way they reacted to most everything he did. And somehow, that little part of Will felt like his parents ought to be able to just magically make them stop thinking he was a freak, but of course that didn't make any sense and he had to stop thinking about it.

Will got himself a bowl and a spoon, reached for the cornflakes and milk, and poured himself some. Nicky glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. She was a pretty girl with wavy dark hair and fairly popular at school, but she never invited any of her friends to their house. Will knew exactly why.

He silently ate his cornflakes. Sarah Hooter, strikingly similar to Will's one and only friend, winked at him from the cover of the book as if deliberately to irritate him, remind him that if only he were a fictional character everyone would probably love him.

Then again, not all the morphs had it as bad as he did. Jean herself, despite of course being viewed as a freak by most, was admired and envied at the same time because everyone loved those books and, as she never tired of reminding everyone, she was due to star in the movies when they came out. And somehow she just did it. She was open and confident, and she even had some normal friends. Will had no idea how she'd managed so well. Nobody ever wanted to talk to him.

He ate the last few spoonfuls and sighed. Nicky followed him with her eyes as he dumped his bowl and spoon into the sink. "Where's James?" he asked her.

"Upstairs," his sister replied shortly.

"Didn't Dad tell him to watch out for us?"

Nicky gave him her signature exasperated glare. "You were in your room."

Will shrugged. "Well, I'll go back there, then," he muttered and walked back to his bedroom door. It was better to stay in his room where he wouldn't get in their way.

-------

Jack looked briefly over the school cafeteria. A number of people glanced up as he entered; he could tell which ones were freshmen just by seeing how freaked out they looked. He smiled to himself, eyed his friends at a table by the window, waved, and pushed himself through the crowd to meet them. He wasn't very hungry.

An unfamiliar face looked up at him from the table and stared. Ah, so they've taken in a new guy, Jack thought. He waved again at the kid – it was a short boy with messy brown hair and large glasses – and sat down.

"Hey, Jack," said Sid, a chubby, dark-haired guy with a severe addiction to MMORPGs. "Where have you been?"

"Sick," Jack replied, glancing at the new guy, who was still staring at them. "Who's that kid?"

The boy flinched, and Jack smiled. "I don't bite."

The kid laughed nervously.

"That's Ben," Vincent explained. "He plays Magic."

"Really? Want a game? I've got a deck with me, if you…"

Jack feigned being stopped short in surprise. Ben was not staring at him anymore, but it was altogether too evident that that was only because he was trying not to.

"Come on. Look at me."

Ben did. The kid had large, brown eyes, or maybe they were just magnified by the glasses.

"Welcome to the tour of me," Jack said. "I'm Jack, I'm blue, and I'm half a Chinchou; glad you noticed. These things," he went on, dangling at the glowing end of one of the antennae that hung down above his face, "are hella useful for reading in the dark, but can be annoying when you're trying to sleep. Don't shake my hand too firmly, since my fingers could crack. They're webbed too, by the way. Get used to this stuff, and you'll be fine. Okay?"

Ben nodded quickly. Jack knew that at this moment the kid was probably seriously considering trying to find another table, but from the sound of it he was enough of a geek to end up with them either way. And experience had taught him they were generally quicker to get used to him than they thought.

It was only to be a couple of weeks before Ben was happily playing Magic with Jack during breaks.

There are Christian lunatics, Muslim lunatics, Hindu lunatics, atheist lunatics, agnostic lunatics and generally lunatics of any religion. I don't know if there are relatively more such lunatics among any one group, but if there are it is not relevant. Isaac Daniels is a lunatic of a nonexistent religion, but one which, like all religions, when the right quotes are picked from it and interpreted in the right way, can be made to seem to approve of his intention to murder the Pokémorphs and their creators.

Click to expand...

Satan himself often appears as an angel of light to the unaware. Unfortunately, the unaware are sometimes religious, and therefore have a potent medium within their freshly mislead grasp. Their justification for their actions becomes a twisted abomination of the values of their religion, which in turn leads to everything that religion is not. It's one of the most ironic and sad situations in existence, really.

Anyways, I noticed that you have some Massive. Run. On. Sentences. Of. Massiveness.

Example:

Nonetheless, Howard didn't doubt that she could easily end up hurting Lucy in the heat of the moment, and their typical games were just far too violent for comfort: Mia chasing Lucy and trying to slash her; Lucy covering something worthless and easily destructible in the folds of the thin, dress-like extra skin that covered most of her body and running around while Mia would try to slash the object apart; Lucy charging up a primitive Shadow Ball that Mia would slash away before it got to her…

Click to expand...

My eyes are sad from having to read such as these...perhaps tone them down even a little bit? They're grammatically correct and all, but just...long.

(Technically a sentence, no matter how long, is not a run-on sentence if it's grammatically correct. A run-on sentence is a sentence in which two independent clauses are joined without punctuation or conjunction, sometimes including comma splices; it has nothing to do with the actual length of the sentence. And that one is neither. Sorry, misuse of the term "run-on sentence" bugs me.)

But yes, my sentences have a tendency to get ridiculously long depending on the mood I'm in while writing. Ironically, the particular one you quoted was an attempt to be more grammatically correct than the most straightforward alternative (i.e. changing those semicolons to periods). I should probably try to reword it altogether.

Well, am I ever on a writing spree.

This is very easily the most eventful chapter so far, putting an end to all those seemingly endless character introductions of the past six chapters. It is also easily my favorite chapter so far. I hope you enjoy it.



Chapter 7

"…and I'm gonna be in the movie!"

Will smiled awkwardly at Jean. "I know. You've told me before."

"Yeah, but they've sent us a contract now! And I'm getting Dad to sign it. He doesn't want me to be in the movie, but I want to."

"Yeah," Will muttered, wondering as he did occasionally whether Jean really was that much better than no company at all. He scratched his whiskers and said nothing more, although he cringed and pulled the hood of his sweatshirt further over his head as the pair of them approached Jean's human friends. He wasn't sure why he did that; after all, it wasn't as if they hadn't seen him before and weren't aware that he was a Pokémorph, and definitely not as if it made them any less likely to ignore him completely (in fact, the opposite was probably true). But he liked to keep his Meowth features concealed anyway. It made him feel less self-conscious.

"You know what? They've sent us a contract! I'm gonna be in the Sarah Hooter movie!"

Her friends didn't look overly impressed. "We don't care, Jean!" moaned a girl with dark, curly hair. "Stop rubbing it in!"

Jean's friends didn't really appear to like her that much, Will had observed. They put up with her and didn't mind talking to her occasionally, but the moment anything reminded them that she wasn't like them, they'd reject her and make it obvious she didn't really belong with human beings. Will wasn't sure whether she ignored it or was just that oblivious.

This time Jean looked at the girls' harsh faces in dumbfounded astonishment and then, abruptly, bared her teeth in a very surprisingly frightening manner and let out an intimidating, uncomfortably bestial snarl.

Will recoiled. Jean's friends jumped and then, after a tense moment, just bolted towards the school building.

Jean's face had returned to normal, her expression confused as if she wasn't entirely sure where the snarl had come from either. She stared after the girls, and Will noted awkwardly that there were tears forming at the corners of her eyes. He backed away a little, not wanting to be the target of a tantrum while also not wanting to look like he was abandoning her as well. He'd never been good with cheering people up.

Jean closed her eyes and shook her head for a second; Will saw the ends of her six red tails curling up a bit more than they already were. Finally she reached for her pocket, grabbed her cellphone from it and opened it, punching in a number with great precision.

Jean's cellphone was really loud. He could hear the slow beeps before her father picked it up even from where he was standing.

"What is it, sweetheart? I'm driving, so make it quick," said Dave's voice.

"My friends all got mad at me," Jean sniffed. "And then I – I like growled at them."

"Really?" her father answered on the other end. "Did you do it voluntarily or just sort of impulsively? What kind of growl was it?"

"I don't know," Jean replied and paused for a second. "They all stared at me and ran away and were all mean."

"Well, honey, when your fire sac is active, you're going to roast 'em all if they're mean to you, understand?"

The thought seemed to cheer Jean up considerably. "Yeah!" she shouted happily into the phone while punching the air.

"But hey, you can tell me all about it when I come to get you home, okay? And when I'm done driving you, I'll have to go back to work. Brian and I have to finish some stuff for Gabriel."

"But what about the contract?" Jean whined. (Will scolded himself for mentally calling it that, but it really was the most appropriate word.)

Dave let out a long sigh. "That'll have to wait until I get back tonight, sweetheart. We won't be able to mail it to them until tomorrow, anywa…" There was a sudden screech of tires. "Oh, ****!" Then, "Look, I love you, honey, but can you not call me while I'm driving? I think I nearly ran over a Meowth or something here. Bye, sweetie."

"Bye," Jean said, but from the sound of it Dave had already hung up. Will was meanwhile shivering at the thought of a Meowth being run over by a car. Especially Dave's car. Even though he'd have loved to be an ordinary human being, he couldn't help identifying slightly with the species he was spliced with. Sometimes he felt stupid about it. At other times he just wondered whether the other morphs felt the same way. It seemed awkward to ask them.

"Okay, so what do you want to do?" Jean asked. The human friends were apparently forgotten. Probably a good thing, since Will couldn't help feeling that if he were them that snarl would have disturbed the hell out of him and there was little hope they would ever think of her the same way again. But Jean always got herself new groups who were semi-willing to hang out with her for a while, for as long as she did not go on about her awaiting acting career too much.

She would get over it before he could say 'That's not friendship'.

"Tag," he said, touching her shoulder before bounding off in a random direction. "You're it."

-------

Night had fallen by the time Dave and Brian stepped out of the main building of Heywood Labs.

"Jean'll be worried," Dave was saying. "I promised I'd be back home by nine o'clock. I just left her some lasagne, but I don't know if she'll have gotten into bed."

"Well, Gabriel knows how to take care of himself," Brian said as Dave motioned to open the door of his car. "I'd call it a good day's wo …"

He was cut off by a gunshot. It took a while for Dave to register all the blood.

"Shit," he swore while his brain numbly attempted to start itself. His eyes refused to look for the wound, instead fixing themselves on the steadily spreading pool of red around Brian's unmoving body as it lay awkwardly on the sidewalk. "Oh, ****, Brian."

It wasn't until the second gunshot, which chipped some concrete from the wall of the building behind him, that he realized who the gunman had actually meant to shoot.

His brain bolted awake with a sudden rush of adrenaline and before he really realized it, he had ducked behind the car.

"****. ****. Goddamnit." Where the hell was his cellphone? While his hand dug through his pockets, another bullet hit the windshield of the car, and Dave somehow found the time to evaluate the yelp the sound squeezed out of him as extremely stupid-sounding before he bolted up and started towards the next car, Brian's, parked a few dozen meters away along the same sidewalk. He finally manoeuvred the phone out of his pocket, opened it and attempted to punch in 911, but the actual outcome on the screen looked more like 986121, either because he was still running or because his hands were trembling too much. He didn't really care which.

Dave threw himself onto the sidewalk behind Brian's car just as a third bullet tore through the air behind him and landed on the wall of a side building of the lab.

He pushed himself into a crouching position, hammered the cancel button on his cellphone and retyped the number. He hit the call button as quickly as he could and jerked the phone up to his ear, surprising himself by how broken his voice sounded.

"Emergency? I think some crazed **** just shot my coworker – yes, still here and still trying to shoot me now, so if you don't mind – just outside Heywood Labs, Grace City – the **** should I know? – Look, can you just send some cops and an ambulance already…? You did? Right. Okay. Thank you. I'll get back to cowering behind this– ****!" Shards of glass suddenly exploded out from the car window just above him as a bullet shattered the pane. Dave tried to cover his head as the rain of broken glass bombarded his back; he felt a couple of pieces pierce the back of his neck before it subsided. He looked quickly at his phone; it was dead. He stuffed it clumsily back into his pocket. The car alarm had gone off with a blaring siren noise.

Dave leapt back to his feet after a moment of thought, racing for the next car which was in front of the next building. "I've called the police!" he screamed on the way, hoping to scare the attacker off even though an increasingly large part of him was sure he had probably given up the wrong information in that phone call or something. "They're on their way!"

He heard another gunshot and felt something strike the side of his forehead, a kind of oddly powerful sting, and warm blood began to leak down the side of his cheek as he attempted to keep running.

****, he thought to himself in disbelief as the power left his legs and he crumpled to the ground. I'm dead. ****er shot me in the head. I'm dead. ****.

While he fell he was hazily surprised at how long it seemed to be taking his brain to shut down, but then his head hit the concrete sidewalk and his vision faded away.

-------

Dave blinked. This was strange, because people had made up the notion of an afterlife in a bout of wishful thinking and that was not supposed to make it exist.

"You're awake?" said a voice. He blinked again and realized that there was a short man in a white coat standing over him. The side of his head throbbed with dull pain.

"Wow," he muttered as his frontal lobes began to process the situation logically. "I didn't think doctors could cure that."

The man gave him a curt smile. "The bullet only grazed your forehead, Mr. Ambrose. You were very lucky."

"What?" Dave tried to sit angrily up, but the attempt drowned in all the pillows in the hospital bed. "No way in hell that just grazed me. I felt how I died, for ****'s sake."

The doctor gave him another one of those irritating smiles of his, something reminiscent of the way people smiled to a child talking about an imaginary friend. "The psychological shock made you fall, and you were knocked out when you hit your head on the sidewalk. A security guard in one of the nearby buildings came to inspect the noise and stopped the bleeding until the ambulance arrived."

"What?" he asked again, unable to think of anything else to say.

"I assure you you did not die at any point this evening. I'm sorry if this upsets you."

"Stop being a wiseass," Dave said, trying to pull his thoughts back into something coherent. "Where's Brian?"

"I'm afraid there was nothing that could be done for your friend when we got there. The bullet went through his heart. I'm sorry."

Dave blinked yet again a few times. He rubbed his forehead and turned away, trying to convince himself that he just had dust in his eye.

"Well, ****." Brian. How could Brian be dead? That was goddamned messed up. Brian wasn't supposed to be murdered. That was just not the way things happened. "****," he repeated to fill the silence. It didn't help very much.

There were a few more seconds of awkward silence.

"Well, there is a policeman here who would like to speak with you, but if this is a bad time…"

"No," Dave said, making some vague gesture with his hand without looking at the doctor. Partly it was just to get rid of him, really. "It's fine. Send him in."

He looked back up now that the doctor was walking out of the room and took a few deep breaths. All this was so ****ed up. Why couldn't there be a time machine to just rewind everything by… how long had it been, anyway? He looked around and found a clock on the wall above the door. It was a quarter to two AM. He reached carefully up to his head; it had been wrapped in some bandages. The pain still throbbed there vaguely as background noise. There were blue curtains hanging by the sides of his bed, presumably concealing other patients.

A comfortably overweight, uniformed police officer with round glasses stepped into the room, walked over to Dave's bed and sat down on a chair beside it. "Good evening, Mr. Ambrose," the man said. "I just have a couple of questions for the time being. First off, I'm sorry about your friend."

"He wasn't really a friend," Dave mumbled. "Just a coworker."

"Well, sorry about your coworker, then," the policeman corrected himself, flipping briefly through a notebook. "Can you think of anyone who would have a motive to want him dead?"

Dave snorted. "Brian? ****, no. He's the least offensive person you've ever met."

The policeman raised his eyebrows and scribbled something into his notebook, but said nothing. "So you have no idea who might have been behind this?"

"Truth to be told, I think the guy was just trying to shoot me and got him instead."

The cop wrote some more. "So you think they had a motive to attack you?" he asked without looking up.

"Oh, sure," Dave replied. "There are all sorts of nuts I've upset in some way or another." And as he said it, he came to the unsettling realization that seeing as whoever it was had clearly not been caught, the psycho was still after him. "He'll try to kill me again," he muttered aloud. "****."

The policeman nodded, pencil still furiously scratching the notebook. "It's possible. I'd be careful if I were you. You should try to stay in your apartment for a while once you get out of here, at least until the guy is caught or we find out more. We'll get a couple of guys to hang around nearby just in case he tries to get you at home."

"Thanks," Dave mumbled, not quite sure what he was thanking the man for as he hadn't really been listening.

"Did you see the attacker?"

"Not a hair."

The cop finished writing, looked up at him and smiled. "Well, that will be all for now. We'll contact you later as the investigation continues."

"All right."

The policeman left. Dave was starting to get a severe headache and wanted to sleep, but the irritating doctor stepped in again. "You also have some visitors. Should I show them in?"

"Sure," he replied, waving the doctor off. He wasn't even sure who the visitors were and wasn't at all sure he would like to meet them, but he said it anyway. As it turned out, the visitors were Howard and Mia, which partly cheered him up and partly didn't; after all, it could have been somebody like his mother (or worse, Jane), but at the same time he was dully disappointed that they were the only people who cared enough to visit him.

Howard hurried over to the bed and attempted to give him a hug, not succeeding very well as he was standing by the side of the bed.

"Brian… oh, God, I can't believe it. I'm glad you got out okay. I'm not sure what the morphs would do without you. But… God…"

Howard actually did have tears in his eyes, which made Dave feel awkward. He looked over at Mia, who stood by the other side of the bed and looked at him with an empty expression. There was no better person to trust not to be sentimental.

"Cheryl stayed home to watch out for Lucy. Joe is on the way and he was going to pick Jean up. Everybody over in Taillow Springs has been contacted. They're all in shock about this. I think your mother…"

"Christ, don't bring her here," Dave muttered, rubbing his head. The headache was getting worse.

"Well," Howard continued after a second's pause, "what I'm saying is everybody is kind of scared now. I mean, there's somebody targeting us, obviously, and from what I heard the killer ran for it the moment the security guard announced he had a gun and he didn't see anything. I think the cops found some bullets, though, and are working on trying to trace down the owner of the gun they came from… oh, God, Dave, he killed Brian. He killed Brian."

"I kind of noticed," Dave mumbled and wished Howard would at least attempt to hide the fact he was crying. "I think he's after me more than you guys. I mean, I'm the main guy behind the Pokémorphs and all."

"You think it has to do with them?" Howard sighed and started trying to wipe his face with his sleeve. "I guess it makes sense, I suppose, but…"

"What else? Most ****ing controversial thing we've ever done. Didn't you get some fundamentalist nut waving a sign in front of your house the other day?"

"You think it was him?"

"Probably not. He seemed more the sort to just wait for God to strike me with lightning." Dave rubbed his forehead again, wishing he could go to sleep. "I see you brought Mia," he said to change the subject.

"She wanted to come."

Dave turned to the girl, who was still standing in the same spot beside the bed as before, unmoved. "Well, that was nice of you."

Mia just looked at him in silence, her eyes flicking between the bandages on his head and his neck.

"It just grazed you," she observed.

"Apparently. Didn't feel that way."

"They took us to the morgue," she went on. "Brian was there. There was a lot of blood. It smelled nice. I think I wanted to eat him."

Howard gave her a very disturbed look which Dave took to mean she had not mentioned this to him.

"Well, you're not going to eat him, Mia," he said, trying to sound as conversational as he could while pushing the image of the half-Scyther tearing Brian's throat out with her teeth firmly out of his head.

"I know. But I don't want to eat you because you've got bandages on."

"That's nice."

"Mia, you should probably wait outside," Howard said, his voice brokenly high-pitched and pathetic. The girl obeyed, walking casually back out the door.

"Why the **** did you take Mia to a morgue of all places?"

"We were the first people to arrive and they wanted us to identify him before the autopsy," Howard said miserably. "I didn't really think before bringing her along."

Howard sighed and looked down. "God," he muttered suddenly. "Who's going to tell Gabriel?"

Dave groaned. "Gabriel. Right." He rubbed his eyes, trying to think. "I'll do it. I was there. You got a phone?"

Howard fished a cellphone out of his pocket and handed it silently to Dave. He found Brian's name in the contact list and pressed the green button, holding the phone to his ear.

He waited for a while, the calm beeps of the phone searing through his ear and magnifying his headache. He was about to hang up when a sleepy voice answered, "Hello?"

"Hey, Gabriel."

"Dave? What… why are you calling in the middle of the night?" Gabriel sounded only sleepy and irritated and had clearly not noticed that Brian hadn't come home yet. That made it worse.

"Your father, he, uh…"

"He what?"

"He died." Dave paused and then decided that was too short and abrupt. "Some psycho shot him when we were coming out of the lab. I think he was trying to shoot me, but I moved and he was behind me, and… he died." Then he realized that was absolutely not the right way to approach this and tried again. "I mean, there was that gunman, and he shot him, and then he tried to get me too but I called an ambulance and then the bullet just grazed me. I'm in the hospital right now. They didn't catch the guy."

That didn't really sound good enough either, as evidenced by the complete lack of a response on the other end of the phone.

"Gabriel?" Dave asked carefully. There was a short silence and then the sound of hanging up.

Dave rubbed his forehead again. Goddamned headache. "****."

Howard made no comment, staring at the curtain on the other side of the bed. "What did he say?" he asked at length.

"Nothing. Absolutely ****ing nothing."

"I should call one of the others in Taillow Springs and get them to go over to him. See if he's okay."

Dave gave him back the phone without words. Howard began to dial a number.

"Any word from Jane?" Dave asked him suddenly. Howard looked up.

"What? No. Why would there be? It's been ten years since you were involved."

Dave shrugged. "Just wondering."

He lay back in his bed and heard vaguely as Howard talked to Bill Ray and asked him to check on Gabriel. He didn't really notice it happening, but by the time Howard hung up, he was fast asleep, dreaming of Mia eating Brian and bullets shattering windshields.